n of
history held a high place among the states of Greece; and in all the
arts of civilised life, in painting, sculpture, letters, and commerce,
it had been lately rising in rank while the other free states had been
falling. Its maritime laws were so highly thought of that they were
copied by most other states, and, being afterwards adopted into the
Pandects of Justinian, they have in part become the law of modern
Europe. It was the only state in which Greek liberty then kept its
ground against the great empires of Alexander's successors.

Against this little state Demetrius led two hundred long galleys and one
hundred and seventy transports, with more than forty thousand men. The
Greek world looked on with deep interest while the veterans of Antigonus
were again and again driven back from the walls of the blockaded city
by its brave and virtuous citizens; who, while their houses were burning
and their walls crumbling under the battering-ram, left the statues of
Antigonus and Demetrius standing unhurt in the market-place, saved by
their love of art and the remembrance of former kindness, which, with
a true greatness of mind, they would not let the cruelties of the siege
outweigh. The galleys of Ptolemy, though unable to keep at sea against
the larger fleet of Demetrius, often forced their way into the harbour
with the welcome supplies of grain. Month after month every stratagem
and machine which the ingenuity of Demetrius could invent were tried and
failed; and, after the siege had lasted more than a year, he was glad to
find an excuse for withdrawing his troops; and the Rhodians in their joy
hailed Ptolemy with the title of Soter or _saviour_. This name he ever
afterwards kept, though by the Greek writers he is more often called
Ptolemy the son of Lagus. If we search the history of the world for a
second instance of so small a state daring to withstand the armies of so
mighty an empire, we shall perhaps not find any one more remarkable than
that of the same island, when, seventeen hundred years afterwards, it
again drew upon itself the eyes of the world, while it beat off the
forces of the Ottoman empire under Mahomet II.; and, standing like a
rock in front of Christendom, it rolled back for years the tide of war,
till its walls were at last crumbled to a heap of ruins by Suleiman the
Great, after a siege of many months.

The next of Ptolemy's conquests was Coele-Syria; and soon after this
the wars between these succe