Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/172

and Asia Minor, in Crete and Cyprus, on the African, Spanish, and Celtic coasts. This struggle did not take place directly on Italian soil, but its effects were deeply and permanently felt in Italy. The fresh energies and more universal endowments of the younger competitor had at first the advantage everywhere. Not only did the Hellenes rid themselves of the Phœnician factories in their own European and Asiatic home, but they dislodged the Phœnicians also from Crete and Cyprus, obtained a footing in Egypt and Cyrene, and possessed themselves of Lower Italy and the larger eastern half of the island of Sicily. On all hands the small trading stations of the Phoenicians gave way before the more energetic colonization of the Greeks. Selinus (126 u.c. ^[628]) and Agrigentum (174 u.c. ^[580]) were founded in western Sicily; the more remote western sea was traversed, Massilia was built on the Celtic coast (about 150 u.c. ^[600]), and the shores of Spain were explored by the bold Phocæans from Asia Minor. But about the middle of the second century the progress of Hellenic colonization was suddenly arrested, and there is no doubt that the cause of this arrest was the contemporary rapid development of Carthage, the most powerful of the Phœnician cities in Libya—a development manifestly due to the danger with which Hellenic aggression threatened the whole Phœnician race. If the nation which had opened up maritime commerce on the Mediterranean had been already dislodged by its younger rival from the sole command of the western half, from the possession of both lines of communication between the eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean, and from the monopoly of the carrying trade between east and west, the sovereignty at least of the seas to the west of Sardinia and Sicily might still be saved for the Orientals; and to its maintenance Carthage applied all the tenacious and circumspect energy peculiar to the Aramæan race. Phœnician colonization and Phœnician resistance assumed an entirely different character. The earlier Phœnician settlements, such as those in Sicily described by Thucydides, were mercantile factories: Carthage subdued extensive provinces with numerous subjects and powerful fortresses. Hitherto each Phœnician settlement had stood isolated in its opposition to the Greeks; now the powerful Libyan city centralized the whole war-resources of the race within its reach with a vigour to which the history of the Greeks can produce nothing