Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 2 (of 3)

by Barthold Georg Niebuhr

THE SECOND PUNIC WAR.

Livy begins his account of the war of Hannibal with the remark, which several others had made before him, that it was the greatest war which had ever been waged by the greatest and most powerful states, when in the height of their greatest vigour. Yet now that two thousand years are passed, we can no longer say the same. The seven years’ war, especially the campaign of 1757, exhibits a greater accumulation of achievements than any part of the war of Hannibal; nor is it inferior in the greatness of the generals. But thus much we may say, that no war in the whole of ancient history is to be compared to this. Nor is there, on the whole, any general to be placed above Hannibal, and of the ancients none can stand at his side. Whilst in the first Punic war, only one great general makes his appearance upon the stage, we see in this, besides Hannibal, Scipio likewise, who, as a general, is indeed not fully his equal, but has claims notwithstanding to be ranked among the very first; and after him, Fabius and Marcellus, who in any war would have gained a high renown, and could have only been eclipsed by men of such extraordinary greatness; and besides these, many other stars of the second magnitude.

The war of Hannibal has been described by several of the ancients. It formed the substance of the works of Fabius and Cincius: in those of the latter it was treated exclusively. He wrote it, as far as he himself lived to see it, very explicitly, merely prefixing an introduction on the earlier history. Fabius had a more extensive plan; he took in both wars. Of Fabius we may say with certainty, that his account to a great extent forms the groundwork of that of Appian: Dionysius left him at the beginning of the first Punic war, and he is there without any guide. I am able to show, that statements of a marked character in Appian and in Zonaras are taken from Fabius; for Dio Cassius also acknowledged that he could find no better source. Very nearly about the same time, Chæreas and Sosilus wrote: of both of these Polybius speaks with censure; he denounces them as fabulists, although Sosilus had staid in the camp with Hannibal. It is strange that Livy did not think of making any use of Hannibal’s short memoirs, and of a letter of Scipio to Philip of Macedon in which he recounted his achievements. Polybius has made use of an authentic document of Hannibal, on a brass tablet in the temple of Juno in Lacinia,[14] in which the numbers especially were given with great accuracy. As far as Polybius goes, we have nothing left to desire: the third book is the masterpiece of what has been preserved to us of his history; unfortunately we have but the first years of his. He too certainly had before him the excellent work of L. Cincius, who described this war as an eye-witness. There was also an account of it in Latin, about the middle of the seventh century, by L. Cœlius Antipater, probably a Greek freedman. He wrote with rhetorical pretension, and I think that many things in Livy are to be traced to him, particularly where the latter goes off into the romantic. For Cœlius had wished to write history for effect, and it may not have been without justice, that Cicero speaks slightingly of him.

In Livy’s work we may clearly distinguish the different sources. In the beginning, the description of the siege of Saguntum is taken beyond a doubt from Cœlius Antipater; other parts follow most closely in the footsteps of Polybius; elsewhere he has either made use of the Annales Pontificum, or of those annalists who had embodied them in their histories. The whole of the third decade is written with evident fondness for the subject; yet he is wanting in the knowledge of facts, in experience of real life, and in the power of taking a general view: he never gets away from the umbracula of the school. Wherever he deviates from Polybius, he is altogether unworthy of belief; and however beautifully his history of the war is written, it is still quite plain that he was unable to bring before his mind one single event, as it really happened: his account of the battle of Cannæ, for instance, is untrue and impossible; whilst, on the other hand, that of Polybius is so excellent, that one may get a most distinct idea of the locality, and even draw a map from his statements, and the better one knows the nature of the spot, the clearer becomes his description. The work of General Vaudoncourt, published some years ago at Milan under the title of Campagnes d’Annibal, which, merely because its author is such an able man, has been praised by every body, is an utterly worthless production. The maps are good for nothing, and the plans are drawn from fancy; he did not understand how to read an author critically, he had no knowledge of Greek, and he has not given anything new: there is only one point of ancient tactics about which I have learned anything from him. He is especially mistaken in the notion which he has formed of the battle array of the Carthaginians; he believes them to have been drawn up in phalanx, which they were not. They were just as moveable as the Romans, and the sword alone was the weapon which they relied on: lances they very likely had none, but javelins in abundance. Ulric Becker’s treatise on the history of the war of Hannibal (in Dahlmann’s “Researches in the Field of History”),[15] although not a mature work, is really valuable, and should not be overlooked.

Hamilcar was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who, after an administration of nine years, was murdered by an Iberian whose chieftain he had caused to be put to death. This personal attachment to their princes prevailed among the Iberians: no one durst leave the death of his chief unavenged,—nay, if possible, he was not to survive him. Hasdrubal had with him for his education young Hannibal, who soon became the favourite of the army. The oath of Hannibal rests on his own authority; the circumstances of it, however, are told in different ways. He is said to have been nine years old when his father went over to Spain (516 according to Cato), and this seems to be historical: if so, he was born about 507, which would make him twenty-seven years old when he marched to Italy. This is the very age, at which several generals have shown themselves greatest. Frederic the Great was twenty-eight years old when he conquered Silesia; Napoleon twenty-seven, or twenty-eight, when he undertook the Italian campaign. The whole conduct of Hannibal during this war bears the character of a very young man; and he was by no means an old one when he died, being nearer his fiftieth than his sixtieth year. Very likely, he was born just before Hamilcar went to Sicily. His brothers were Hasdrubal and Mago. Whether Hasdrubal was his elder, is doubtful; Mago was considerably younger.

The opinions of the ancients as to Hannibal’s personal character might very easily have been divided. In the Roman writers, he appears throughout only as a terrific being. Livy’s delineation of him is in some parts quite excellent,—no one could gainsay his extraordinary qualities as a general: yet when Livy says that these were darkened by vitia of equal magnitude, he is in direct opposition to Polybius. The latter expressly disputes the fact of Hannibal’s cruelty, and says that whenever anything of the kind did happen, it was through the fault of some subordinate commander, especially of another Hannibal. He also flatly contradicts the statements about his bad faith (plus quam Punica fides). Atrocities may have been committed,—there are stories of these in Appian which are borrowed from Fabius,—nor will I doubt in the least that the war was conducted with cruelty on the side of the Carthaginians; but so it was likewise by the Romans. This is the general character of the ancient wars, which we are far from representing to ourselves as so horrible as they really were. Sometimes also there are cases in which a general cannot help himself.[16] Of the bad faith of Hannibal, not an instance can be brought forward; on the contrary, as far as we have any positive evidence, he must have kept his word; otherwise he would have been taxed with it, especially in capitulations, and then indeed people would not have capitulated to him. The Romans are awful liars when they want to lay the blame upon their enemies. Such stories as the murder of the senate of Nuceria, and the extermination of that of Acerræ,[17] are unauthenticated. In peace, he is quite a different man from Scipio. The latter forgot himself after his victory; he did not find himself at home in the free constitution of his native city, and as a peaceful citizen he never was of any use to the commonwealth; the example which he set of contempt for an impeachment was perhaps highly perilous and baneful. It was great in him, that he did not make an ill use of the popular enthusiasm in his behalf: but he was conscious of his own greatness; he displayed from the very first, when he stood for the ædileship and the consulship, an overbearing pride; he wished to raise himself with impunity above the laws wherever he could harmlessly do it. With the influence which he had, he might have become the source of the greatest blessings to the state; but this was not the case. Not a law, not a beneficial measure is to be traced to him. The neglect of the Roman constitution after the Punic wars, was a principal cause of the decay of the republic: with regard to this, it was in his power to have done much good. Hannibal, on the contrary, comes forth after the Punic war as a public benefactor likewise, as a reformer of the law, of the administration and finances of his country. Scipio and Hannibal were both of them well acquainted with Greek literature. Hannibal had Greeks for his companions, and though indeed they were not the most distinguished men of their day, this shows that in his leisure hours he enjoyed a literary conversation.[18] There was something irresistible about him, which he seems to have inherited from his father. For sixteen years, he commanded an army which at last, like that of Gustavus Adolphus, had not a man of the old soldiers left; but consisted only of a herd of abandoned adventurers. Though he was placed in the most difficult circumstances, no Gaul ever attempted anything against him; the ruthless, reckless Numidians never dared to raise a hand against him. He demanded of the Italians the most gigantic efforts; he wore them out, was not able to protect them; and still he so fascinated them also, that they never wavered in their fidelity. A man, like him, who achieved such things as the settlement and subjugation of Spain, the march across the Alps, the victories over the Romans, the shaking of Italy to its centre, we may call the first and greatest of his age,—indeed we might almost call him the first and greatest in all history. How little in comparison has Alexander done! He had no difficulties whatever to overcome. As for Scipio, he entered the lists against his rival under the most favourable circumstances: if he had not conquered, Hannibal must have been more than man. But Hannibal worked for the sole purpose of delivering his country; and when he returned thither, it was his only object to restore it. Even when banished, he did not seek for protection anywhere; but wherever he was, he commanded, he stood forth as a superior, and never bowed before any one, nor ever sinned against truth. Such a man I admire and love, almost without any qualification. That he let Decius Magius go from Capua, was not policy: it was a greatness of mind of which very few only would have been capable. Scipio could have done it.

The third general of this war, Q. Fabius Maximus, had gained some reputation already in the former obscure contest: the surname of Maximus, however, is inherited from his grandfather, or great-grandfather, Q. Fabius Rullianus in the days of the Samnite wars, who received it when he separated the four city tribes from the country ones. He acted in what seemed to him the fittest way, and was net afraid of doing what might be mistaken in him for cowardice. Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem, says Ennius. He was a very good general; he had coolness, circumspection, and quickness of eye: but he has been much overrated notwithstanding. Daun has been compared to him, and there were many who thought that this was doing too much honour to the Austrian commander; but Daun was by no means inferior to him as a general. The only important achievement of Fabius is the recovering of Tarentum; yet, after all, what was it? What is certainly true, is his opposition to Scipio. All the speeches of Hanno and others in Livy, are perhaps rhetorical trifles from Cœlius Antipater; but this opposition bears the impress of history. One sees distinctly that he was of an envious mind. He could not bear the great rising star; he would rather have had Hannibal unconquered, than that Scipio should gain a glory which outvied his own. He did not rejoice at the freshness of the new generation; he wished Hannibal to be worn out by the power of time alone.

The fourth character of this war is M. Claudius Marcellus, a dashing, able general, the opposite to Fabius in his daring, distinguished as a commander, and at the same time a brave soldier.

We also divide this war into periods. To the introduction belongs all that happened previously in Spain from the taking of Saguntum to the march over the Alps 534. The first period of the war itself contains the first three years, and a part of 537, during which was the irresistible progress of Hannibal. The second extends from 537 to the taking of Capua 541, when his star was already on the wane, while the Romans once more gained ground, and their prospects became brighter. The third is from 541 to 545, when Hannibal set his hopes on Spain, and on being reinforced by his brother Hasdrubal. He maintains himself in Apulia, Bruttium, and Lucania, until Hasdrubal’s defeat on the Metaurus. The fourth period is from 545 to 550, when Hannibal was obliged to evacuate Italy. The last, from his arrival in Africa to the end of the war.

The years 535 to 546, or 547, are those of the wars of the Romans in Spain, which were waged with various success until the taking of New Carthage. The time from 548 to the end, may be called the African war of Scipio. The Sicilian war and the conquest of Sardinia, from 535 to 540, come in like episodes. In 540, the Macedonian war begins, which lasts until 547.

Hannibal had taken upon himself the command after Hasdrubal’s death, and he forthwith displayed increased activity. The Romans, probably after the outbreak of the Cisalpine war, had made a treaty with Hasdrubal, not with the Carthaginian state, by which both parties with regard to Spain fixed upon the Ebro as the boundary between their respective possessions. Owing to the great gap which here occurs in our history, we cannot make out at what time the Romans settled in those parts; yet at the beginning of the second Punic war, they were masters of Tarraco and of the coast of Catalonia. Livy adds, that the Saguntines were to be left as a free state between both. Polybius, notwithstanding his general excellence, is sometimes mistaken in details. He had first edited his work down to the war of Perseus, a second edition went as far as the taking of Corinth; yet it may clearly be shown that he did not revise the first books in the second edition, and it is plain that he had not at that time the least knowledge of the geography of Spain: very likely he fancied, as Livy evidently did, that Saguntum lay east of the Ebro. Moreover, he knows nothing of the fact that Saguntum was to remain independent, and yet he had all the documents before him. Were it not so, there would then indeed have been a breach of faith on the side of Hannibal. Perhaps the Romans did not mean at any rate to abandon the people of Saguntum, with whom they were in alliance; and yet it may not have been expressedly stipulated, that an attack on Saguntum would be a violation of the peace. Now it is generally thought from the treaty between Rome and Carthage, that the Carthaginians had then under their rule the whole of Spain as far as the sources of the Ebro; but this is by no means the case. Under Hamilcar, they seem to have acquired the whole of Andalusia, and the greater part of Valencia; but beyond the Sierra Morena, they in all likelihood only first spread under Hasdrubal: their sway never extended further than New Castile and Estremadura; Lusitania, Old Castile, and Leon, never belonged to them. The farthest point to which Hannibal reached in the campaign against the Vaccæans, described by Polybius, was Salamanca, where, however, he did not found any lasting dominion: the tribes in the interior, and the Celtiberians, seem never to have acknowledged the supremacy of Carthage. The other peoples were under its protectorate: they retained their own form of government, and though not bound to serve, were ready to enlist under the banners of the Carthaginians, who gave good pay. Polybius himself remarks very justly, that the Romans kept silent at the progress of the Carthaginians, because they were greatly afraid of offending them now that the Gauls had stirred. Had Hamilcar been alive, he would perhaps have taken a share in that war. It is strange that once during this period a Carthaginian fleet makes its appearance off the coast of Etruria.

Hannibal carried on the war in Spain only as a preparatory one: his real object was the war in Italy, which he now tried to kindle. The Carthaginians stood in the same position to him, as the Romans did to Cæsar; commanding as he did an army entirely devoted to him, in a country subjected by him, he was not to be controlled by the senate. Carthage, according to the natural march of development in republics, was then already on the decline: the chief power had passed from the senate to the popular assembly. Now, although the people might have idolized Hannibal, yet the senate was hardly friendly towards him; and notwithstanding the general hatred against the Romans, the majority at that time were not perhaps of opinion, that a war would bring relief, and they could not see in what way Rome was to be attacked. The higher classes were also afraid of Hannibal at the head of a victorious army.

