They were governed, as all such states have been, by the wealthiest of their citizens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought a mere plutocracy; its populace were admitted to such lethargic interference with public affairs as they might occasionally demand; perhaps they voted: certainly they did not rule; and the whole city enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown to it, for its vast mass of poorer members could not even be armed in the service of their country, save at a wage, and certainly had no military aptitudes to waste upon domestic quarrels. To such a people the furious valour of Roman and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar anarchy, nor perhaps could they understand that the States which are destined alternately to dominate the world by thought or by armies are in every age those whose energy creates a perpetual conflict within themselves. It was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they depended for their existence upon a profound sense of security and that they based it upon a complete command of the sea. It was their contention that since no others could (to use their phrase) “wash their hands” in the sea without the leave of Carthage, their polity was immortal. They made no attempt to absorb or to win the vast populations from whom they claimed various degrees of allegiance. The whole Maghreb, and, later, Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and Sardinia, were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town. When they contemplated their own greatness their satisfaction must have reposed upon the density of their population—their walls may have held more than half a million souls at a time when few towns of the west could count a tenth of such a number—upon their immemorial security from invasion, upon the excessive wealth of their great families (whose luxury the whole nation could contemplate with a vicarious satisfaction), upon the solidity of their credit, the resources of their treasury, and, above all, upon the excellent seamanship, the trained activity, and the overwhelming numbers of their navy. As for their religion, it was of that dark inhuman sort which has in various forms tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves. Gods remote and vengeful, an absence of those lesser deities and shrines which grace common experience and which attach themselves to local affections: perhaps some awful and unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence and fear distinguished it. Even the goddess who presided over their loves had something in her at once obscene and murderous.