The Macedonians had been provoked by their obstinate resistance, and enraged at the recent murder of some of their comrades, as before mentioned, and little mercy was shown. The city was burnt; eight thousand were killed, and the rest, with the exception of those to whom the Sidonians gave shelter on board their vessels, sold for slaves to the number of thirty thousand, including the mercenary troops. Two thousand are said to have been crucified, as a reprisal for the death of the Macedonian prisoners. The king and the chief magistrates, with the Carthaginian deputation, had taken refuge in the temple of Hercules, and their lives were spared. Alexander offered sacrifice to him and led a naval and military procession in his honour, accompanied with gymnastic games and a torch race. He consecrated also to Hercules the battering-ram which had made the first breach in the walls, and a Tyrian ship, sacred to the service of the god, which he had captured. And thus, after a siege of seven months, Tyre was taken in July of the year 332 B.C. Alexander replaced the population, which had been nearly exterminated, by colonists, of whom a considerable part were probably Carians, a nation closely allied to the Phœnicians.
The capture of Tyre took place in July, that of Gaza in October. The following winter (331 B.C.) was occupied by Alexander in Egypt, partly in laying the foundation of Alexandria, which was destined to become the great commercial rival of the Phœnician cities. Having visited the oracle of Ammon, he returned in the ensuing spring to Tyre, where his fleet was assembled, sacrificed again to Hercules, detached one hundred Phœnician and Cyprian ships to the Peloponnesus, and appointed Cœranus as collector of the tribute of Phœnicia.
After the battle of Arbela, Alexander incorporated Syria, Phœnicia, and Cilicia in one province, of which he gave the command to Menes. He had broken the power of Tyre, but the commercial activity and maritime enterprise of Phœnicia remained unimpaired. The Phœnicians followed his army on the march to India for the purposes of traffic, and loaded their beasts of burden on their return through the desert of Gedrosia with the gum of the myrrh and the nard, which it yielded in such abundance as to scent the whole region with the fragrance which was diffused, as the army in its march crushed them under foot. The Phœnicians are mentioned first, along with the Cyprians, Carians, and Egyptians, as composing the crews of the ships which were to sail down the Hydaspes to the Indian Ocean and thence to the mouth of the Euphrates and the Tigris. After his return to Babylon, he commanded forty-seven Phœnician vessels of various rates to be constructed and then taken to pieces, conveyed overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates, and put together again that they might descend the river to Babylon. They were manned from the Phœnicians engaged in the fishery of purple, and other seafaring people from the coast; and wherever in Syria or Palestine any one could be found possessed of nautical skill, if he were a freeman he was enlisted, if a slave purchased. It was one of his vast projects to colonise by their means the islands in the Persian Gulf and its seacoast—a region not less fertile, says Arrian, than Phœnicia itself. His views of conquest extended to the whole Arabian peninsula—a country whose marshes, he was told, yielded cassia; its trees, myrrh and frankincense; and its shrubs, cinnamon. This scheme, with others still more gigantic, was rendered abortive by his death at Babylon in 323 B.C.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[8] [Other authorities attribute this end to Tennes’ father, Strato, and its cause to the failure of an alliance with Tachus of Egypt against the Persians.]
CHAPTER V. PHŒNICIA UNDER THE GREEKS, THE ROMANS, AND THE SARACENS
Ptolemy, to whom Egypt fell in the first division of Alexander’s empire, almost immediately attempted the conquest of Syria and Palestine, agreeably to the policy which the sovereigns of Egypt have always adopted, when that country has been ruled by an enterprising king. The forces which Antipater had left there were unequal to its defence, and Ptolemy easily made himself master of them, Jerusalem alone offering any resistance. He placed garrisons in the Phœnician cities, of which he kept possession till the year 315 B.C., when Antigonus, returning victorious from his war in Babylonia, easily reduced the other towns of Phœnicia, and took Joppa and Gaza by storm, but met with an obstinate resistance from Tyre.