XIV. On the southern coast of Asia Minor, some towns still sustained the rank they had attained one or two centuries before. The capital of Caria was Halicarnassus, a very strong town, defended by two citadels,[385] and celebrated for one of the finest works of Greek art, the _Mausoleum_. In spite of the extraordinary fertility of the country, the Carians were accustomed, like the people of Crete, to engage as mercenaries in the Greek armies.[386] On their territory stood the Ionian town of Miletus, with its four ports.[387] The Milesians alone had civilised the shores of the Black Sea by the foundation of about eighty colonies.[388] In turn independent, or placed under foreign dominion, Lycia, a province comprised between Caria and Cilicia, possessed some rich commercial towns. One especially, renowned for its ancient oracle of Apollo, no less celebrated than that of Delphi, was remarkable for its spacious port;[389] this was Patara, which was large enough to contain the whole fleet of Antiochus, burnt by Fabius in 565.[390] Xanthus, the largest town of the province, to which place ships ascended, only lost its importance after having been pillaged by Brutus.[391] Its riches had at an earlier period drawn upon it the same fate from the Persians.[392] Under the Roman dominion, Lycia beheld its population decline gradually; and of the seventy towns which it had possessed, no more than thirty-six remained in the eighth century of Rome.[393] More to the east, the coasts of Cilicia were less favoured; subjugated in turn by the Macedonians, Egyptians, and Syrians, they had become receptacles of pirates, who were encouraged by the kings of Egypt in their hostility to the Seleucidæ.[394] From the heights of the mountains which cross a part of the province, robbers descended to plunder the fertile plains situated on the eastern side (_Cilicia Campestris_).[395] Still, the part watered by the Cydnus and the Pyramus was more prosperous, owing to the manufacture of coarse linen and to the export of saffron. There stood ancient Tarsus, formerly the residence of a satrap, the commerce of which had sprung up along with that of Tyre;[396] and Soli, on which Alexander levied an imposition of a hundred talents as a punishment for its fidelity to the Persians,[397] and which, by its maritime position, excited the envy of the Rhodians.[398] These towns and other ports entered, after the battle of Ipsus, into the great commercial movement of which the provinces of Syria became the seat. [Sidenote: Syria.]