Page:The Periplus of Hanno.djvu/23

, it was the gloomy and debasing side of their worship which tended to predominate alike in Phœnicia proper and in the greatest of the Phœnician colonies.

"But there was one of these inferior gods who stood in such a peculiar relation to Carthage, and whose worship seems to have been so much more genial and so much more spiritual than the rest, that we are fain to dwell upon it as a foil to what has preceded. This god was Melcarth, that is Melech-Kirjath, or the king of the city; he is called by the Greeks 'the Phœnician Hercules,' and his name itself has passed, with a slight alteration, into Greek mythology as Melicertes. The city of which he was pre-eminently the god was Tyre. There he had a magnificent temple, which was visited for antiquarian purposes by Herodotus. ... At Carthage Melcarth had not even a temple. The whole city was his temple, and he refused to be localized in any particular part of it. He received, there is reason to believe, no sacrifices of blood; and it was his comparatively pure and spiritual worship which, as we see repeatedly in Carthaginian history, formed a chief link in the chain that bound the parent to the various daughter-cities scattered over the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean.

"The Carthaginian proper names which have come down to us form one among many proofs of the depth of their religious feelings, for they are all, or nearly all, compounded with the name of one or other of their chief gods. Hamilcar is he whom Melcarth protects; Hasdrubal is he whose help is in Baal; Hannibal, the Hanniel of the Bible, the grace of Baal; and so on with Bomilcar, Himilco, Ethbaal, Maherbal, Adherbal, and Mastanabal.

"But if the life of the great capitalists of Carthage was as brilliant as we have described it, how did it fare with the poorer citizens, with those whom we call the masses, till we sometimes forget that they are made up of individual units? If we know little of the rich, how much less do we know of the poor of Carthage and her dependencies? The city population, with the exception—a large exception doubtless—of those engaged in commerce, well contented, as it would seem, like the Romans under the Empire, if nothing deprived them of their bread and their amusement, went on eating and marrying and multiplying until their numbers became excessive, and then they were shipped off by the prudence of their rulers to found colonies in other parts of Africa or in Spain. Their natural leaders, or, as probably more often happened, the bankrupt members of the aristocracy, would take the command of the colony, and obtain free leave, in return for their services, to enrich themselves by the plunder of the adjoining tribes.