A bulletin had appeared on the Great Square proclaiming, in the name of the High Council of Tyre, a stupendous religious celebration. Vast sums of money had been appropriated from the city treasury, and more was demanded from the people. A multitude of animals was to be sacrificed, and even the blood of human victims should enrich the altar, that thus might be purchased the favor of Almighty Baal.
To understand this proclamation, we must know the circumstances that led to it.
The Phœnician prestige among the nations had for many years been steadily waning. The political dominance of Persia, with her capital far over the deserts at Susa, was less humiliating to this proud people than was the growing commercial importance of the Greeks across the sea. For not only had the Greeks whipped the Phœnicians in naval battles, as at Salamis and Eurymedon, but they were displacing Phœnician wares in foreign markets, and teaching the Greek language, customs, and religion to all the world. Yet the Greeks were thought by the Tyrians to be but an upstart people. They had not so many generations, as the Phœnicians had ages, of glorious history.
How could Phœnicia regain the supremacy? This was the all-absorbing question which appealed to the patriotism, and still more to the purses, of the Tyrians, and of their neighbors along the coast.
Many were the wiseacres who readily solved this problem to their own satisfaction. Thus, for example, the priests of Melkarth—the name they gave to Baal in his special office as guardian of the city—had a theory of their own. It was to the effect that the gods were offended at the growing laxity of worship, and especially at the falling-off of the temple revenues, which were in great measure the sumptuous perquisites of the priests themselves. They were especially disaffected towards their young king, Hiram, whom they regarded as an obstacle to any reforms on this line. Hiram had spent his early training years with the fleet, and was conversant with the faiths and customs of many countries. Thus he was educated to a cosmopolitan, not to say sceptical, habit of mind, and was led to doubt whether any movement that originated in the ambition of a horde of unscrupulous and superstitious priests could win the favor of the gods, even admitting that such supernal beings existed, of which the king was reported to have expressed a doubt.
King Hiram had been but a few months on the throne, to which he had succeeded on the death of his father, when he opened the meeting of the Great Council which issued the proclamation regarding the sacrifice.
His Majesty sat upon the bronze throne. Above him shone a canopy of beaten gold. At his back hung a curtain of richest Tyrian purple, in the centre of which gleamed a silver dove with outspread wings, the symbol of Tyre from those ancient days when its commerce and renown began to fly abroad over the world.
Hiram's face was typically Phœnician, and betokened the clear tide of his racial blood. His forehead was broad, and prominent at the brows. His eyes were gleaming black. His nose started as if with the purpose of being Jewish, but terminated in the expanded nostril that suggested the Egyptian. His hair was black, with the slightest touch of red, which, however, only strong light would reveal. He wore the conical cap of the sailor, for his pride of naval command had never become secondary to even his sense of royal dignity; and many a time had he declared that a true Phœnician king was chiefly king of the sea. The royal cap was distinguished from that of common sailors by the uræus, or winged serpent's crest, which was wrought in golden needlework upon the front. The king's throat and chest were bare, except for a purple mantle which hung from his left shoulder, and crossed his body diagonally; and for a broad collar of silk embroidered with silver threads, which shone in contrast with his weather-bronzed skin. His arms were clasped above the elbows with heavy spirals of gold. He wore a loose white chiton, or undergarment, which terminated above the knees, and revealed as knotty a pair of legs as ever balanced so graceful a figure. But one thing marred his appearance—a deep scar on his chin, the memorial of a hand-to-hand fight with Egyptian pirates off the mouth of the Nile.
The king leaned upon one of the lion-heads that made the arms of his throne. One foot rested upon a footstool of bronze; the other in the spotted fur of a leopard, spread upon the dais.
Sitting thus, he spoke of the subject before the council. At first he scarcely changed his easy attitude. He traced the rise of the Greek power with voluble accuracy, for he had studied the problems it presented in another school than that of Phœnician prejudices. As he proceeded he warmed with the kindling of his own thoughts, and, straightening himself on the throne, gesticulated forcibly, making the huge arm of the chair tremble under the stroke of his fist, as if the moulded bronze were the obdurate heads of his listeners. At length, fully heated with the excitement of his speech, and by the antagonism too plainly revealed in the faces of some of his courtiers, he rose from his throne, and stood upon the leopard skin as he concluded with these words:
"Let me speak plainly, O leaders of Phœnicia, as a king of men should speak to kingly men! Why does the Greek outstrip us? Because he is stronger. Why is he stronger? Because he is wiser. Why is he wiser? Because he learns from all the world; and we, though we trade with all the tribes of men, learn from none. Our guide-marks are our own footprints, which we follow in endless circles. We boast, O Phœnicians, that we have taught the world its alphabet, but we ourselves have no books beyond the tablets on which we keep the accounts of our ships, our caravans, and our shambles. It is our shame, O men of Tyre! We have instructed the sailors of the Great Sea to guide their ships by the stars, but in all our customs of government and religion we dare not leave the coast-line of our ancient notions. We go up and down the channels of our prejudice; ay, we ground ourselves in our ignorance.
"And hear, O ye priests! Our religion as practised is our disgrace. If Baal be the intelligence that shines in the sun, he despises us for our stupidity. Nay, scowl if ye will! But look at the statues of our gods! A Greek boy could carve as finely with the dough he eats. Look at our temples! The Great Hiram built a finer one than we possess five centuries ago, there in Jerusalem, for the miserable Jews to worship their Jehovah in. Ye say that Baal is angry with us. And well he may be! For we open not our minds to the brightness of his beams: we hide in the shadows of things that are old and decayed, even as the lizards crawl in the shadow of the ruins that everywhere mark our plains.
"Ye say, O priests, that we must sacrifice more to Baal. Truly! But it is not the sacrifice of death, rather the real offering of life, of our wiser thoughts, our braver enterprise, that Baal would have.
"This, this is the end of all my speaking, O men of Tyre! Heap up your treasures, and burn them if ye will! Slaughter your beasts! Toss your babes into the fire of Moloch! But know ye that your king gives you no such commandment; nor will he have more of such counsel."
So saying, King Hiram strode down from the dais, and left the council chamber. As he passed out, the members rose and made deep obeisance; but their bowed forms did not conceal from him their scowling faces.
The councillors, left alone, gathered close together, evidently not for debate, but to confirm one another in some predetermined purpose. Their words were bitter. Old Egbalus, the high priest of Baal-Melkarth for the year, thanked his god that the throne of Tyre had lost its power, since one so utterly blasphemous, so traitorous, had come to occupy it.
"That travelling Greek, Herodotus, who is even now his guest, has bewitched the king with his talk," sneered one.
"Or with his Greek gold," timidly ventured another.
The last speaker was a young man, in princely attire, with marked resemblance to King Hiram; but such resemblance as is often noticed between an ugly and a beautiful face; certain features attesting kinship,