The History of Rome, vol 3 | Page 3

the Italians possessed, of
civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of
culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the
Phoenicians. In the field of Roman conquest the Iberian and the Celtic
languages have disappeared before the Romanic tongue; the Berbers of
Africa speak at the present day the same language as they spoke in the
times of the Hannos and the Barcides.
Their Political Qualities
Above all, the Phoenicians, like the rest of the Aramaean nations as

compared with the Indo-Germans, lacked the instinct of political life
--the noble idea of self-governing freedom. During the most flourishing
times of Sidon and Tyre the land of the Phoenicians was a perpetual
apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the Euphrates and
on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians, sometimes to
the Egyptians. With half its power Hellenic cities would have made
themselves independent; but the prudent men of Sidon calculated that
the closing of the caravan-routes to the east or of the ports of Egypt
would cost them more than the heaviest tribute, and so they punctually
paid their taxes, as it might happen, to Nineveh or to Memphis, and
even, if they could not avoid it, helped with their ships to fight the
battles of the kings. And, as at home the Phoenicians patiently bore the
oppression of their masters, so also abroad they were by no means
inclined to exchange the peaceful career of commerce for a policy of
conquest. Their settlements were factories. It was of more moment in
their view to deal in buying and selling with the natives than to acquire
extensive territories in distant lands, and to carry out there the slow and
difficult work of colonization. They avoided war even with their rivals;
they allowed themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and
the east of Sicily almost without resistance; and in the great naval
battles, which were fought in early times for the supremacy of the
western Mediterranean, at Alalia (217) and at Cumae (280), it was the
Etruscans, and not the Phoenicians, that bore the brunt of the struggle
with the Greeks. If rivalry could not be avoided, they compromised the
matter as best they could; no attempt was ever made by the Phoenicians
to conquer Caere or Massilia. Still less, of course, were the Phoenicians
disposed to enter on aggressive war. On the only occasion in earlier
times when they took the field on the offensive--in the great Sicilian
expedition of the African Phoenicians which ended in their defeat at
Himera by Gelo of Syracuse (274)--it was simply as dutiful subjects of
the great-king and in order to avoid taking part in the campaign against
the Hellenes of the east, that they entered the lists against the Hellenes
of the west; just as their Syrian kinsmen were in fact obliged in that
same year to share the defeat of the Persians at Salamis(1).
This was not the result of cowardice; navigation in unknown waters
and with armed vessels requires brave hearts, and that such were to be

found among the Phoenicians, they often showed. Still less was it the
result of any lack of tenacity and idiosyncrasy of national feeling; on
the contrary the Aramaeans defended their nationality with the weapons
of intellect as well as with their blood against all the allurements of
Greek civilization and all the coercive measures of eastern and western
despots, and that with an obstinacy which no Indo- Germanic people
has ever equalled, and which to us who are Occidentals seems to be
sometimes more, sometimes less, than human. It was the result of that
want of political instinct, which amidst all their lively sense of the ties
of race, and amidst all their faithful attachment to the city of their
fathers, formed the most essential feature in the character of the
Phoenicians. Liberty had no charms for them, and they lusted not after
dominion; "quietly they lived," says the Book of Judges, "after the
manner of the Sidonians, careless and secure, and in possession of
riches."
Carthage
Of all the Phoenician settlements none attained a more rapid and secure
prosperity than those which were established by the Tyrians and
Sidonians on the south coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa--
regions that lay beyond the reach of the arm of the great-king and the
dangerous rivalry of the mariners of Greece, and in which the natives
held the same relation to the strangers as the Indians in America held to
the Europeans. Among the numerous and flourishing Phoenician cities
along these shores, the most prominent by far was the "new town,"
Karthada or, as the Occidentals called it, Karchedon or Carthago.
Although not the earliest settlement of the Phoenicians in this region,