Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/362

 346 HISTORY OF GREECE. means the oldest of the Tyrian colonies ; but though TJtica and Gades may have been more ancient than Carthage, 1 the latter greatly outstripped them in wealth and power, and acquired a sort of federal preeminence over all the Phenician colonies on the coast of Africa. In those later times when the dominion of the Carthaginians had reached its maximum, it comprised the towns of Utica, Hippo, Adrumetum, and Leptis, all original Phenician foundations, and enjoying probably, even as dependents of Car- thage, a certain qualified autonomy, besides a great number of smaller towns planted by themselves, and inhabited by a mixed population called Liby-Phenicians. Three hundred such towns ? a dependent territory covering half the space between the lesser and the greater Syrtis, and in many parts remarkably fer- tile, a city said to contain seven hundred thousand inhabitants, active, wealthy, and seemingly homogeneous, and foreign de- pendencies in Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic isles, and Spain, all this aggregate of power, under one political management, was sufficient to render the contest of Carthage even with Rome for some time doubtful. But by what steps the Carthaginians raised themselves to such a pitch of greatness we have no information, and we are even left to guess how much of it had already been acquired in the sixth century B. c. As in the case of so many other cities, 1 Utica is said to have been founded 287 years earlier than Carthage ; the author who states this, professing to draw his information from Phenician histories (Aristot. Mirab. Auscult. c. 134). Vellcius Patcrculus states Gades to he older than Utica, and places the foundation of Carthage B. c. 819 (i, 2, G). He seems to follow in the main the same authority as the com- poser of the Aristotelic compilation above cited. Other statements place the foundation of Carthage in 878 B. c. (Heercn, Ideen iibcr den Verkehr, etc., part ii, b. i, p. 29). Appian states the date of the foundation as fifty years before the Trojan war (De Reb. Punic, c. 1 ) ; Philistus, as twenty-one years before the same event (Philist. Fragm. 50, ed. Goller) ; Timanis, as thirty-eight years earlier than the 1st Olympiad (Timaji Fragm. 21, ed. Didot) ; Justin, seventy-two years earlier than the foundation of Rome (xviii, 6). The citation which Joscphus gives from Mcnander's work, extracted from Tyrian uvaypafyai, placed the foundation of Carthage 143 years after the building of the temple of Jerusalem (Joseph, cont. Apion. 5, c. 17-1,'H Apion said that Carthage was founded in the first year of Olympiad 7 (B. ?.
 * 48), (Joseph, c. Apion. ii, 2.)