Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/47

 ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 27 have preferred suffetes or judges, two of whom held power at once. But whatever title they enjoyed, whether they were hereditary princes or consuls appointed for a time or for life, their power must always have been more than a little precarious. Remember the doges of Venice and Genoa ! the true masters of the city were the heads of the principal families, or, to speak more accurately still, of the chief commercial houses. In Phoenicia, as at Carthage and in the Italian republics, the creators of the national wealth and the employers of the national labour formed, under one name or another, a species of senate. 1 They all had ex- perience of affairs and habits of command. Each of them counted his ships by dozens, and his sailors, workmen, and agents by hundreds. One of these merchants would have a monopoly of trade to some country far larger than Phoenicia ; another might work tin or gold mines in some distant island of the north or west. The interests of the nation were therefore bound up with those of the shipowners, who offered it a continually widening field for its energies, and with those of its manufacturers, who provided the materials for profitable exchanges. There was no question bearing upon the future prosperity of the people in which the rich merchants and shipowners of the country who knew per- sonally every shore and every nation of the Mediterranean were not the best guides, and a council composed of such men could not fail, in time, to gather all real power into its hands. It was in such a council that all questions of importance were discussed and decided. Even when they had kings the Phoenician cities were in reality small aristocratic republics. It w T as in Phoenicia that municipal liberty made its first appearance in the ancient world and that it first gave evidence of its inherent power. It created what the great oriental states, or rather agglomerations of men, had never known, namely, the citizen, the individual citizen, full of pride in the independence of his narrow fatherland, full of ambition for 1 ARISTOTLE, who was a great admirer of Carthage, insists upon the oligarchic character of her constitution and upon the importance it gave to wealth and to those who possessed it (Politics, ii. viii. 5). " It was the opinion of the Carthaginians that he who should exercise public functions should have not only great qualities but also great riches ; they thought that a man without fortune would not have the leisure necessary to make him successful as a governor of men."