The siege of Saguntum is placed by Livy in the year 534; yet he sees himself that it took place in 533. Polybius blames Hannibal for having tried to kindle the war by all kinds of artifices, and for this he has been reproached with having been too much the partisan of the Romans; but even as he is to be acquitted of this charge, so must Hannibal of his. Polybius would have had him at once demand Sardinia; but that he could not do. Had Hannibal been a king, he would perhaps have done it; but as it was, he was obliged to draw the Carthaginians into the war by degrees, whether they liked it or not. With this view, he intrigued in Saguntum, and got up a quarrel between the Saguntines and the Turdetanians, (but very likely we ought to read, instead of Turdetanians, Edetanians, who were inhabitants of Valencia, as the former lived too far off). Saguntum may not have been a purely Iberian town: it is said that colonists from Ardea had settled there, in which case it would be Tyrrhenian; and this is not unlikely, although afterwards perhaps the Iberian population outnumbered them. The derivation from Zacynthus has probably originated only from its name. Some years before, there had been troubles there; (several of these Spanish towns were republics; one must not fancy that their inhabitants were barbarians like the Celts;) and the Romans had come forward as mediators, and the victorious party had wreaked its vengeance upon the conquered. Hannibal took advantage of this, and stirred up the latter: at the same time, he complained at Carthage that the Saguntines, relying upon Rome, had been guilty of acts of violence against Carthaginian subjects. This is certainly craftiness; but he could hardly have behaved otherwise if he wanted to kindle the war. The Romans were exceedingly afraid of a Carthaginian war: the manner in which the city had risen again, could not but make an impression upon them. They did not know how it was to be carried on. They could only remove it to Africa by means of a fleet, of which the cost was enormous, not to speak of the many disasters which they had already had to suffer from it. To Spain also they had to transport the war by sea; and in that country, they had no base for their operations, and only insignificant allies. There, on the other hand, Carthage had at her disposal the whole of a subjugated population, and all the troops which were wanted in readiness; whilst Rome had to fight her battles with her own men, and these she had to bring over at an immense expense. The Romans therefore let Hannibal widen his rule, without themselves undertaking anything; nay, even when he began the siege of Saguntum, they merely negociated, and took no measures for sending assistance thither; so that Hannibal besieged the town for eight months, whilst they were engaged in the Illyrian war. The full description in Livy of the siege of Saguntum is certainly from Cœlius Antipater: according to him, the inhabitants themselves destroyed their town from despair; this is a repetition of what is told of so many Spanish towns. Another account is given by Polybius, which is really historical. Hannibal besieged the town, which lay one mile from the sea-coast, on the last ridges of the mountains which, rising from thence, separate Arragon from Castile. At the end of eight months, it was taken, but by no means destroyed: on the contrary, Hannibal found in the booty the means for fresh undertakings, and for rich presents to Carthage; and thus he was able to strengthen and encourage his own army. This is a complete refutation of Livy’s story, which also betrays itself by its empty prolixity. Hannibal himself had been wounded at this siege. So little is it to be placed in the year 534, that Hannibal afterwards put his army into winter-quarters, where he completed his preparations for his great expedition. The Romans had sent an embassy to him in behalf of their injured allies, but he referred them to Carthage: there they made their complaints, and demanded the giving up of Hannibal, and of the commissaries (σύνεδροι) who were with him, which throws some light on the state of things at Carthage, which is otherwise so obscure. The Carthaginians, instead of going into the complaint, tried to prove to the Romans that Hannibal had done no wrong; that Carthage could not be restricted by its treaties with Rome with regard to its acquisitions in Spain. Polybius justly remarks, that they argued beside the point, without entering into the question which was really before them. The Roman ambassadors now made a sinus of their toga, and declared to the Carthaginians, that they might choose between peace and war; the Carthaginians answered that they would follow the choice of the Romans; and when these cried out “war,” a loud shout of joy was raised.

One would now have thought that the Romans had already made great preparations; yet this was not the case. They had at that time only a small fleet, which moreover we afterwards hear of but seldom, and even then, little is said about it. The consuls, since the Ides of March, were P. Cornelius Scipio and Ti. Sempronius Longus. The Romans had the intention of sending the consul Scipio with two legions and ten thousand allies to Spain, and Sempronius with the same number of troops to Africa. The Carthaginians had no fleet of any importance; this was the first fault committed by them in this war. It may be that the rich who were in the government made niggardly retrenchments, that they might cut down the expenses of the war as much as possible. The plan of the Romans was not badly devised; only it is plain that they were quite mistaken in their estimate of their antagonist. Had Scipio arrived in Spain, before Hannibal had passed the Ebro, his army would have been driven by Hannibal into the sea, or annihilated within the first weeks, and the invasion of Italy would have become far more easy. And yet, if Hannibal had not carried on the war with such very great speed, the season of the year might have come on, in which he could no longer have crossed the Alps. The Romans show themselves unskilful at the beginning of every great war; their troops were not thoroughly trained, they had no standing army like Hannibal, nor did it even occur to them that they ought to place the very best of their generals in command. Hannibal took the wisest precautions: he sent the chief men of the conquered tribes over to Carthage, or kept them with him; and he despatched besides some picked Spanish troops for the defence of Africa, and a body of Libyans trained by himself, who were to garrison Carthage. Into Spain, on the other hand, he drew over a great many Libyans.

The Roman consul Sempronius went with a hundred and sixty quinqueremes to Africa, and already dreamed of a siege of Carthage; but before he reached it, events of quite a different kind had come to pass. Hannibal, who had rested himself during the winter, now crossed the Ebro with ninety thousand infantry and twelve thousand horse (according to Polybius, who took it from the tablet of Hannibal,—a number which the writer certainly meant to be correct; yet one ought perhaps to suppose it to be a slip of the pen, so as to read seventy thousand instead of ninety). The tribes beyond the Ebro were allies of the Romans, though not subject to them, and were therefore hostile to the Carthaginians: they made a stout resistance; but Hannibal quickly hastened on and took their strongholds, at the cost, however, of many men’s lives. He in all likelihood set out in May, as from Polybius it is pretty certain that he reached Italy in the middle of October. There is no doubt but that, if he could have started a month sooner, his expedition would have been far from being as dangerous as it was; yet the obstacles which had given rise to this delay, must have been insurmountable. He was leagued with those Gauls in Lombardy, who four years before had been subjected and cruelly treated by the Romans: they had promised him to put the whole of their force at his disposal. The Romans, however, had now seen through his plan. A year before, they had begun to build Placentia and Cremona; colonists were sent thither in great haste, and the fortifications completed before the beginning of the campaign; so that neither Hannibal nor the Gauls were able to take these places. Polybius rebukes the writers of his day, who spoke of Hannibal’s undertaking as of a thing that had never happened before, but had sprung from a desire of doing some thing which was unheard of, and never could be carried through without the co-operation of unearthly powers. The story that a demon had showed Hannibal the way, is in Livy changed into a dream of surpassing beauty, as if a being more than human were directing Hannibal not to look backward, but only forward; but the writers of those times gave it as an actual part of their narrative.

Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees with fifty thousand infantry and nine thousand horse, numbers which Polybius has likewise evidently taken from the monumental tablet of Hannibal. The passage was effected near Figueras and Rosas towards Roussillon, where it is easiest. He had previously sent envoys to the Gallic tribes from the Pyrenees to the Rhone, to ask them for a free passage through their countries, and had tried to move them to peace by presents of money; so that he reached the Rhone without meeting with any hostility worth mentioning. After the passage over the Pyrenees, signs of a dangerous mutiny began to show themselves; three thousand Carpetanians returned home, and Hannibal also of his own accord sent back other Spaniards whom he suspected. His army seems to have suffered from desertion besides: otherwise it could not have lessened so much as Polybius states. He advanced with the utmost speed. From Carthagena to the Po, Polybius reckons two hundred German miles, which is indeed somewhat exaggerated; but, even then, what difficulties were to be overcome! Until Hannibal came to Cisalpine Gaul, he had to pass through nothing but tribes to whom his march was as a curse. Having gone through the beautiful province of Lower Languedoc, he came to the Rhone in the neighbourhood of Pont St. Esprit. As for the inhabitants of Languedoc, they had been obliged to send their women and children into the Cevennes; but things were now quite different. The Gauls of the Dauphiné, Provence, and those parts, had the rapid river in front of them, and could therefore more readily venture upon resistance; perhaps they had heard moreover that a Roman army was already in Catalonia, nay, even, on the Gallic coast. However much they at other times had scorned the Romans, they now looked to them with eager confidence. P. Scipio had on his voyage to Spain put in at Marseilles, as he had learned that Hannibal, whom he supposed still at the Ebro, was already near the Rhone. He could not but have found it hazardous to take the field against an army of such superior numbers; but in conjunction with the Gauls on the left bank of the Rhone, he could have hindered the enemy’s passage over the river. Hannibal, even without this, had already immense difficulties in his way: the building of a bridge of boats was no easy task. He therefore bought from the people who lived along the bank on which he was, every kind of boat that he could get, and he had canoes made of trees; then he ordered a division to make a night-march higher up the river, so as to cross over on rafts at a spot which was some way off, and threaten the Gauls in the rear. This plan succeeded; yet one cannot understand how the Gauls were not up to it. When the detachment had made its appearance, Hannibal embarked all his forces in the boats, and crossed the stream whilst this division attacked the Gauls. Thus, after inflicting great loss upon the Gauls, he landed on the other side: he got the elephants over with a great deal of trouble. His victory over Nature, which seemed here herself to have set bounds to his advance, made a decisive impression on the neighbouring tribes. Had he delayed eight days longer, Scipio would have barred his way, and hindered him from crossing. He had only thirty-eight thousand infantry, and eight thousand cavalry left; the latter were most of them Numidians, and on the whole were only good for foraging and skirmishing, but not for regular fighting: he had still nearly all his elephants. He now sent some Numidians on to the road to Marseilles, and these fell in with some of the Roman horse: on both sides they were astonished at the meeting. Scipio, who had but just heard of Hannibal’s passing over the Pyrenees, could not have thought that he had already crossed the Rhone. An insignificant skirmish took place, in which the Romans had the advantage. Hannibal, however, did not mind the Roman general, but continued his march.

Here we begin to have most discrepant accounts of Hannibal’s expedition. Had he gone in the direction which Livy makes him take,—up the valley of the Durance by Briançon, Mont Genèvre, and Susa, and coming out near Turin,—he could not have done a better service to the Romans; Scipio would have fallen upon his rear, and on the other side, from the mountains, the Gauls would have laid wait for him, with barricades of felled trees, and the like. There was even among the ancients already some uncertainty as to the road by which Hannibal crossed the Alps; Polybius says nothing about it, because in his time it may have been a thing generally known. Some thought that he had gone over the Little, others, over the Great St. Bernard; others again were even for the Simplon: in times of old, there was no road over Mont Cenis. In these days, opinions are also divided. And yet, after General Melville’s masterly researches, edited by the younger De Luc,[19] which are based on a more accurate survey of the places themselves, there can be no more doubt on the subject: that Letronne, who truly deserves to be spoken of with respect, does not see this, is passing strange. No other road can be meant, but that over the little St. Bernard. In the beginning of October, Hannibal was on the last mountains. The little St. Bernard has no glaciers at all, nor is it much higher than the Brenner; in summer it is even a green Alp, and though indeed for a pretty long time it is covered with snow, this always melts away; at the very top, the soil is still so fertile that rye grows there: on the great St. Bernard, on the contrary, there is everlasting snow. On the mountain over which Hannibal went, was a frequented road, and there he found new-fallen snow. Particularly decisive, however, is the following circumstance: before Hannibal reached the top of the mountain, he had a sharp fight with the Alpine tribes, on which, as Polybius says, he stationed himself with his reserve near a white rock. Now, there is in the whole of that part of the country only one rock of gypsum, which lies near the old road in the Tarantaise; the inhabitants still call it la roche blanche: De Luc remarks that whoever has once passed that way, must needs remember the cliff for ever. The Alps in Polybius mean the whole mountain range from Savoy and Aosta; there are several ridges of them, running one behind the other, to be crossed.

Hannibal had to go higher up the Rhone, that he might get further away from Scipio. Had Scipio dared to follow him, he would have been just as well pleased; for he was sure to have beaten him, and Scipio would have been lost, if defeated. He marched as far as Vienne, a place which was the capital of the Allobroges, which Livy does not mention; that it is Vienne, has also been shown by Melville. Here a civil war was going on. Hannibal took the part of one of the pretenders to the throne, led him on to victory, and got great supplies from him. The Allobroges had at that time the country between the Rhone, the Saone, the Isère, and the west of Savoy. Near Vienne, he left the Rhone, and turned towards Yenne and Chambéry, where Melville has discovered an old Roman road from Chambéry by the great Carthusian monastery: it was used during the whole of the middle ages, and was abandoned only as late as in the seventeenth century. From Chambéry, he came into the Tarantaise, and followed the Isère up to its source. To the Alpine tribes which dwelt in the small valleys, Hannibal’s expedition was a real calamity; it was like a swarm of locusts which eat up all that they had. Hannibal did everything he could to make them friends; yet they all of them withstood him. They did not indeed venture upon open resistance; but they had recourse to cunning, which is the characteristic of weak nations. They brought provisions, and even hostages; and then fell upon the Carthaginians as they were marching through the defiles. But Hannibal had never trusted them, as on the whole he never let himself be deceived: his plan had been to send his baggage in advance, to follow cautiously, and strongly to cover his rear; and thus he managed to beat them off. Yet the Carthaginians suffered a dreadful loss. Melville has shown, that the onward march, although very toilsome, and through unfriendly tribes, was by no means over fields of ice and snow, but across a thickly-peopled, beautiful country: the road winds between the hills through rich and well cultivated mountain valleys, through woods of walnut trees, and corn fields. But when from thence it mounts up higher into the Alps, it becomes exceedingly narrow and difficult, being in most places nothing but a path for beasts of burthen, by which not more than two can barely pass each other; and it runs along the brink of deep mountain steeps, over most of which torrents rush: it is only within the present century that a carriage road has been made. Fifteen days were spent by Hannibal on his march through these mountains; yet for the greater part of that time, his way led through those fine valleys, full of cultivation and wealth, the inhabitants of which one must not deem to have been more savage than the Tyrolese were in the fifteenth century.[20] Thus he came as far as the Little St. Bernard. Had he reached it a month sooner, in August or the beginning of September, no snow would yet have fallen, and he might every where have found fodder for his cattle. The chief difficulty was the carrying of provisions for thirty or forty thousand men, eight thousand horses, and certainly as many as four thousand mules and pack-horses, which were laden with the bread; for, if the snow fell, it was impossible to get fresh grass for the beasts. A great part of the baggage had been taken by the mountaineers. Until he came to the heights of the Little St. Bernard, Hannibal had not much suffered from the cold; want of food and the enmity of the neighbouring tribes were his worst hardships: but now, when he reached the top of the mountain, he was overtaken by a fall of snow, which made the roads quite impassable. Only think, what a dead stop this must have been for Africans! The greatness of the snowdrifts, by which many deep clefts in the rocks were covered over, soon gave rise to accidents; the feet of the horses slipped, and the animals tumbled down the steeps; fodder was scarce, and many elephants died of cold. The army also suffered from hunger, like the French on their retreat from Russia; in those few days, thousands met with their death. The story of Livy, that Hannibal softened the rocks by fire, and split them by means of vinegar, and thus made a way for himself, is a fable. This is only sometimes possible, when there are cliffs of limestone; but to imagine it in the case of a whole army, and with a mountain like the Alps, is one of those things of which one cannot understand how a man of sense can write them down. Particularly dangerous was the descent: with a great deal of trouble they reached a spot, of which Livy speaks just as incomprehensibly as Polybius does clearly. The roads, in fact, were in some places carried round the mountains, so that on one side there was often an abrupt precipice; now it not unseldom happens that torrents undermine a way like this from beneath, and it falls in; or that avalanches bury it. This had happened here. A bit of the road had fallen in a year before, and it had not yet been mended, as Polybius tells us in the most natural manner. Livy, who takes it for granted that Hannibal had altogether made the road for the first time, says that he had now been stopped all at once by a precipice; and that on this he had ordered trees to be felled, and had had them piled up below against the steep, so as to go down by them as on ladders. But according to Polybius, the landslip went down a stadium and a half, that is to say, a thousand feet in depth, to the bed of the river Dora at the mouth of the valley of Aosta. Hannibal tried to go by a new way, having heard perhaps that some huntsmen of the Alps had already struck out several other tracks. It did not answer; and so he had to encamp for three days and three nights in the midst of the snow, that at the spot where the road was broken down, he might make with timber a new one broad enough for the beasts of burthen to pass. This is the place where indeed the distress of the army was overpowering, and it suffered such immense loss, especially in beasts. This difficulty being overcome, they came by and by to the valley of Aosta, where the Salassians dwelt, a cultivated and rather civilized country. The story of Hannibal’s having shown to his army, from the top of the mountain, the blooming land of Italy, is likewise an impossible one, and a rhetorical flourish: from the summit of St. Bernard, one sees nothing but mountains.

