Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/126

 ioS A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud.ea. of the character and special genius of the Phoenicians ; these enabled us to gauge with absolute certainty their civilization, to note its lacunes, and define what Carthage lacked and the cause of her failure in becoming a great educational force, which her marvellous activity, her incomparable gift of transporting herself almost to any point of the compass, seemed to single her out pre- eminently for playing a similar part. While it is the merest truism to say that an efficient teacher makes a good pupil, it is an apt illustration of the case at hand. The Sardi furnish the exact mark of what the world would have been had Tyre and Carthage remained sole mistresses of the Mediterranean ; and had not the Greeks entered upon the scene towards the eighth century b.c. ; when taking up the reins that had fallen from Punic grasp, they expounded to the neighbouring peoples, the noble and exquisite forms of their poetic fancy ; the anthropomorphic and humanizing types of their Olympus, the models of their plastic art, which, untrammelled from the conventionality and time honoured tradi- tions that had swathed their mode of expression and that were no longer in harmony with the teaching of their philosophers, rose to the highest pitch the world had seen, and that are unsurpassed at the present day.