Lying in the heart of the great North-African roadstead, the Gulf of
Tunis, at the very spot where that beautiful basin affords the best
anchorage for vessels of larger size, and where drinkable spring water
is got close by the shore, the place proved singularly favourable for
agriculture and commerce and for the exchange of their respective
commodities--so favourable, that not only was the Tyrian settlement
in that quarter the first of Phoenician mercantile cities, but even
in the Roman period Carthage was no sooner restored than it became the
third city in the empire, and even now, under circumstances far from
favourable and on a site far less judiciously chosen, there exists and
flourishes in that quarter a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.
The prosperity, agricultural, mercantile, and industrial, of a city
so situated and so peopled, needs no explanation; but the question
requires an answer--in what way did this settlement come to attain
a development of political power, such as no other Phoenician
city possessed?

Carthage Heads the Western Phoenicians in Opposition to the Hellenes

That the Phoenician stock did not even in Carthage renounce its policy
of passiveness, there is no lack of evidence to prove. Carthage paid,
even down to the times of its prosperity, a ground-rent for the space
occupied by the city to the native Berbers, the tribe of the Maxyes or
Maxitani; and although the sea and the desert sufficiently protected
the city from any assault of the eastern powers, Carthage appears to
have recognized--although but nominally--the supremacy of the great-
king, and to have paid tribute to him occasionally, in order to secure
its commercial communications with Tyre and the East.

But with all their disposition to be submissive and cringing,