nations beyond Italy. There was a great settlement of the Phoenicians,
the merchants of the old world, at Carthage, on the northern coast of
Africa, the same place at which Virgil afterwards described Æneas as
spending so much time. Dido, the queen who was said to have founded
Carthage when fleeing from her wicked brother-in-law at Tyre, is thought
to have been an old goddess, and the religion and manners of the
Carthaginians were thoroughly Phoenician, or, as the Romans called them,
Punic. They had no king, but a Senate, and therewith rulers called by
the name that is translated as judges in the Bible; and they did not
love war, only trade, and spread out their settlements for this purpose
all over the coast of the Mediterranean, from Spain to the Black Sea,
wherever a country had mines, wool, dyes, spices, or men to trade with;
and their sailors were the boldest to be found anywhere, and were the
only ones who had passed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, namely, the
Straits of Gibraltar, in the Atlantic Ocean. They built handsome cities,
and country houses with farms and gardens round them, and had all tokens
of wealth and luxury--ivory, jewels, and spices from India, pearls from
the Persian Gulf, gold from Spain, silver from the Balearic Isles, tin
from the Scilly Isles, amber from the Baltic; and they had forts to
protect their settlements. They generally hired the men of the
countries, where they settled, to fight their battles, sometimes under
hired Greek captains, but often under generals of their own.

[Illustration: ROMAN SHIP.]

The first place where they did not have everything their own way was
Sicily. The old inhabitants of the island were called Sicels, a rough
people; but besides these there were a great number of Greek
settlements, also of Carthaginian ones, and these two hated one another.
The Carthaginians tried to overthrow the Greeks, and Pyrrhus, by