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 successors of Alexander were put an end to by the death of Antigonus, whose overtowering ambition was among the chief causes of quarrel. This happened at the great battle of Ipsus in Phrygia, where they all met, with more than eighty thousand men in each army. Antigonus, King of Asia Minor, was accompanied by his son Demetrius, and by Pyrrhus, King of Epirus; and he was defeated by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, Seleucus, King of Babylon, Lysimachus, King of Thrace, and Cassander, King of Macedonia; and the old man lost his life fighting bravely. After the battle Demetrius fled to Cyprus, and yielded to the terms of peace which were imposed on him by the four allied sovereigns. He sent his friend Pyrrhus as a hostage to Alexandria; and there this young King of Epirus soon gained the friendship of Ptolemy and afterwards his stepdaughter in marriage. Ptolemy was thus left master of the whole of the southern coast of Asia Minor and Syria, indeed of the whole coast of the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from the island of Cos on the north to Cyrene on the south.