INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.

Lo have founded the worship of Melicertes or Mclcarth. Nor
were they behindhand in the pursuit of the precious metals in
these parts, for Herodotus1 tells us that they worked the gold
mines in Thasos; and in other places there are evidences of their
mining operations.
At an early period also we meet with the Phoenicians at
the western extremity of the central basin of the
Mediterranean. Here on the African coast they
founded their colony of Utica, the date of which,
if we may trust the authorities, was about eleven hundred years
before Christ; and the same neighbourhood three centuries later
saw the establishment of the more famous city of Carthage. The
causes of the prosperity of that place, which was destined to bo
the rival of its parent state, were its central position in the
Mediterranean, owing to which it commanded the spaces of sea
both to the east and west of it, its nearness to Sicily and Italy,
which brought it into communication with Europe, and the access
which it enjoyed to the interior of Africa; these advantages
rendered it an almost ideal trading station. On the opposite
coast of Sicily, also, the most favourable points were occupied
either by Phoenician or Carthaginian settlements. At the
westernmost point stood Lilybaeum—the town ' opposite Libya/
as its Semitic name signifies; to the northward of this rose the
conspicuous mountain on which Eryx stands, with its famous
temple of Venus Erycina, in which the worship of Astarte was
perpetuated; and not far off they had a station at Panormus,
where they commanded one of the finest harbours in the island.
Again, in the third bay of the Mediterranean, that which reaches
from Sicily to the Straits, they established themselves in Sardinia
and Corsica, along the Spanish coast, and in the neighbouring
Balearic islands; and even MassiJia was probably one of their
stations before the arrival of the Greek settlers. Yet, wonderful
to relate, all these advances had been anticipated by more
adventurous voyages, for long before this time, and several cen-
turies before the Greeks were even aware that the Mediterranean
was an enclosed sea, these energetic traders had passed the Pillars
of Hercules, and reached the ocean. There—a few years earlier,
1 Herod. 6. 47.