Hannibal was now in the valley of Aosta. A great part of his elephants were dead, and his army now consisted of no more than twenty thousand foot (twelve thousand Africans, and eight thousand Spaniards), and six thousand horse, most of them Numidians. It is wonderful how strong the horses here showed themselves to have been; the Numidians must have treated them with great care.

The whole management of the war on the side of the Romans, is a remarkable counterpart of that want of design, and that sluggishness, which in the wars of the revolution so often let the victory fall into the hands of the French. When the Romans heard that Hannibal was going to cross the Alps, they most certainly must have thought him a madman: this supposition alone can account for the slackness of their movements. Scipio, who had advanced as far as Avignon, ought, as he had a fleet, to have been in Lombardy, long before Hannibal reached the St. Bernard. He very likely thought, that there would still be always plenty of time whenever he came; and thus, when he arrived at the Po, Hannibal was already descending the Alps. The reports also of the losses of the Carthaginians, one may fancy to oneself from that logic of absurdity of which we have heard so many examples during the revolution. His condition was now indeed a very bad one for an ordinary general; yet Hannibal, without stopping, hastened on with his army in which typhus fever must necessarily have raged, and which must have looked like a horde of gipsies. Scipio had only two legions, a corresponding number of allies, and a few horse. The Romans were in many respects the slaves of established usage, from which they frequently did not know how to free themselves in an emergency. Thus from ancient times downward, such an army was looked upon as quite large enough, and therefore they did not send more. Part of the Gauls were already in open rebellion; the Boians, the summer before, had beaten a Roman legion, and kept the survivors shut up in Modena,—they dwelt from Parma and Placentia to the frontier of the Romagna,—and by treachery they seized three Romans of rank who had been sent as triumvirs to found Placentia, that they might exchange them for their own hostages. They sent ambassadors to meet Hannibal at the Rhone, and invited him to their country. The Insubrian Gauls beyond the Po were likewise ripe for rebellion; but they did not yet venture upon any open movement. Hannibal marched against the Taurinians, and conquered Turin; and whilst he was engaged there, Scipio had arrived at Genoa, and had crossed the Apennines and the Po, to take up his position in the country of the Insubrians. Here Hannibal turned round to face him. They encountered, for the first time, at the Ticinus, probably in the neighbourhood of Pavia, and to the dismay of the Romans, Hannibal had still a very large army. A cavalry skirmish took place: the Romans were defeated by the Spaniards and the Numidians; Scipio himself was wounded, and only with great difficulty got out of the affray, as some have it, by his son, who was afterwards so famous as P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus. This result of a fight which in itself was insignificant, convinced the Romans how much they had been mistaken as to the condition of Hannibal’s army, and that they should have to keep on the defensive. Scipio abandoned the northern bank of the Po. He had thrown a bridge of rafts over the river, and in the consternation it was broken up too soon: part of the troops, which were to cover the bridge on the left bank, were taken prisoners by the Carthaginians.

The consul Sempronius had effected a landing at Malta, conquered some places on the Italian coast, and taken some booty; he now returned, and went to join Scipio. Here the discipline of the Romans truly shows itself. They knew that nothing is more fatiguing for the soldier, than to march in columns on the road, and they therefore avoided it as much as they could. But now they did a thing which only seems possible under circumstances of extraordinary enthusiasm. The army was not kept together, to march to the place of its destination; but every one was to take his oath on such and such a day to make his appearance at a given place, severe punishment being denounced against the breach of the oath. Sempronius mustered his troops at Puteoli,[21] and there dismissed them with orders to meet him again near Ariminum. From thence they marched to the Trebia, and joined Scipio. What we cannot now understand, is how the consuls could have united; Sempronius must have marched through Liguria by Genoa.[22] Here the two consuls take the command by turns. The accounts of the fight on the Trebia are not even now quite correct. Vaudoncourt has not turned to account his position as a chief officer on the staff: his notions with regard to this battle are quite incomprehensible. As the Romans ford the Trebia in order to engage, and one wing, which is cut off, falls back upon Placentia without recrossing the river, we must necessarily presume that Hannibal was on the right, on the eastern bank of the river, and had crossed the Po below Placentia. It is quite in the style of Hannibal’s tactics to go round the enemy and cut off his retreat, as he was certain of his superiority; just as Napoleon in 1800 passed the Po between Pavia and Piacenza, and placed himself between the bungling, stupid general Melas and his base, so as to bring him to battle at Marengo, and Melas was obliged to conclude the convention. The Romans therefore passed the Po near Piacenza, and Hannibal below this town. This is manifest from the whole position; Major-General Von Schütz of Magdeburg, who is a distinguished tactician, assures us that it could not have been otherwise. This explains also why the Roman camp was removed. The Romans, after they had crossed, had the Trebia behind them (on the west), which made their position a hazardous one, as in case of defeat they would have been driven into the river: for this reason, they placed the Trebia between themselves and Hannibal, as a protection; and they pitched their camp in a strong ground at the foot of the Apennines, where they were nearer to Sempronius. Their object, which was to effect a junction with the army of Sempronius, they had attained, as we have already mentioned; but they were cut off from Rome, and pushed towards Piedmont. If Providence has once decreed that a campaign must come to a hapless end, all kinds of untoward circumstances will crowd upon each other. The wound of Scipio was slow in healing, and he was not able to appear at the head of the army; and thus the Romans were paralysed, whilst Hannibal for two months and a half, ever since his march over the St. Bernard, had made use of his time to strengthen his position, and to restore his army, especially as to horses. He also took from the Romans their magazines, so that they became very hard pressed. Sempronius, when the two armies had joined, looked upon this state of things as highly disgraceful, and insisted upon giving battle; he said that one ought to fight as soon as possible, and not let the Carthaginians seem formidable: Scipio, on the other hand, was cautious, and would not give his consent to this. Hannibal, who knew all that was passing, was very much bent on bringing them to an engagement; for so long as they lay where they were, he could not go into winter-quarters; and he also wished to get the Romans out of the way, that the Gauls might thus be encouraged to declare themselves. He was about two (German) miles south of Piacenza, on the right bank of the Trebia, and the Romans on the other side: he now enticed them on by small skirmishes, in which he let them gain seeming advantages. The river Trebia, in the year 1799, became noted for the battle which Macdonald lost against Suwarow: on that occasion, I gathered exact information concerning it. The locality is very remarkable, and quite tallies with the description of Polybius. It is a mountain torrent with many arms, very broad, and straggling through thickets and heaps of gravel: there are many islets in it in summer; in winter, when the snow melts, or after heavy rain, these are quite flooded over. It is not deep, so that it can always be forded: the banks are overgrown some way up with shrubs. In these, Hannibal placed troops in ambush, and Sempronius thought that he was afraid; but it was Hannibal’s plan to get the Romans to cross the river. It was about Christmas tide, and so he did not wish his soldiers to wade through the river, which was cold as ice: that he wanted the Romans to do. They fell into the snare. Hannibal, on the other hand, had large fires lighted in his camp the evening before, (brandy there was none at that time, except in Egypt, where certainly they knew how to distil, as the whole process is depicted on the walls at Thebes); he also made the men take a good meal of warm food, and rub themselves before the fire with oil; thus they became quite warm and brisk. There was a sharp snow-storm,—the cold is in Lombardy not less severe than in Germany,—the Romans had now the madness to wade during the night through the river, which was so swollen by the snow, that they were up to the chin in water: they got quite benumbed, and they had the pelting storm right in their faces. The fight was a fierce one, as indeed there were thirty thousand Romans against twenty thousand of the enemy; but the Carthaginian cavalry quickly routed that of the Romans, and the Roman infantry also was too tired out to effect any thing. They did what they could; but they were fighting as militia against veterans, besides which they had the elements against them, and when they had passed the river, the men in ambush arose and fell upon their flank. The loss was very great: some were driven into the river, and perished; the left wing—about ten thousand men—escaped to Placentia. The snow-storm was so fearful, and the troops were likewise so much in want of rest, that Hannibal was unable to pursue the enemy, though otherwise he always made the very most of his victories. The Romans therefore, one and all, threw themselves into Placentia, where they had their magazines, and there they remained some time. At first, the consul deceived the senate by false reports; but the truth was soon known. Hannibal took up his quarters on both banks of the Po, and lived in plenty on the stores of the Romans; he wished his troops to have their full rest, and did not care for Placentia. The Insubrians also now declared for him. The Romans, on the other hand, embarked on the Po, and went to Ariminum, where the new consul Flaminius brought them reinforcements.

According to Livy Hannibal tried that very winter to break through the Apennines into Etruria. This is possible, but hardly likely; Polybius does not mention it: it may have been a movement of no consequence, perhaps a reconnoitring. Livy’s description, however, of the locality, and of the struggle which Hannibal had to sustain with the elements, is, as I myself know from experience, a very happy one.

The unlucky honour of the consulship devolved, the next year, on C. Flaminius, a man, whose name has come down to us with disgrace, though, as far as we can judge from his actions, unjustly. He had, when a tribune, carried through the assignment of the Ager Gallicus Picenus, for which the nobles never forgave him; he now, as consul, supported a tribunician law which also gave high offence, and was a remarkable instance of the hypocrisy of the nobility. The aristocracy always rail against trade, business, and so forth, and talk of noble feeling and high-mindedness; and yet, they will not let an advantage slip out of their hands. The new law decreed, that no senator, and no one, whose father had a seat in the senate, should own a sea-going ship of more than a certain tonnage, nor for any other purpose than to convey corn from his estates to Rome; and it therefore debarred the nobility from making money by traffic, and restricted them to what they got from their landed property. Commerce, shipping, and such things, were to be left to the trading class which had now risen, the equites, and the senators were not to interfere with them. Nothing indeed could have been more in the spirit of the Venetian aristocracy in the best times, than such a law; but the grasping nobility of Rome felt so much aggrieved by its operation, that Flaminius was spoken of as a turbulent fellow. Flaminius may have been a rash and hot-headed man; yet I am convinced that he was any thing but a revolutionist. In the same spirit, he was also now decried for having made too much haste, because he had set out for Ariminum, without waiting for the Feriæ Latinæ! Such an accusation is quite unbearable; for it is plain that Hannibal had not waited for the end of the Latin holidays. Flaminius in fact still came too late.

The prospects of the Romans were very gloomy, the enemy being in Italy with a superior force. And when they raised new legions, a great disadvantage now shewed itself; for the veterans were lost, and the Roman system of tactics was the very worst when the troops were not well trained, (hence the defeat at Cannæ,) as, on the other hand, it was the best with practised soldiers: they ought now to have formed in phalanx only, so as to keep their ground by means of masses. Hannibal had three roads before him, two of them through Tuscany, and one along the Adriatic to Rimini; there lay the army of Sempronius, reinforced by the fresh draughts which the new consul had brought with him. In Tuscany, the Romans must have expected no attack whatever, nor does any army seem to have been stationed there, unless perhaps an Etrurian levy at most; for Hannibal met with no resistance at all when he had resolved to go through the marshes. One of the roads was through the Apennines, by Prato to Florence; the other, from Bologna by Pietramala and Barberino, where the Apennines are broadest and wildest. The latter of these must at that time have been impassable, having perhaps been left to grow wild as a protection against the Gauls; it also passed too close by the Apennines,[23] and Flaminius might have arrived before its difficulties were overcome. He therefore chose the other road. With regard to this, much dispute has unaccountably arisen, and even the judicious and excellent Strabo is mistaken in thinking of the marshes near Parma: in Tuscany, no one now has a doubt about it. The road in question led by Lucca and Pisa. It is a very pleasant one now; but formerly the outlet of the Arno was a shallow gulf running up into the land as far as Sendi,[24] and this had been filled up from time immemorial, and had become a marsh like the Pontine, only it was not quite so unhealthy. Even now, on the northern side, one still sees a succession of lakes, six German miles long; the marshes drained by canals may everywhere be traced. This extends as far as Pisa, which lies somewhat higher, and is connected with the fruitful country of Lucca. Here, by Lucca where in spring all is a vast lake, we must presume the march of Hannibal to have been. He had learned that it was not a morass, but that it could be passed, although the whole way was under water: the Romans, however, did not expect any inroad from thence. Hannibal very likely went first to Modena, in order to deceive the Romans, and then turned off to the right. The difficulties of the march may have been somewhat exaggerated; but on the whole, there is a correct notion at bottom. Hannibal lost very many men and horses, and all his remaining elephants but one: he himself lost an eye. After three days and a half, he got out near Fiesole, and marched behind Florence into the upper valley of the Arno, which even as early as that time was drained; and he allowed his soldiers, among whom there were now already many Gauls, to console themselves for the toils which they had gone through.[25] The Romans under Flaminius were encamped near Arezzo. He believed that Hannibal would now burst upon Ariminum, and so he wished to go across the Romagna to the assistance of the Romans there. But Hannibal now suddenly appeared in the heart of Etruria, on which Flaminius broke up in all haste, that he might get the start of him in reaching the road to Rome. Hannibal advanced to Chiusi, wasting the country on his way; Flaminius followed with his utmost speed. Among the hypocritical reproaches made against him was also this, that he had not stopped his march when a standard stuck fast in the ground,—a superstition which, to use the remark of Polybius, is beyond all conception. Hannibal went on from the upper valley of the Arno below Cortona, having the lake of Perugia (Trasimenus) on his left, still on the road to Rome. He had got ahead of Flaminius by some days’ marches; the latter with hurried speed pressed on from Cortona. Hannibal could now already discern the goal, and he wished for a decisive battle. When the Romans reached the pass on the south side, they found it beset. On that very morning, there was an impenetrable fog, so that they saw neither the hills nor the lake: the troops in front kept pushing on, in order to find room. When these were already attacked at the defile, the men behind, as they were marching in a long column, did not perceive any thing of it; and now the rear itself was charged by the troops which had been posted on the hills. Then the Carthaginians wheeled to the right, until they outflanked the Romans, and thus drove them towards the lake; and these, in order to force their way, again and again assailed the intrenchments of the defile, without effecting anything. The battle had a great resemblance to the unfortunate affair of Auerstedt, where continual assaults were likewise made in vain, and one division sacrificed after another. At last, about six thousand men made an assault upon the hills, broke through, and thus made their escape: the rest were either driven into the lake, or taken prisoners. In Dutens Manuel du Voyageur, and other books, it is stated that the names of two spots of that neighbourhood, la Ossaja and Ponte di Sanguinetto, referred to the battle on the Trasimene lake; yet at the latter place a battle cannot possibly have been fought, and la Ossaja was as late as in the sixteenth century called Orsaria, that is, bear’s-garden, because the lords of Perugia kept there the bears and wild beasts for their sports.

