Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/471

 THE R6LE OF THE PHCENICIANS IN HISTORY. 431 And our admiration of their achievements is enhanced by the feebleness of their resources. At the time of their greatest expansion, the true Phoenicians numbered, at the very most, a few hundreds of thousands. It was with such scanty numbers that they contrived to be present everywhere, to construct ports of refuge for their ships, factories for their merchants and warehouses for their goods. These " English of antiquity," as they have been so well called, 1 upheld their power by means very similar to those employed by England, who has succeeded for two centuries in holding together her vast colonial empire by a handful of soldiers and a huge fleet of ships. The great difference lies in the fact that Tyre made no attempt to subjugate and govern the nations she traded with. Carthage tried it, in Sicily, in Sardinia, and in Spain ; and at first her enterprise seemed to be successful, but in the long run it brought embarrassment and ruin upon her. If she had been faithful to the policy of Tyre she might perhaps have retained the commerce of the Mediterranean in her hands for a century or two longer than she did. England has followed the policy of Tyre wherever she could. The Tyrians and Sidonians avoided conquests which might have exhausted their strength ; they were content to occupy points which commanded the great commercial routes ; for choice they established themselves upon islands and islets, where a stub- born defence could be offered with small means. When an island was very large, like Sicily or Sardinia, they made no effort to occupy it all. They took possession of some easily fortified peninsula or commanding hill, leaving the interior to the natives and doing their best to live amicably with them and to carry on a fruitful and pacific commerce. At first sight it is difficult to understand how a trading people like this should have failed to invent money, but a moment's reflection will show that their failure was natural enough. The kind of traffic they carried on did not require it ; neither Egypt nor Chaldaea, to whom their early commerce was restricted, made use of money, and as for more distant and far less civilized tribes it would have been no use to offer them money if they had had it. With them it was pure barter ; even the Egyptian and Babylonian fashion of valuing things by weight of gold or silver was unknown. As in modern trade on the west coast of Africa one thing was exchanged for another in the most direct and least artificial way, a 1 G. CHARMES, Lettrcs de Tunisie (Journal des Debats, May 4th, 1882).