Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/468

 428 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. external trade could be carried farther afield or its home manu- factures improved. The Syrian merchant would dare anything for his profits. He would expatriate himself ; he would visit the tribes of the Syrian desert to buy their wool ; he would go beyond them and establish himself in Nineveh, Babylon, or Memphis. He would take to the sea and hold his markets on every shore to which the winds and waves would give him access ; in his desire to sell the whole of any cargo with which he sailed, he would pass on step by step till he had left the confines of the known world behind him. The epigraphic texts left us by the Phoenicians are too short and dry to give us any of those vivid glimpses into the past that the historian loves. When we wish to make the men of Tyre and Sidon live again, when we try to see them as they moved in those seven or eight centuries during which they were supreme in the Mediterranean, we have to turn to the Greeks, to Herodotus and Homer, for the details of our picture ; it is in their pages that we are told how these eastern traders made themselves indis- pensable to the half-savage races of Europe. Their coming was at once looked forward to and dreaded ; the arms and other aids to life they brought with them were desired with all the impatience of half-civilized man, while their greed for gain and their perfidy were reasons for distrust and dislike. It was notorious that they took what they had not bought, that they dealt in slaves, and that they had no scruples about carrying off a child or a young woman when they could contrive to do so either by force or fraud. They were feared and hated, but men could not do without them. They were called irov7raiTrdoi " cunning men, who knew how to cheat," cnraTrjia elBorts, " men who exploited others, who devoured," Tpw/crai, who worked unnum- bered ills to mankind. 1 It has been said truly enough that the Phoenician had many characteristics of the Jew of the Middle Ages, but he belonged to a strong race, to a race whose superiority in many respects must be recognized. The Phoenicians carried on their trade in a leisurely way. It consisted for the most part in exchanging their manufactured wares for the natural produce of the countries they visited ; it was in 1 HOMER, Odyssey, xiv. 288, 289 : 8?) rore <f)olvL^ rjXOtv avrjp, aTraT^Aia etSws, Tpt!)KTr)<s,o<i 817 TroXXa KOLK avOpwTrouriv cwpyei.