25
of the Mediterranean countries. Wax and honey were the staple goods of Corsica. Corsican slaves, too, were highly valued. The iron of Elba, the fruit and the cattle of the Balearic islands, and to go further, the tin and copper of Britain, and even amber from the Baltic, were articles of Carthaginian commerce. Trade was carried on not only with the dwellers on the coast, but with inland tribes. Thus goods were transported across Spain to the interior of Gaul, the jealousy of Massilia (Marseilles) not permitting the Carthaginians to have any trading stations on the northern coast of that country."—A. J. Church and A. Filman, The Story of Carthage, pt. 3, ch. 3.
THE DOMINION OF CARTHAGE
"All our positive information, scanty as it is, about Carthage and her institutions, relates to the fourth, third and second centuries B. C.; yet it may be held to justify presumptive conclusions as to the fifth century B. C, especially in reference to the general system pursued. The maximum of her power was attained before her first war with Rome, which began in 364 B. C.; the first and second Punic wars both of them greatly reduced her strength and dominion. Yet in spite of such reduction we learn that about 150 B. C. shortly before the third Punic war, which ended in the capture and depopulation of the city, not less than 700,000 were computed in it, as occupants of a fortified circumference of above twenty milles, covering a peninsula with its isthmus. Upon this isthmus its citadel Byrsa was situated, surrounded by a triple wall of its own, and crowned at its summit by a magnificent temple of Esculapius. The numerous population is the more remarkable, since Utica (a considerable city, colonized from Phœnicia more anciently than even Carthage itself, and always independent of the Carthaginians, though in the condition of an inferior and discontented ally) was within the distance of seven miles of Carthage on the one side, and Tunis seemingly not much further off on the other. Even at that time, too, the Carthaginians are said to have possessed 300 tributary cities in Libya. Yet this was but a small fraction of the prodigious empire which had belonged to them certainly in the fourth century B. C. , and in all probability also between 480-410 B. C. That empire extended eastward as far as the Altars of the Philæni, near the Greater Syrtis,—westward all along the coast to the Pillars of Herakles and the western coast of Morocco. The line of coast southeast of Carthage, as far as the bay called the Lesser Syrtis, was proverbial (under the name of Byzacium and the Emporia) for its fertility. Along this extensive line were distributed indigenous Libyan tribes, living by agriculture; and a mixed population called Liby-Phœnician. . . . Of the Liby-Phœnician towns the
