Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/214

CHAP. VI.
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of Asia,the splendid to the more useful parts of history. We are informed that, by the conquests of Pompey, the tributes of Asia were raised from fifty to one hundred and thirty-five milHons of drachms ; or about four of Egypt,millions and a half sterling^[1]. Under the last and most indolent of the Ptolemies, the revenue of Egypt is said to have amounted to twelve thousand five hundred talents ; a sum equivalent to more than two millions and a half of our money, but which was afterwards considerably improved by the more exact economy of the Romans, and the increase of the trade of Ethiopia and of Gaul,India^[2]. Gaul was enriched by rapine, as Egypt was by commerce ; and the tributes of those two great provinces have been compared as nearly equal to each of Africa,other in value^[3]. The ten thousand Euboic or Phoenician talents, about four millions sterling^[4], which vanquished Carthage was condemned to pay within the term of fifty years, were a shght acknowledgment of the superiority of Rome^[5], and cannot bear the least proportion with the taxes afterwards raised both on the lands and on the persons of the inhabitants, when the fertile coast of Africa was reduced into a province^[6].

of Spain,Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phoenicians, and the oppression of the simple natives, who were compelled to labour in their own mines for the benefit of strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish America^[7]. The Phoenicians were acquainted only with the seacoast of Spain; avarice, as well as ambition, carried the arms of Rome and Carthage into the heart of the country ; and almost every part of the

1. Plutarch, in Pompeio, p. 642.
2. Strabo, 1. xvii. p. 798.
3. Velleius Paterculus, 1. ii. c. 39. He seems to give the preference to the revenue of Gaul.
4. The Euboic, the Phoenician, and Alexandrian talents, were double in weight to the Attic. See Hooper of Ancient Weights and Measures, p. iv. c- 5. It is very probable, that the same talent was carried from Tyre to Carthage.
5. Polyb. 1. XV. c. 2.
6. Appian in Punicis, p. 84.
7. Diodorus Siculus, 1. v. Cadiz was built by the Phoenicians a little more than a thousand years before Christ. See Veil. Paterc. i. 2.