into a paradise. The Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman conquered by arms, and reconverted the paradise into a waste.

139. Colonies which emanated from Phoenicia became the centres of further civilization. The daughters of Tyre became the mothers and grandmothers of prosperous races, and spread civilization far and wide.

140. CYPRUS, Chittim, Paphos.-Macaria the happy lies near and immediately opposite the Phoenician coasts. The birth-place of Aphrodite was the first insular colony which came under the dominion of Melkarth and the Phoenician ships. More than 2000 years before the Christian era at least, they civilized this land of forests, and peopled it with that beautiful and stately race, the mothers of the haughty Carthaginian and Tartessian, the grandmothers of the Cassiteridan dames. Cyprus became part of Phoenicia, rich in commerce and ships. It never attained a permanent independent existence. It fell sometimes with and sometimes apart from its parent state under the dominion of the Egyptian, the Greek, the Persian, and the Macedonian, and in after times it became subject to the Roman, the Saracen, and the Crusader. It enjoyed a sort of independence and some prosperity and power for about three centuries, and then relapsed under the Mohammedan rule.

141. CRETE. Long before the reign of Minos or Rhadamanthus Phoenicians had laid the foundations of the prosperity of Crete. They subjected it not to vassalage, but to the regulations of commerce and the dominion of law. They became blended with the natives and infused into its people the tastes and sentiments of a civilized nation, impressed them with the obligations of friendship, but left them to govern themselves. Crete is styled by Aristotle "the Empress of the Sea.'

142. 66 Of the commercial efforts of the Cretans little or nothing is known. Castor Rhodius, as copied by Eusebius, has ascribed to them the honour of being the first who held

the dominion of the sea. But we must be careful not to affix modern ideas to ancient terms. This boasted dominion of the sea extended only to the suppression of the Carians and some other pirates who infested the coasts, by a naval force fitted out by Minos, the second king of that name in Crete, an expedition made by him to Athens in revenge for the murder of his son, on which occasion he subjected the Athenians to very humiliating conditions of peace; and another to Sicily, in which he lost his life." (Macpherson, an. 1234 B.C.)

143. Crete does not appear to have formed one of the great centres of colonization, though Miletus, the mother of many colonies, partially issued from her, and although she contributed to the Phoenicio-Hellenic settlements in the south of Sicily. She enjoyed a considerable commerce and at all times a respectable marine force. Till the time of the Romans, she, to a great extent, preserved her independence from external powers, at first under a regal and afterwards under a republican rule in general, but was too much disturbed by internal discord to direct her attention to the propagation of colonies abroad.

144. RHODES.-From Cyprus the tide of commerce flowed on to Rhodes, fertilizing the sea-coasts as it flowed. It wafted into this celebrated colony the institutions which took root and flourished there. This little island gave few colonies to commerce, but it preserved and concentrated its laws, and performed a part more important than any other

Phoenician or Grecian state.

145. This prudent nation appears to have devoted herself rather to the mercantile than to the military marine, although described by Homer as the baughty Rhodians, on whom the son of Saturn had poured down incalculable wealth. She sent only nine ships to the Trojan war.

146. The testimony of Homer is testimony of the extent of her trade, for her small area precludes the acquisition of great wealth from any other source.

147. Her principal contribution to the establishment of

colonies appears to have been in conjunction with Crete. From these celebrated islands emigrants went forth to Miletus, and probably some other towns on the Ionian, and to Gela on the Sicilian, coast. She seems to have established some, but we are unable to ascertain what, colonies in the far west of the Mediterranean, probably in connection with the Phonicians or their allies of Crete. (Strabo i. 57; Justin xxx. 4.)

148. The commercial ordinances of Rhodes, derived perhaps from her Phoenician progenitors, established themselves among the codes of imperial Rome, and laid the foundations of the mediæval and still accepted rules of the sea. This little state still reigns the only recognized ruler of oceans which she never knew; to the Atlantic and Pacific she has given the law.

