ns than of the husbandman sowing his seed. The power which
the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and
assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with
whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.
In the field of Roman conquest the Iberian and the Celtic languages
have disappeared before the Romanic tongue; the Berbers of Africa
speak at the present day the same language as they spoke in the times
of the Hannos and the Barcides.

Their Political Qualities

Above all, the Phoenicians, like the rest of the Aramaean nations as
compared with the Indo-Germans, lacked the instinct of political life
--the noble idea of self-governing freedom. During the most
flourishing times of Sidon and Tyre the land of the Phoenicians was
a perpetual apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the
Euphrates and on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians,
sometimes to the Egyptians. With half its power Hellenic cities
would have made themselves independent; but the prudent men of Sidon
calculated that the closing of the caravan-routes to the east or of
the ports of Egypt would cost them more than the heaviest tribute, and
so they punctually paid their taxes, as it might happen, to Nineveh or
to Memphis, and even, if they could not avoid it, helped with their
ships to fight the battles of the kings. And, as at home the
Phoenicians patiently bore the oppression of their masters, so also
abroad they were by no means inclined to exchange the peaceful career
of commerce for a policy of conquest. Their settlements were
factories. It was of more moment in their view to deal in buying and
selling with the natives than to acquire extensive territories in
distant lands, and to carry out there the slow and difficult work of
colonization. They avoided war even with their rivals; they allowed
themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the east of
Sicily almost without resistance; and in the great naval battles,
which were fought in early times for the supremacy of the western
Mediterranean, at Alalia (217) and at Cumae (280), it was the
Etruscans, and not the Phoenicians, that bore the brunt of the
struggle with the Greeks. If rivalry could not be avoided, they
compromised the matter as best they could; no attempt was ever made
by the Phoenicians to conquer Caere or Massilia. Still less, of
course, were the Phoenicians disposed to enter on aggressi