Part 16 (2/2)
perhaps to some extent criticised.[14490] Strabo attended this school for a time in conjunction with two other students, named Boethus and Diodotus. Tyre had even previously produced the philosophers, Antipater, who was intimate with the younger Cato, and Apollonius, who wrote a work about Zeno, and formed a descriptive catalogue of the authors who had composed books on the subject of the philosophy of the Stoics.[14491]
Strabo goes so far as to say that philosophy in all its various aspects might in his day be better studied at Tyre and Sidon than anywhere else.[14492] A little later we find Byblus producing the semi-religious historian, Philo, who professed to reveal to the Greeks the secrets of the ancient Phoenician mythology, and who, whatever we may think of his judgment, was certainly a man of considerable learning. He was followed by his pupil, Hermippus, who was contemporary with Trajan and Hadrian, and obtained some reputation as a critic and grammarian.[14493] About the same time flourished Marinus, the writer on geography, who was a Tyrian by birth, and ”the first author who subst.i.tuted maps, mathematically constructed according to lat.i.tude and longitude, for the itinerary charts” of his predecessors.[14494] Ptolemy of Pelusium based his great work entirely upon that of Marinus, who is believed to have utilised the geographical and hydrographical acc.u.mulations of the old Phoenician navigators, besides availing himself of the observations of Hipparchus, and of the accounts given of their travels by various Greek and Roman authors. Contemporary with Marinus was Paulus, a native of Tyre, who was noted as a rhetorician, and deputed by his city to go as their representative to Rome and plead the cause of the Tyrians before Hadrian.[14495] A little later we hear of Maximus, who flourished under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (ab. A.D. 160-190), a Tyrian, like Paulus, and a rhetorician and Platonic philosopher.[14496] The literary glories of Tyre culminated and terminated with Porphyry, of whose works we have already given an account.
Towards the middle of the third century after Christ a school of law and jurisprudence arose at Berytus, which attained high distinction, and is said by Gibbon[14497] to have furnished the eastern provinces of the empire with pleaders and magistrates for the s.p.a.ce of three centuries (A.D. 250-550). The course of education at Berytus lasted five years, and included Roman Law in all its various forms, the works of Papinian being especially studied in the earlier times, and the same together with the edicts of Justinian in the later.[14498] Pleaders were forced to study either at Berytus, or at Rome, or at Constantinople,[14499]
and, the honours and emoluments of the profession being large, the supply of students was abundant and perpetual. External misfortune, and not internal decay, at last destroyed the school, the town of Berytus being completely demolished by an earthquake in the year A.D. 551. The school was then transferred to Sidon, but appears to have languished on its transplantation to a new soil and never to have recovered its pristine vigour or vitality.
It is difficult to decide how far these literary glories of the Phoenician cities reflect any credit on the Phoenician race. Such a number of Greeks settled in Syria and Phoenicia under the Seleucidae that to be a Tyrian or a Sidonian in the Graeco-Roman period furnished no evidence at all of a man having any Phoenician blood in his veins.
It will have been observed that the names of the Tyrian, Sidonian, and Berytian learned men and authors of the time--Antipater, Apollonius, Boethus, Diodotus, Philo, Hermippus, Marinus, Paulus, Maximus, Porphyrius--are without exception either Latin or Greek. The language in which the books were written was universally Greek, and in only one or two cases is there reason to suppose that the authors had any knowledge of the Phoenician tongue. The students at Berytus between A.D. 250 and 550 were probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, Greeks or Romans. Phoenician nationality had, in fact, almost wholly disappeared in the Seleucid period. The old language ceased to be spoken, and though for some time retained upon the coins together with a Greek legend,[14500] became less frequent as time went on, and soon after the Christian era disappeared altogether. It is probable that, as a spoken language, Phoenician had gone out of use even earlier.[14501]
In two respects only did the old national spirit survive, and give indication that, even in the nation's ”ashes,” there still lived some remnant of its ”wonted fires.” Tyre and Sidon were great commercial centres down to the time of the Crusades, and quite as rich, quite as important, quite as flouris.h.i.+ng, commercially, as in the old days of Hiram and Ithobal. Mela[14502] speaks of Sidon in the second century after Christ as ”still opulent.” Ulpian,[14503] himself a Tyrian by descent, calls Tyre in the reign of Septimus Severus ”a most splendid colony.” A writer of the age of Constantine says of it: ”The prosperity of Tyre is extraordinary. There is no state in the whole of the East which excels it in the amount of its business. Its merchants are persons of great wealth, and there is no port where they do not exercise considerable influence.”[14504] St. Jerome, towards the end of the fourth century, speaks of Tyre as ”the n.o.blest and most beautiful of all the cities of Phoenicia,”[14505] and as ”an emporium for the commerce of almost the whole world.”[14506] During the period of the Crusades, ”Tyre retained its ancient pre-eminence among the cities of the Syrian coast, and excited the admiration of the warriors of Europe by its capacious harbours, its wall, triple towards the land and double towards the sea, its still active commerce, and the beauty and fertility of the opposite sh.o.r.e.” The manufactures of purple and of gla.s.s were still carried on.
