Besides the Hellenes and Italians there was another people who strove for the mastery of all the Western Mediterranean. The ancient city of Tyre had sent out many colonies into the far West, when the nascent power of Hellas had already begun to assert its superiority in the Aegean. Trade grew and flourished between the colonies and the mother city in Phoenicia; thus there was unbroken intercourse between remote Gades and her Eastern mother until after the destruction of the latter (720 B.C.). Henceforward the headship of the Phoenician cities of the West falls into the hands of Carthage, the scene of the last great act and final catastrophe in the drama of Phoenician history. At the very time, nay some say on the very day, when the Greeks of the East were destroying the host of Xerxes in the Strait of Salamis, the Hellenes of the West led by brave Gelon of Syracus were repelling a great army of Carthaginians before the walls of Himera, and during the third and fourth centuries B.C. the Greeks of Sicily lived in constant danger from the Carthaginians, who held the western part of the island with their factories of Lilybaeum, Drepanum and Motyé, until at last they were finally expelled from the island by the resistless might of Rome (241 B.C.). Could we but learn the estimate put upon the ox by the Phoenicians or Carthaginians, we would get a fair index to its value over a wide extended area. For as in earlier times the Phoenician influence extended from Tyre to Gades, linking both east and west, so in later days Carthage extended her power over all North Africa from the Pillars of Herakles to the confines of Egypt, and over Southern Spain.