Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/71

ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 5 1 disaster which recalled to Scipio and Polybius the melancholy lines of Homer, the supremacy of the Greek civilization was assured. The art of Greece had arrived at perfection by the middle of the fifth century. From that date onwards the Hellenic world drew from the East nothing but raw material, to which it gave forms so superior to those hitherto known that they soon imposed themselves on every neighbouring people. Carthage no more escaped the action of this powerful rivalry than the Phcenician towns of Syria. In the middle of the fourth century the throne of Tyre was occupied by that Strato whose passion for all that was Greek gave him the name of the Phil-Hellene. Something of the same kind went on at Carthage. The Carthaginians waged a murderous war against the Greeks of Sicily, but in the sequel they carried off the statues from their enemy's shrines, and set them up in the temples and public places of their own city. 1 They even copied the money of Greece, or rather they caused coins to be struck by Greek artists for their use (Figs, ii and i2). 2 Finally, Greek architects found their way to Carthage long before Scipio and his legions. The temples which disappeared in the great conflagration, the shrines of Baal-Hammon and Tanit, cannot have preserved the look of Phcenician sanc- tuaries, they must have been reconstructed in the style made fashionable by the Greek artists of the time of Alexander and his successors ; at least we may fairly conclude that it was so from the fact that the military harbour was decorated with columns of the Ionic order. 3 Not the slightest fragment of these structures has come down to our time ; but we find a trace of Greek influence even in the ornaments with which those steles 1 APPIAN, Punica, 133 ; CICERO, In Verrem, De Signis, xxxv. 2 For the chronology of the Carthaginian coinage see FR. LENORMANT, Essai sur la Propagation de V Alphabet phenicien dans F ancien Monde, vol. i. p. 156-161. The two specimens which we reproduce are thus described by DE SAULCY (in the notes to M. Duruy's Histoire romaine, vol. i- p. 419 and 420, and from which we borrow these two figures) : n. Obv. Head of the nymph Arethusa ; Rev. Pegasus. The legend BARAT signifies the wells, or perhaps more accurately Bi ARAT, at the wells, the Punic name for Syracuse, which possessed the famous well of Arethusa. Large silver piece, certainly struck in Sicily, and probably at Syracuse. 12. Obv. Head of Arethusa. Rev. A horse supported by a palm-tree ; an especially Cartha- ginian type. Sub-division of No. n. The inscription on both has the same signification, so that the two coins must have originated in Sicily. Electrum. 3 Kioves 8' cKacrrou vewo-otKou Trpov^ov 'law/cot St'o. . . APPIAN, Punica, 96.