Just as Shakspeare connects awful natural phenomena with frightful moral ones, and as Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war always mentions such phenomena, thus also during the war of Hannibal the earth was convulsed with throes. The year of the battle at the Trasimenus was, as Pliny says, richer in earthquakes than had ever been known in the memory of man: fifty-seven of them were observed. We shall not discuss whether these were all on different days, or whether it was always the same one on different points. Many places lay in ruins, as Cannæ in Apulia; others lost their walls. But we cannot believe what Livy relates, that during the battle such a dreadful earthquake had happened, that the walls of many Italian towns fell down, and yet that the contending armies were not aware of it. It is possible that the thick fog was connected with this earthquake. Fogs are, however, very frequent there at that time of the year: I have myself seen a very thick one in the same neighbourhood, which very strongly reminded me of the battle at the Trasimene lake. Flaminius himself fell bravely fighting. Although his guilt is infinitely small when compared with the charges which have been laid upon him, yet, according to my views of the battle, he is not quite to be acquitted of carelessness; but in great events which are to change the destinies of the world, a fatality rules, which blinds the eyes even of the very shrewdest.

After this battle, Hannibal exchanged, even as he had already begun to do so after that of the Trebia, the arms of his Libyans for those of the Romans, a proof how, even in the midst of war, he still trained his troops. The practice of the pilum was not so easy to learn: in fact, to use the Roman arms with success, he was obliged to adopt their drill in all its parts. To the Spaniards he left their original mode of fighting. As early as after the battle of the Trebia, he had made a difference between his prisoners. He had treated the Italians with kindness, having often given them presents, taken care of their wounded, and then sent them home, probably under a promise of serving no longer against him; he now did the same on a larger scale, and announced himself to the inhabitants of Italy as their deliverer from the Roman yoke. A man like Hannibal was far from intending, with the troops which he had brought with him, and the Cisalpine Gauls who had joined him, to sweep down like a torrent upon Italy, and without fresh forces to scale the walls of Rome: he must have founded all his hopes on rousing the south of Italy, by the remembrance of the old struggles with Rome, to cast off the Roman rule, and unite with him, and thus to shake down Rome in the course of a few years. Pyrrhus had the power, to run down Rome; Hannibal had first to create one for himself. He must have started immediately after the battle, as in Umbria he fell in with a reinforcement of four thousand men, which the consul Servilius sent to Flaminius, and which consisted chiefly of cavalry: it was surrounded by Hannibal, and almost entirely destroyed. Such is the account of Polybius, which has every appearance of truth; Livy, on the contrary, says that Centenius had formed an army by order of the senate, when tidings had been heard of the defeat at the Trasimene lake, a thing which is not likely, as the news could not yet have reached Rome.

Hannibal now turned to Spoleto, which he could hope to overawe; yet the town, which belonged to the third line of the Roman colonies, remained faithful, and held out. Hannibal, like many great generals, Frederic the Great, for instance, had an aversion to sieges, and he never undertook any in person. He first tried to intimidate Spoleto; and when he did not succeed in it he withdrew. The gates were everywhere shut against him, wherever the earthquake had not opened them. He strove therefore to spread terror far and wide. Why did he not march close up to Rome? why did he not entrench himself before its walls? and why, if he could not take it by storm, did he not at least try and blockade it? But for a siege like this, very great machines were indeed requisite, and as he had none whatever with him, he could only have burned down the suburbs. When one knows the extent of ancient Rome, one understands the difficulties of a siege. The Capitoline hill was a scarped rock; the side of the Quirinal to the Porta Collina was very much like it; then came the wall of Servius Tullius: it would have needed an immense army to invest Rome. Hannibal’s men were suffering from sickness, especially from diseases of the skin; the horses also had suffered much; he had therefore to put them into quarters. The unhealthy air of the neighbourhood of Rome in summer is another reason. The battle at the Trasimene lake may have taken place in May, or in the beginning of June, and already before the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, the malaria at Rome begins; so that the army would have been swept away by disease. He therefore stationed himself in Picenum and the March of Ancona, a fruitful country, with a very temperate climate, and exceedingly healthy. There he had his summer-quarters, which in Italy are just as necessary as winter-quarters are elsewhere. The earthquakes had been his battering rams, and the walls of not an inconsiderable number of Italian towns had been thrown down: he was thus able to enter into them without hindrance, and to appropriate to himself their resources.

Whilst he was allowing his soldiers this necessary relaxation, the Romans made every exertion in their power, and appointed Q. Fabius Cunctator dictator. The flower of the Roman troops were destroyed, and Fabius had to bring together a new army: this was now a medley of all sorts of people; even the prisoners were already taken as volunteers. With such troops he was to make head against Hannibal, whose power could not but increase with his success; whilst, on the other hand, the Romans had the consciousness of having been beaten, and dared not risk an engagement, although Hannibal, like all great generals, was not willing to give battle when there was no necessity for it. Fabius perceived that he had to train his troops, and that it was very fortunate for him that the allies remained faithful: this he was to turn to advantage. He also hoped that the consequences which might be expected from such a motley composition of Hannibal’s army would show themselves; and yet this was not the case. That army was indeed swept together from all nations,—Gauls especially there were in it, though these were so exasperated against the Romans, that he might safely rely upon them,—but his choice troops consisted of Africans, and in a lesser proportion, of Spaniards, which last were most likely the best of all. Moreover, he had many slingers; his infantry did not yet on the whole amount to more than forty thousand men; and with this army, he was in a country in which not one town had hitherto opened to him its gates of its own free will. The country especially which he had last marched through, was firmly attached to the Romans; in Apulia, perhaps, the feeling was already different.

Hannibal, however, started in autumn, and marched along the Adriatic through the Abruzzi, the country of the Marrucinians and Pelignians. Here Fabius withstood him, and tried to cut off his supplies, in which he also partly succeeded. But Hannibal, when hard pressed, eluded his vigilance, and quietly breaking up his camp, appeared all at once in Campania. It was his design to make himself master of Casinum and the Latin road, and by confining the communication between Rome and Campania to the Appian road alone, to try and see whether the Italians would declare for him. Here we may see an example of the disadvantage of the want of maps, although on the whole it is wonderful how well they managed in ancient times without them. Hannibal meant to give the order to lead the army to Casinum; but the guide, either misunderstanding him, or from downright dishonesty, led him through Upper Samnium, along the banks of the Vulturnus, down to Casilinum; and here Hannibal perceived that he was in quite a different neighbourhood from where he had wished to be. In the meanwhile, Fabius had been beforehand with him, and had left the Latin road, and strongly posted himself in Samnium. Hannibal, after having visited the country of the Falernians and Campania with devastation, and made an immense booty, owing to which the men of rank at Rome were already sufferers, now wanted to begin his retreat through Samnium to Apulia, a very mild, sunny district, where he meant to take up his winter-quarters, and to establish a communication with Tarentum and other towns of lower Italy, and also with the king of Macedon. Here Fabius cut off his retreat near Mount Callicula, blocking up with his troops the Caudine road, while another body of Romans beset the passes of Casinum, which led to Rome. Then Hannibal availed himself of his famous stratagem: he had encamped near the mountains which Fabius occupied. Livy’s account of this stratagem makes out rather a silly story for the Romans. He says that Hannibal tied faggots to the horns of oxen, and setting these on fire, had them driven up into the mountains between the Roman posts; and that on this, the Romans, believing them to be spectres, had betaken themselves to flight. But the real truth is what Polybius tells. Nothing was more common among the ancients than to march by torch light. Now, when the Romans saw lights between their stations in the space which was left unoccupied, they thought that the Carthaginians were breaking through; and they quickly made for what they supposed to be the endangered spot, that they might stop their further progress. In the meanwhile, the rest of the Carthaginians had advanced close to the defiles, and had stormed the abandoned posts; and thus the whole of the army got off without any loss: the Roman camp was burnt. Hannibal encamped on the borders between Apulia and the country of the Frentanians. Fabius followed him; and here the Master of the Horse, Minucius, in Fabius’ absence, and contrary to his orders, engaged in a successful battle with Hannibal. This raised the pride of the Romans so much, that they took it into their heads, that all their former mishaps had only befallen them by chance, and that now they were able to make up for it all; and Minucius got an equal command with Fabius. Hannibal enticed him out, and gave him such a defeat, that he would have been annihilated, had not Fabius and a faithful band of Samnites come up at the very nick of time. Fabius brought the campaign to an honourable conclusion, as he did not lose anything against Hannibal, and not to lose anything, was a great deal indeed. Minucius resigned his power. Hannibal passed the winter in a state of actual distress: he was badly off for provisions, and as yet, not a single people had declared for him.

In the year 536, L. Æmilius Paullus and C. Terentius Varro were consuls. For the first, and perhaps, the only time in Roman history, symptoms now manifest themselves, like those to which we are so well accustomed in the times of Cleon and Hyperbolus, namely, that we meet with tradesmen holding the first offices of the state. C. Terentius Varro is said to have been the son of a butcher, which is so much at variance with everything before and after, that we can hardly believe it. Yet if this were so, the notion of plebeity must already have been quite changed, and such trades were carried on, not only by foreigners, Metics, and freedmen, but also by born citizens. Terentius Varro is made out to have been a demagogue who had a decided influence with the people, and used it in a spirit the very fellow to that of Cleon at Athens. But if we look to facts, we might entertain some doubts with regard to the sentence of condemnation, which our historians pronounce against him. If the overthrow at Cannæ had really been owing to his fault, and his fault alone, how would the senate—although, ominis causa, he was no more chosen consul—have over and over again, during a long series of years, entrusted him with an army, and after the battle have gone out to meet him, and to thank him for not having despaired? This shows that the judgment formed of Varro, as handed down to us, cannot be relied on; and that the pride of the great men was arrayed against him, as it was in former times against Cn. Flavius. That the learned M. Terentius Varro was his descendant, seems to be beyond a doubt: the latter, who lived not a hundred and fifty years later, belonged to the aristocratical party,—so much, and so quickly will the state of things change. L. Æmilius Paullus was μισόδημος, very likely from just causes; he had, after his Illyrian campaign, been wrongfully accused, and had a narrow escape from being condemned.

It was the rule that each consul had to command a consular army of two legions, each of four thousand two hundred foot and two hundred horse, with a corresponding number of allies: the latter furnished five thousand men and six hundred horse. If this force was to be strengthened, four legions and a proportionate number of allies took the field, in all, 16,800 Romans, 20,000 allies, and 3,200 horse; if one wanted to increase it still more, then, instead of four thousand two hundred Romans, there were five thousand levied for each legion, and three hundred horse instead of two hundred. The Romans now raised such an army of eight legions; and besides the consuls of the year, those of the year before were also placed at its head as proconsuls. This army collected in Apulia. Q. Fabius most earnestly recommended that his plan should be faithfully kept to, and such was likewise the conviction of the consul L. Æmilius Paullus; but the feeling at Rome was quite different.

The description of the battle of Cannæ in Appian, is taken from Fabius Pictor; the very same is likewise to be found in Zonaras. According to this version, Terentius Varro was far from being so blameable as Livy, and also Polybius make out. In fact, it is said that at the departure of the consuls from Rome, the whole people had raised an outcry against the sluggishness of Fabius, and had demanded a battle, because the long war pressed heavily upon them. This story is likely in itself, and it accounts for Paullus having yielded against his own conviction. The two consuls joined each other in Apulia, and embarrassed Hannibal by their superior numbers: he took up his position near Cannæ. This town had been destroyed by the earthquake; but the arx was yet standing, and he took it by treachery. The statement in Gellius[26] that the battle was fought on the second of August, is hard to understand: if it be correct, the two armies must have faced each other for months. But it would seem from Polybius’ account, that the season was not yet so far advanced; though this is by no means clear: the harvest there is at the end of May, and it must at all events have been already over. Both armies were encamped on the banks of the Aufidus, in the midst of the plains of Apulia, where the soil throughout is calcareous, as in Champagne, and there are therefore but few springs in it; so that they were obliged to keep near the river. Hannibal is said to have been so hard put to it for provisions, that, if the battle had been at all delayed, he must needs have decamped. Yet he enticed the Romans into fighting; for in a petty skirmish, whilst foraging, they got the best of it, as he did not come to the support of his men, but feigned to be afraid. The Romans still had a camp on either side of the river; their base was Canusium, their magazines at Cannæ: Hannibal took these before their eyes, they being not yet strong enough to hinder it. Even later than this, Paullus was very loth to give battle, and it would also have perhaps been best to wait quietly: the longer Hannibal kept himself inactive, the more favourable matters became for the Romans; if once the day was lost, all would be lost. Yet, on the other hand, much might be said in behalf of the expediency of a battle. If the Romans could not gain the victory with such superior numbers, they gave the allies, who, as it was, were already troublesome, the opportunity of falling off; and if, in their rear, the Samnites, or Capua proved faithless, their situation would have been desperate. The Romans therefore passed the river.

