In two respects only did the old national spirit survive, and give indication that, even in the nation’s “ashes,” there still lived some remnant of its “wonted fires.”  Tyre and Sidon were great commercial centres down to the time of the Crusades, and quite as rich, quite as important, quite as flourishing, commercially, as in the old days of Hiram and Ithobal.  Mela[14502] speaks of Sidon in the second century after Christ as “still opulent.”  Ulpian,[14503] himself a Tyrian by descent, calls Tyre in the reign of Septimus Severus “a most splendid colony.”  A writer of the age of Constantine says of it:  “The prosperity of Tyre is extraordinary.  There is no state in the whole of the East which excels it in the amount of its business.  Its merchants are persons of great wealth, and there is no port where they do not exercise considerable influence."[14504] St. Jerome, towards the end of the fourth century, speaks of Tyre as “the noblest and most beautiful of all the cities of Phoenicia,"[14505] and as “an emporium for the commerce of almost the whole world."[14506] During the period of the Crusades, “Tyre retained its ancient pre-eminence among the cities of the Syrian coast, and excited the admiration of the warriors of Europe by its capacious harbours, its wall, triple towards the land and double towards the sea, its still active commerce, and the beauty and fertility of the opposite shore.”  The manufactures of purple and of glass were still carried on.  Tyre was not reduced to insignificance until the Saracenic conquest towards the close of the thirteenth century of our era, when its trade collapsed, and it became “a rock for fishermen to spread their nets upon."[14507]

The other respect in which the vitality of the old national spirit displayed itself was in the continuance of the ancient religion.  While Christianity was adopted very generally by the more civilised of the inhabitants, and especially by those who occupied the towns, there were shrines and fanes in the remote districts, and particularly in the less accessible parts of Lebanon, where the old rites were still in force, and the old orgies continued to be carried on, just as in ancient times, down to the reign of Constantine.  The account of the licentious worship of Ashtoreth at Aphaca, which has been already quoted from Eusebius, belongs to the fourth century after our era, and shows the tenacity with which a section of the Phoenicians, not withstanding their Hellenisation in language, in literature, and in art, clung to the old barbarous and awful cult, which had come down to them by tradition from their fathers.  A similar worship at the same time maintained itself on the other side of the Lebanon chain in Heliopolis, or Baalbek, where the votaries of impurity allowed their female relatives, even their wives and their daughters, to play the harlot as much as they pleased.[14508] Constantine exerted himself to put down and crush out these iniquities, but it is more than probable that, in the secret recesses of the mountain region, whither government officials would find it hard to penetrate, the shameful and degrading rites still found a refuge, rooted as they were in the depraved affections of the common people, to a much later period.