modern times the fate of India and the fate of North America were
determined by sea-power, so also at a very remote epoch sea-power
decided whether or not Hellenic colonisation was to take root in,
and Hellenic culture to dominate, Central and Northern Italy as
it dominated Southern Italy, where traces of it are extant to this
day. A moment's consideration will enable us to see how different
the history of the world would have been had a Hellenised city
grown and prospered on the Seven Hills. Before the Tarquins were
driven out of Rome a Phocoean fleet was encountered (537 B.C.) off
Corsica by a combined force of Etruscans and Phoenicians, and
was so handled that the Phocoeans abandoned the island and settled
on the coast of Lucania.[14] The enterprise of their navigators
had built up for the Phoenician cities and their great off-shoot
Carthage, a sea-power which enabled them to gain the practical
sovereignty of the sea to the west of Sardinia and Sicily. The
control of these waters was the object of prolonged and memorable
struggles, for on it--as the result showed--depended the empire of
the world. From very remote times the consolidation and expansion,
from within outwards, of great continental states have had serious
consequences for mankind when they were accompanied by the
acquisition of a coast-line and the absorption of a maritime
population. We shall find that the process loses none of its
importance in recent years. 'The ancient empires,' says the historian
of Greece, Ernst Curtius, 'as long as no foreign elements had
intruded into them, had an invincible horror of the water.' When
the condition, which Curtius notices in parenthesis, arose, the
'horror' disappeared. There is something highly significant in
the uniformity of the efforts of Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, and
Persia to get possession of the maritime resources of Phoenicia.
Our own immediate posterity will, perhaps, have to reckon with