The first who has given a satisfactory and clear description of the ground of the battle of Cannæ, was the traveller Swinburne. From his account, the battle may easily be made out. The Aufidus near Cannæ makes a bend within which the two armies took their position: the Romans stood on the chord of the arc which is formed by the river; Hannibal likewise passed over, and rested his two flanks on the curve of the river, so that the numerical superiority of the Romans was of no avail.

• a. Place where the Romans crossed.
• b. Place where the Carthaginians crossed.
• c. Line of battle of the Carthaginians.
• d. Line of battle of the Romans.

The Romans therefore had the land behind them. Hannibal placed himself in such a dangerous position, because anyhow he was lost, if he did not win this battle. The Romans had 80,000 foot, and from 6 to 8,000 horse; among the latter, about 2,500 were Romans. The Carthaginians had 40,000 foot, and also about 8,000 horse, most of which, however, were Numidians; these were excellent for foraging, reconnoitering, and harassing the enemy, but by no means fitted to stand the shock of a battle, and of no use at all against heavy cavalry: if they were worth anything, it was against light infantry. The Romans left ten thousand men behind in the camp, and thus advanced against the enemy with only 70,000, from whom we are besides to deduct a large number for those who at all times, and especially in a summer campaign, are either sick, or remain behind from other causes. On their right wing, they had the Roman cavalry; on the left, was that of the allies. Hannibal had no elephants in this battle: he placed his best cavalry on his left wing, over-against the right one of the Romans; on his own right, he had the Numidians. Besides these, there were on the left wing the Libyans, and on the right, the Celts and Spaniards, but part of the Libyans and Celts were also in the centre. The Romans had not room enough for the whole of their army; so that they were drawn up unusually deep, many maniples being one behind the other, which in their system of warfare was of no advantage. The battle was opened by the cavalry on the left wing of the Carthaginians making an attack upon the Roman horse, who, although they fought with great bravery, were soon routed, as the whole battle lasted only a short time: it began two hours after sunrise, and was ended two hours before sunset. In the meanwhile, the Numidians on the right wing were engaged with the cavalry of the allies. Hannibal now divided his line in the middle, and ordered one half to advance with the right, and the other with the left shoulders forward; so that they advanced in the form of a wedge against the Roman centre. This was an employment of what is called the oblique line of battle, which in the seven years’ war was so fatal at Collin, wherein one of the two extreme points stands still, while the rest of the line moves forward: he did this here with two lines. The Romans advanced to meet them, and the fight was very bloody. The Carthaginian troops could not break through, so they retreated by the wings; and these, when the Romans were pressing on, wheeled half round and attacked them in the flanks. At the same time, the cavalry of the Carthaginian left wing had gone round that of the Romans, and having been joined by the Numidians, it had routed the cavalry on the Roman left: it could now freely fall upon the Roman infantry from the rear. Æmilius Paullus was mortally wounded, and in the dreadful confusion there was no longer any command; so that two hours before sunset the whole army was annihilated. The loss is not stated with precision. Polybius, contrary to his custom, gives the largest numbers: according to him, out of 80,000 men, 50,000 were killed, and 30,000 taken prisoners: but in this instance, we must deem Livy’s statement to be the more correct one. Not to speak of those who were saved by having remained behind in the fortified camp, there also escaped at least ten thousand men from the field of battle; the Romans consequently lost about forty thousand men. In Zonaras and Appian, we meet with the following story, borrowed in all likelihood from Fabius, which is characteristic, as it shows how the Romans tried to throw a vail over their disasters. It is said that in Apulia a breeze rises every afternoon from the east, that is to say, from the sea, which lifts up clouds of dust from the chalky soil; and that Hannibal on this had not only placed himself in such a position that the Romans had the dust blown into their faces, but also on the day before had caused the ground to be ploughed, so as to increase these clouds. That he took advantage of the wind, we may believe; the rest sounds somewhat unlikely. There is another idle tale of his having allowed Spaniards, with daggers hidden about them, to go over as deserters to the enemy, and that these, being stationed by the Romans in the rear of their army, had afterwards suddenly fallen upon them. This is quite a childish and pitiful fable. The day after the battle, the Romans in the camp surrendered, on condition that if the Roman people would ransom them, they should regain their liberty. Varro escaped with seventy men to Canusium, whither all those now collected, who had got away safe; and with these he betook himself to Venusia. Here Hannibal again shows how much he disliked sieges; for he let Canusium alone with its Roman garrison, and hastened to Capua, with which he had already before entered into negotiations.

Cato has told us that Maharbal, the commander of the Carthaginian cavalry, called upon Hannibal to follow him, saying that on the fifth day he would hold a feast as conqueror on the Capitol. Hannibal smiled, and said that it was a fine idea, but that it could not be carried out. Then Maharbal had answered, “Thou art able then to gain a victory, but not to make use of it!”—There is no saying indeed what impression it would have made in Rome, if, instead of any tidings from the field of battle, the Carthaginian cavalry had been seen on the Latin road. But even cavalry could hardly have done it: the distance in a straight line is from fifty to sixty German miles; so that they must have had relays of horses: for infantry, the thing was quite impossible. Against cavalry, the gates might have been shut. Nor would the Romans have felt so utterly defenceless as they did after the battle at the Alia. There were recruits in Rome, who were drilled, and in training for the naval service; nothing would have been achieved, and the Carthaginians would in the most pestilential time of the year have been lying before the walls of Rome. To burn the country round the city, would not have been of any use to Hannibal; whilst, on the other hand, it could not but have made the worst impression upon the Italians, had he returned with the cavalry without having done anything.

How soon Hannibal arrived at Capua, is more than we can tell, as, generally speaking, in such matters we have no precise dates given us by the ancients; yet in the same year he was master of Capua, much earlier than it would seem from Livy’s account. This town enjoyed isopolity with the Romans, and was under its own government; its nobility held itself equal to that of Rome, and was connected by marriage with the very highest Roman families, even with the Claudii. During its long alliance with the Romans, it had gotten great wealth and many demesnes, and it was therefore in a very prosperous condition. But owing to their riches and their luxury, its citizens had become utterly effeminate; so that they formed the strongest contrast to the moral and political energy of Rome. If such a town had dreamed of acquiring the leading rule over Italy after the downfall of that city, it was an inconceivable delusion. Were the nations indeed to shake off the yoke of Rome, only that they might put themselves under that of Capua! But the Campanians flattered themselves with the hope of getting this hegemony with the help of Hannibal, who fostered their day-dreams, but without promising them anything for certain. They therefore separated from Rome, formed a league with Hannibal, and received him into their city, which he forthwith made his arsenal. The terms of their alliance, taken literally, were very favourable. They were granted perfect independence; and it was stipulated that no single Campanian should be charged with any burden whatever; that they should not have to furnish any soldiers; and that, in short, they should be free from everything which had been irksome to the Tarentines in their alliance with Pyrrhus. The Romans had no garrison at Capua; but three hundred horsemen from that town served in Sicily, and as hostages for these, Hannibal gave them as many Roman prisoners. They seem to have been exchanged: Rome, at that time, was by no means so haughty. The description in Livy of the way in which Hannibal established himself in the town, of the banquet and the attempt to murder Hannibal, is wonderfully beautiful, but certainly a romance. The story of Decius Magus, the only man in Capua who raised his voice for remaining true to the Romans, may alone have some foundation, however much it be embellished: there is no reason for us to doubt, that Hannibal banished him as a friend of the Romans. On the part of Capua, it was indeed a foul ingratitude to fall off from Rome, and therefore the frightful vengeance of the Romans is very much to be excused. The Campanians had derived from their alliance with Rome nothing but benefit; and now they did not only show themselves ungrateful, but they also committed an act of useless barbarity. They put the Romans who were staying with them, to death in overheated bath rooms. Nothing is more sickening than the arrogance of the unworthy, when they array themselves against worth.

Whether it be true that the winter-quarters in luxurious Capua made the troops of Hannibal effeminate and dissolute, or whether this be a mere rhetorical flourish, cannot now be decided any longer; but it is evident that the Romans made a better use of the winter. When after long and extraordinary exertions, men come into an easy life, they often fall into a state of lassitude; they are then very apt to lose the proper tone of mind, and the power of finding their way back to their former condition, and it returns no more. This is a rock on which many great characters have split. What, however, has not been taken into account, is that Hannibal was not able to recruit his army from Spaniards and Libyans. Every one of his battles cost him many men; little skirmishes, and diseases in foreign climate, swept away a great number; and he was only able to make up his losses from the Italians, which we know with certainty as for the Bruttians. This circumstance is quite enough to account for the demoralised state of his troops. The Prussian army of 1762 was much inferior to that of 1757, and likewise the French one of 1812, which fought in the Russian campaign, was not so good as that of 1807. Another difficulty for him was that the Romans, after the battle of Cannæ, had not let their courage droop: they would not even receive Carthalo, the Carthaginian ambassador. He found himself in the same plight as Napoleon was in Russia, after the battle of Borodino, when the peace was not accepted. It is true that part of southern Italy declared for him, and that he might have reinforced himself from thence; but all the Latin colonies throughout its whole extent remained faithful, and were not to be conquered. He was master of the country, but with a number of hostile fortresses in it. If he wanted to advance by Campania, he was obliged to subdue the whole chain of fortified colonies, or to break through them, and reduce the Latin and Hernican towns in the neighbourhood of the city. These places were entirely in the interest of Rome, and indignant at the faithlessness of Capua. It was especially Cales, Fregellæ, Interamnium, Casinum, Beneventum, Luceria, Venusia, Brundisium, Pæstum, Æsernia, and others, which paralysed the peoples there; these could not fairly gather their forces, because they had to fear the sallies of the Romans. They therefore in most instances blockaded those towns, and were no increase of strength to Hannibal. Thus his position was far from being an easy one. He reckoned upon support from Carthage and Spain; the former he got, as Livy states in a few lines (probably from Cœlius Antipater), although in his view of the matter, it is always as if the Carthaginians had deemed the whole undertaking of Hannibal to be madness. According to Zonaras (from Dio Cassius), the reinforcement was considerable; but it only came in the following year, or even later: from Spain he received none at all. If dearth of money had exercised as decisive an influence among the ancients, as it does with us, the Romans indeed could no more have done anything. But they made every possible sacrifice; and thus it happened that by the battle of Cannæ they only lost those districts which yielded themselves to the enemy, whilst they had no danger to fear with regard to the rest. The Marsians, Marrucinians, Sabines, Umbrians, Etruscans, Picentines, and others, remained faithful to them.

In the list of the peoples which fell off after the battle of Cannæ, as given by Livy and Polybius, no distinction is made between what took place at different times: the course of defection was but gradual, and there was no general rising,—so strong was the belief in the unshaken might of Rome. Immediately after the battle, a part only of the Apulians, Samnites, and Lucanians, fell away; so did afterwards the Bruttians, and at a much later period, the Sallentines; but none of the Greek towns as yet. It seems that the Ferentines, Hirpinians, and Caudines declared for Hannibal, whilst he was still on his march to Capua: Acerræ was taken after a long siege. Hannibal’s object, while he was abiding in Campania, was now to gain a sea-port; so that he might keep up a direct communication with Carthage. He found himself in the strangest position; for though the general of a first-rate power, which was mistress of the seas, he did not possess one single harbour. An attempt against Cumæ and Naples was repulsed. Near Nola, for the first time, the current of his victories was checked; Marcellus threw himself into this important town, put down the party which wanted to go over to the Carthaginians, and drove Hannibal back; which is described by the Romans as a victory, but was not so by any means, although it was now something great, even to have delayed the progress of Hannibal. Marcellus showed here considerable talent as a general, and once more inspired the Romans with confidence.

The Bruttians, after having themselves fallen off, now succeeded in gaining over Locri, the first Greek town, which declared for Hannibal. Croton was taken by force of arms; and this completed the ruin of that place, which, though once so great and prosperous, was still inhabited only about the centre, as Leyden is now, and still more so, Pisa; so that the deserted walls could easily be stormed. Every attempt on the part of the inhabitants to defend the town was impossible; for after the different devastations by Dionysius, Agathocles, and the Romans under Rufinus, in the war of Pyrrhus, their number had become very small. Thus Hannibal had now seaports; and he received by Locri that reinforcement of troops and elephants from Carthage, which was the only one which he ever had from thence in a large mass: its amount is unknown to us.

With the taking of Capua, ends the first period of the war of Hannibal, which here reaches its culminating point. From 537 to 541, five years elapse to the fall of Capua, which is the second period. The Romans make now already the most astonishing efforts. Their legions were continually increased. Allies we hear no more about: the bravest had most of them fallen away; Etruscans, Umbrians, &c., are not even spoken of. Perhaps they incorporated the allies for the time of that war with the legions, so as not to let them stand isolated. Instead of confining themselves to the lowest scale, the Romans conceived the grand idea, of redoubling their exertions everywhere, and of raising an entirely new army. They refused to ransom the prisoners, and therefore Hannibal sold these for slaves, and they were scattered all over the world: many of them may have been butchered. This conduct of the Romans must not be judged of too severely. One should bear in mind, that in the first moment of dismay, after the battle of Cannæ, they were completely stunned: in such moments, those who belong to a mass, will act quite without any will of their own. It may also be well imagined that Hannibal demanded ready money, and that the Romans were not able to pay it. This may have been a principal motive. Those also who had escaped from the battle of Cannæ, were treated with undeserved severity; just as the unfortunate Admiral Byng was shot by the English. The whole of the young men were enlisted; nevertheless there was a scarcity of freemen able to bear arms. Many, from utter despondency, tried to shun the service. All who had not been able to pay a delictum, and likewise all the addicti, were discharged on the bail of the state, that they might serve; eight thousand slaves were bought on credit from their masters, and two regiments formed of them; even gladiators and their weapons were taken, as there was also a want of arms. Of the warlike races, there still remained on the side of the Romans only the Marsians, Marrucinians, Vestinians, Frentanians, Pelignians, and Picentines. Their greatest strength lay in the many Latin colonies, which extended from Bruttium to the Po. Such were the resources of Rome, and notwithstanding Livy’s account, there is no denying that the danger was very great. He describes the rich individuals who advanced money to the state, as excellent patriots, although we know for certain that they were guilty of the most infamous fraud: they had the supplies for Spain ensured against danger at sea, and had then caused ships laden with the worst articles, to be wrecked. The price of corn had risen to ten times its ordinary rate. The town of Petelia alone among the Lucanians kept true to the Romans, for which it was destroyed by the Carthaginians and the rest of the Lucanians; Bruttium, the greater part of Samnium, and many Greek towns went over to the enemy; the Romans had the ground shaking under their feet. It is surprising that, under these circumstances, not only had Hannibal no lasting success, but the Romans also raised their head more and more. Their troops gradually became well trained, as their foes did not fight any great battles, which of course gave them time for practice; and thus they got an army which was certainly better than the one they had before the battle of Cannæ. Hannibal left Capua, and stayed in Apulia and Lucania, where he marched backwards and forwards, and made little conquests, so as to keep the Romans in constant excitement: we cannot quite trace his designs. In the following year, he made two unsuccessful attempts upon the Roman camp near Nola. Marcellus and Fabius were here opposed to him; the operations of the latter were slow, but highly felicitous. Hannibal is stated to have said, that he considered Fabius as his tutor, and Marcellus as his rival; that Fabius was teaching him to guard against blunders, and Marcellus how to develope his good ideas. This saying is certainly authentic; it displays Hannibal’s great soul.

