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Julius Marathus informs us, that a few months before his birth, there happened at Rome a prodigy, by which was signified that Nature was in travail with a king for the Roman people; and that the senate, in alarm, came to the resolution that no child born that year should be brought up; but that those amongst them, whose wives were pregnant, to secure to themselves a chance of that dignity, took care that the decree of the senate should not be registered in the treasury.
The northern part of the plain is known as Ard-el-Burajineh. The plain is deficient in water, yet is cultivated in olives and mulberries, and contains the largest olive grove in all Syria. The plain of Marathus is, next to Sharon, the most extensive in Phoenicia. The rock crops out from it in places and it is broken between Tortosa and Hammam by a line of low hills running parallel with the shore.
They could not at once, however, divest themselves of their acquired habits, and consequently, their earliest buildings continued to have, in part, the character of rock dwellings, while in part they were constructions of the more ordinary and regular type. The remains of a dwelling-house at Amrith, the ancient Marathus, offer a remarkable example of this intermixture of styles.
First Strato, the son of Ger-astartus, king of Aradus, who was serving on board the Phoenician contingent to the Persian fleet, went out to meet Alexander, and surrendered into his hands the four cities of Aradus, Marathus, Sigon, and Mariamme. Then Byblus, whose king was also absent with the fleet, opened its gates to the Macedonians.
The sand is confined to a comparatively narrow strip along the seashore, and to the sites of ancient harbours now filled up. It is exceedingly fine and of excellent silicious quality, especially in the vicinity of Sidon and at the foot of Mount Carmel. The most remarkable plains are those of Sharon, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beyrout, and Marathus.
There remain fifteen important cities, of which six may be placed in the first rank and nine in the second the six being Tyre, Sidon, Aradus, Byblus or Gebal, Marathus, and Tripolis; the nine, Laodicea, Simyra, Arka, Aphaca, Berytus, Ecdippa, Accho, Dor, and Joppa. It will be sufficient in the present place to give some account of these fifteen.
Marathus was an ancient Phoenician town, probably one of the most ancient, and was always looked upon with some jealousy by the Aradians, who ultimately destroyed it and partitioned out the territory among their own citizens. The same fate befell Simyra, a place of equal antiquity, the home probably of those Zemarites who are coupled with the Arvadites in Genesis.
With this view he sent a letter to Alexander, who was now at Marathus in Phoenicia, proposing to become his friend and ally; but Alexander rejected all his overtures, and told him that he must in future be addressed not in the language of an equal, but of a subject.
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