W Chapter XI CARTHAGE. 500-264 B.C. E now turn our eyes to a race of people widely differing from any in Italy in nature and origin, viz., the Carthaginians. Belonging to the great Semitic race, which has ever, as though from some instinctive sense of its wide diversity, kept itself severed from the European nations, Carthage was one of the numerous settlements of the enterprising Phoenicians. This particular branch of the Semitic stock issued forth from its native land of Canaan or "the plain," and spread further west than any other people of the same race. Utilizing to the full the excellent harbors, and the bountiful supply of timber and metals of their own country, the Phoenicians early attained an unrivaled. position in the ancient world as the pioneers of commerce, navigation, manufacture, and colonization. In the most remote times we find them in Cyprus and Egypt, Greece and Sicily, Africa and Spain, and even on the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The field of their commerce reached from Sierra Leone and Cornwall in the west, eastward to the coast of Malabar. But the one-sided character that marks the development of the great nations of antiquity is especially visible in the case of the Phoenicians. We cannot ascribe to them the credit of having originated any of the intellectual or scientific discoveries which have been the glory of other members of the Semitic family. Their religious conceptions were gross and barbarous; their art was not comparable to that of Italy, still less to that of Greece; their knowledge of astronomy and chronology, of the alphabet, of weights and measures, was derived from Babylon. No doubt, in their commercial dealings, the Phoenicians spread valuable germs of civilization, but rather as a bird dropping grain than a husbandman sowing seed. They never civilized and assimilated to themselves the nations with which they came into contact. Moreover, politically, the Phoenicians were, like the rest of 537-474 B.C their race, without the ennobling idea of self-governed freedom. A policy of conquest was never in their eyes to be compared with a policy of commerce. Their colonies were factories. The power to trade with natives was bought too dear if it entailed constant war and the interruption of peaceful barter. Thus they allowed themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the east of Sicily, almost without resistance; and in the great naval battles at Alalia in 537 B.C., and at Cumae in 474 B.C., for the supremacy of the western Mediterranean, the brunt of the struggle with the Greeks fell upon the Etruscans, and not on the Phoenicians. In the great Sicilian expedition, which ended in their defeat at Himera by Gelo of Syracuse in 480 B.C., the African Phoenicians only took the field as subjects of the Great King, and to avoid being obliged to aid him in the East instead of the West. This was not from want of courage or national spirit; indeed, the tenacity and obstinacy with which the race has ever held to its feelings and prejudices as a nation far exceeds the pertinacity of any European people: it was rather due to their want of political instinct and of the love of liberty. No Phoenician settlements attained a more rapid and secure prosperity than those established by the cities of Tyre and Sidon on the south coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa. Here they were out of the reach of the Great King and of Greek rivals, and held the same relation to the natives as the Europeans held to the American Indians. Although not the earliest settlement, by far the most prominent was Karthada, "the new town," or Carthage. Situated near the mouth of the river Bagradas, which flows through the richest corn district in North Africa, on rising ground which slopes gently towards the plain and ends in a seagirt promontory, commanding the great roadstead of North Africa, the Gulf of Tunis, Carthage owed its sudden rise to preëminence even more to the natural advantages of its situation than to the character of its inhabitants. Even when restored, Carthage at once became the third city in the Roman empire; and in our day, on a far worse site, and under far less favorable conditions, a city exists in that district, whose inhabitants number one hundred thousand. We need no explanation, then, of the commercial prosperity of ancient Carthage; but we must answer the question raised by its development of political power, a development never attained by any other Phoenician city. At the outset Carthage pursued the usual passive policy of 500-450 B.C. Phoenician cities. She paid a ground-rent for the space occupied by the city to the native Berbers, the tribe of Maxitani or Maxyes; and she recognized the nominal supremacy of the Great King by paying tribute to him on different occasions. It gradually, however, became clear to the Carthaginians that, unless they undertook the task of repelling Greek influences and Greek migrations, the Phoenicians would be supplanted in Africa, as they had already been in Greece, Italy, and Sicily. The colony of Cyrene threatened their very stronghold and imperiled their existence. The Carthaginians, therefore, undertook the task; and by about 500 B.C., after a long and obstinate struggle, they had to a great extent effected their purpose, and set bounds to Greek invasion. These successes changed the character of the city itself; it no longer aimed at being merely preeminent in commerce, but at establishing an empire as mistress of Libya and of part of the Mediterranean. About the year 450 B.C. the Carthaginians refused