As early as in 539, the Romans again established themselves in Campania with a decided superiority. The Campanians showed themselves to be pitiful cowards. They appeared in the field but once, near Cumæ, and were beaten; then they allowed themselves to be pent up like sheep, and Hannibal made several attempts to relieve them. One Hanno is routed near Beneventum by Tib. Sempronius Gracchus, which is the first decisive victory of the Romans; it was chiefly gained by the slaves (volones), and these had their freedom given them for it. In the following year, Arpi returned to the side of the Romans, and in this way they gradually got many a little town. These small undertakings, which led to encounters of which the success was various, fill up the time until 540, when Tarentum delivered itself over to Hannibal; the secession of Metapontum and Thurii followed shortly afterwards, and it was perfectly justifiable in a moral point of view. When the hostages which these places had given to the Romans had made their escape, and had been retaken, the latter caused them to be indiscriminately put to death; and therefore, as so many had lost a son or a brother, and the very first families in these towns had been thus deeply wronged, they naturally sought for revenge, and gave themselves up to Hannibal. Yet the citadel of Tarentum remained to the Romans, and into it the garrison of Metapontum also threw itself. The negotiations with Philip of Macedon, which took place at this time, may have detained Hannibal in the east of Italy. Whilst he was waiting till matters improved, he reduced the Sallentine towns, and tried to keep the allies which he still had true to him; for the Lucanians and the neighbouring peoples changed, like weathercocks, with every wind. The Romans now set to work in good earnest to take Capua. Hanno was still carrying on operations in that neighbourhood; but they had already for two years established themselves near Suessula, and had been laying waste the whole country, so that famine had raged for a good while in Capua. I cannot understand, why Hannibal, who now had got reinforcements, did not make every exertion to relieve Capua which the Romans had invested with a double entrenchment. He ought to have attacked them in their entrenchments, and driven them out. At the urgent request of the Campanians, he made in 541 an attempt, the meaning of which, however, is not to be accounted for by our history, and there are many contradictions in this undertaking. If we follow the most unpretending account, Hannibal attacked the Romans, but was not able to break through their lines: a few Numidians only got through, and opened a communication with the town. But this could not be followed up, and so he determined to make a diversion.

Of the two conflicting statements as to which road he took, we are to consider that of Cœlius as the most improbable. The point in dispute is, whether he came before the Porta Collina from the north, through the country of the Pelignians, and on his retreat started from the Capena, or the reverse. The former account is the more worthy of belief; the other line would be too great a way round. This determination of his seems to have taken the Romans by surprise; so that there was hardly time enough for half of the troops from Capua to reach Rome by the Appian road before him,—he was some days march in advance,—although he moved along the arc of that chord by which they went, namely, across the Vulturnus, through the district of Cales towards Fregellæ, which was a very strong place. The people of Fregellæ, like brave men, had broken down the bridges over the Liris, and while he had to wait there till they were rebuilt, he wasted their country: he then marched by the Latin road, and through Tusculum, to the gates of Rome. But before his arrival, the consul Fulvius had come up by the Appian road, and was at the Porta Capena. Whilst Hannibal was already on the Esquiline, the former marched through the city by the Carinæ at the very nick of time, and by a sudden attack hindered the Carthaginian general from surprising the city on that spot. This was also what Hannibal had wished; but he had hoped that both the armies would be called away from Capua: the general, whom he had ordered either to relieve the place, or else carry off its population, must not have been able to do it. Hannibal encamped before the Porta Collina, on the Monte Pincio, beyond the low grounds of the gardens of Sallust. Here history again appears poetical. Twice did Hannibal march forth to offer battle to the Romans, who also went out against him; but both times a thunderstorm is said to have broken out just then, and when the two armies withdrew, the brightness of the sky returned. These portenta, we are told, convinced Hannibal that he could do nothing against Rome. Other stories sound very fine; but they likewise are idle tales. The Romans, it is said, at the very moment that Hannibal was encamped before their city, were sending out reinforcements to the army in Spain; and the field which was occupied by the enemy, was sold at just as good a price as in the height of peace. It was not advisable for Hannibal to accept a battle: he had no stronghold whatever in his rear, while the Romans had behind them the unscaleable walls of the city. When he had stayed eight days before the town, and the Roman allies far and wide had not stirred, he broke up again, and retired by Antrodoco and Sulmo to Samnium and Apulia, going through the midst of hostile countries in which all the towns were shut against him, like a lion chased by the hunters, but unhurt. The object of his undertaking had been baffled; he was in that dismal plight, that with great objects and great means, he still wanted the very thing, however trifling it might have been, which could have brought about the result of those objects and means.

In Capua, the distress had risen to the highest pitch, and the town wanted to capitulate; but the Romans demanded, that it should surrender unconditionally, on which the heads of the hostile party, Vibius Virrius and twenty-seven other senators, resolved to die. And indeed the result showed that they were right; for the Romans behaved with the most frightful cruelty. The whole senate of Capua, without any exception, were led in chains to Teanum, and the proconsul Q. Fulvius Flaccus wished not even to leave the decision to the Roman senate. But the proconsul Appius Claudius, to whom, as well as the other, the city had been yielded up, wished to save as many as he could, and he wrote to the senate, requesting them to institute a causæ cognitio. Flaccus however, foreseeing this, went to Teanum, and leaving unopened the letters received from the senate, ordered all the senators of Capua to be put to death. Jubellius Taurea, the bravest of the Campanians, whose heroism was acknowledged even by the Romans, killed his wife and children, and himself awaited his execution by the Romans. When the gates of Capua were opened, there is no doubt but that the inhabitants suffered all that the citizens of a town taken by storm have to suffer from the fury of the soldiers. Destroyed it was not; but all Campanians of rank were banished, most of them to Etruria; a great number of them were still executed as guilty, and even without any direct charge against them, they lost their property; the whole of the ager Campanus, all the houses and landed estates were confiscated; so that there remained nothing but the common, nameless rabble, and not a magistrate, besides foreigners and freedmen. The city was afterwards filled again with a new population of Roman citizens and others; a Roman præfect was sent thither to administer the law. Atella and Acerræ, the periœcians of Capua, had a like fate. From one of the Campanian towns, the whole of the population went over to Hannibal.

During this period, in the year of the battle of Cannæ, or in the following one, old Hiero died at the age of ninety. His son Gelon, who bore the same character for mildness as his father, but had been long dead, had two or three daughters, and a son, Hieronymus. Hiero’s authority was as well established as if his family had sat on the throne for centuries. Hieronymus, who succeeded his grandfather, was a contemptible, effeminate fellow; his father Gelon would have followed quite a different policy from his. That the Syracusans did not like to have the Romans as their real masters, was but natural; yet they were obliged to acknowledge either the Carthaginians or the Romans as such, and the latter, after all, had, on the whole, treated them well. But there was a general fatality, which made all the nations fall away from Rome. Hannibal had behaved in the same way towards Sicily, as he had done in Italy after the battle on the Trasimene lake: he had dismissed the Syracusan prisoners with presents, and after the battle of Cannæ, he sent envoys to Syracuse to entice the king into an alliance. Among these emissaries there were Hippocrates and Epicydes, two grandsons of a Syracusan, who, when banished from his native city, had settled in Carthage; a proof that such metics in Carthage did not cease to be Greeks, although they had even Carthaginian names, as we may see from monuments. These two were readily listened to by Hieronymus. Their first proposition was to divide Sicily between Carthage and Syracuse, with the Himera as a boundary, as in the days of Timoleon; but Hieronymus in his day-dreams was not yet content with this: he would not promise his alliance for anything less than the possession of the whole island. Hannibal, who was far from being much in earnest in this discussion, granted him his demand; for he hoped that afterwards indeed he would be able to put him down, if he could only get him for the present to declare himself against Rome. The Syracusans, who under Hiero’s rule had never thought of a revolution, were disgusted with his grandson’s ridiculous aping of eastern kings, and also with his outrages and those of his companions; so that a party was formed which wanted to restore the republic, and of course it was joined by all who were for the Romans, and likewise by all those men of sense who looked upon the rule of the Carthaginians as more ruinous than that of the Romans. The conspiracy was discovered, and one of the accomplices punished with death; yet those who had been found out would not betray the rest, and thus Hieronymus was off his guard when a great number of conspirators carried out their design, and he was murdered on the road from Syracuse to Leontini, one of the most considerable places of his petty kingdom. After his death, the republic was proclaimed, and a number of generals appointed, very likely, one for every tribe (φυλή). We find that a βουλά had always, even under the kings, a share in the administration, as in all the republics governed by tyrants: that council was allowed to continue. The question now was, who were to be generals? There were also the brothers-in-law of the king elected among them; so that the revolution cannot have been a root and branch one. Nor indeed did they yet know after all whether they ought to uphold the league with the Carthaginians. The Roman prætor Appius Claudius negotiated with them, wishing to keep up the Roman alliance, and the Syracusan citizens felt great hesitation to break it; but these two envoys of Hannibal managed to get themselves chosen generals, and they now did all they could to disturb the negotiation. The whole history of those events is exceedingly perplexed. Livy has it from Polybius; his account therefore is authentic. After there had been several times an appearance of peace being concluded, the Carthaginian party brought about a revolution with the help of the mercenaries, by which the chief power was placed in the grasp of Hippocrates and Epicydes, and the whole family of Hiero was murdered on the threshold of the altar. After this horrible event, all was wild confusion: there was a republic indeed in name; but these two fellows ruled by means of the mercenaries; the unfortunate Syracusans were mere tools in their hands. Yet it must not be forgotten, that it was also the unjustifiable cruelty of the Romans which had irritated men’s minds. The community of Enna, called together under a false pretext, was slaughtered for a sham insurrection; so that far and near, every one fell away to the Carthaginians. These now sent a considerable fleet under Himilco to Sicily, which was indeed quite right and welcome to Hannibal himself, for the purpose of maintaining the island, and dividing the Roman forces. The fleet, for some time, kept the communication open between Carthage and Syracuse; but the generals showed themselves to be most wretchedly incompetent. Marcellus, who had gained glory by his contest against Viridomarus, and near Nola, now got the command of a Roman army in Sicily, and invested Syracuse. The town was quite easy to blockade on the landside; but the sea remained nearly always open. The war lasted for two years (538-540). It is represented to us as the siege of Syracuse; but it rather consisted in the Romans carrying on war from two very strong camps against the surrounding country. Himilco had made himself master of Agrigentum, and from thence of a great part of the Sicilian cities. Only the western towns of Lilybæum and Panormus, and Messana and Catana in the north, remained always with the Romans; but the whole semicircle round Agrigentum, even beyond Heraclea, became subject to the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians tried to relieve Syracuse, and they encamped in its neighbourhood; but the unwholesome air, which had prevailed there ever since the foundation of the city, and had more than once proved its salvation, destroyed the whole of their army, and the general himself, and Hippocrates, who had joined him, died. Marcellus made several attempts against Syracuse; but when from the sea-side he attacked the Achradina, all his endeavours were baffled by the mechanical skill of Archimedes. As is well known, there are many accounts of this matter: the best authenticated confines itself to this, that Archimedes foiled all the attempts of the Romans to sap the walls; that he smashed the sheds which protected the assailants, and destroyed the battering engines on their ships by his superior machinery. It seems less true that he set fire to the Roman fleet with burning-glasses: the silence of Livy, and consequently of Polybius, from whom he borrowed his description, bears witness against it. Marcellus never could have taken the town, had he not by chance perceived that part of the wall, which adjoined the sea, was but badly fortified, and had he not heard at the same time from deserters that the citizens were quite heedlessly keeping a festival. This day he availed himself of to scale that weak place; and thus the Romans became masters of two parts of the town, Tycha and Neapolis, and soon afterwards of the Epipolæ, that is to say, the town on the heights: the greater portion was still to be taken, namely, the old town (Νᾶσος), and the most flourishing part, namely, the Achradina; for Tycha and Neapolis were only suburbs, which were not even connected with the city. The Syracusans now began to treat. They were much inclined to surrender, and Marcellus wished for nothing better; but the Roman deserters, in their rage and despair, wanted to hold out to the last gasp, and they managed to mislead the mercenaries, and to inspire them with their own fury. Thus in a massacre the most eminent citizens were butchered, and these barbarians usurped the government; so that there was now at Syracuse the same terrible state of things which we read of in Josephus of the besieged city of Jerusalem. If the Romans ever could have openly departed from their principles, and have allowed the deserters to go out free, Syracuse would not have been destroyed: but they would not deviate from them ostensibly, although they did so in other ways; for they had recourse in this war to bribery and corruption of every kind, means which they had formerly scouted. Marcellus bribed Mericus, a Spanish general among the mercenaries, to give up to him part of the Achradina; and this treachery was planned with such fiendish cleverness that it was completely successful. The garrison of the Νᾶσος was enticed out under the pretence of repelling the enemy, and the Νᾶσος as well as Achradina were taken. Syracuse was at that time the most magnificent of all the Greek cities, Athens having long since lost its splendour. Timæus, who had lived in the latter city, and must needs have had a distinct remembrance of it, acknowledged Syracuse as the first and greatest of all.

The humanity of Marcellus after the conquest of the town, is by the ancients generally set forth as quite exemplary; but the Ἐκλογαὶ περὶ γνωμῶν now show us what a sort of forbearance it was. The town was not burned, but completely sacked; and the inhabitants were driven out, and had to tear up the grass from the earth, to appease their hunger. The slaves were sold, a fate, which was so much envied by those who were free, that many gave themselves out to be slaves, and let themselves be sold, only to keep soul and body together. All that was in the town, became the prize of the soldiers or of the state; Marcellus carried away the highest works of Grecian art in a mass to Rome. Livy’s remark is a true one, that this melancholy gain was avenged upon him, inasmuch as the temple of Virtus and Honor, which he thus bedecked, was already thoroughly stripped by others in his (Livy’s) times. After the fall of Syracuse, the war in Sicily lasted yet two years, and it ended with the taking of Agrigentum, which was still more terribly dealt with, as the Romans sold all the freemen as slaves. Thus Agrigentum was thrice laid waste:—once under Dionysius; then, a hundred and fifty years later, in the first Punic war; and now once more, after another fifty years. It was the most splendid town in the island next to Syracuse, and it became at that time the insignificant place which it is still to this day. M. Valerius Lævinus, a Roman of humane disposition, afterwards gathered together a new community therein (549). This victory over the Carthaginian army was also brought about by treachery; for a Numidian captain named Mutines went over with his soldiers to the Romans, and, like Mericus, was liberally rewarded by them. Thus, in the sixth year after the defection of Hieronymus, Sicily was again quite under the rule of the Romans.