149. Of those laws one portion is distinctly adopted in the fourteenth book of the digest which contains the Roman institutions as to the conduct and contracts of the mariner and owner of the ship. That portion is entitled "De Lege Rhodia de Jactu," and forms the second title of the book. It contains most precise provisions for the contribution of all interested in the vessel and her cargo in case of injury and loss; many with regard to conduct and the remuneration of those employed in assisting to save the cargo, and distinctly declares that there is no relinquishment of property in throwing it overboard to lighten the ship. The provisions are too extensive to admit of even an abstract in such a work as this, and moreover indicate that they constitute a portion only of the law of Rhodes. Probably many of the other provisions were derived from the same source, and the Rhodian law is declared to have been sanctioned by two of the greatest emperors of Rome. "Deprecatio Eudæmonis Nicomediensis ad Antoninum Imperatorem. Domine Imperator Antonine, naufragium in Italia facientes, direpti sumus à Publicanis, Cyclades insulas habitantibus. Respondit Antoninus Eudæmoni: Ego quidem mundi dominus; lex autem maris, lege id Rhodia, quæ de rebus nauticis præscripta

est, judicetur: quatenus nulla nostrarum legum adversatur. Hoc idem Divus quoque Augustus judicavit."

150. It is not to be assumed that the Rhodian laws were the enactments or institutions of any sovereign power, although the Rhodians were the third or fourth of the states to which, in the catalogue or chronological list prepared by Castor Rhodius, has been ascribed the sovereignty of the sea. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that in the time of the maritime ascendency of this little state, some Rhodian merchant, or lawyer, or association, collected and digested such of the rules and regulations which then prevailed as were deemed most convenient for the regulation of their commercial affairs; regulations which had been previously extensively accepted, and from being so adopted had obtained that authority which constituted the only real sove→ reignty that ever existed in the Mediterranean Sea. We shall have casually to refer to the influence which they in after times exerted over all Europe, and almost the whole world.

151. The Rhodians moreover set the first example of a small neutral nation valiantly asserting its rights (B.c. 304). Antigonus demanded their assistance against Ptolemy, which they refused; he blockaded their port, and prohibited commerce with Egypt. The Rhodians assumed an armed neutrality, sent their ships under convoy, beat off those of Antigonus, and conveyed their cargoes to the Egyptian ports. The enraged belligerent strained his strength, collected his navy, and gathered the pirates of the Mediterranean against the asserter of the law; but the engines of the famous Demetrius became the prize of the Rhodians. The product of their sale constructed the Apollo, 105 feet in height, for future centuries, to light their fleets into their harbour, and to stand a monument of the successful vindication of neutral rights.

152. GREECE.-Northward by the Sporades, the Cyclades, and the islands of the Ægean, touching at Argolis, at Athens and Boeotia, at Miletus, and on Thrace, laving either shore

in its course, the tide of civilization from Phoenicia and her earlier colonies flowed on through the Hellespont and Propontis into and along each coast of the Euxine Sea.

153. The Egyptian provinces of the Mediterranean were still held by the Phoenician or Hyksos princes when Ogyges led the first recorded migration (B.c. 1586) into Greece, and laid the foundation of the Boeotian and Athenian States: about the time of the expulsion of the shepherds from Avaris, their last stronghold (B.c. 1550). Cecrops, a native of Sais, perhaps an expelled Hyksos prince, arrived in Attica with another band; erected the city of Minerva and her sacred fane.

154. Within fifty years (1500), Danaus, described as brother of an Egyptian king, just at the time of the expulsion of the Hebrews, with his followers settled in Argolis, and dethroned the ancient dynasty of the Peloponnese.

155. COLCHIS, in the extreme east of the Euxine, where its capital a arose on the banks of the Phasis, the river of pheasants, had become an emporium for the merchandise. of the Orient and the South. Thither, through the civilized regions of Bactria, Media, and Mesopotamia, and the ruder country of Armenia, commerce, issuing from India and the far East, wound its weary way, subject to the vicissitudes of alteration, substitution, increase, or diminution, by purchases, by sales, by barter, taxation, and pillage on the way, passing through various hands, and means of conveyance, commodities reached the mart of Colchis to be distributed along the southern coasts of the Euxine, behind which the Dardan realm had risen, and the provinces preparing to form the Lydian empire were spread.

156. Nor is it improbable that even the rude Taurics and inhabitants further north purchased the fineries of Samarcand and Ind with the metals, the amber, and raw commodities of their own and neighbouring regions.

157. Egypt had heard of its wealth, and while the Israelite invaders on the eastern borders of Palestine were in