Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/67

ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 47 stations, abandoned the rest of the island to the Etruscans. 1 But on the other hand they razed to the ground most of the towns built by the lonians on the coast of Spain ; they re-established themselves in Liguria, where the rock of Monaco was one of their fortresses. Massilia lived a precarious life until the great victory, won by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, over the Etruscans in 474, re- stored freedom of movement to the Greek colonists in the Gulfs of Lyons and Genoa. The Massilians seem never to have resumed the great enterprises of a century before ; they were content to make the most of southern Gaul, and to leave Spain and the islands to the Phoenicians of Africa. By the force of events a tacit convention or formal agreement was entered into between these various commercial races ; in the rapid multiplica- tion of transactions there was profit for them all. The discovery at Marseilles of a table of charges, in the Punic language, for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, seems to prove that Carthage had a factory at Massilia. The tablet must have been engraved at Massilia, for the stone of which it consists has been recognized as that of a neighbouring quarry. 2 Freed from the uneasiness inspired by the enterprise and armed competition of the lonians, the Carthaginians set to work to complete their network of strategic positions in the western Mediterranean. After a check or two they finished the conquest of Sardinia, and, as in Africa, they favoured its agricultural development. " Under their rule the island reached a prosperity it has never seen since. Sardinia, which is now so thinly peopled, so wild, so unhealthy, was, when the Romans took possession of it after three centuries of Carthaginian domination, a rich and flourishing garden, with a large rural and urban population." Mago, the general who had brought the conquest of Sardinia to a happy conclusion, also succeeded in taking full possession of the Balearic group. In Minorca he founded a city which after- wards became one of the chief naval stations of the republic a city which has preserved the name of its founder with but little 1 DIODORUS, v. xii. 3, 4. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 164. 3 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cFHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 197. According to DIODORUS (x. xv. 4) a few savage tribes continued to maintain their independence in the mountains, but the whole of the plains were occupied by the Carthaginian colonists.