The taking of Syracuse is of the same date as that of Capua (541), and both of these events may show us, how little the wars of the ancients are to be deemed like those of our own days. Since the end of the seventeenth century especially, quite a different notion of waging war has come into vogue. The last war of horrors, was the devastation of the Palatinate under Louis XIV.

The period from 541 to 545 is enlivened by a number of battles, in which Hannibal almost always had the best of it. From the tenth year of the struggle, he was in possession of the greatest part of Apulia, Samnium, and Lucania, and of the whole of Bruttium: here was the seat of the war in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth years. He defeated the proconsul Cn. Fulvius near Herdonia with considerable slaughter; from an ambush, he surprised the consuls, M. Claudius Marcellus, and T. Quinctius Crispinus: both of them died; the first, in the fight; the second afterwards, of his wounds. He took Arpi and Salapia (likewise an Apulian town); but the Romans recovered them again. Tarentum he gained after a three years’ siege, in which he displayed all the superiority of his genius. Every one of the Greek towns of Lower Italy had now gone over to him. Tarentum, which had fallen into his hands owing to the treachery of the inhabitants, was afterwards again betrayed to the Romans by the commander of the Bruttian garrison. The city was treated like one which had been taken by the sword: all its treasures were carried to Rome, and thenceforward Tarentum appears desolate, until C. Gracchus sent a colony thither.

The Romans might have expected from the very beginning, that the Carthaginians, after the great successes of Hannibal, would send from Spain army upon army. It was not therefore on account of their small settlements there, but to prevent these from sending out new troops, that with incredible exertions they dispatched an army to Spain under the command of P. and Cn. Scipio (in the second year of the war, 535). These at first established themselves in Tarragona, and from thence they harassed the Carthaginians. After the battle of Cannæ already, it was intended that Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, should set out for Italy with an army to support him; but the Scipios hindered this, and although in the beginning the rule of Carthage had been really popular, the fickleness of the Spaniards led them to join the Romans, when they saw that they were only used by the Carthaginians as tools to furnish numbers of men and supplies of money for the war. How these wars were conducted, is not to be clearly made out from Livy’s narration. It is surprising, but there seems to be no doubt of it, that the Romans advanced as far as Cordova; (for Illiturgis is surely the place of that name near Cordova, and not the other). This war is not worth a detailed description, as from the great distance of the scene of operations, according to Livy’s own opinion, who is here our only authority, all the accounts of it are anything but trustworthy.[27] We cannot even say for certain how long the two Scipios (duo fulmina belli in Lucretius and others) carried it on. Livy mentions the eighth year; but if this were reckoned from the arrival of the Scipios in Spain, it would not tally with the one in which he places their death. But I am very much inclined to believe that they were not killed before 542: otherwise there is a gap, and the date of Hasdrubal’s departure from Spain is too early.

The Carthaginians had increased the number of their troops, and had raised a considerable host, which was to march under Hasdrubal to Italy. They had divided it into three bodies, which by skilful movements separated the armies of the two Scipios, and won two battles against them. In the first of these, P. Scipio was slain, owing to the faithlessness of the Celtiberians, a plain proof of the barbarous condition of that people. Faithlessness is a leading feature in the character of barbarians: good-faith is not the growth of the savage state, but of a higher civilization; the savage follows the impulse of his passions. The ancient Goths, and still more so the Vandals, were just as faithless as the Albanians of the present day. Thirty days after his brother, Cn. Scipio also fell: the Romans lost all the country beyond the Ebro, and their rule in Spain was almost wholly destroyed. Yet, if we trust the accounts which Livy repeats without quite believing in them, they soon retrieved all their losses; a Roman knight, L. Marcius, gathered together all that had been left of his countrymen, and with these, in his turn, he utterly routed the Carthaginians. The senator Acilius, who described this victory in Greek, has said that the Carthaginians lost by it thirty-eight thousand men, and the whole of their camp; but Livy himself seems rather to agree with Piso, that Marcius had only collected what remained of the Romans, and beaten off the attacks of the Carthaginians upon their entrenchments. The difficulty at Rome was now what to do, as the army was nearly destroyed, all but the remnant at Taraco. A reinforcement was sent out under C. Claudius Nero; but he did not succeed in doing anything beyond occupying a somewhat larger space along the sea coast on this side of the Ebro, and hindering the march of Hasdrubal. It was determined therefore, as both the consuls were engaged in Italy, that the people should elect a general with proconsular power to go to Spain. Comitia centuriata were held, as at the election of a consul; but no one offered himself as a candidate. On this, P. Scipio, the son of the Publius Scipio who had lately fallen, a young man in his twenty-fourth year, stepped forth, and proposed himself for that dignity. To him the Roman people had, even at an early period, directed its attention. He is said to have saved his father from a deadly stroke at the battle on the Ticinus already; and after the rout at Cannæ, to have compelled the young Roman nobles who in their despair would have left the city to its fate, and have emigrated to Macedon, to take an oath on his sword not to go away. But if he was really not more than twenty-four years old when he went to Spain, he could hardly have saved his father at the Ticinus. As no one else applied for it, the place was given to him in spite of the opposition, made by many on the ground of his being still so young, and ex domo funestata, in which even the year of mourning was not yet over.

Scipio was called among his contemporaries the Great, a surname which has unjustly fallen into disuse; for no man in the Roman history ought to be set above him. His personal qualities everywhere turned the scales. He was not only a great general, but also a well educated man; he possessed Greek learning, and understood the Greek language, so that he composed his memoirs in it. It was the opinion of the people that there was some mysterious influence upon him, and he fostered it by his own belief that he was leagued with the powers above. If he gave advice in the assembly or in the army, he always gave it as if it had been inspired by the gods, and all his counsels succeeded. He also went every morning to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and would stay there for a while by himself. At one time, he gave out that he had heard a voice which prophesied victory to him; at another, he told his soldiers that in three days he would take the enemy’s camp with its rich stores; and it turned out as he had said. This wonderfully strengthened the confidence which the soldiers had in him. We must therefore either deem him to have been an inspired enthusiast, or a crafty impostor, just like Mohammed. The latter hypothesis is not to be thought of. It is a great question to this day, whether Cromwell until his last years was an honest fanatic or an impostor. There is in such characters a remarkable mixture, which is scarcely to be distinguished.

Scipio was at that time highly popular in Rome, even in the senate, and he was furnished with all the means for carrying on the war. The first period which he passed in Spain, was taken up by preparations at Tarragona; it very likely lasted longer than what Livy states. The latter himself tells us that some writers dated the taking of Carthago Nova later than he did; and this is probably correct, as it surely is to be placed one year later, in 546; for otherwise the conduct of the Carthaginians would be unaccountable, nor could it be understood how Scipio could have marched from Tarragona to Carthagena in spite of three hostile armies. Very likely the writers thought that it had been inglorious for Scipio to have rested for so long a time. Hasdrubal had gained over the Celtiberians as free allies, and had raised among them an army which he was to lead to Italy. Besides Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, there were also Hasdrubal, Gisgo’s son, and Mago, another brother of Hannibal, in Spain. But Scipio led his army to New Carthage, without the Carthaginians having expected it. With regard to the details of this campaign, and the time which it lasted, it is impossible to arrive at any positive result. New Carthage, for a city, was but small, as indeed most of the towns in southern France, Italy, and even in Spain, were smaller in the days of old than they are now. It was scarcely more than a military station; but during the short time since it had been founded, it had already become of great consequence: it was well-peopled with a numerous Punic community; it was an important place of arms; there were arsenals and dockyards in it; and it was strongly fortified with high and new built walls. To take this place, was one of those all but impracticable undertakings, which are only possible from their being quite unlooked for. The town lay on a peninsula. Scipio, who must have had intelligence of its weakness, first made an attack on the wall which was on the peninsula; but his men were repulsed with great loss. That part of the bay which washes the north side of the town, is a shallow pool, and does not belong to the harbour; there is still a tide there, though not so strong a one as on the open sea, and it may be forded at low water, as a firm bed of gravel runs along the wall: these shallows Scipio had caused to be examined by fishing boats. He renewed the attack from the land side, and whilst the ebb was at its lowest, he had soldiers brought to the shore, who scaled the low wall by means of ladders, and made themselves masters of a gate; and thus the town was taken by storm. This loss was a death-blow to the Carthaginians. Hasdrubal must at that time have already been in the country near the Pyrenees, and he must have reckoned on the place being able to defend itself.

How many troops Hasdrubal carried over to Italy, is not exactly known to us, as we are left here without Polybius.[28] He did not march with a large army from Spain; but, with the skill of his father and brother, he increased it in Gaul. Many a messenger, as Livy expressly tells us, had in those days stolen across the Alps over to Hannibal in Apulia; so that the Alpine tribes had already become acquainted with the Carthaginians. Moreover, by a twelve years’ intercourse the people there were convinced, that the passage through their country was only a secondary object, and that therefore it was their interest to grant it under fair conditions. Hasdrubal avoided the blunder made by his brother in starting too late; in the autumn his preparations were ended, and he now set out, going a great way round. It is evident, on a careful collation of the different statements, that after a short engagement with Scipio, he marched from the country of the Celtiberians, not through Catalonia, but through Biscay, by what is now Bayonne, along the north side of the Pyrenees; so as to elude the Romans, and not be stopped by them. In the south of Gaul, he took up his winter-quarters somewhere in modern Roussillon, and was able to start from thence by the first beginning of spring. We learn from Livy, that at that time the Arvernians had the principatus Galliæ, and that they allowed him a free passage. He now reached Italy without any mischance, because he had started early enough. When it is said that he had gone over the ground which had taken Hannibal five months, in two, this applies only to his march from the Pyrenees to Placentia, whereas Hannibal had set out from New Carthage.

The Romans heard with great dismay of Hasdrubal’s departure, and they made immense exertions. Hannibal was well apprised of everything; but he expected his brother later. There is no doubt but that in the course of the preceding years he had received more reinforcements than Livy tells us; yet his old troops were indeed almost gone, and he had nothing but Italians, whom, however, he had completely under his control and command: he was therefore now obliged to carry on the war according to the Roman system. It was his endeavour, by continual marchings and counter-marchings in Apulia, Lucania, and Bruttium, to move the Romans from one place to the other, like a clever chess-player; and in this he was perfectly successful. Had Hasdrubal been like Hannibal, he would not have loitered. But he wished first to take Piacenza, which, wonderful to say, had held out until then in the midst of the Gallic tribes; for thus he would remove this thorn from the side of those Gauls, and at the same time gain a safe place of arms. In this he wasted a good deal of time in vain, which perhaps was one of the causes of his bad success. His messengers to Hannibal were intercepted, and his letters read. The Romans kept Hannibal hemmed in within three armies, none of which, however, had the courage to give battle: their main force they had sent against Gaul. Hasdrubal’s plan was to march, not through Tuscany, but along the Adriatic to the frontier of Apulia, where Hannibal was stationed. He was opposed by C. Claudius Nero as commander-in-chief; to Ariminum, M. Livius Salinator had been sent with the volones and two legions of allies, six legions altogether. But Livius fell back before Hasdrubal as far as Sena Gallica, and would have retreated even to the Aternus in Picenum, had not Nero risked an expedition which is one of the boldest and most romantic ever made, but which was nevertheless successful. Hannibal was certainly not informed of the approach of his brother; this is proved beyond dispute by his march to Larinum: yet as he was not in a condition to take the Roman camp by storm, Claudius picked out the flower of his troops, and went with these by forced marches to the aid of his colleague. Hasdrubal, who had got ready to attack Livius, perceived from a careful observation of the Romans as they were turning out, that the state of their horses, arms, and accoutrements, which was quite different from what had been seen in Livius’ troops hitherto, betrayed their having made a long march; from this he concluded that the latter had received reinforcements. In the night his attention was still more aroused: he heard the trumpets and bugles blow twice, from which he inferred that there were two consuls, although the Romans had in other respects taken every care to deceive him, and had not enlarged their camps. When Hasdrubal was sure of this, he wished to go a long way round, whereas until then he had evidently advanced by the straight road along the Adriatic. He had crossed the Metaurus, but now he wished to recross the river; and he marched higher up on its opposite bank, so as to approach the Apennines, and thus turn the Romans, or else to keep himself on the defensive behind the Metaurus. Here he had the misfortune of his guide deserting him; and he went along the river, under the very eyes of the Romans, without being able to find the ford. It is not unlikely that heavy rains had lately fallen; for otherwise the Metaurus may be forded anywhere. When he had been wearing himself out during the greatest part of the day, and he was now wavering, now trying to cross over, the Romans fell upon him. The battle was set in array in a manner worthy of a son of Hamilcar and brother of Hannibal; the Iberians and Libyans fought like lions: but the star of Rome decreed a requital for the day of Cannæ, and almost all the army, though not the whole of it, as Livy says, together with the general himself, was destroyed. Those who escaped, only got off because the Romans were too tired to follow after them any farther. According to Appian (whose account is from Polybius or Fabius), part of the Celtiberians cut their way through, and reached Hannibal; and in this there is an air of truth, as it does not redound to the glory of the Romans, and is not therefore likely to have been invented by them: the Gauls who were not slain, retired into their own land. Thus the whole undertaking ended in discomfiture. The Roman army now quickly returned, without Hannibal’s having ventured in the meanwhile to strike a blow. Claudius caused the head of the hero-warrior of the house of Barcas to be taken to the outposts of Hannibal, who in this way received the first tidings of his brother’s overthrow. Here ends the third period of the war.

