Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/291

 I'ilKNICIAXS SUPPLANTED BY GKKKKS. 27a ficulties, must have been rewarded with profits on the largest scale of monopoly. The Phenician settlers on the coast of Spain became gradually more and more numerous, and appear to have been distributed, either in separate townships or intermingled with the native pop- ulation, between the mouth of the Anas (Guadiana) and the town of Malaka (Malaga) on the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we are very little informed about their precise localities and details, but we find no information of Phenician settlements on the Mediterranean coast of Spain northward of Malaka ; for Carlhagena, or New Car- thage, was a Carthaginian settlement, founded only in the third cen- tury B. c., after the first Punic war. 1 The Greek word Pheni- cians being used to signify as well the inhabitants of Carthage as those of Tyre and Sidon, it is not easy to distinguish what belongs to each of them ; nevertheless, we can discern a great and important difference in the character of their establishments, especially in Iberia. The Carthaginians combined with their commercial pro- jects large schemes of conquest and empire : it is thus that the independent Phenician establishments in and near the gulf of Tunis, in Africa, were reduced to dependence upon them, while many new small townships, direct from Carthage itself, were planted on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and the whole of that coast from the great Syrtis westward to the Pillars of Her- akles (strait of Gibraltar) is described as their territory in the Periplus of Skylax (B. c. 360). In Iberia, during the third cen- tury B. c., they maintained large armies, 2 constrained the inland tribes to subjection, and acquired a dominion which nothing but the superior force of Rome prevented from being durable : in Sicily, also, the resistance of the Greeks prevented a similar con- summation. But the foreign settlements of Tyre and Sidon were formed with views purely commercial. In the region of Tartes- sus as well as in the western coast of Africa outside of the strait of Gibraltar, we hear only of pacific interchange and metallurgy ; and the number of Phenicians who acquired gradually settle- ments in the interior was so great, that Strabo describes these towns not less than two hundred in number as altogether 1 Strabo, iii, pp. 156, 158. 161 ; Polyhius, iii, 10, 3-10.
 * Polyb. i, 10; ii, 1.