Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/122

 the siege of Byzantium. Nor, indeed, are such principles wholly forgotten at the present day; for, even now, while Great Britain captures and destroys at sea the private property of the people with whom she may happen to be at war (which is simply the right of the strong confirmed by ancient usage and unhappily still sanctioned by international maritime law), she does not allow depredations similar in their character to be perpetrated by nations that sell their prisoners as captives of war. We, like Philip of Macedon, denounce in others what we ourselves practise, because it is sanctioned by usage and by law. Who will say that the destruction at sea of the goods of private individuals is not as barbarous as the practice which still prevails among illiterate African chiefs? England, in this matter, simply overlooks the beam in her own eye, though sacrificing much to extract the mote in that of other and less civilized nations.

Corinth, once so celebrated, was among the first of the Greek states to avail herself of the many advantages nature had given her. Built a little to the west of the isthmus connecting the Peloponnesus with northern Greece, she was destined by her position to be the entrepôt of both. Nor did her people fail to appreciate this, for, contrary to what Herodotus states generally of the Greeks, the Corinthians are known to have been expert sailors, and to have made navigation and ship-building their study, being, as Thucydides remarks (i. 13), the inventors of the trireme. *