CARTHAGE AND THE CARTHAGINIAN EMPIRE.--Foremost among the cities founded by the Phoenicians upon the different shores of the Mediterranean was Carthage, upon the northern coast of Africa. The city is thought to have had its beginnings in a small trading-post, established late in the ninth century B.C., about one hundred years before the founding of Rome. Carthage was simply another Tyre. She was mistress and queen of the Western Mediterranean. At the period we have now reached, she held sway, through peaceful colonization or by force of arms, over all the northern coast of Africa from the Greater Syrtis to the Pillars of Hercules, and possessed the larger part of Sicily, as well as Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Isles, Southern Spain, and scores of little islands scattered here and there in the neighboring seas. With all its shores dotted with her colonies and fortresses, and swept in every direction by the Carthaginian war-galleys, the Western Mediterranean had become a "Phoenician lake," in which, as the Carthaginians boasted, no one dared wash his hands without their permission. CARTHAGINIAN GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION.--The government of Carthage, like that of Rome, was republican in form. Corresponding to the Roman consuls, two magistrates, called Suffetes, stood at the head of the state. The Senate was composed of the heads of the leading families; its duties and powers were very like those of the Roman Senate. So well-balanced was the constitution, and so prudent was its administration, that six hundred years of Carthaginian history exhibited not a single revolution. The religion of the Carthaginians was the old Canaanitish worship of Baal, or the Sun. To Moloch,--another name for the fire-god,--"who rejoiced in human victims and in parents' tears," they offered human sacrifices. ROME AND CARTHAGE COMPARED.--These two great republics, which for more than five centuries had been slowly extending their limits and maturing their powers upon the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, were now about to begin one of the most memorable struggles of all antiquity--a duel that was to last, with every vicissitude of fortune, for over one hundred years.