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 The Western World and Rome 257 thus left Sicily more than ever open to Carthaginian control. The resulting supremacy of the Carthaginian merchants in Sicily was a source of aggravation to the merchants of Rome. Carthage^ was governed by an aristocracy of wealthy mer- Carthage chants. The mercantile instinct, which still makes their race a line of merchant princes at the present day, was strong in the blood of the Semitic Carthaginians. In their veins flowed the blood of those hardy desert mariners of Arabia, the Semitic caravaneers (p. 59) who had made the market places of Baby- lon the center of ancient eastern trade two thousand years before Rome ever owned a ship (p. 67). The fleets of their Phoenician ancestors had coursed the Mediterranean in the days when the Stone Age barbarians of Italy were eagerly looking for the merchant of the East and his metal implements (p. 244). Now Rome had gained the supremacy in Italy only to find that the merchant princes of Carthage had made the western Medi- terranean a Carthaginian sea. They ruled the northern coast of Africa from the frontiers of the Greek city of Cyrene west- ward to the Atlantic. They controlled southern Spain, they had absorbed the islands of the west, large and small, including Sardinia and Corsica, and only the Greek cities of Sicily had prevented them from appropriating the whole of this island long ago. Thus they formed the extreme left or western wing of the great Semitic line (Fig. 49).^ We are now to witness the continuation of the old struggle of Semite and Indo-European, which has reached its final phase on the Semitic left wing, where the areas of Roman and Carthaginian trade have over- lapped and brought on the contest. fought him, and, although at first defeated, finally forced him to retire to Epirus again. This new failure of the southern Greeks to unite was of course another example of that local independence of which we have seen so much in Hellas. I The student should here reread pp. 59-60, 67, 137-139. '2 We have followed Europe and Asia in a long struggle for the possession of the eastern Mediterranean; we now behold Europe and Asia, as represented by Carthage, again facing each other, but this time across the western Mediter- ranean, for the control of which they are fighting. I