Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history." There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon, who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks---10,000 in number--who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it. But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther afield--or oversea--and not for the first time, to Sicily. And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and another people--of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the story---Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city established on the Tiber. The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C. or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met there. {147} CHAPTER X THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities of Tyre and Sidon. Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital, the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told, a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers. {148}