Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/65

ORIGIN OF THE PIKKNICIANS. 45 tribes in check. The system of government and colonisation which had been put in action in Zeugitania and Byzacenia was applied to Betica. In order to keep open their strategic and commercial communications with Spain by land as well as by sea, the Carthaginians occupied and fortified the towns, called Meta- gonites by the Greeks, which formed an unbroken chain along the whole coast of Mauretania as far as the pillars of Hercules. They had been founded by Tyre in the first instance as harbours of refuge and victualling stations for ships on their way to Gades and back. An intimate alliance was entered into with the Numidians, who were engaged to respect the ports established on their coasts ports which served as recruiting stations for the Carthaginian armies among the warlike tribes in their neighbourhood." Encouraged by these first successes, the Carthaginians deter- mined to cast an army into Sicily which might win the co-opera- tion of the tribes in the interior, the Siculi and Sicani. These tribes were beginning to feel some apprehension at the rapid growth of the Greek colonies, which encroached yearly upon their narrow territory. The Carthaginians soon succeeded in making themselves masters of the western part of the island and of the interior, throwing the Greek colonists back on the northern and eastern coasts. 2 The towns which still belonged to the Syrian stock were relieved by the success of this bold policy ; garrisons were thrown into them and they were put in an efficient state of defence. Where the Tyrians had left only watchers and ware- house-keepers, there the Carthaginians put soldiers. A no less successful effort was made to reconquer the Phoenician supremacy in the waters that lie between Sardinia and the north-eastern coasts of Spain. In 556 the Phocaeans founded the town of Alalia, or Aleria, on the eastern coast of Corsica, in a situation well chosen for the desired purpose of counter- acting the advantages given to the Phoenicians by their possession of a part of Sardinia ; it enabled its founders to command the whole of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ligurian Gulf. The capture and destruction of Phocsea by Harpagus in 547, at the time of the conquest of Ionia by the Persians, instead of ruining the Ionian possessions in the west, really added greatly to their importance. 1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cTHistoire antienne, vol. iii. p. 187. 2 This we learn from a few short and rather vague sentences of JUSTIN (xviii. 7).