7.  Phoenicia under the Greeks (B.C. 323-65)

The Phoenicians faithful subjects of Alexander—­At his death Phoenicia falls, first to Laomedon, then to Ptolemy Lagi—­Is held by the Ptolemies for seventy years—­Passes willingly, B.C. 198, under the Seleucidae—­Relations with the Seleucid princes and with the Jews—­Hellenisation of Phoenicia—­ Continued devotion of the Phoenicians generally to trade and commerce—­Material prosperity of Phoenicia.

Phoenicia continued faithful to Alexander during the remainder of his career.  Phoenician vessels were sent across the AEgean to the coast of the Peloponnese to maintain the Macedonian interest in that quarter.[14430] Large numbers of the mercantile class accompanied the march of his army for the purposes of traffic.  A portion of these, when Alexander reached the Hydaspes and determined to sail down the course of the Indus to the sea, were drafted into the vessels which he caused to be built,[14431] descended the river, and accompanied Nearchus in his voyage from Patala to the Persian Gulf.  Others still remained with the land force, and marched with Alexander himself across the frightful deserts of Beloochistan, where they collected the nard and myrrh, which were almost its only products, and which were produced in such abundance as to scent the entire region.[14432] On Alexander’s return to Babylon, Phoenicia was required to supply him with additional vessels, and readily complied with the demand.  A fleet of forty-eight ships—­two of them quinqueremes, four quadriremes, twelve triremes, and thirty pentaconters, or fifty-oared galleys—­was constructed on the Phoenician coast, carried in fragments to Thapsacus on the Euphrates, and there put together and launched on the stream of the Euphrates, down which it sailed to Babylon.[14433] Seafaring men from Phoenicia and Syria were at the same time enlisted in considerable numbers, and brought to Alexander at his new capital to man the ships which he was building there, and also to supply colonists for the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the islands scattered over its surface.[14434] Alexander, among his many projects, nourished an intention of adding to his dominions, at any rate, the seaboard of Arabia, and understood that for this purpose he must establish in the Persian Gulf a great naval power, such as Phoenicia alone out of all the countries under his dominion was able to furnish.  His untimely death brought all these schemes to an end, and plunged the East into a sea of troubles.

In the division of Alexander’s empire, which followed upon his death, Phoenicia was at first assigned, together with Syria, to Laemedon, and the two formed together a separate satrapy.[14435] But, after the arrangement of Triparadisus (B.C. 320), Ptolemy Lagi almost immediately attacked Laemedon, dispossessed him of his government, and attached it to his own satrapy of Egypt.[14436] Six years later (B.C. 314), attacked in his turn by Antigonus, Ptolemy was forced