The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

Phœnician Sarcophagus

(In the Metropolitan Museum, New York)

CHAPTER VI. THE STORY OF CARTHAGE

The city of Carthage was the culmination in history of the commerce, ambition, and military prowess of the Phœnician people. It was a city which never quite reached the first rank, yet always threatened to seize the supremacy. As a collaborator with the Persians in the great invasion of Greece, Carthage sent her forces against Sicily, only to meet an equal discomfiture. Later she wrought the great city of Rome to frenzies of terror, or hatred. Carthage appears constantly throughout Grecian and Roman history, but it seems well to place here a brief and consecutive story of her career as a city. The picturesque legends of the foundation will be found in Appendix A. The date to be accepted by historians was long uncertain, but seems now to be fixed at 818 B.C. Utica and Gades (now Cadiz) were founded earlier than Carthage, but the feverish ambition of the city of Dido soon told.a

Carthage so greatly outstripped them in wealth and power, as to acquire a sort of federal pre-eminence over all the Phœnician colonies on the coast of Africa. In those later times when the dominion of the Carthaginians had reached its maximum, it comprised the towns of Utica, Hippo, Adrumetum, and Leptis—all original Phœnician foundations, and enjoying probably even as dependents of Carthage a certain qualified autonomy—besides a great number of smaller towns planted by themselves, and inhabited by a mixed population called Liby-Phœnicians. Three hundred such towns—a dependent territory covering half the space between the Lesser and the Greater Syrtis, and in many parts remarkably fertile—a city said to contain 700,000 inhabitants, active, wealthy, and seemingly homogeneous—and foreign dependencies in Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic isles, and Spain,—all this aggregate of power, under one political management, was sufficient to render the contest of Carthage even with Rome for some time doubtful.

[813-600 B.C.]

But by what steps the Carthaginians raised themselves to such a pitch of greatness we have no information, and we are even left to guess how much of it had already been acquired in the sixth century B.C. As in the case of so many other cities, we have a foundation legend decorating the moment of birth, and then nothing farther. The Tyrian princess Dido or Elissa, daughter of Belus, sister of Pygmalion, king of Tyre, and wife of the wealthy Sichæus [or Sicharbas] priest of Hercules [Melkarth] in that city—is said to have been left a widow in consequence of the murder of Sichæus by Pygmalion, who seized the treasures belonging to his victim. But Dido found means to disappoint him of his booty, possessed herself of the gold which had tempted Pygmalion, and secretly emigrated, carrying with her the sacred insignia of Hercules; a considerable body of Tyrians followed her. She settled at Carthage on a small hilly peninsula joined by a narrow tongue of land to the continent, purchasing from the natives as much land as could be surrounded by an ox’s hide, which she caused to be cut into the thinnest strip, and thus made it sufficient for the site of her first citadel, Byrsa, which afterwards grew up into the great city of Carthage. As soon as her new settlement had acquired footing, she was solicited in marriage by several princes of the native tribes, especially by the Gætulian Jarbas, who threatened war if he were refused. Thus pressed by the clamours of her own people, who desired to come into alliance with the natives, yet irrevocably determined to maintain exclusive fidelity to her first husband, she escaped the conflict by putting an end to her life. She pretended to acquiesce in the proposition of a second marriage, requiring only delay sufficient to offer an expiatory sacrifice to the manes of Sichæus; a vast funeral pile was erected, and many victims slain upon it, in the midst of which Dido pierced her own bosom with a sword, and perished in the flames. Such is the legend to which Virgil has given a new colour by interweaving the adventures of Æneas, and thus connecting the foundation legends of Carthage and Rome, careless of his deviation from the received mythical chronology. Dido was worshipped as a goddess at Carthage until the destruction of the city: and it has been imagined with some probability that she is identical with Astarte, the divine patroness under whose auspices the colony was originally established, as Gades and Tarsus were founded under those of Hercules—the tale of the funeral pile and self-burning appearing in the religious ceremonies of other Cilician and Syrian towns. Phœnician religion and worship were diffused along with the Phœnician colonies throughout the larger portion of the Mediterranean.

The Phocæans of Ionia, who amidst their adventurous voyages westward established the colony of Massalia (as early as 600 B.C.), were only enabled to accomplish this by a naval victory over the Carthaginians—the earliest example of Greek and Carthaginian collision which has been preserved to us. The Carthaginians were jealous of commercial rivalry, and their traffic with the Tuscans and Latins in Italy, as well as their lucrative mine-working in Spain, dates from a period when Greek commerce in those regions was hardly known. In Greek authors the denomination Phœnicians is often used to designate the Carthaginians as well as the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, so that we cannot always distinguish which of the two is meant. But it is remarkable that the distant establishment of Gades, and the numerous settlements planted for commercial purposes along the western coast of Africa and without the Straits of Gibraltar, are expressly ascribed to the Tyrians. Many of the other Phœnician establishments on the southern coast of Spain seem to have owed their origin to Carthage rather than to Tyre. But the relations between the two, so far as we know them, were constantly amicable, and Carthage even at the period of her highest glory sent Theori with a tribute of religious recognition to the Tyrian Hercules; the visit of these envoys coincided with the siege of the town by Alexander the Great. On that critical occasion, the wives and children of the Tyrians were sent to find shelter at Carthage: two centuries before, when the Persian empire was in its age of growth and expansion, the Tyrians had refused to aid Cambyses with their fleet in its plans for conquering Carthage, and thus probably preserved their colony from subjugation.b