Now, the Phœnicians were evidently not people of the kind that are contented to sit still. They were energetic, pushing; and of course they came into conflict with the Greek colonies. The principal conflicts took place in, or around, Sicily, where the Phœnicians, as well as the Greeks, had long been settled. It was not until Carthage had grown to considerable power that the Phœnicians could hope to do much against the Greeks, and about that time some of the Greek cities also gained strength for military and naval enterprise by coming into rather closer union with each other. The constitution of very many of the Greek city states went through the same succession of changes. After the rule of the aristocratic party, that is to say, of the best-born people, who were the rich landowners, there came a time of rule by the democracy, that is to say by the poorer, the common people. This democratic rule was so disorderly that a strong single ruler generally arose out of the disorder and established his power, somewhat as Napoleon I. did out of the disorder of the French Revolution. These rulers, or dictators, were called tyrants in Greece, and the changes of the constitutions in the government of their colonial cities in Sicily went on in exactly the same way as in Greece itself. A strong ruler established over one city would often be able to make good his power over another city near him. Thus began to be formed alliances of cities under the rule of one or of a few leading men; and so the Sicilian Greeks found some strength of their own to oppose to the strength of Carthage. Historians tell us of such sweeping successes of the Phœnicians in the earliest conflicts that if we were to {149} believe them all we should have to believe that hardly a Greek was left in Sicily. But evidently that is not exactly how it did happen, for it was just while the Persians were threatening Greece that Gelo, one of the greatest of the Sicilian "tyrants," established Syracuse as the capital city of Sicily and the headquarters of his power. The Greek colonists had largely assimilated the native peoples to themselves. There had been marriages between them, and Greek thought had penetrated here as it had everywhere that the Greeks went. So the strength of the Greeks in Sicily did not depend on the colonists. Only the Greek colonists seem to have been far more successful in getting help from the native people than the Phœnician colonists were. The Phœnicians, however, had their friends in Sicily, even among the Greeks themselves, for there were jealousies between the Greek cities in Sicily as everywhere else. [Sidenote: Phœnicians defeated]