Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/71

 *turbed, her naval reputation in later days having been mainly caused by the necessity of protecting her commerce and her colonies from the piratical attacks of other nations. With Spain, for instance, she maintained for centuries extensive and peaceful commercial relations: nor was it till the Greeks and Romans had become the most daring marauders in the Mediterranean, that Carthage, in self-defence, fitted out a navy, and thus became a great naval power. That these peaceful employments were crowned with success, we learn from the universal testimony of antiquity, it being generally admitted that, in the manufactures she had transplanted from Tyre and Sidon, she greatly surpassed in excellence whatever reputation the parent state had acquired. Moreover, we have still extant a series of coins of extraordinary beauty, struck for her no doubt, in many instances, by Greek artists of Sicily and Magna Græcia, yet which could hardly have been intended, as some numismatists have thought, for only her colonial cities of Panormus, Segesta, &c.

Acknowledged by Polybius to have possessed hereditary pre-eminence in nautical matters, with the undisputed dominion of the sea for a long period, it may be fairly assumed that her ships were then unrivalled. Indeed Aristotle states that the Carthaginians were the first to increase the size of their galleys from three to four banks of oars.

As the Carthaginians followed in the wake of the Phœnicians, it is impossible to ascertain the exact