Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/175

Rh impression, so completely does it fill our imaginations, that we forget for awhile the interest which belongs to Rhodes as the site of one of the great maritime republics of the ancient world, a city celebrated not less for the wisdom of its institutions than for the beauty of its architecture, the perfection of its ports and arsenals, and the strength of its defences by sea and land.

Founded B.C. 408, and laid out by the same great architect, Hippodamos, who built the Pirgeus, 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. The temples 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.$63$

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