Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/416

 394 HISTORY OF GREECE. dwelt in towns, seemingly of moderate size and unfortified, bin each surrounded by a territory ample and fertile, yielding large produce. They were assiduous cultivators, but generally unwarlike, which latter quality was ascribed by ancient theory to the extreme richness of their soil. 1 Of the Liby-Phoenician towns the number is not known to us, but it must have been prodigiously great, since we are told that both Agathokles and Regulus in their respective Invasions captured no less than two hundred. A single district, called Tuska, is also spoken of as having fifty towns. 2 A few of the towns along the coast, Hippo, Utica, Adrume- tum, Thapsus, Leptis, etc., were colonies from Tyre, like Carthage herself. With respect to Carthage, therefore, they stood upon a different footing from the Liby-Phoenician towns, either maritime or in the interior. Yet the Carthaginians contrived in time to render every town tributary, with the exception of Utica. They thus derived revenue from all the inhabitants of this fertile region, Tyrian, Liby-Phoenician, and indigenous Libyan ; and the amount which they imposed appears to have been exorbitant. At one time, immediately after the first Punic war, they took from the rural cultivators as much as one-half of their produce, 3 and doubled at one stroke the tribute levied upon the towns. The town and district of Leptis paid to them a tribute of one talent per day, or three hundred and sixty-five talents annually. Such exactions were not collected without extreme harshness of enforcement, learned and instructive work Geschichte der Phcenizier, vol. ii, part ii, p. 435-455. See Diodor. xx, 55. 1 Livy, xxix, 25. Compare the last chapter of the history of Herodotus. 2 Diodor. xx, 1 7 ; Appian, viii, 3, 68. 3 Colonel Leake observes, with respect to the modern Greeks, who work on the plains of Turkey, upon the landed property of Turkish proprietors " The Helots seem to have resembled the Greeks, who labor on the Turk- ish farms in the plains of Turkey, and who are bound to account to their masters for one-half of the produce of the soil, as Tyrtaeus says of the Messenians of his time "Qanep ovoi fieyatoif ax&e bea-KoovvoLGi (jtepovref, uvayKaijc n "H.p.iav iruv, oaaov Kupnov upovpa (jiepoi. (Tyrtsens, Frag. 5, ed. Sctaeid.) The condition of the Greeks in the mountainous regions is not so hard
 * Leake, Peloponnesiaca, p. 168).