Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/473

THE R6LE OF THE PHOENICIANS IN HISTORY. 433 arrival at last at some distant port of Italy or Sicily. In our hearts we echo the prayers and thanksgivings of the sailors who do homage to Melkart as soon as their keels grate upon the sands after their long and perilous navigation. Melkart was not, like Heracles his successor, transfigured and immortalized by poetry and art ; he was neither begotten by Zeus in the light of the morning, nor did he die upon Ossa in the splendours of the setting sun ; but how well he earned the incense that smoked upon his altars and the blood with which they were bathed ! What thousands of ships ploughed the Mediterranean and more distant seas through their confidence in him ! Without the Syrian god how much slower the spread of civilization might have been, and how different its paths ! Who can say how much longer the fathers of the Greeks and Romans might have lingered in the barbarism which prevailed in the valleys of the Rhine and Danube down even to our own era ? Melkart deserves better of humanity than Heracles. What were the Hydra and the Nemsean lion to the storms which played with the frail Phoenician ships as the winds play with a dead leaf ! If there had been sculptors of genius to carve his statues and poets to sing his exploits, he would neither have merged in his Greek successor, nor would he have failed of his true meed of gratitude from modern humanity. O Sacer et magnus vatum labor, omnia fato Eripis, et populis donas mortalibus aevum ! VOL. II.