But she had had enough of matrimony, and, denying his pleadings to share his throne, she set about building a kingdom of her own. She chose for the site of her future capital a low hill beside the sea-shore, looking down upon a little sheltered bay, and guilefully induced its Berber owners to sell her as much land as could be covered by the hide of a bull. Thereupon—and for the sake of her reputation the less said about the ethics of the transaction the better—she proceeded to cut the hide into a long and narrow strip, as sometimes, for amusement, one strives to see how long a paring can be obtained from an apple. With the lengthy strand of rawhide thus ingeniously obtained, she inclosed an area of sufficient size on which to build her city, which, it is to be assumed, was in the beginning a mere collection of wattle-and-daub huts. At first the settlement was known as Byrsa (the name means bull’s hide), but later it took the name of Carthage, or Karthadasht, “the New City” in the Phenician tongue. So much for the legendary version, which Virgil gave to the world in the Æneid and which has been so expanded and embroidered in the centuries which have intervened that even the men of science have been unable to determine with any certainty where the fable ends and history begins. * * * * * We have grown so accustomed to referring to the inhabitants of the city traditionally founded by Dido as Carthaginians or Phenicians that it is difficult to realize that the name by which they called themselves was neither of these, but Canaanite—a lowlander, a man of the plains. The Greeks gave the country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from which these people came the name of Phœnike, the Land of Purple—so called, no doubt, from the purple dyes for which the Tyrians were famous; the Romans in their turn corrupted the name into Pœni; yet well into the Christian era the farmers of Libya, which roughly corresponded to the Tunisia of to-day, were wont to speak of themselves as being of the land of Canaan.[1]