History of Julius Caesar Vol. 1 of 2. Napoleon III

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СКАЧАТЬ and so rich, that this metal took its name from the island itself (Cuprum). In Cyprus were seen numerous sanctuaries, and especially the temple of Venus at Paphos, which contained a hundred altars.451

      Crete.

      XIX. Crete, peopled by different races, had attained even in the heroic age a great celebrity; Homer sang its hundred cities; but during several centuries it had been on the decline. Without commerce, without a regular navy, without agriculture, it possessed little else than its fruits and woods, and the sterility which characterises it now had already commenced. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that at the time of the Roman conquest, the island was still well peopled.452 Devoted to piracy,453 and reduced to sell their services, the Cretans, celebrated as archers, fought as mercenaries in the armies of Syria, Macedonia, and Egypt.454

      Rhodes.

      XX. If Crete was in decline, Rhodes, on the contrary, was extending its commerce, which took gradually the place of that of the maritime towns of Ionia and Caria. Already inhabited, in the time of Homer, by a numerous population, and containing three important towns, Lindos, Ialysus, and Camirus,455 the isle was, in the fifth century of Rome, the first maritime power after Carthage. The town of Rhodes, built during the war of the Peloponnesus (346), had, like the Punic city, two ports, one for merchant vessels, the other for ships of war. The right of anchorage produced a revenue of a million of drachmas a year.456 The Rhodians had founded colonies on different points of the Mediterranean shore,457 and entertained friendly relations with a great number of towns from which they received more than once succours and presents.458 They possessed upon the neighbouring Asiatic continent tributary towns, such as Caunus and Stratonicea, which paid them 120 talents (700,000 francs [£28,000]). The navigation of the Bosphorus, of which they strove to maintain the passage free, soon belonged to them almost exclusively.459 All the maritime commerce from the Nile to the Palus Mæotis thus fell into their hands. Laden with slaves, cattle, honey, wax, and salt meats,460 their ships went to fetch on the coast of the Cimmerian Bosphorus (Sea of Azof) the wheat then very celebrated,461 and to carry wines and oils to the northern coast of Asia Minor. By means of its fleets, though its land army was composed wholly of foreigners,462 Rhodes several times made war with success. She contended with Athens, especially from 397 to 399; she resisted victoriously, in 450, Demetrius Poliorcetes, and owed her safety to the respect of this prince for a magnificent painting of Ialysus, the work of Protogenes.463 During the campaigns of the Romans in Macedonia and Asia, she furnished them with considerable fleets.464 Her naval force was maintained until the civil war which followed the death of Cæsar, but was then annihilated.

      The celebrity of Rhodes was no less great in arts and letters than in commerce. After the reign of Alexander, it became the seat of a famous school of sculpture and painting, from which issued Protogenes and the authors of the Laocoon and the Farnese Bull. The town contained three thousand statues,465 and a hundred and six colossi, among others the famous Statue of the Sun, one of the seven wonders of the world, a hundred and five feet high, the cost of which had been three thousand talents (17,400,000 francs [£696,000]).466 The school of rhetoric at Rhodes was frequented by students who repaired thither from all parts of Greece, and Cæsar, as well as Cicero, went there to perfect themselves in the art of oratory.

      The other islands of the Ægean Sea had nearly all lost their political importance, and their commercial life was absorbed by the new states of Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Rhodes. It was not so with the Archipelago of the Ionian Sea, the prosperity of which continued until the moment when it fell into the power of the Romans. Corcyra, which received into its port the Roman forces, owed to its fertility and favourable position an extensive commerce. The rival of Corinth since the fourth century, she became corrupted like Byzantium and Zacynthus (Zante), which Agatharchides, towards 640, represents as grown effeminate by excess of luxury.467

      Sardinia.

      XXI. The flourishing condition of Sardinia arose especially from the colonies which Carthage had planted in it. The population of this island rendered itself formidable to the Romans by its spirit of independence.468 From 541469 to 580, 130,000 men were slain, taken, or sold.470 The number of these last was so considerable, that the expression Sardinians to sell (Sardi venales) became proverbial.471 Sardinia, which now counts not more than 544,000 inhabitants, then possessed at least a million. Its quantity of corn, and numerous herds of cattle, made of this island the second granary of Carthage.472 The avidity of the Romans soon exhausted it. Yet, in 552, the harvests were still so abundant, that there were merchants who were obliged to abandon the wheat to the sailors for the price of the freight.473 The working of the mines and the trade in wool of a superior quality474 occupied thousands of hands.

      Corsica.

      XXII. Corsica was much less populous. Diodorus Siculus gives it hardly more than 30,000 inhabitants,475 and Strabo represents them as savages, and living in the mountains.476 According to Pliny, however, it had thirty towns.477 Resin, wax, honey,478 exported from factories founded by the Etruscans and Phocæans on the coasts, were almost the only products of the island.

      Sicily.

      XXIII. Sicily, called by the ancients the favourite abode of Ceres, owed its name to the Sicani or Siculi, a race which had once peopled a part of Italy; Phœnician colonies, and afterwards Greek colonies, had established themselves in it. In 371, the Greeks occupied the eastern part, about two-thirds of the island; the Carthaginians, the western part. Sicily, on account of its prodigious fertility, was, as may be supposed, coveted by both peoples; it was soon the same in regard to the Romans, and, after the conquest, it became the granary of Italy.479 The orations of Cicero against Verres show the prodigious quantities of wheat which it sent, and to what a great sum the tenths or taxes amounted, which procured immense profits to the farmers of the revenues.480

      The towns which, under Roman rule, declined, were possessed of considerable importance at the time of which we are speaking. The first among them, Syracuse, the capital of Hiero’s kingdom, contained 600,000 souls; it was composed of six quarters, comprised in a circumference of 180 stadia (36 kilometres); it furnished, when it was conquered, a booty equal to that of Carthage.481 Other cities rivalled Syracuse in extent and power. Agrigentum, in the time of the first Punic war, contained 50,000 soldiers;482 it was one of the principal garrisons in Sicily.483 СКАЧАТЬ