Little do we find any Phoenician architecture or plastic art at all comparable even to those of Italy, to say nothing of the lands where art was native.
Category Archive: Theodor Mommsen
About the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, the Etruscan power had reached its height.
The order of things established by the Romans in Libya rested in substance on a balance of power between the Nomad kingdom of Massinissa and the city of Carthage.
The defeat of the Augustan policy, as the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a victory of the Germans.
When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.
The Celtic, Galatian, or Gallic nation received from the common mother endowments different from those of its Italian, Germanic, and Hellenic sisters.
Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.
The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.
If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted.
The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.