Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/62

 42 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. grains and fruits in exchange for the stuffs, tools and jewellery sold in the city bazaars. These relations continued for centuries without interruption, and in time produced the mixed but strongly Semitic race of men whom the Greeks called Liby-Phomicians. It was by the help of these half breeds that Carthage succeeded in an enterprise which Tyre had not even attempted. In two hundred years, from the end of the ninth to the end of the seventh centuries, she conquered, foot by foot, the whole of the region stretching from the Lesser Syrtes to the frontier of Numidia ; and her occupation was not confined to the littoral ; she founded, in the interior, a number of towns and fortified villages whose fidelity to the metropolis, like that of the Roman colonies in Italy, was secured by the enjoyment of important privileges. 1 The earlier Tyrian colonies had been nothing more than factories with supre- macy over the land in their immediate neighbourhood, while the skilful policies of Carthage soon made her the mistress of a wide and fruitful territory supporting several millions of inhabitants. As for the other Tyrian and Sidonian cities on the same coast, they preserved for the most part the dignity implied by the name of allies, but Carthage was the permanent mistress of the confederacy and the disposer of its forces. Neither Tyre nor Sidon ever had an army. In most cases they founded their settlements in islands to which the sea was a sufficient protection, and nothing more than a few ships to guard the straits was required. When they were compelled to raise factories on the main land, they surrounded them with a wall strong enough and high enough to defeat a coup-de-main, while they paid an annual subsidy to the chiefs of the nearest tribes, 2 just as our modern merchants did on the coast of Guinea when- ever they wished to set up their establishments on the lands of some negro king. In these days the subsidies take the form of beads, barrels of rum or gunpowder and old muskets. The Phoenicians can have had no difficulty in supplying the natives 1 " It is thus," says ARISTOTLE, " that Carthage guards against the dangers of an oligarchy she sends periodically colonies made up from among her own citizens into the countries round about, and insures them an easy existence." Politics, ii. viii. 9. 2 "Statute annuo vectigali pro solo urbis" says JUSTIN (xviii. 5). He even says that Carthage herself paid such a subsidy for more than three centuries, which hardly seems likely (xix. i and 2).