The fall of the metropolis had decided the fortune of the Babylonian kingdom, and the provinces. The most important of these was Syria, with the great trading places of the Phenicians on the Mediterranean; we remember how many and what severe struggles the subjection of Syria had cost Nebuchadnezzar. At the present moment the approach of the Persians was enough to cause Syria to recognise the supremacy of Cyrus almost without a blow. Herodotus tells us that the Phenicians voluntarily submitted to the Persians; Xenophon mentions that Cyrus had subjugated the Phenicians; Polybius observes that Gaza alone among all the cities of Syria offered resistance; the rest, terrified at the approach of the Persians and the greatness of their power, had surrendered themselves and their lands to them. With the capture of Gaza Cyrus stood on the borders of Egypt. As we have seen, Nebuchadnezzar allowed the states and cities of Syria to retain their native princes, so long as these preserved their fidelity to him; even over the Phenician cities he and his successors placed men of their own royal or priestly families to be at once judges or princes of the cities and viceroys of Babylon. That Tyre surrendered without a struggle, as Herodotus and Polybius tell us of Syria, that Cyrus, like Nebuchadnezzar before him, left the princes who submitted in command, follows from the fact that Hiram, whom Nabonetus had made king of Tyre, continued to reign over the city under Cyrus.[83] If Cyrus felt himself compelled to establish princes in the Greek cities of the coast for the first time, who owed their position to him, and could not maintain it without his aid, the cities of Phoenicia had long been accustomed to receive these princes from distant sovereigns. Cyrus and his successors confined themselves in their choice to the old royal families of the Phenician cities; at any rate we find, even under the Achæmenids, men with the hereditary names at the head of Tyre and Sidon. Yet the relations of the Phenician cities did not remain without change. Cyrus, as it seems, availed himself of the old rivalry between Tyre and Sidon to win a further support for his power. Ever since the foundation of Gades, and the times of the first Hiram of Tyre, the contemporary of Solomon, Sidon had been gradually forced by Tyre into the second place; under the Persian kingdom Sidon again appears as the first city of Phoenicia, and her kings have the precedence of those of Tyre and the other cities.[84] To the population on the whole the change to the Persian dominion would be regarded with indifference if not with pleasure; a connection with the Persian empire opened a far more extensive market for trade, and secured and protected intercourse over a far greater extent of country than the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar.