THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY
Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It
was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good
harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in
importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the
chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had
planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities
of Tyre and Sidon.
Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on
Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was
to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the
Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital,
the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters
of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many
different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the
shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those
Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told,
a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not
allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his
sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers.
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Now, the Phœnicians were evidently not people of the kind that are
contented to sit still. They were energetic, pushing; and of course
they came into conflict with the Greek colonies. The principal
conflicts took place in, or around, Sicily, where the Phœnicians,
as well as the Greeks, had long been settled. It was not until
Carthage had grown to considerable power that the Phœnicians could
hope to do much against the Greeks, and about that time some of the
Greek cities also gained strength for military and naval enterprise
by coming into rather closer union with each other.
The constitution of very many of the Greek city states went through
the same succession of changes. After the rule of the aristocratic
party, that is to say, of the best-born people, who were the rich
landowners, there came a time of rule by the democracy, that is to
say by the poorer, the common people. This democratic rule was so
disorderly that a strong single ruler generally arose out of the
disorder and established his power, somewhat as Napoleon I. did out
of the disorder of the French Revolution. These rulers, or
dictators, were called tyrants in Greece, and the changes of the
constitutions in the government of their colonial cities in Sicily
went on in exactly the same way as in Greece itself. A strong ruler
established over one city would often be able to make good his power
over another city near him. Thus began to be formed alliances of
cities under the rule of one or of a few leading men; and so the
Sicilian Greeks found some strength of their own to oppose to the
strength of Carthage.
Historians tell us of such sweeping successes of the Phœnicians in
the earliest conflicts that if we were to {149} believe them all we
should have to believe that hardly a Greek was left in Sicily. But
evidently that is not exactly how it did happen, for it was just
while the Persians were threatening Greece that Gelo, one of the
greatest of the Sicilian "tyrants," established Syracuse as the
capital city of Sicily and the headquarters of his power. The Greek
colonists had largely assimilated the native peoples to themselves.
There had been marriages between them, and Greek thought had
penetrated here as it had everywhere that the Greeks went. So the
strength of the Greeks in Sicily did not depend on the colonists.
Only the Greek colonists seem to have been far more successful in
getting help from the native people than the Phœnician colonists
were. The Phœnicians, however, had their friends in Sicily, even
among the Greeks themselves, for there were jealousies between the
Greek cities in Sicily as everywhere else.
[Sidenote: Phœnicians defeated]
I told you that Xerxes for the safety of his fleet had made an
alliance with Carthage before making his great attack on Greece. It
was something more than a mere arrangement that his ships should not
be meddled with as they went to and fro. It was an agreement for
some more active help than this. Carthage was to attack the Greek
colonial power in Sicily at the same time as Xerxes fell upon the
mainland of Greece from the east. The two attacks were so well timed
that it is said that the battle which decided the result of the
Phœnician expedition against Sicily was fought on the very same
day as the battle of Salamis which decided the fate of the Persian
attack on Greece. And the result of the one battle was the same as
that of the other. Gelo completely vanquished the Phœnicians; so
completely that Sicily had rest from their troubling nearly {150} all
through what remained of that century--that is to say, for ninety
years or so.
During that period the arts and civilisation made great advance in
the cities of Sicily. Again, as before, it was really the jealousy
and fighting of the Greek cities among themselves that brought them
under fresh attack by what they called the barbarian power. Again
the Carthaginians came upon them. They were disunited, fighting
among themselves. The Athenian navy had come to Sicily to take its
part in the fighting, as is told in the splendid history of
Thucydides. It was fighting which all grew out of that Peloponnesian
War which was fought between Athens, as the leading state in the main
part of Greece, on the one side, and Sparta, as the great power of
the Peloponnese, on the other. The Syracusans, of Sicily, were
originally a Corinthian colony, from Corinth, on the Isthmus between
the greater part of Greece and the Peloponnese. The Athenian navy
came to Sicily in the year 415 B.C., and if it had made a vigorous
attack on Syracuse at its first coming it is probable that the city
would have fallen. The Athenian admiral, however, delayed; he
allowed the Syracusans time to improve their defences, and he had to
sit down to blockade the city both by land and sea. A small Spartan
force came to the help of the besieged, they put all their own naval
power into the struggle, and in the spring of 413 B.C. fought and
defeated the Athenian fleet.
They were just in time, for the very next day strong reinforcements
arrived from Athens. With this new force the besiegers tried to
recover their lost positions, but were defeated. The Syracusans then
blocked the mouth of the harbour in which the Athenian ships lay, and
after a final struggle both by land and {151} sea, the Athenians were
hopelessly beaten; those who survived had a wretched fate as captives.
But even after this great defence and complete victory there were
many different and opposing interests in Sicily. Sometimes a city
which you would expect to find helping one side, is found fighting on
just the opposite side. The story of the whole would be far too long
to tell here. The effect of it all was that when a new Carthaginian
force attacked the Sicilian Greeks in 409 B.C. the Greeks were
weakened and disunited after all these contentions among themselves.
[Sidenote: Dionysius of Syracuse]
Again, it was a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, who drew together the
Grecian strength, together with that of the native Sicilians, but it
was not until half the Greek cities on the island had been lost and
their civilisation destroyed. It is evident that Dionysius was a
ruler of very much more than common ability. These tyrants who
seized the power in so many of the Greek states, both at home and in
the colonies, did not generally sit on their thrones very securely or
very long, but Dionysius reigned for no less than thirty-eight years.
He employed a large number of mercenary troops, both Greeks and
others; he had Sparta as an ally, and he sustained four invasions of
the Carthaginians. He made alliances with some of the states on the
Italian mainland, and made war on others, till he became master of
much of the southern region of Italy. But it was for a time only,
and the power of Syracuse was never firmly established on any part of
the mainland.
After the death of Dionysius there was continual fighting, for and
around Sicily, between the Carthaginians on the one side and the
Sicilian Greeks, with various and often-changing alliances, on the
other. At one moment we see the Sicilians actually carrying {152}
the war into Africa, while at the very same moment the Carthaginians
are attacking the Sicilians in Sicily itself!
And so the story goes, a story of continual contests, with
continually changing results, down to 300 B.C. and later, and
gradually we begin to hear more and more of a certain small, and at
first quite insignificant, state in Italy, namely, Rome, taking part
in the contest. It is a part that becomes greater and greater as
time goes on till it fills almost every chapter and page.
But now that we have traced the story of what was happening in and
about Sicily, and Carthage, and Italy, down to this date of about 300
B.C., we have to turn back again, first to Greece itself and then to
the eastern side of the Mediterranean, for tremendous events have
been going on there during the last half-century of this period.
We left it, you will remember, with the Persians repulsed, no longer
a serious danger to Greece, yet the Greeks themselves unable, because
of their own jealousies and divisions, to make any large conquests in
Asia Minor. A new power, of over-mastering strength, suddenly
appears in that eastern portion of our picture--the power of Macedon.
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