[600-520 B.C.]
As the Carthaginian fleet was defeated in 600 B.C. by the force of a single Greek city, Phocæa, its naval power was at that time not very great. Sixty years later they came again into conflict off Corsica with less advantage to the Phocæans, now expelled from their home by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus. A great change had taken place in Asiatic history. Soon after the first conflict of these powers, Tyre underwent a siege by Nebuchadrezzar, in which, whether captured or not, it suffered so severely that it was never able to regain its former ascendency; and from this time we may date the entire independence of Carthage, and its succession to that dominion in the West which had hitherto belonged to Tyre. This increase of power is connected with the name of Hanno; not the same who commanded the expedition to the western coast of Africa, but of a generation earlier, and living about the middle of the sixth century B.C. According to Dio Chrysostom, “he made the Carthaginians to be Libyans instead of Tyrians, and to inhabit Libya instead of Phœnicia, and to acquire much wealth, and many emporia and harbours and triremes, and an extensive dominion both by land and sea.” These words plainly imply, that in the time, and by means of the measures of Hanno, Carthage, from being a dependency of Tyre, became a substantive state, having its seat in Africa; and that a great extension of its wealth and its power, both by sea and land, took place at the same time and under the same auspices. In an historian, we should have inferred from the phrase “that he had caused the Carthaginians to inhabit Libya instead of Phœnicia,” that he had been the leader of a large emigration from Tyre, to which this increase was owing; in a rhetorician it appears to mean nothing more than the preceding clause, namely, that before his time Carthage had been virtually a portion of Phœnicia, but henceforth was an independent African power. That such was the effect of the decline of Tyre after the siege by Nebuchadrezzar is certain; and even if no large part of its population migrated at once, during the siege and after it, the decay of its prosperity and the loss of its independence would naturally attract them towards Carthage, which was already powerful and able to protect itself. Such an increase, coupled with the decline of the Tyrian power throughout the western Mediterranean, would account for the sudden start which Carthage appears to have made in the sixth century B.C. The military talents of Mago, who lived between the middle and end of this century, contributed to the same result. He organised their military forces, and prepared the way for the extensive wars which the Carthaginians carried on in Sicily.
[480 B.C.]
Cambyses, after the conquest of Egypt, wished to have attacked Carthage, the submission of Cyrene and Barca having brought his frontier into contact with theirs; but the Phœnicians, who must have furnished the fleet for this purpose, refused to engage in hostilities against their own colony. Darius solicited the aid of Carthage in his projected invasion of the Greeks, but without success. When Xerxes renewed his father’s undertaking, he entered into a treaty with the Carthaginians, in virtue of which, in the same year in which he crossed the Hellespont, they poured a large army into Sicily, gathered from Gaul, Liguria, and Spain, as well as all their African territories. The battle of Himera was as fatal to the plans of Carthage as Salamis and Platæa to those of Xerxes; but Sicily continued for a long time to be the scene of struggles between Carthaginians and Greeks, till both were absorbed in the growing empire of Rome.[c]
MOMMSEN’S ACCOUNT OF CARTHAGE
The Semitic race stands amongst and yet apart from the peoples of the old classical world. The base of the former is the East, of the latter the Mediterranean; and as war and migration advanced the frontiers and threw the races amongst one another, a deep sense of dissimilarity still divided and yet divides the Indo-Germanic peoples from the Syrian, Israelitish, and Arabian nations. This is also true of that Semitic people which more than any other has extended itself westward; namely, the Phœnician or Punic race. Their first home is the narrow strip of coast between Asia Minor, the highlands of Syria, and Egypt, which is called the plain—that is Canaan. This is the only name which the nation applied to itself—in Christian times the Libyan peasant still called himself a Canaanite; but to the Hellenes Canaan was the “Purple Country,” or the “Land of the Red Men,” Phœnicia, and in the same way the Italians were accustomed, as we are ourselves, to call the Canaanites Phœnicians.
The country is well adapted to agriculture; but above all the excellent harbours and the abundance of wood and metals are favourable to trade, which here, where the superabundance of the eastern continent stretches far into the Mediterranean Sea with its numerous islands and harbours, may have first started in all its importance to man. What courage, sagacity, and enthusiasm can contribute, the Phœnicians called into play to unite the East and West and give full development to commerce and what it involves, as navigation, manufacture, colonisation. At an incredibly early period we find them in Cyprus and Egypt, in Greece and Sicily, in Africa and Spain, and even in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The region of their commerce extends from Sierra Leone and Cornwall as far as the Malabar coast; through their hands pass the gold and pearls of the East, the Tyrian purple, slaves, ivory, lion and panther skins from the interior of Africa, Arabian incense, the linen of Egypt, clay pottery and wines from Greece, Cyprian copper, Spanish silver, English tin, the iron of Elba.
In contrast to the Indo-Germanic aptitude for political organisation, the Phœnicians, like all Aramaic nations, lacked the inspiring idea of self-governing freedom. In the best days of Sidon and Tyre, Phœnicia was the eternal apple of discord of the powers which ruled on the Nile and the Euphrates, and was subject now to the Assyrians, now to the Egyptians. With half their force the Hellenic cities would have made themselves independent; but the sharp-sighted men of Sidon calculated that the barring of the caravan routes towards the East or of the Egyptian harbours would be more costly than the heaviest tribute, and consequently they paid their taxes punctually to Nineveh or Memphis, as the case might be, and when nothing else would serve, even fought the kings’ battles with their ships.
And as at home the Phœnician placidly endured the oppression of their masters, so abroad they were by no means inclined to exchange the peaceful ways of a commercial policy for one of conquest. Their colonies are factories; to them it was of more importance to take their wares from the natives and bring others to them than to acquire broad lands in distant countries and accomplish there the slow and difficult work of colonisation. They even avoided war with their competitors; almost without resistance they allowed themselves to be driven out of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and in the great sea fights which were fought in early days for the dominion of the western Mediterranean, at Alalia and Cyme it was the Etruscans, not the Phœnicians, who bore the brunt of the battle against the Greeks. If, on occasion, competition could not be avoided, the matter was compromised as well as might be; no attempt was ever made by the Phœnicians to conquer Cære or Massalia.
Still less, of course, were the Phœnicians inclined to wars of aggression. The sole instance in ancient times of their taking the offensive on the battle-field, was in the Sicilian expedition of the African Phœnicians, which ended with the defeat of Himera by Gelo of Syracuse (480), and then it was only as obedient subjects of the great king and in order to avoid taking a share in the campaign against the eastern Hellenes, that they took the field against the Hellenes of the west, as their Syrian kinsmen, in the same year, had to submit to joining with the Persians in the battle of Salamis.