In view of the destruction of Reggio by earthqualte in 190S, when .S.5,000 out of 40,000 inhabitants perished, Strabo'a words, with their curious mingling of fact and fancy, are strilting. ' It was called Rhegium, as jEschylus says, because of the con- vulsion which had taken place in this region ; for Sicily was broken from the continent by earthquakes. . . . Hut now these mouths [of iEtna, the Lipari, and the neighbourinjr islands] being opened, through which the fire is drawn up, and the ardent masses and water poured out, they say that the land in the neighbourhood of the Sicilian Strait rarely suffers from the effect of earthquakes ; but formerly all the passages to the surface being blocked up, the fire which was smoulder- ing beneath the earth, together with the vapour, occasioned terrible earthquakes ' (vi. i. 6).
To indicate the course of St. Paul's ship from Syracuse to Rhegium, St. Luke, who w .as evidently impressed by the good seamanship of the crew, uses a nautical term (wepie\86vTe$) which has per- plexed exegetes (Ac 28"). Probably it means ' by tacking.' This explanation was suggested by J. .Smith, who writes, ' I am inclined to su])i)ose that the wind was north-west, and that they worked to windward' (The Voyage and Shijnvreck of St. Paul*, 18S0, p. 156). This tr. is now generally adopted in place of 'we fetched a compass' (AV) or 'we made a circuit' (RV). The alternative reading in X*B — 7rep(eX6i'res, 'casting loose' — was ]>robably due to copyists who were not at home in the language of men of the sea. Arriving at Rhegium,
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RIGHTEOUSNESS
the crew liad to wait a day for a favourable wind. If tlie north-west breeze was still blowing;, tliey could not go through the Straits, where there is scarcely enough sea-room for suouessful tacking ; but wlu^n the wind veered to south they ran before it to Futeoli, a distance of 180 miles, in little more than a day ('28'^).
LiTBRATi'KE. — C. Baedeker, Southern Italy and Sicily'^'^, London, 1806 ; P. Larissa, lihejiinn Chalcidcnae, Rome, 1905.
Jamks STU.\11.\N.
RHODA ('PMv, 'rose').— After St. Peter's mira- culous deliverance from Herod's prison he went to the house of Mary the mother of Mark. When he had knocked, a young girl called Khoda came to listen. In her joy at the sound of St. Peter's voice, she forgot to open the door, and, returning to report his presence, she was accused of being mad, but persisted in her declaration (Ac 12'^'''). Nothing further is known of her. The name was a common slave name, and she may have been a Christian slave in the home where we find her.
LlTKRATliRE. — W. M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Dis- covery ml the Truxtirortfiinessofthe NT, London, 1915, p. 209 ff.; Lady Ramsay, * Her that kept the Door,' ExpT xxvii. (1915-16)
2i7ff., 3i4ff. W. F. Boyd.
RHODES CPiiios).— When St. Paul, in his voyage from Troas to C;esarea, touched at the island of Rhodes (Ac 21'), 12 miles from the S.W. corner of Asia Minor, he was in sight, if only for an evening and morning, of a beautiful city which was for cen- turies the capital of one of the noblest free States of ancient Greece. ' With regard to harbours, roads, walls, and other buildings, it so far sur- pa.sses other cities, that we know of none equal, much less superior to it' (Strabo, XIV. ii. 5). Highlj' favoured by Nature — ' the sun shines every day in Rhodes,' said an ancient proverb (Pliny, HN ii. 62) — it owed still more to the naval enterprise, political wisdom, commercial integrity, and artistic genius of its people. On an amphitheatre of hills it was as carefully planned in 404 B.C. — by Hippo- damus of Miletus, who also laid out the Pira?us — as a modern garden-city. Occupying so central a position in the world that geographers reckoned from it their parallels of latitude and longitude, it succeeded in making itself a focus of the traffic of three continents. After the time of Alexander the Great, it was the first naval power in the /Egean, and its code of mercantile law was regarded as an ideal for all other States. Its opulence was merited by its humanity. ' The Rhodians, although their form of government is not democratic, are attentive to the welfare of the people, and endeavour to maintain the multitude of the poor. . . . There are public officers in the State, the function of whom is to procure and distribute provisions, so that the poor may obtain subsistence, and the city not sutler for want of persons to serve her, especially in manning her fleets' (Strabo, loc. cit.).
Such a commercial centre naturally attracted a colony of Jews, and aVjout 139 B.C. Rhodes was one of the many free States to which Rome is said to have addressed a letter in favour of that race (1 Mac 15-'). Rhodes alternately benefited by the deserved favour and suffered from the unworthy jealousy of the Romans. For assisting them in their war against Antiochus the Great, she received (189 B.C.) a large part of Lycia and Caria, hut when she began to be dreaded as a possible rival of Rome itself, she was not only shorn of these possessions, but nearly rained in her commerce by the raising of her rival Delos into a free port. In the Mithridatic war her services to Rome were again so signal, and she won so much glory by 5uccessfully resisting a great siege (88 B.C.), that ?he recovered some of her lost territory and all her Former prestige. Finally, however, for taking Caesar's part in the Civil War, she was so severely