They had seen the mirage all along that hot coast, and bare sandhills shimmering above shallow roadsteads: they had felt round the lesser Syrtis for water and a landing-place and had found none, when the shore-line turned abruptly east and north before them. It showed first the rank grass of a steppe; it grew more and more fertile as they advanced: at last, as they rounded the Hermæan promontory, they opened a bay, the mountainous arms of which broke the Levanter and whose aspect immediately invited them to beach their keels.
|“Afrigya”|
It stands at the narrow passage between the eastern and the western basins of the Mediterranean; and the western basin had not as yet been visited (it would seem) by men capable of developing its wealth. This bay upon which the Tyrians landed was sheltered and deep: there was, as in their own country, a belt of fertile soil between the shore and the mountains; the largest river of Barbary was to hand. Their first settlements, of which Utica, near Porto Farina, was perhaps the earliest, began the new expansion of the Phœnician people. They called the shore their “Afrigya”—that is, their “colony.” The word took root and remained. It was in this way that Asia, much older than we are, much more wily, not so brave, came in as a merchant and crept along till she found, and landed on, the Maghreb, where it stands out across the entry to the western seas.
|Carthage|
When these first African cities had been founded for some centuries, there was built on the same gulf and at its head—perhaps as a depôt for Utica, more probably as a refuge for Tyrian exiles—a city called “The New Town”: it is of this title, whose Semitic form must have resembled some such sound as “Karthadtha,” that the Greeks made Carchedon and the Latins Carthago, and it was from this centre that there arose and was maintained for seven hundred years over the Western Mediterranean an Oriental influence which was always paramount and threatened at certain moments to become universal and permanent.
Our race was not then conscious of itself. Gaul, Spain, the Alps and Italy north of the Apennines were a dust of tribes, villages and little fortified towns to which there was not to be given for many centuries the visible unity which we inherit from Rome. Rome itself was not yet walled. Southern Italy, though far more wealthy, was divided, and as for Africa it was full of roving men, Berbers, to whom some prehistoric chance, coupled with their soil and climate, had bequeathed such horses and such a tradition of riding as their descendants still possess. These savages must have felt in their blood that the Greek colonies, (when such towns were planted among them,) were of their own family and worshipped gods whom they could understand; just as, much later, they learnt to accept quite easily the kindred domination of the Italians: but the western instinct was still far too vague to permit of any coalition, or to react with any vigour against the newcomers from the east. It was not till travel, increasing wealth and the discipline of government had permitted the nomads to know themselves for Europeans that the presence of the foreigner became first irksome and then intolerable. It was not till nearly seven hundred years had passed that Rome, the centre and representative of the West, first conquered and then obliterated the power of Asia in this land.
Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent, and as she grew, manifested to the full the spirit which had made her. Her citizens sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar; they knew the African and the Iberian coasts of the Atlantic. They may have visited Britain. They crossed Gaul. It is said that they saw the Baltic. And everywhere they sought eagerly and obtained the two objects of their desire: metals and negotiation. In this quest, in spite of themselves, these merchants, who could see nothing glorious in either the plough or the sword, stumbled upon an empire. Their constitution and their religion are enough to explain the fate which befell it.
They were governed, as all such states have been, by the wealthiest of their citizens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought a mere plutocracy; its populace were admitted to such lethargic interference with public affairs as they might occasionally demand; perhaps they voted: certainly they did not rule; and the whole city enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown to it, for its vast mass of poorer members could not even be armed in the service of their country, save at a wage, and certainly had no military aptitudes to waste upon domestic quarrels. To such a people the furious valour of Roman and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar anarchy, nor perhaps could they understand that the States which are destined alternately to dominate the world by thought or by armies are in every age those whose energy creates a perpetual conflict within themselves. It was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they depended for their existence upon a profound sense of security and that they based it upon a complete command of the sea. It was their contention that since no others could (to use their phrase) “wash their hands” in the sea without the leave of Carthage, their polity was immortal. They made no attempt to absorb or to win the vast populations from whom they claimed various degrees of allegiance. The whole Maghreb, and, later, Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and Sardinia, were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town. When they contemplated their own greatness their satisfaction must have reposed upon the density of their population—their walls may have held more than half a million souls at a time when few towns of the west could count a tenth of such a number—upon their immemorial security from invasion, upon the excessive wealth of their great families (whose luxury the whole nation could contemplate with a vicarious satisfaction), upon the solidity of their credit, the resources of their treasury, and, above all, upon the excellent seamanship, the trained activity, and the overwhelming numbers of their navy.
As for their religion, it was of that dark inhuman sort which has in various forms tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves. Gods remote and vengeful, an absence of those lesser deities and shrines which grace common experience and which attach themselves to local affections: perhaps some awful and unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence and fear distinguished it. Even the goddess who presided over their loves had something in her at once obscene and murderous.
It is natural to those who are possessed by such servile phantasies that their worship should mix in with the whole of their lives and even penetrate to an immoderate degree those spheres of action which a happier and a saner philosophy is content to leave untrammelled. These dreadful deities of theirs afforded names for their leaders and served for a link between the scattered cities of their race: the common worship of Melcarth made an invisible bond for the whole Phœnician world; the greatest of the Carthaginian generals bore the title of “Baal’s Grace.”