Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/25

 4 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. ten or twelve hundred years before our era, mayhap even sooner, she assumed the office of ubiquitous broker, of an in- termediary moving to and fro between the East and West. We may be sure that a function bringing with it such large profits was not given up even when the Hellenic race, in its expansion, became the sole mistress of the iEgean sea. If, after the Medic campaigns, her war-ships can no longer show themselves beyond the headlands of Lycia, her merchantmen continue to frequent Hellenic and Italian seaports, where they bring commodities whose monopoly they keep in their own lands, the raw products which Tyrian and Sidonian traders obtained from the depths of Africa and Asia, wrought objects which they purchased of Egyptian and Chaldaean artificers, along with the manufactures of their own industry, imitated from foreign models. The fall of Tyre to the Macedonians and the founding of Alexandria greatly diminished, from the end of the fourth century b.c, the industrial and commercial im- portance of Phoenicia in the eastern basin of the inland sea; but the supremacy which had been lost in the east, was more than compensated in the west of the same sea by the bold and brilliant action of Carthage, where for a hundred and fifty years all the profits accruing from undivided sway were great enough to satisfy Punic lust of possession. Scant justice how- ever would be done to the Canaanite, if we refused it our meed of praise for its untiring activity and the great services which it confessedly rendered to its customers down to the fateful struggle and the final overthrow of Carthage. Consequently we were not free to halt mid-way and turn aside to learn what was taking place in either of the southern peninsulas of Europe, whilst the nations by whom the preparatory work of civilization had been accomplished were tottering under the weight of great age. Had we done so, we should have been open to the reproach of breaking asunder, without having any call for it, the continuity of an organic life, each of whose main phases ever preserved and reproduced 3ome special features of the preceding epoch. Hence it has come to pass that we were gradually and almost imperceptibly led on to prosecute the Art- history of Asia to the Macedonian thunder-clap conquest, and even for Phoenicia to the day when the fateful fires were lighted for the burning of Tyre's greatest daughter. But under one