valrous valor of
Charles Martel and the sword of the Cid. The crusades were the natural
reprisals for the Arab invasions, and form the last epoch of that great
struggle between the two principal families of the human race."

It is difficult, amid the glimmering light supplied by the allusions of
the classical writers, to gain a full idea of the character and
institutions of Rome's great rival. But we can perceive how inferior
Carthage was to her competitor in military resources, and how far less
fitted than Rome she was to become the founder of centralized and
centralizing dominion that should endure for centuries, and fuse into
imperial unity the narrow nationalities of the ancient races that dwelt
around and near the shores of the Mediterranean Sea?

Carthage was originally neither the most ancient nor the most powerful
of the numerous colonies which the Phoenicians planted on the coast of
Northern Africa. But her advantageous position, the excellence of her
constitution--of which, though ill-informed as to its details, we know
that it commanded the admiration of Aristotle--and the commercial and
political energy of her citizens gave her the ascendency over Hippo,
Utica, Leptis, and her other sister Phoenician cities in those regions;
and she finally reduced them to a condition of dependency similar to
that which the subject allies of Athens occupied relatively to that once
imperial city. When Tyre and Sidon and the other cities of Phoenicia
itself sank from independent republics into mere vassal states of the
great Asiatic monarchies, and obeyed by turns a Babylonian, a Persian,
and a Macedonian master, their power and their traffic rapidly declined,
and Carthage succeeded to the important maritime and commercial
character which they had previously maintained.

The Carthaginians did not seek to compete with the Greeks on the
northeastern shores of the Mediterranean, or in the three inland seas
which are connected with it; but they maintained an active intercourse
with the Phoenicians, and through them with Lower and Central Asia; and
they, and they alone, after the decline and fall of Tyre, navigated the
waters of the Atlantic. They had the monopoly of all the commerce of the
world that was carried on beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. We have yet
extant (in a Greek translation) the narrative of the voyage of Hanno,
one of their admirals, along the western coast of Africa as far as
Sierra Leone; and in the Latin poem