commercial people—warlike when wanted. They planted colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, and had commercial relationship with all the then known nations of the world, including a trans-Sahara trade with the people living to the South of the Great Desert. We shall never know to the full where those Carthaginians went, from the paucity of record; but we have record of the voyage of this Hanno in a Periplus originally written in the Punic language and then translated into Greek.[1] Hanno, it seems, was a chief magistrate at Carthage, and Pliny says his voyage was undertaken when Carthage was in a most flourishing condition.[2] From the Periplus we learn that the expedition to the West Coast consisted of sixty ships of fifty oars each, and 30,000 persons of both sexes, ample provisions and everything necessary for so great an undertaking. The object of this expedition was to explore, to found colonies, and to increase commerce. The expedition, after passing the Pillars of
- ↑ There is doubt as to whether this Periplus is the entire one with which the classic writers were conversant.
- ↑ "Et Hanno Carthaginis potentia florente circumvectus a Gabibus ad finem Arabiae navigationem eam prodidit scripto"; (and Hanno, when Carthage flourished, sailed round from Cadiz to the remotest parts of Arabia, and left an account of his voyage in writing) Plinius, lib. ii. cap. lxvii. p.m. 220. See also lib. v. cap. i. p.m. 523, and Pomponius Mela, lib. iii. cap. ix. p. 63, edit. Isaici Vossii.
There is an English version of the Periplus, edited by Falconer, London, 1797; and an Oxford edition of it, and some other works, by Dr. Hudson, 1698. Also there is a work on Hanno's Periplus based on MS. in the Meyer Museum at Liverpool by Simonides, not the Iambic poet, who wrote a ridiculous satire against women, quoted by Ælian; nor yet Simonides who was one of the greatest of the ancient poets, and flourished in the seventy-fifth Olympia; but a modern gentleman connected with America, whose work I am sufficient scholar neither to use nor to criticise.
