egree as before; but these
were grave events to occur within a brief period, and the spirit of the
seat of trade in every case having been broken, and its means and
resources more or less plundered and dissipated--in some cases, as in
that of Carthage, irreparably--the most necessary commerce could only
proceed with feeble and languid interest under the military, consular
and proconsular licence of Rome at that period. Tyre, the great seaport
of Palestine, having been destroyed by Alexander the Great, Palmyra, the
great inland centre of Syrian trade, was visited with a still more
complete annihilation by the Roman Emperor Aurelian within little more
than half a century after the capture and spoliation of Athens. The
walls were razed to their foundations; the population--men, women,
children and the rustics round the city--were all either massacred or
dispersed; and the queen Zenobia was carried captive to Rome. Palmyra
had for centuries, as a centre of commercial intercourse and transit,
been of great service to her neighbours, east and west. In the wars of
the Romans and Parthians she was respected by both as an asylum of
common interests which it would have been simple barbarity to invade or
injure; and when the Parthians were subdued, and Palmyra became a Roman
_annexe_, she continued to flourish as before. Her relations with Rome
were more than friendly; they became enthusiastic and heroic; and her
citizens having inflicted signal chastisement on the king of Persia for
the imprisonment of the emperor Valerian, the admiration of this conduct
at Rome was so great that their spirited leader Odaenathus, the husband
of Zenobia, was proclaimed Augustus, and became co-emperor with
Gallienus. It is obvious that the destruction of Palmyra must not only
have doomed Palestine, already bereft of her seaports, to greater
poverty and commercial isolation than had been known in long preceding
ages, but have also rendered it more difficult to Rome herself to hold
or turn to any profitable account her conquests in Asia; and, being an
example of the policy of Rome to the seats of trade over nearly the
whole ancient world, it may be said to contain in graphic characters a
presage of what came to be the actual event--the collapse and fall of
the Roman empire itself.

Venice.

The repeated invasions of Italy by the Goths and Huns gave rise to a
seat of trade in the Adriatic, which was to sustain during more than a
thousand years a