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

And as at home the Phœnician placidly endured the oppression of their masters, so abroad they were by no means inclined to exchange the peaceful ways of a commercial policy for one of conquest. Their colonies are factories; to them it was of more importance to take their wares from the natives and bring others to them than to acquire broad lands in distant countries and accomplish there the slow and difficult work of colonisation. They even avoided war with their competitors; almost without resistance they allowed themselves to be driven out of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and in the great sea fights which were fought in early days for the dominion of the western Mediterranean, at Alalia and Cyme it was the Etruscans, not the Phœnicians, who bore the brunt of the battle against the Greeks. If, on occasion, competition could not be avoided, the matter was compromised as well as might be; no attempt was ever made by the Phœnicians to conquer Cære or Massalia.

Still less, of course, were the Phœnicians inclined to wars of aggression. The sole instance in ancient times of their taking the offensive on the battle-field, was in the Sicilian expedition of the African Phœnicians, which ended with the defeat of Himera by Gelo of Syracuse (480), and then it was only as obedient subjects of the great king and in order to avoid taking a share in the campaign against the eastern Hellenes, that they took the field against the Hellenes of the west, as their Syrian kinsmen, in the same year, had to submit to joining with the Persians in the battle of Salamis.

This was not cowardice; the navigation of unknown waters in armed vessels demands brave hearts, and the Phœnicians have often shown that such were to be found among them. Still less was it the want of persistence and individuality in the sense of nationality; rather have the Aramæans, with an obstinacy to which no Indo-Germanic people ever attained, and which to us of the West appears as either more or less than human, defended their nationality against all the seductions of Greek civilisation, as well as against all the coercive force of both eastern and western despots, alike with the weapons of the spirit and with their blood. It is the want of a political sense which, though co-existing with the liveliest racial feeling and the most faithful adherence to the mother-city, still characterises the essential nature of the Phœnicians. Freedom had no attractions for them, nor did they possess any lust of rule; “they dwelt careless,” says the Book of Judges, “after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure,” and in possession of riches.

Amongst all the Phœnician settlements none throve more quickly nor more securely than those which the Tyrians and Sidonians had founded on the south coast of Spain and in the north of Africa, in regions where neither the arm of the great king, nor the dangerous rivalry of the Grecian sailors had reached, but where the natives stood face to face with the foreigners as the Indians to the Europeans in America.

Amongst the numerous and flourishing cities on these shores one was pre-eminent, the “New City” of Karthada, or, as the westerns called it, Karchedon, or Carthage. Though not the earliest settlement of the Phœnicians in this region, and perhaps originally a city standing under the protection of the neighbouring Utica, the oldest Phœnician city in Libya, she soon outstripped her neighbour and even the mother-country, owing to the incomparable advantages of her position and the eager activity of her inhabitants. She stood not far from the (former) estuary of the Bagradas (Mejerda) which flows through the richest grain-bearing district of North Africa on a fertile elevation of the soil, which is even now set with villas and covered with olive and orange groves, and which sinking gently towards the plain ends on the sea side in a promontory encircled by the waves. Situated near the centre of the Gulf of Tunis, the greatest haven of North Africa, where that beautiful stretch of water offers the best anchorage for large ships and the most excellent springs gush close to the shore, this place is so peculiarly favourable to agriculture and commerce and the connection between the two, that not only did the Tyrian settlement there become the first commercial city of the Phœnicians, but in Roman times also, Carthage, though scarcely restored, became the third city in the empire, and even to-day under no very favourable conditions a flourishing town of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants still exists. The agricultural, mercantile, and industrial prosperity of a city in such a position and with such inhabitants explains itself; but we need some answer to the question as to how this settlement developed a political power such as no other Phœnician city possessed.