Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/387

 TOWNS AND HYDRAULIC WORKS. 365 that from its upper stories a wide sea view can everywhere be obtained in spite of the surrounding ramparts. But even at the height of its prosperity, St. Malo was hardly more than a sailor's town, while the great Phoenician cities had more strings to their bow than navigation and its profits ; they were great manufacturing centres ; they deserved to be compared to our great industrial cities, such as Birmingham, Leeds, Elbeuf, or Roubaix. In some quarters at least the air was full of the sounds and the scent of factories. " At Tyre," says Strabo, " all the most favourable conditions for dyeing were united ; and it must be allowed that although they added so much to the wealth of the place the presence of so many dyeworks took away from its advantages as a place of residence." A whole quarter of the city was occupied by industrials, but there was another, the highest and most open no doubt, where the dwellings of the rich merchants who sent a fleet to sea as each spring came round, were grouped. Such men as these vould require houses whose external aspect should announce the wealth of their owner to every passer by. The houses of Tyre, of Sidon, and of other Phoenician cities were admired by the ancients and taken as standards and points of comparison. 2 And the rich men of whom we speak would not be satisfied with their town houses, which must have been cramped for room like every other building within the walls. 3 It was in the suburbs, outside the walls, that they had their favourite dwellings, the homes in which they enjoyed their wealth and the repose it gave. The people of Arvad and Tyre crossed the narrow straits dividing their cities from the mainland ; those of Sidon and Berytus had only to spread themselves over the fine forests and flowery plains to get all they wanted. There they had the villas and small farms, the sites of which can be divined by the modern explorer from the traces they have left in the soil. 4 It was in these plains that those agricultural 1 STRABO, xvi. ii. 23. 2 JOSEPHUS, De Bello Judaico, ii. xviii. 9. Seven hundred years before Ezekiel had already said of Tyre : " Thy builders have perfected thy beauty" (xxxviii. 4), and again "They shall break down thy walls and destroy thy pleasant houses" (xxvi. 12). 3 See MENANDER, quoted by Josephus, Ant. Jud. viii. v. 3. The historian says of Hiram : ovros ex 000 " 6 T *vpox<P ov - Another historian of Tyre, Dios, refers to the same works and also to those by which a small islet with a temple was added to the principal island QOSEPHUS, Ibid.}. 4 RENAN, Mission, pp. 633-635, 638, 639, 644, 668, 669, c.