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islet to islet, till it became the highway of the nations of the ancient world; and the products of each of the countries whose shores it laves became the common property of all. At a very early period the Etruscans, for instance, that mysterious people who then occupied with their settlements Campania and Cisalpine Gaul, as well as that extensive intermediate region to which they afterwards gave their name, swept all the Italian seas with their galleys, half piratical, and half commercial. The Greeks, somewhat later, founded (B. C. 631) Cyrene and (B. C. 560) Barca in Africa, (B. C. 564) Alalia in Corsica, and (B. C. 600) Massilia in Gaul, and lined the southern shores of Italy and the western shores of Asia Minor with that fringe of colonies which were so soon to eclipse in prosperity and power their parent cities. Even Egypt, with her immemorial antiquity and her exclusive civilization, deigned to open (B. C. 550) an emporium at Naucratis for the ships and commerce of the Greeks, creatures of yesterday as they must have seemed in comparison with her.
"But in this general race of enterprise and commerce among the nations which bordered on the Mediterranean, it is to the Phœnicians that unquestionably belongs the foremost place. In the dimmest dawn of history, many centuries before the Greeks had set foot in Asia Minor or in Italy, before even they had settled down in secure possession of their own territories, we hear of Phœnician settlements in Asia Minor and in Greece itself, in Africa, in Macedon, and in Spain. There is hardly an island in the Mediterranean which has not preserved some traces of these early visitors; Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete in the Levant; Malta, Sicily, and the Balearic Isles in the middle passage; Sardinia, Corsica, and Elba in the Tyrrhenian Sea; the Cyclades, as Thucydides tells us, in the mid-Ægean; and even Samothrace and Thasos at its northern extremity, where Herodotus, to use his own forcible expression, himself saw a whole mountain 'turned upside down' by their mining energy; all have either yielded Phœnician coins and inscriptions, have retained Phœnician proper names and legends, or possess mines, long, perhaps, disused, but which were worked as none but Phœnicians ever worked them. And among the Phœnician factories which dotted the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean, from the east end of the Greater Syrtis even to the Pillars of Hercules, there was one which, from a concurrence of circumstances, was destined rapidly to outstrip all the others, to make herself their acknowledged head, to become the Queen of the Mediterranean, and, in some sense, of the Ocean beyond, and for a space of over a hundred years, to maintain a deadly and not an unequal contest with the future mistress of the world.
