the city of their fathers, formed the most essential
feature in the character of the Phoenicians. Liberty had no charms
for them, and they lusted not after dominion; "quietly they lived,"
says the Book of Judges, "after the manner of the Sidonians, careless
and secure, and in possession of riches."

Carthage

Of all the Phoenician settlements none attained a more rapid and
secure prosperity than those which were established by the Tyrians and
Sidonians on the south coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa--
regions that lay beyond the reach of the arm of the great-king and the
dangerous rivalry of the mariners of Greece, and in which the natives
held the same relation to the strangers as the Indians in America held
to the Europeans. Among the numerous and flourishing Phoenician
cities along these shores, the most prominent by far was the "new
town," Karthada or, as the Occidentals called it, Karchedon or
Carthago. Although not the earliest settlement of the Phoenicians
in this region, and originally perhaps a dependency of the adjoining
Utica, the oldest of the Phoenician towns in Libya, it soon
outstripped its neighbours and even the motherland through the
incomparable advantages of its situation and the energetic activity
of its inhabitants. It was situated not far from the (former) mouth
of the Bagradas (Mejerda), which flows through the richest corn
district of northern Africa, and was placed on a fertile rising
ground, still occupied with country houses and covered with groves
of olive and orange trees, falling off in a gentle slope towards the
plain, and terminating towards the sea in a sea-girt promontory.
Lying in the heart of the great North-African roadstead, the Gulf of
Tunis, at the very spot where that beautiful basin affords the best
anchorage for vessels of larger size, and where drinkable spring water
is got close by the shore, the place proved singularly favourable for
agriculture and commerce and for the exchange of their respective
commodities--so favourable, that not only was the Tyrian settlement
in that quarter the first of Phoenician mercantile cities, but even
in the Roman period Carthage was no sooner restored than it became the
third city in the empire, and even now, under circumstances far from
favourable and on a site far less judiciously chosen, there exists and
flourishes in that quarter a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.
The prosperity, agricultural, mercantile, and indus