the Hellenic coasts of Asia. But the fact that he had to be driven back from all of them of itself showed what an enemy it was against whom Greece had now to strive. For a moment Thebes was the willing ally, Athens was the defenceless conquest, of the lord of Susa and Ekbatana. And after all the Persian did cut Hellas short on the side of Asia; he even declared his will as a master in the councils of Europe. A century had not passed since the day of Salamis when, by the peace of Antalkidas, the peace which the King sent down, the Greek cities of Asia, the Greek cities of Cyprus, were formally acknowledged to be the King’s. In the West meanwhile Hellas had to strive against a rival yet more worthy of her rivalry, not against a barbarian empire, but against a barbarian commonwealth. The old Phœnicia on the Syrian shore had fallen from its glory; its commonwealths, still rich and flourishing, had sunk into dependencies of the Persian power. The great field of Phœnician enterprise now lay in the western seas. One Phœnician city, the youngest of the great Phœnician cities, had risen to a place in the world and the world’s history such as the cities of the elder Canaan had never reached. The New City, Carthage, was now the centre and representative of Phœnician life far more than Sidon or Tyre. Carthage, in after days the rival of Rome, was now before all things the rival of Greece. She was to bring Rome nearer to destruction than was ever done by any other power of the Mediterranean world; she was to destroy for a season, to weaken for ever, more than one of the greatest among the western cities of Hellas. At the head of a mighty following of dependencies of her own race, swollen by barbarian subjects and mercenaries of every race, the Asiatic city planted on the shores of Africa came nearer than any other power of those days to rooting up the elder life of Europe, the life of which first Greece and then Italy was the centre. We do not rightly take in the full significance of the struggle which Greece went through at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. if we do not at every moment bear in mind how the whole Greek folk was attacked on both sides at once. It may or may not be true that Xerxes entered into an actual league with Carthage; it may or may not be true that the fight of Salamis and the fight of Himera were fought on the same day. True or false, both beliefs set forth the true position of the Greek states at that moment, threatened by Persia on one side and by Carthage on the other. The Persian was beaten back; from the actual soil of continuous Hellas he was beaten back for ever. The Carthaginian was beaten back only for a moment; he still kept his hold on Sicily; he was yet to destroy Selinous and Akragas, to come within a hair’s-breadth of destroying Syracuse. In earlier days the scattered Phœnician settlements in eastern Sicily had withdrawn before the coming of the Greek colonists; but now the Phœnician power