Page:The Periplus of Hanno.djvu/19

 "The rising African factory was known to its inhabitants by the name of Kirjath-Hadeschath, or New Town, to distinguish it from the much older settlement of Utica, of which it may have been, to some extent, an offshoot. The Greeks, when they came to know of its existence, called it Karchedon, and the Romans Carthago. The date of its foundation is uncertain; but the current tradition refers it to a period about a hundred years before the founding of Rome.

"In her origin, at least, Carthage seems to have been, like other Phœnician settlements, a mere commercial factory. Her inhabitants cultivated friendly relations with the natives, looked upon themselves as tenants at will rather than owners of the soil, and, as such, cheerfully paid a rent to the African Berbers for the ground covered by their dwellings. Thus much, if thus much only, of truth is contained in the legend of Dido, which, adorned as it has been by the genius of Virgil, and resting in part on early local traditions, must always remain indissolubly bound up with the name of Carthage.

"It was the instinct of self-preservation alone which, in the course of the sixth century, dictated a change of policy at Carthage, and transformed her peace-loving mercantile community into the war-like and conquering state, of which the whole of the western Mediterranean was so soon to feel the power. A people far less keensighted than the Phœnicians must have discerned that it was their very existence which was at stake; at all events, unless they were willing to be dislodged from Africa, and Sicily, and Spain, as they had already been dislodged from Italy and Greece and the islands of the Levant, by the flood of Hellenic colonization, they must alter their policy. Accordingly they joined hands (in B. C. 537) with their inveterate enemies, the Etruscans, to prevent a threatened settlement of some exiled Phocæans on the important island of Corsica. In Africa they took up arms to make the inhabitants of Cyrene feel that it was towards Egypt or the interior, not towards Carthage, that they must look for an extension of their boundaries; and in Sicily, by withdrawing half voluntarily from the eastern side of the island in which the Greeks had settled, they tightened their grip upon the western portion which, as being nearer to Carthage, was more important to them, and where the original Phœnician settlements of Panormus, Motye, and Soloeis had been planted.

"The result of this change of policy was that the western half of the Mediterranean became, with one exception, what the whole of it had once bidden fair to be—a Phœnician lake, in which no foreign merchantmen dared to show themselves. It was a vast preserve, to be caught trespassing upon which, so Strabo tells us, on the authority