Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/465

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 448 banks and sources of the Euphrates and Tigris : ^^^ the long disputed barrier of Rome and Persia was for ever confounded ; the walls of Edessa and Amida, of Dara and Nisibis, which had resisted the arms and engines of Sapor or Nushirvan, were levelled in the dust ; and the holy city of Abgarus might vainly produce the epistle of the image of Christ to an unbelieving conqueror. To the 7vest, the Syrian kingdom is bounded by the sea ; and the ruin of Aradus, a small island or peninsula on the coast, was postponed during ten years. But the hills of Libanus abounded in timber, the trade of Phoenicia was populous in mariners ; and a fleet of seventeen hundred barks was equipped and manned by the natives of the desert. The Im- perial navy of the Romans fled before them from the Pamphylian rocks to the Hellespont ; but the spirit of the emperor, a grand- [Constansju.] son of Heraclius, had been subdued before the combat by a dream and a pun.^^^ The Saracens rode masters of the sea ; and the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclades, were successively exposed to their rapacious visits. Three hundred years before the Christian aera, the memorable though fruitless siege of Rhodes ^^^ by Demetrius had furnished that maritime republic with the materials and the subject of a trophy. A gigantic statue of Apollo, or the sun, seventy cubits in height, was erected at the entrance of the harbour, a monument of the freedom and the arts of Greece. After standing fifty-six years, the colossus of Rhodes was overthrown by an earthquake ; but the massy [b.c. 227] 110 Al Wakidi had likewise written an history of the conquest of Diarbekir, or Mesopotamia (Ockley, at the end of the iid vol.), which our interpreters do not appear to have seen. [The text has been published by Ewald : Liber Wakedii de Mesopotamiae expugnatae historia, Gottingen, 1827.] The Chronicle of Diony- sius of Telmar, the Jacobite patriarch, records the taking of Edessa, A.u. 637, and of Dara, A.u. 641 (Asseman. Bibliot. Orient, torn. ii. p. 103), and the attentive may glean some doubtful information from the Chronography of Theophanes (p. 285- 287). Most of the towns of Mesopotamia yielded by surrender (Abulpharag. p. 112). [The chronicle of Dionysius of Tellmahre (Patriarch of Antioch A.D. 818- 845) reached down to the year 775 ; the later part of it has never been published.] m He dreamed that he was at Thessalonica, an harmless and unmeaning vision ; but his soothsayer, or his cowardice, understood the sure omen of a defeat con- cealed in that inauspicious word 6^5 aAAw I'lxrji/, Give to another the victory (Theophan. p. 286 ^leg. 287; a.m. 6146]. Zonaras, tom. ii. 1. xiv. p. 88 [c. 19J). 11- Every passage and every fact that relates to the isle, the city, and the colossus of Rhodes, are compiled in the laborious treatise of Meursius, who has bestowed the same diligence on the two larger islands of Crete and Cyprus. See in the iiird vol. of his works, the Rhodus of Meursius (1. i. c. 15, p. 715-719) [cp. especially Pliny, Nat. Hist., 34, 18]. The Byzantine writers, Theophanes and Constantine, have ignorantly prolonged the term to 1360 years, and ridiculously divide the weight among 30,000 camels. [See A-Ir. C. Torr's Rhodes in Ancient Times, p. 96-7. He observes : ' ' The twenty tons of metal would not load more than 90 camels".]