This was not cowardice; the navigation of unknown waters in armed vessels demands brave hearts, and the Phœnicians have often shown that such were to be found among them. Still less was it the want of persistence and individuality in the sense of nationality; rather have the Aramæans, with an obstinacy to which no Indo-Germanic people ever attained, and which to us of the West appears as either more or less than human, defended their nationality against all the seductions of Greek civilisation, as well as against all the coercive force of both eastern and western despots, alike with the weapons of the spirit and with their blood. It is the want of a political sense which, though co-existing with the liveliest racial feeling and the most faithful adherence to the mother-city, still characterises the essential nature of the Phœnicians. Freedom had no attractions for them, nor did they possess any lust of rule; “they dwelt careless,” says the Book of Judges, “after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure,” and in possession of riches.
Amongst all the Phœnician settlements none throve more quickly nor more securely than those which the Tyrians and Sidonians had founded on the south coast of Spain and in the north of Africa, in regions where neither the arm of the great king, nor the dangerous rivalry of the Grecian sailors had reached, but where the natives stood face to face with the foreigners as the Indians to the Europeans in America.
Amongst the numerous and flourishing cities on these shores one was pre-eminent, the “New City” of Karthada, or, as the westerns called it, Karchedon, or Carthage. Though not the earliest settlement of the Phœnicians in this region, and perhaps originally a city standing under the protection of the neighbouring Utica, the oldest Phœnician city in Libya, she soon outstripped her neighbour and even the mother-country, owing to the incomparable advantages of her position and the eager activity of her inhabitants. She stood not far from the (former) estuary of the Bagradas (Mejerda) which flows through the richest grain-bearing district of North Africa on a fertile elevation of the soil, which is even now set with villas and covered with olive and orange groves, and which sinking gently towards the plain ends on the sea side in a promontory encircled by the waves. Situated near the centre of the Gulf of Tunis, the greatest haven of North Africa, where that beautiful stretch of water offers the best anchorage for large ships and the most excellent springs gush close to the shore, this place is so peculiarly favourable to agriculture and commerce and the connection between the two, that not only did the Tyrian settlement there become the first commercial city of the Phœnicians, but in Roman times also, Carthage, though scarcely restored, became the third city in the empire, and even to-day under no very favourable conditions a flourishing town of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants still exists. The agricultural, mercantile, and industrial prosperity of a city in such a position and with such inhabitants explains itself; but we need some answer to the question as to how this settlement developed a political power such as no other Phœnician city possessed.
[450 B.C.]
Before the stream of Hellenic migration which was pouring itself westward in unrestrained flood, which had already thrust the Phœnicians from Greece itself and from Italy, and was preparing to do the like in Sicily, Spain, and even Libya, the Phœnicians were compelled to make some kind of stand if they did not wish to be utterly annihilated. Here, where they had to do with Greek merchants and not with the Great King, it was not enough for them to submit in order to be allowed to carry on their trade and industry in the old fashion, in return for the payment of a tax. Cyrene and Massalia had already been founded; already the whole east of Sicily was in the hands of the Greeks; it was high time for the Phœnicians to make resistance in earnest. The Carthaginians assumed the task; in long and obstinate wars they set a bound to the encroachment of the Cyrenæans, and Hellenism was unable to establish itself west of the desert of Tripoli. Moreover, the Phœnician settlements in the west of Sicily defended themselves against the Greeks with Carthaginian help, and gladly and voluntarily added themselves to the dependants of the powerful kindred city. These important successes, which belong to the second century of the town, and which saved the southwestern portion of the Mediterranean to the Phœnicians, of themselves gave the city which had won them the hegemony of the nation and at the same time an altered political position. Carthage was no longer a mere merchant city; she aimed at the supremacy over Lydia and over a portion of the Mediterranean Sea because she was compelled to do so.
It was probably the after effect of these foreign successes which first induced the Carthaginians to pass from the position of tenants and occupants by concession to that of actual owners and conquerors. In the 300th year of Rome the Carthaginians seem to have first freed themselves from the payment of ground-rent, which they had hitherto been obliged to deliver to the natives. Thus it became possible to cultivate the soil on a large scale for themselves. Even as landowners, the Phœnicians had always relied on making use of their capital and on cultivating the fields to a great extent, by means of slaves or hired workmen; thus a great part of the Jews were employed in this fashion for a daily wage by the Tyrian merchant princes. The Carthaginians could now exploit the rich Libyan soil to an unlimited extent through a system analogous to that of the planters of the present day. Chained slaves tilled the ground—we find that individual citizens possessed as many as twenty thousand of them. More than this. The agricultural towns in the neighbourhood were forcibly subdued, and the free Libyan peasants transformed into fellahs, who paid their masters a tribute of the fourth part of the produce, and were subject to a regular system of recruiting in order that Carthage might have an army of its own. Feuds with the wandering shepherd tribes (νομαδες) on the frontiers were constant; but a chain of fortified military posts secured the pacified districts and these tribes were slowly pushed back into the deserts and mountains, or compelled to recognise the Carthaginian supremacy, pay tribute, and furnish troops.
Besides this the dominion of Carthage was finally extended over the rest of the Phœnicians in Africa, the so-called Liby-Phœnicians. These consisted partly of the smaller bands of settlers which had been led from Carthage to places along the whole northern and part of the northwestern coast of Africa, and cannot have been without importance, since at one time thirty thousand such colonists were settled on the Atlantic shore alone; and partly of ancient Phœnician settlements, which were especially numerous on the coast of the modern province of Constantine and of the Beylik of Tunis, and included, for example, Hippo, later called Regius (Bonah), Adrumetum (Susa), the lesser Leptis (south of Susa),—the second city of the African Phœnicians,—Thapsus, and greater Leptis (near Tripoli). How it came about that all these towns placed themselves under the command of Carthage, and whether they did so voluntarily to shelter themselves from the attacks of the Cyrenæans and Numidians or under compulsion, cannot now be discovered; it is certain that they were described in official documents as subjects of the Carthaginians, were obliged to pull down their walls and had to pay taxes and render military service to Carthage.
Thus the Tyrian factory had become the capital of a powerful North African empire, which reached from the desert of Tripoli as far as the Atlantic sea, and though it is true that in the western half (Morocco and Algiers) it contented itself with a somewhat nominal occupation of the coast, on the other hand in the wealthier East it ruled over the modern districts of Constantine and Tunis, as well as over the interior and was continually advancing its southern frontiers; the Carthaginians, as an ancient author significantly remarks, had changed from Tyrians into Libyans.
The period in which this transformation of Carthage into the capital city of Libya took place is all the more difficult to determine since the change was doubtless effected by degrees. The author just referred to mentions Hanno as the reformer of the nation; if this is the same man who lived in the time of the first war with Rome, he can only be regarded as the perfecter of the new system, which was presumably worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries of the city of Rome.
Side by side with the rise of Carthage went the decline of the great Phœnician cities in the mother-country, of Sidon and especially of Tyre, whose prosperity was ruined partly as the result of internal commotions, partly by pressure from without, in particular the sieges by Shalmaneser in the first century of Rome, by Nebuchadrezzar in the second, and by Alexander in the third. The noble families and the ancient commercial houses of Tyre removed for the most part to the secure and flourishing daughter-city and brought thither their intelligence, their capital, and their traditions. When the Phœnicians came into touch with Rome, Carthage was emphatically the first Canaanite city as Rome was the first Latin community.