V. THE ASCENDANCY OF RHODES
Frightened by the violence of faction and drawn by the movements of population, trade and capital passed from the mainland and sought new havens in the Aegean. Delos, once rich through Apollo, flourished in the second century as a free port under the protection of Rome and the management of Athens. The little isle was crowded with alien merchants, business offices, palaces and hovels, and the diverse temples of exotic faiths.
Rhodes reached her zenith in the third century, and was then by common consent the most civilized and beautiful city in Hellas. Strabo described the great port as “so far superior to all others in harbors, roads, walls, and improvements that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it.”40 Situated at one of the crossroads of the Mediterranean, in a position to take advantage of that expanding trade which Alexander’s conquests had made possible between Europe, Egypt, and Asia, Rhodes’ spacious harbors replaced Tyre and the Piraeus as a port of reshipment for goods, and as a clearinghouse for the organization and financing of commerce in the eastern sea. Her merchants established a profitable reputation for honesty, her banks and her government for stability, in a world of treachery and change; her powerful fleet, manned by her citizens, cleared the Aegean of pirates, maintained an equal security for the merchant vessels of all nations, and established a code of maritime law so ably devised and so widely accepted that it governed Mediterranean trade for centuries, and passed down into the marine law of Rome, Constantinople, and Venice.
Having freed herself from Macedonian domination by her heroic resistance to Demetrius Poliorcetes (305), Rhodes steered successfully through the troubled politics of the age by maintaining a wise neutrality, or by going to war only to check the growth of an aggressor state, or to preserve the freedom of the seas. She united many of the Aegean cities in an “Island League,” and exercised her presidency so fairly that no one questioned her right to lead. Her government—an aristocracy resting on a democratic base as in republican Rome—ruled the synoecized cities of Lindus, Camirus, Ialysus, and Rhodes with skill and comparative justice, gave to alien residents such privileges as Athens had never yielded to her metics, protected a large population of slaves so well that when in danger it dared to arm them, and laid upon the rich men of the city the obligation to take care of the poor.41 The state met its expenses by a two per cent tax upon imports and exports. It lent money generously, sometimes without interest, to cities in distress.
When Rhodes herself was physically ruined by an earthquake (225), all the Greek world came to her aid, for everyone recognized that her disappearance from the Aegean would lead to commercial and financial chaos. Hieron II sent one hundred gold talents ($300,000), and set up in the restored city a statuary group showing the people of Rhodes being crowned by the people of Syracuse. Ptolemy III sent three hundred talents* of silver; Antigonus III sent three thousand, together with great quantities of timber and pitch for building; his queen Chryseis gave three thousand talents of lead, and 150,000 bushels of corn. Seleucus III sent 300,000 bushels of corn and ten fully equipped quinqueremes. “As for the towns that contributed each according to its means,” says Polybius, “it would be difficult to enumerate them.”42 It was a bright interlude in the dark annals of political history, one of the rare occasions when all the Greek world thought and acted as one.