there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. There
were civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discrete
civilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came into
contact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than our
own came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, of
Peru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutual
communication of empire with empire. It was in the Ægean and the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point where
great commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. The
Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era.
Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world,
and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece,
Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas
itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria,
Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake."
But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean
basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the
mid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such a
mid-point in the Mediterranean--Rome and Carthage; and they were driven
to fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed)
between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to take
in the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however,
lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. During
the Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea as
well as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the Italian
Republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers;
but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to compete
with them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries,
rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries of
Columbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce is