The nations and cities on the borders of the Mediterranean Sea, where arts and commerce first began, where agriculture flourished, and population had risen to a high pitch, carried on perpetual struggles to supplant each other; and, in those struggles, the most wealthy generally sunk under; till Alexander, the first great conqueror, with whose history we are tolerably well acquainted, reduced them all to [end of page #70] his yoke; one small and brave people triumphing over the Egyptian and Assyrian empires, where wealth and luxury had already produced their effects.

Though this triumph of poverty over riches was very complete, except in one single instance, it did not occasion any real change, either in the abodes of wealth, or the channels of commerce.  Tyre, the richest commercial city till then, was ruined, to make way for the prosperity of Alexandria, which became the most wealthy; drawing great part of the commerce from Carthage on the west, and taking the whole from Rhinocolura on the east:  but, in Egypt and Syria, Babylon and Memphis still remained great cities.

The whole of this ancient world was for a moment under one chief, but was soon again divided amongst the generals who succeeded to that great conqueror; and the Egyptian and Persian empires became rivals, as Egypt and Syria had been before.  The Grecian nations still remained the chief seats of civilization and the fine arts; and this continued till the Romans, originally a poorer people than the Macedonians, conquered the whole.  This was the second great triumph of poverty and energy over wealth and grandeur, and, in this struggle, Greece itself fell.

The effects of wealth were not less formidable to the Romans themselves, than they had been to those nations they had enabled that brave and warlike people to conquer; so that the mistress of the world, in her turn, fell before nations that were rude and barbarous, but uncorrupted by wealth and luxury.

The conquerors of Rome were too rude, and too many in number, to become themselves enervated by wealth, which disappeared under their rapacious grasp, and which they neither had the art nor inclination to preserve.

This invasion of the fertile and rich provinces by men rude and ignorant, but who came from northern climates, established a new order of things; and only a small remnant of former wealth and greatness was preserved in Egypt and at Constantinople.

For several centuries of war and confusion commerce and the arts appear to have been undervalued and neglected; but still the taste [end of page #71] for oriental luxuries was not entirely banished, and, at the first interval of peace and safety, sprung up again.  It was then that Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, and Constantinople, became the channels through which the people of Europe procured the luxuries of Asia.  Babylon, Memphis, Palmyra, and all the other great cities of antiquity, were no more; even Greece had lost its arts and splendour;