colonies and their offshoots become,
that a great Greek influence pervaded all the Mediterranean shores and
many of the most important islands, attention more particularly being
paid to the latter, from their supposed strategical value; thus, in the
opinion of Alexander the Great, the command of the Mediterranean lay in
the possession of Cyprus. The Greek colonists were filibusters; they
seized by force the women wherever they settled, but their children were
taught to speak the paternal language, as has been the case in more
recent times with the descendants of the Spaniards in America. The
wealth of some of these Greek colonial towns is said to have been
incredible. Crotona was more than twelve miles in circumference; and
Sybaris, another of the Italiot cities, was so luxurious and dissipated
as even to give rise to a proverb. The prosperity of these places was
due to two causes: they were not only the centres of great agricultural
districts, but carried on also an active commerce in all directions, the
dense population of the mother country offering them a steady and
profitable market; they also maintained an active traffic with all the
Mediterranean cities; thus, if they furnished Athens with corn, they
also furnished Carthage with oil. In the Greek cities connected with
this colonial system, especially in Athens, the business of
ship-building and navigation was so extensively prosecuted as to give a
special character to public life. In other parts of Greece, as in
Sparta, it was altogether different. In that state the laws of Lycurgus
had abolished private property; all things were held in common; savage
life was reduced to a system, and therefore there was no object in
commerce. But in Athens, commerce was regarded as being so far from
dishonourable that some of the most illustrious men, whose names have
descended to us as philosophers, were occupied with mercantile pursuits.
Aristotle kept a druggist's shop in Athens, and Plato sold oil in Egypt.

[Sidenote: Carthaginian supremacy in the Mediterranean.]

It was the intention of Athens, had she succeeded in the conquest of
Sicily, to make an attempt upon Carthage, foreseeing therein the
dominion of the Mediterranean, as was actually realized subsequently by
Rome. The destruction of that city constituted the point of ascendancy
in the history of the Great Republic. Carthage stood upon a peninsula
forty-five miles round, with a neck only three miles across. Her
te