Only eighteen years had elapsed since its desolation by Alexander, but the elastic power of commerce had repaired its strength, and though joined to the mainland by his mole, it was nearly as unassailable by an enemy that did not command the sea as while it remained an island. Antigonus blockaded it by land, and collecting a body of eight thousand wood-cutters and sawyers, felled the cedars and cypresses of Lebanon, which were conveyed to the coast by one thousand yoke of oxen, and fashioned into a fleet at Tripolis, Byblus, and Sidon. With the ships constructed in Phœnicia, Rhodes, and Cilicia, he reduced Tyre at the end of fifteen months. His son Demetrius, however, having advanced to Gaza, was totally defeated there (312 B.C.) by Ptolemy, who regained possession of the whole coast of Palestine and Phœnicia, but was compelled almost immediately to resign it to Antigonus and retire into Egypt, having destroyed the fortifications of Akko (Acre), Joppa, Samaria, and Gaza, the first of which was the key of Syria, the second and third of Judea, and the fourth of Egypt. Having defeated the fleet of Ptolemy before Salamis in Cyprus, and reduced that island, which was a chief source of his naval power, Antigonus, in 307 B.C., with his son Demetrius, attempted without success the invasion of Egypt, and on their retreat Ptolemy again possessed himself for a short time of the seacoast of Phœnicia, with the exception of Sidon. False intelligence of a victory gained by Antigonus caused him to make a truce with Sidon and withdraw into Egypt. By the battle of Ipsus (301 B.C.), in which Antigonus lost his life, his son Demetrius was dispossessed of the throne of Syria. He still, however, retained Cyprus, and having obtained possession of the harbours of Tyre and Sidon, reinforced his garrisons in those cities, when required by Seleucus to surrender them, as belonging to his kingdom of Syria, in the new division of territory consequent on the battle of Ipsus. During the war between them, terminated by the surrender of Demetrius in 287 B.C., Ptolemy, who had conquered Cyprus, appears quietly to have reoccupied Phœnicia and retained it during his life.
[301-63 B.C.]
The possession of Phœnicia had become still more important to the kings of Syria, since Seleucus (300 B.C.) made Antioch on the Orontes, with the harbour of Seleucia at its mouth, a principal seat of his power. Hence a series of struggles between the Seleucidæ and the Ptolemies during the latter part of the third century B.C. Ptolemy Euergetes, the third of the dynasty, had marched an army into Syria in the beginning of his reign (246 B.C.), and had placed an Egyptian garrison in Seleucia, of which his son, Ptolemy Philopator, still kept possession, when Antiochus the Great undertook (218 B.C.) the reconquest of Syria and Phœnicia. He took Seleucia by assault; Tyre and Akko were put into his hands by the treachery of Theodotus, Ptolemy’s lieutenant; and Nicolaus, who commanded the Egyptian army and fleet, was defeated and driven to take refuge in Sidon. In the following year, however, Antiochus, having collected his forces at Raphia, between Gaza and the frontier of Egypt, was totally defeated by Ptolemy, and Phœnicia and Syria remained in the possession of the Egyptians till the death of Ptolemy and the succession of his infant son.
In the year 203 B.C. Antiochus led an army into Syria and Palestine, and recovered possession of them. The Egyptians sent a force under Scopas, which gained some temporary advantages, but they were defeated at Panium and shut up in Sidon, where they were compelled to surrender. Thus Phœnicia once more (198 B.C.) fell under the power of Syria.
Tyre suffered a severe blow, when Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed the harbour of Berenice on the Red Sea, and established a road with stations and watering places between that place and Coptos, reopening at the same time the canal which joined the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Gulf of Suez. The traffic of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which had hitherto passed from Eloth and Ezion-geber across the Desert to Rhinocolura, and thence been conveyed by Tyrian vessels to all parts of the Mediterranean, was now brought by the Nile or the canal to Alexandria. The opening of the safe and easy route by Kosseir and Coptos, which saved the dangerous navigation of the northern end of the Red Sea, gradually drew to Egypt the wealth that had previously flowed into Phœnicia.
