Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/156

136 same may be with almost equal truth affirmed of the Phœnicians. It is true that, issuing from their narrow home on the extreme eastern verge of the Mediterranean, they were the first of all known races who ventured forth in floating houses on the bosom of the deep, at first for the purpose of fishing and dredging, but soon also for the prosecution of trade. They were the first to open up maritime commerce; and at an incredibly early period they traversed the Mediterranean even to its furthest extremity in the west. Maritime stations of the Phœnicians appear on almost all its coasts earlier than those of the Hellenes; in Hellas itself, for instance, in Crete and Cyprus, in Egypt, Libya, and Spain, and likewise on the western Italian main. Thucydides tells us that all around Sicily, before the Greeks came thither, or at least before they had established themselves there in any considerable numbers, the Phœnicians had set up their factories on the headlands and islets, not with a view to territorial aggrandizement, but for the sake of trading with the natives. But it was otherwise in the case of continental Italy. No reliable indication has hitherto been given of the existence of any Phœnician settlement there excepting one, a Punic factory at Cære, the memory of which has been preserved partly by the appellation Punicum given to a little village on the Cærite coast, partly by the other name of the town of Cære itself, Agylla, which is not, as idle fiction asserts, of Pelasgic origin, but is a Phœnician word signifying the "round town"—precisely the appearance which Cære presents when seen from the sea. That this station and any similar establishments which may have elsewhere existed on the coasts of Italy were neither of much importance nor of long standing is evident from their having disappeared almost without leaving a trace. We have not the smallest reason to think them older than the Hellenic settlements of a similar kind on the same coasts. An evidence of no slight weight that Latium at least first became acquainted with the men of Canaan through the medium of the Hellenes is furnished by the Latin name "Pœni," which is borrowed from the Greeks. All the oldest relations, indeed, of the Italians to the civilization of the East point decidedly towards Greece; and the rise of a Phœnician factory at Cære may be very well explained, without resorting to the pre-Hellenic period, by the subsequent well-known relations between the commercial state of Cære and Carthage. In fact when