Carthage and Venice

In [...] managing to retain her rank as a Great Power in an Hellenic or Hellenizing World in spite of the sudden vast increase in the scale of Hellenic life at the transition from a pre-Alexandnne to a post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history, Carthage achieved something that Venice failed to achieve at the transition from a Late Medieval to an Early Modern Age of Western history. Circa 281 B.C. Carthage was a Great Power still, whereas Venice, circa A.D. 1559, was lucky to find herself still independent and in possession of an empire in the Levant and on the Italian mainland that was now dwarfed by the gigantic stature of Great Powers of a higher calibre that had loomed up all around her. [...] By A.D. 1559 Venice had long since met her Ottoman fate, whereas Carthage was not to meet her Roman fate till 264 B.C.; and by A.D. 1559 Venice had also felt the adverse economic effects of the Portuguese conquest of the Indies and the Spanish conquest of the Americas, whereas the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenian Empire had no similar adverse economic effects on Carthage’s monopoly of the African and Iberian hinterlands of her “wooden curtain”.

Carthage belonged to the “Syriac society” which Greece was overwhelming in the Levant.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)