Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/415

 POWER OF CARTHAGE. ?gg century u. c., especially in reference to the general system pursued, The maximum of her power was attained before her first war with Rome, which began in 264 B. c. ; the first and second Punic wars both of them greatly reduced her strength and dominion. Yet in spite of such reduction we learn that about 150 B. c., shortly be- fore the third Punic war, which ended in the capture and depopu- lation of the city, not less than seven hundred thousand souls 1 were computed in it, as occupants of a fortified circumference of above twenty miles, covering a peninsula with its isthmus. Upon this isthmus its citadel Byrsa was situated, surrounded by a triple wall of its own, and crowned at its summit by a magnificent temple of JEsculapius. The numerous population is the more remarkable, since Utica (a considerable city, colonized from Pho3nicia more anciently than even Carthage'itself, and always independent of the Carthaginians, though in the condition of an inferior and discon- tented ally), was within the distance of seven miles from Carthage 5 on the one side, and Tunis seemingly not much farther off on the other. Even at that time, too, the Carthaginians are said to have possessed three hundred tributary cities in Libya. 3 Yet this wa& but a small fraction of the prodigious empire which had belonged to them certainly in the fourth century B. c., and in all probability also between 480-410 B. c. That empire extended eastward as far as the Altars of the Philaeni, near the Great Syrtis, west- ward, all along the coast to the Pillars of Herakles and the west- ern coast of Morocco. The line of coast south-east of Carthage, as far as the bay called the Lesser Syrtis, was proverbial (un- der the name of Byzacium and the Emporia) for its fertility. Along this extensive line were distributed indigenous Libyan tribes, living by agriculture ; and a mixed population called Liby-Phoe- nicians, formed by intermarriage and coalition of some of these tribes either with colonists from Tyre and Sidon, or perhaps with a Canaanitish population akin in race to the Phoenicians, yet of still earlier settlement in the country .4 These Liby-Phoenicians 1 Strabo, xvii, p. 832, 833 ; Livy, Epitome, lib. 51. Strabo gives the circumference as three hundred and sixty stadia, and the breadth of the isthmus as sixty stadia. But this is noticed by Barth aa much exaggerated ( Wanderungen auf der Kuste des Mittelmeers, p. 85). 2 Appian. Reb. Punic, yiii, 75. 3 Strabo, ut sup. 17*
 * This is the view of Movers, sustained with much plausibility, in hit