Pyrrhus they had for a moment been in almost complete possession of the island. But they foolishly deserted Pyrrhus at the critical moment, and now again the Carthaginians had recovered it, all but the kingdom of Hiero of Syracuse, stretching along the eastern coast under Mount Etna. Carthaginian fleets cruised round the island, and were often seen off the coasts of Italy as well. For Carthage was the mistress of the seas in all the western part of the Mediterranean basin. Carthage was a daughter of the Canaanite city of Tyre, belonging to that seafaring people known in history as Phœnicians, whom the Israelites had pushed down to the coast of Palestine without subduing them. The genius of the Phœnicians was for trade, and the splendid position of Carthage, near the modern Tunis, with a rich corn-growing country in the rear, had helped her merchant princes to establish by degrees what may loosely be called an empire of trading settlements extending not only along the African coast, but over that of Sardinia and southern and eastern Spain, and including Sicily, as we have seen. To maintain this empire she had to keep up great fleets, and huge docks in her own port; but as her Phœnician population was largely occupied with trade, she had to rely for her crews and also for her land forces largely on the native Africans whom she had subdued, or on mercenaries hired from other races with whom she came in contact. Though this was a weak point in her armour, she was far the greatest power in the western seas, and any other people ambitious of power in that region would have to reckon with her. So far she had been on friendly terms with Rome, and we still have the text of three treaties between the two states; but the latest of these shows signs of mutual distrust, and Rome had now risen so high that a collision was all but inevitable. A people ruling in Italy cannot afford to have a rival in Sicily and also in undisputed command of the sea.