Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/146

120 the roses, for which the island was famous. It had previously been called by the Greeks Orphieuse, or the island of serpents, owing to the number of venomous reptiles with which it was in those days infested. Possessing a mild and equable climate, which, while far removed from the scorching heat of the tropics, was at the same time free from the chilling blasts of more northern latitudes, with a soil of such fertility as to render the whole island one vast garden, broken into alternate masses of hill and dale, of which the rich and varied undulations were clothed with the most brilliant verdure, it was indeed a spot likely to attract the attention and excite the desires of a body of men who, like the Hospitallers, were in search of a permanent home. The following description of the ancient Rhodes is taken from Newton’s “Travels in the Levant”:—

“Founded B.C. 408, and laid out by the same great architect, Hippodanus, who built the Pirus, Rhodes was probably one of the earliest of the Hellenic cities of which the plan was designed by one master mind. Hence that symmetry in the arrangement of the city which the rhetorician Aristides, writing in the second century A.D., describes in a well-known passage. Rhodes, he says, was built in the form of an amphitheatre; the temples and public buildings were grouped together so as to form one composition, of which the several parts balanced each other as in the design of a single edifice. The whole was encompassed by a wall, which, with its stately towers and battlements, he compares to a crown. Thetemples and other public buildings were adorned with celebrated works in painting and sculpture, and according to Pliny the city contained no less than 3,000 statues, of which 100 were of colossal size. The maritime greatness of Rhodes was due not only to its geographical position, but also to the convenience of its harbours and to the perfect equipment of the dockyards and arsenal, which from Strabo’s description occupied a large space in relation to the rest of the city, and like those of Carthage and Halicarnassus were probably screened from observation by high walls and roofs. Any curious interloper found within these forbidden precincts at Rhodes or at Carthage was liable to the punishment of death. Aristides, in describing the harbours, specially praises their convenience in reference to the prevailing winds. They are so