any longer to pay rent for the soil they occupied to the natives, and were thus enabled to prosecute agriculture on a greatly extended scale. Capital thus found a new outlet, and the rich soil of Libya was cultivated on a system similar to that employed by modern planters. Single landowners appear to have employed on their estates no fewer than twenty thousand slaves. Moreover, the native Libyan farmers were subdued, and reduced to the position of fellahs, who paid a fourth of the produce of their soil as tribute to their new masters, and served as a recruiting ground for the Carthaginian armies. The Nomads, or roving pastoral tribes, were driven back into the deserts and mountains, or were compelled to pay tribute and supply soldiers. Finally, the Carthaginian rule embraced the other Phoenician settlements in Africa, or the so-called LibyPhoenicians. These states, with the exception of Utica, the ancient protectress of Carthage, lost their independence, and had to pull down their walls and to contribute a fixed sum of money and a definite number of soldiers. But they did not pay a land-tax, nor were they subject to the recruiting system like the subject Libyans; and they enjoyed equal legal privileges and right of intermarriage with the Carthaginians. Thus Carthage became the capital of a great North African empire, extending from the desert of Tripoli to the Atlantic Ocean; on the west in Morocco and Algiers, indeed, she merely held a belt along the coast, but on the east in the region of Tunis Circa 500 B.C. she extended her sway far into the interior. In the words of an ancient writer, the Carthaginians were changed from Tyrians into Libyans. The Phoenician tongue and civilization were, at any rate among the more advanced natives, adopted in Libya. The rise of Carthage was synchronous with a decline of the great cities in the mother-country, Tyre and Sidon; and from the first-named most of the powerful families emigrated to their prosperous daughter city. In addition to the empire in Libya we must bear in mind the parallel growth of the maritime and colonial dominion of Carthage. The early Tyrian settlement at Gades (Cadiz) was the chief Phoenician colony in Spain. By a chain of factories on the west and east of Gades, and by the possession of the silver mines in the interior, the Phoenicians occupied nearly all the modern Andalusia and Granada. Although not strictly under the rule of Carthage, no doubt Gades and the other stations in Spain fell under her hegemony. The island of Ivizo and the Baleares were early occupied by the Carthaginians, partly as fishing-stations, partly as outposts against the Greek colony of Massilia, with which Carthage was ever at war. Moreover, about 500 B.C., the Carthaginians established themselves in Sardinia, the natives of which island retired before them into the mountainous interior, just as the Numidians withdrew to the borders of the African desert. The fertile districts of the Sardinian coast were cultivated by imported Libyans, and colonies were planted at Caralis (Cagliari) and other points. They also held the west and northwest coast of Sicily, to 415-306 B.C. gether with the smaller adjacent islands of the Aegates, Melita, Gaulos, Cossyra; the station at Motya, and later at Lilybaeum, preserved their communication with Africa, as those at Panormus and Soluntum did with Sardinia. For a long period, down to the Athenian expedition to Sicily (415-413 B.C.), the Greeks and Carthaginians seem to have agreed to tolerate one another in Sicily. All these possessions served not only as commercial centers, but as pillars of the Carthaginian supremacy by sea. The western straits of the Mediterranean were practically closed to other nations, and in the Tyrrhene and Gallic seas alone the Phoenicians had to endure the rivalry of foreign fleets. As long, indeed, as the Etruscan power counterbalanced the Greek in those waters, Carthage could afford to remain passive; but on the fall of the Etruscans and the rise of the naval power of Syracuse, a great contest ensued between Dionysius of Syracuse (406-367 B.C.) and Carthage, in the course of which all the smaller Greek cities in Sicily were either totally destroyed, e. g., Selinus, Himera, Agrigentum, Gela, and Messana, or reduced to a state of utter prostration. The island was partitioned between the Syracusans and Carthaginians, and on several occasions each side in turn was on the point of completely expelling its rival from the island. gradually the balance inclined in favor of the Carthaginians, and, after the failure of the attempt of Pyrrhus to restore the Syracusan fleet, the Carthaginians commanded without a rival the whole western Mediterranean; and their efforts to occupy Syracuse, Rhegium, and Tarentum show the extent of their power, and the objects they had in view. They shrank from no violence in their attempt to monopolize the whole trade of the West; any foreigner sailing towards Sardinia and Gades, if apprehended, was thrown into the sea, and the treaty of 306 B.C. closed every Phoenician port except that of Carthage against Roman vessels, which forty-two years before had been allowed to trade with the ports in Spain, Sardinia, and Libya. But The constitution of Carthage was described by Aristotle as having changed from a monarchy to an aristocracy, or as a democracy inclining toward oligarchy. The conduct of affairs was directly vested in the hands of a council of elders, which consisted, like the Spartan gerusia, of two kings, annually nominated by the citizens, and of twenty-eight elders, also annually chosen by |