The sufferings which the Syrians endured from the civil wars of the Seleucidæ induced them in the year 83 B.C. to place themselves under the dominion of Tigranes, king of Armenia, who took possession of Syria. This state of things lasted for fourteen years, when, in consequence of the victories of Lucullus, Syria and Phœnicia returned for a short time (67 B.C.) to the dominion of the Seleucidæ. Four years later Pompey reduced Syria into a Roman province, making Gaza, Joppa, Dora, and Turris Stratonis free.
[63 B.C.-636 A.D.]
The dominion of Rome, however, was exercised mildly; and though Tyre and Sidon ceased to have any political importance, they retained their ancient fame for nautical science, for the manufacture of glass, and the preparation of the purple dye. A school of philosophy arose here, whose doctrines, like those of Alexandria, combined Greek and oriental elements, and endeavoured to reconcile philosophy with theology. Strabo mentions several contemporaries, eminent in their day, whom Tyre and Sidon had produced. Philo, to whom we owe the translation of Sanchoniathon, was a native of Byblus; his pupil, Hermippus, of Berytus. Porphyry, whose original name was Malchus, was of Tyrian parentage, though born at Batanæa, on the eastern side of the Jordan. Berytus became the seat of a school of law, which for three centuries furnished the eastern portion of the empire with pleaders and magistrates. Marinus of Tyre, who lived in the early part of the second century after Christ, was the first author who substituted maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude, for the itinerary charts which had been in use before. The maps of Marinus, like those of Ptolemy, which were only an improvement upon them, must have been founded on records of voyages and travels, of which the measured or computed distances were translated into latitudes and longitudes. Nowhere could such records have abounded more than in Phœnicia, which for so many centuries had taken the lead of all other nations in navigation and commerce. Had the invention of maps, in the modern sense, been due to the geographers and mathematicians of Alexandria, it is not probable that Ptolemy, himself a native of Alexandria, would have based his own work entirely on that of Marinus of Tyre.
After the sale of the empire by the Roman soldiery to Didius Julianus and his subsequent assassination (A.D. 193), Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger were competitors for the purple. Niger, who commanded in the East, had his headquarters at Antioch, and all Syria as far as the Euphrates and the coast of Phœnicia was under his power. Antioch and Berytus favoured the cause of Niger; Laodicea and Tyre, through jealousy of their neighbours, that of Severus. On the news of Niger’s unsuccessful attempt to obstruct the march of Severus through the passes of Taurus, they destroyed the insignia of Niger, and proclaimed his rival. Niger sent against them his Mauritanian light troops, with orders to destroy the towns, and put the inhabitants to the sword. The commission was cruelly executed by the barbarians entrusted with it; they fell on the Laodiceans by surprise, and having inflicted great injury upon them, proceeded to Tyre, which they plundered and burnt after a great slaughter of the inhabitants. It had no longer the protection which its insular situation would have afforded it against an invasion of cavalry; Alexander had joined it permanently to the land.
Niger had been defeated by Severus in the battle of Issus (A.D. 194), and was soon after slain at Antioch. In his subsequent settlement of the affairs of the East (A.D. 201), Severus recruited the population of Tyre from the third legion, whose quarters had long been in Syria and Phœnicia, and rewarded the attachment of its inhabitants by giving it the title of Colony with the Jus Italicum. Its prosperity appears to have received only a transient check from its conflagration. A writer of the age of Constantine describes it as equalling all the cities of the East in wealth and commercial activity; there was no port in which its merchants did not hold the first rank. St. Jerome, about the end of the fourth century, in his Commentary on Ezekiel, speaks of it as the noblest and most beautiful city of Phœnicia, an emporium for the commerce of the world, and is at a loss how to reconcile its actual condition with the threat of its perpetual desolation.