Tyre was not reduced to insignificance until the Saracenic conquest towards the close of the thirteenth century of our era, when its trade collapsed, and it became ”a rock for fishermen to spread their nets upon.”[14507]
The other respect in which the vitality of the old national spirit displayed itself was in the continuance of the ancient religion. While Christianity was adopted very generally by the more civilised of the inhabitants, and especially by those who occupied the towns, there were shrines and fanes in the remote districts, and particularly in the less accessible parts of Lebanon, where the old rites were still in force, and the old orgies continued to be carried on, just as in ancient times, down to the reign of Constantine. The account of the licentious wors.h.i.+p of Ashtoreth at Aphaca, which has been already quoted from Eusebius, belongs to the fourth century after our era, and shows the tenacity with which a section of the Phoenicians, not withstanding their h.e.l.lenisation in language, in literature, and in art, clung to the old barbarous and awful cult, which had come down to them by tradition from their fathers.
A similar wors.h.i.+p at the same time maintained itself on the other side of the Lebanon chain in Heliopolis, or Baalbek, where the votaries of impurity allowed their female relatives, even their wives and their daughters, to play the harlot as much as they pleased.[14508]
Constantine exerted himself to put down and crush out these iniquities, but it is more than probable that, in the secret recesses of the mountain region, whither government officials would find it hard to penetrate, the shameful and degrading rites still found a refuge, rooted as they were in the depraved affections of the common people, to a much later period.
The mission of the Phoenicians, as a people, was accomplished before the subjection to Rome began. Under the Romans they were still ingenious, industrious, intelligent. But in the earlier times they were far more than this. They were the great pioneers of civilisation. Intrepid, inventive, enterprising, they at once made vast progress in the arts themselves, and carried their knowledge, their active habits, and their commercial instincts into the remotest regions of the old continent.
They exercised a stimulating, refining, and civilising influence wherever they went. North and south and east and west they adventured themselves amid perils of all kinds, actuated by the love of adventure more than by the thirst for gain, conferring benefits, spreading knowledge, suggesting, encouraging, and developing trade, turning men from the barbarous and unprofitable pursuits of war and bloodshed to the peaceful occupations of productive industry. They did not aim at conquest. They united the various races of men by the friendly links of mutual advantage and mutual dependence, conciliated them, softened them, humanised them. While, among the nations of the earth generally, brute force was wors.h.i.+pped as the true source of power and the only basis of national repute, the Phoenicians succeeded in proving that as much could be done by arts as by arms, as great glory and reputation gained, as real a power built up, by the quiet agencies of exploration, trade, and commerce, as by the violent and brutal methods of war, ma.s.sacre, and ravage. They were the first to set this example. If the history of the world since their time has not been wholly one of the potency in human affairs of ”blood and iron,” it is very much owing to them. They, and their kinsmen of Carthage, showed mankind what a power might be wielded by commercial states. The lesson has not been altogether neglected in the past. May the writer be pardoned if, in the last words of what is probably his last historical work, he expresses a hope that, in the future, the nations of the earth will more and more take the lesson to heart, and vie with each other in the arts which made Phoenicia great, rather than in those which exalted Rome, her oppressor and destroyer?
FOOTNOTES
PREFACE
[Footnote 01: _Die Phonizier, und das phonizische Alterthum_, by F. C.
Movers, in five volumes, Berlin, 1841-1856.]
[Footnote 02: _History and Antiquities of Phoenicia_, by John Kenrick, London, 1855.]
[Footnote 03: _Histoire de l'Art dans l'Antiquite_, par MM. Perrot et Chipiez, Paris, 1881-7, 4 vols.]
[Footnote 04: Will of William Camden, Clarencieux King-of-Arms, founder of the ”Camden Professors.h.i.+p,” 1662.]
I--THE LAND
[Footnote 11: See Eckhel, _Doctr. Num. Vet._ p. 441.]
[Footnote 12: {'H ton 'Aradion paralia}, xvi. 2, -- 12.]
[Footnote 13: Pomp. Mel. _De Situ Orbis_, i. 12.]
[Footnote 14: The tract of white sand (Er-Ramleh) which forms the coast-line of the entire sh.o.r.e from Rhinocolura to Carmel is said to be gradually encroaching, fresh sand being continually brought by the south-west wind from Egypt. ”It has buried Ascalon, and in the north, between Joppa and Caesaraea, the dunes are said to be as much as three miles wide and 300 feet high” (Grove, in Smith's _Dict. of the Bible_, ii. 673).]
[Footnote 15: See Cant. ii. 1; Is. x.x.xiii. 9; x.x.xv. 2; lxv. 10.]
[Footnote 16: Stanley, _Sinai and Palestine_, p. 254.]
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