After Hasdrubal had led his troops into Italy, there still remained in Spain the two armies of Hasdrubal Gisgo and of Mago, which had been driven back to the Atlantic. Against these, Scipio carried on the war the rest of that year, and in the following one; but all the spirit of it had fled with the Barcine Hasdrubal. Mago tried only to keep Gades; Hasdrubal after a series of battles went over to Africa. In Gades, a city which wanted to be equal with Carthage, and yet was subject to her, treachery was brewing; they were engaged in a plan to give up Mago to the Romans. It was discovered and defeated: the magistrates were enticed out, and put to death. Mago, however, now received orders to withdraw from the place. He was to go to the Balearic isles, which seem to have revolted against Carthage; and from thence to Liguria, there to collect a force with which he was to support Hannibal in Italy, and also, at the same time, to raise troubles in Etruria. When the Spanish peoples saw that the Carthaginians had given them up, and that they were employing the last means in their power to squeeze out of them supplies for other wars, they refused to obey them any longer. To the inhabitants of Gades also, the severity which had been shown towards them, was only an additional motive for an everlasting separation; and they made an alliance with the Romans, to which some writers give an earlier date than we can possibly assume from the very connected account of Livy. This is a political falsification of history; the Gaditanians in fact pretended out of vanity to have concluded it immediately after Scipio’s arrival in the country. Scipio was still remaining in Spain in 545 and 546; the Carthaginians were quite driven out of it.

Yet the Romans had no firm footing in that country; for they only offered to its people, who had reckoned upon having freedom, a rule which perhaps was still more oppressive than that of the Carthaginians, with whom they had an opportunity of getting pay, as these employed mercenaries, whilst the Romans only occasionally took small bodies of Celtiberian troops into their service. The Romans also now revenged themselves on some towns which had behaved with particular fury against them. There happened at this period some horrible events, the outbursts of a fanaticism of bravery which is turned into madness. Such was the defence of Illiturgis and of Astapa. From the latter of these, all who were able to bear arms sallied forth, and fought to the last man; and at the same time, those who remained behind killed the women and children, and set fire to the town, laying hands on themselves also while it was burning.

While Scipio was now putting the province in order, which was still limited to Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia, an insurrection was planned among the Spaniards. Few of the Spanish states were republics; most of them were governed by princes, two of whom, Mandonius and Indibilis, after a long alliance with the Romans, had imbibed a furious hatred against them. Here also that nationality of the Spaniards which one meets with in all ages, displays itself in the wrath which all at once breaks out against the foreigners, whom they had wished from the beginning only to use as tools. These events are also remarkable for another reason, being the first traces of a state of things which long afterwards showed itself in a more decided shape, the tendency of the Italian allies towards equality with the Romans. Yet our accounts of them are incomplete, and do not hit the main point. Scipio was very ill; and a report got abroad of his death, at a time when there was stationed near Sucro an army of eight thousand men, consisting of Italian allies, and not, as Livy says, of Romans. These resolved to make themselves masters of Spain, and to found an independent state. The first pretext of this insurrection was the arrears of their pay, which, although it was taken from their own treasuries, they received much more irregularly than the Romans: on the whole, they felt that they were neglected, and yet they well knew, that there was no doing without them. They chose two from among themselves, an Umbrian, and a Latin from Cales, to be their generals, and even invested them with the consular insignia, which Zonaras mentions, though Livy says nothing about it: these took the command, and were entering into an understanding with the two Spanish princes. The crisis seemed most highly dangerous; but when the tidings of Scipio’s recovery reached the camp, they at once lost courage, and his personal character had such influence, that they abandoned every idea of an insurrection, and thought of nothing but making their peace. Scipio came down to Carthagena; he behaved as if he deemed them to be in the right, and intimated to them, that they might atone for their offence by serving against the Spanish princes; and that they were to go to Carthagena to receive their pay, either singly, or in a body. They determined upon coming in a body, as this seemed to be the safer plan, and they believed that everything had been forgiven them. And their minds were set quite at ease, when on the day before their entry into Carthagena, they met with a quartermaster, who told them that the Roman army was to march to Catalonia: thus they arrived in the evening, and were quartered in the suburbs, the officers in the town itself. The latter were invited to the houses of the most respectable Romans, and arrested during the night. The next morning, the Roman army, on which he could implicitly rely, made a show of marching out of the gates, and the mutineers were summoned to the forum to get their pay: these had their suspicions completely lulled, and they came unarmed. But at the gates, the columns were ordered to halt; they occupied all the streets, and hemmed in the mutineers. Scipio now addressed these last, and told them what punishment they had deserved; yet he contented himself with having only the ringleaders, thirty-five in number, seized and put to death: the rest received their pay, and were let off. After this, the war against the Spaniards was easy. The two princes were pardoned on their oath to keep quiet.

Before Scipio had yet left Spain, he achieved a feat of romantic daring in going over to Africa to visit Syphax, the king of the Massæsylians, who lived in eastern and part of western Algeria, and whose capital was Cirta: the geography of those countries at the time of the Carthaginian rule, is one of the most obscure. Syphax was not tributary to the Carthaginians, but in that sort of dependence in which the prince of a barbarous people must be upon a very powerful and civilized state: he served them for pay, and felt altogether subordinate; sometimes he was quite at their disposition, at others, he fell away from them, after which, he would make peace again. Just then, he was at peace with them; but he had previously, when at war, made overtures to the Romans, and on his demand for Roman officers to train his troops, Scipio had sent over envoys with full powers. This, however, led to no results; for in the meanwhile peace had been concluded, and Syphax kept neutral. Scipio now ventured to cross over at his invitation, in the hope of forming an alliance with him, as he had, from the very first, entertained the just notion of attacking Carthage on her own ground. Here he actually met with Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, at the same banquet. The object of the conduct of Syphax towards the Romans, was not to allow the Carthaginians to become too powerful, and to draw money out of them: that he let Scipio escape, is really to be wondered at.

In Spain, all was now ended, and Scipio returned to Italy, where, however, he was not granted a triumph, because while conducting this war, he had not held any curule office: every other mark of honour was shown him. He was still proconsul; before that, he had been ædile; he had not yet been prætor; nevertheless he now stood for the consulship, though he had not yet reached the age prescribed by law: the leges annales, by a very wise enactment, had been set aside for so long as the war should last. He was unanimously chosen by all the centuries; the nation longed to see the end of the war, and every one expected it from him. As far as we can see, this was nothing but one of those silly notions, by which the public are so easily taken in; the great men, it was said, were right glad that the war with Hannibal should drag on, as thus they could so much the oftener get for themselves the highest dignities. Scipio, who was the idol of the people, was withstood by the party of the grandees, of which Fabius is to be deemed the mainspring,—a party just like the one which Livy describes as having existed in Carthage against Hannibal. Yet one ought to be fair, even to that party. Old Fabius Maximus, perhaps already in his eightieth year, was at its head for more reasons than one; perhaps, even because, like every old man who sees his own brightness fading away, he was inclined to look upon the rising young men with unfavourable eyes. Scipio also, from the very circumstance of his being no common man, may have seemed to the Romans a very incomprehensible character; many may have been afraid that his good luck would make him reckless, as it did Regulus; others, that it might tempt him to overthrow the constitution. That this suspicion was utterly groundless, as far as it was founded upon Scipio’s personal disposition, may safely be asserted; yet we find it mentioned here and there,[29] that it was intended to make him consul or censor for life: had this been done, he would have been king, although, as things then were, this could not possibly have been brought about without bloodshed: yet it shows, that the mistrust, after all, was not without reason. Hence it was that a determined opposition manifested itself in the senate, to whose department belonged grants of men and money. Scipio tried to get Africa for his province; but they gave him Sicily, without allowing him any other troops but those which were there already: he, however, got leave to try his chance in an expedition with those who might voluntarily offer themselves. This conduct of the senate towards Scipio is an acknowledged fact, and by it Rome was very nearly on the point of losing again all the advantages of the war. This behaviour of the senate ought to be borne in mind, when its stedfastness in the war with Hannibal is spoken of.

The influence of Scipio’s personal qualities was now seen. In Italy there was famine and disease, and yet part of the Etruscan and Umbrian states, which were not obliged to bear any burthens whatever, and therefore, owing to the regard which the Romans then had for every sort of privilege, had remained in full vigour, whilst Rome had worn herself out, exerted themselves for Scipio, as much as if they had themselves to undertake a war. They built a fleet for him, and equipped it; Arretium gave him arms for thirty thousand men, and likewise money and provisions; from the Sabines, Picentines, Marsians, and other neighbouring peoples, a great number of veterans and young discharged soldiers volunteered to serve under him. Thus he got a considerable fleet and a large army, quite against the wishes of the senate. He crossed over to Sicily, made from thence an attempt upon Locri, and took that town from Hannibal; yet, on the whole, the year of his consulship passed off without any thing remarkable. Why he waited so long in Sicily, has not been fully accounted for; it seems that he took matters easy, and willingly lingered in these Sicilian regions, being particularly delighted with Syracuse. Men’s expectations were most signally disappointed: it had been believed, that as soon as his preparations were at all complete, he would pass over to Africa; and now it was understood that he was living quite in the Greek style at Syracuse. Commissioners thereupon were sent to inquire into the matter, and if the charge were true, to depose him; but he so overawed them, that they reported that he was by no means wasting his time, but was finishing his preparations.

Hannibal, after the battle of Sena, had already foreseen the issue of the war; but he did not yet lose courage. On the contrary, he deemed it his duty to struggle to the last moment, that the Romans might not be sure of their own country; yet, as he could not defend such extensive provinces, he evacuated Apulia, Messapia, the country of the Hirpinians, and the greater part of Lucania, so that he only kept the south-eastern part of it, and Bruttium. Here he remained for three campaigns, with a perseverance which Livy himself admires; like a lion, he made whoever dared to touch him, pay heavily for it. Within this narrow tract of country, he had to recruit and provision his army, and to detain the Romans, so as to keep them away from Africa, living the whole time in the midst of peoples whom he drove to despair by the most exorbitant demands. And he succeeded in all this, without a thought either of rebellion or of violence being awakened against him; yet he was neither able to pay nor to feed his army, and he suffered from plague and hunger. His headquarters and arsenal was Croton. Thus the war went on, until the Carthaginians called him to Africa, the Romans narrowing his district more and more by wresting from him one place after the other.

It was not till the year after his consulship, 548, when his proconsular imperium was prolonged, that Scipio with four hundred transports, protected by forty quinqueremes, crossed over to Africa. If the Carthaginians had had their ships of war assembled, they must have baffled Scipio’s undertaking; but this could hardly have been the case, or else their inactivity would have been quite unaccountable. How many troops he carried over, was unknown, even to the ancients themselves; as an average number, we may assume sixteen thousand men foot, several thousand horse, and a considerable fleet: when these departed, there were great tremblings of heart in the timid party among the Romans, who thought of nothing but the fate of Regulus. Scipio’s arrangements were admirable. In three days he made the passage, and landed north of Carthage, not far from Utica, near a headland at the mouth of the river Bagradas, which, like almost all the rivers which fall into the Mediterranean, has formed another mouth farther on, its old one having been choked up with sand; Shaw, however, in his travels, fixes the point with admirable precision. Its memory was kept up as long as the Roman empire lasted, by the name of Castra Cornelia; it was a headland with an offing, a gradually sloping beach of gravel, on which the ships had to be drawn up. Here Scipio entrenched himself, and from thence made excursions. In the meanwhile, Syphax had been entirely gained over to the Carthaginians, having married Sophonis (in Hebrew Zephaniah), or, as Livy has it, Sophonisbe, the daughter of Hasdrubal, the son of Gisgo. When Scipio had landed, a Carthaginian army under Hasdrubal, a great Numidian one under Syphax, and a smaller Numidian one under Masinissa, went out to meet him. Masinissa was hereditary prince of the Massylians, a people on the frontier of what is now Tunis, which dwelt at the foot of the mountains. He was a vassal of the Carthaginians, had served under their standards in Spain, and in that country already had entered into some correspondence with the Romans. He is known to have been the guest-friend of Scipio; in the Somnium Scipionis, he makes his appearance as a venerable old man; he was brought up in Carthage, and, at least in his later years, understood Greek or Latin. These African princes were all of them thoroughly faithless. That his truth to the Romans ever became so renowned, was merely owing to the fact that it was his object to enrich himself at the expense of Carthage, in which he was aided by the Romans; but his son, who already stood in a different relation to them, in the third Punic war certainly did them a great deal of mischief. A romance has been got up, in which Masinissa is in love with Sophonisbe, and therefore jealous of Syphax; with the latter, he is said to have been involved in a war, and afterwards reconciled. He now came, it would seem, as an ally of the Carthaginians against Scipio, who enticed him to go over. He had lost his hereditary right, owing to the Carthaginians having favoured a rival of his; for some time, he had roved in the desert: he now wished to try his luck with the Romans, and he showed himself useful to them as a centre, round which a host of Africans gathered. He imparted to Scipio his plan by which he had beguiled the Carthaginians, and Scipio fell upon them from an ambush: the loss was considerable for Carthage, as it comprised a number of her citizens. The Carthaginian general Hanno was taken prisoner, and afterwards exchanged for Masinissa’s mother. In the meanwhile, Syphax had had the presumption to act as mediator between the Romans and Carthaginians; which, of course, came to nothing, as everything was then to remain as before, and Hannibal and Scipio were each of them to withdraw from Italy and Africa. But the attempt was of use to Scipio; for while this was going on, he was able to establish himself in Africa.

Scipio besieged Utica with ill success; Hasdrubal and Syphax kept him in check, very likely in open camps. On this, Scipio undertook a sudden night-attack, which shows what wretched discipline there was in their armies. He managed to get in, and to set fire to both the camps, which were of straw-built huts; the enemy, taken by surprise, tried to make their escape, but were pent in like sheep, and slaughtered by the Romans. The two armies were scattered; Syphax left the Carthaginians, and returned to his own country. Masinissa now set himself up as a competitor for his throne, and marched against him: the subjects of Syphax joined him in great masses, and Lælius accomplished the undertaking. Syphax was taken prisoner. Masinissa followed up his advantage, and made himself master of Cirta, the chief town, afterwards called Constantineh, a name which it still bears. There the wife of Syphax was found, and Masinissa immediately married her, without asking the consent of the Romans. But Scipio was positive in his demand, that Sophonis, as a Carthaginian woman and an enemy of the Romans, should be given up; Masinissa, not wishing to let her suffer such a fate, sent her poison, and she killed herself. Part of the kingdom of Syphax was given to his son; he himself was sent as a prisoner to Italy, and led in the triumph of Scipio: he died an old man at Alba in the country of the Marsians. His statues must have been common: there are still several pedestals which have his name and a summary of his history.

The Carthaginians became convinced that their force was not sufficient; they had indeed succeeded in an attempt against the Roman ships, but this was also the only time during the three years of the war in Africa. They sent word to Hannibal and Mago that both of them were to come, which was good news for Italy; yet as it was uncertain, whether the transport of the armies was possible, the Carthaginians also made Scipio proposals of peace, to which he listened the more readily, as he had now for three years been proconsul in Africa, and had always to expect his dismissal, in which case the consul of the following year, Ti. Claudius Nero, would have carried away the glory of having ended the war. Moreover, the issue of the contest with Hannibal was still very doubtful; and therefore the conditions of Scipio, hard as they were, were yet tolerable in comparison with what happened afterwards. The independence of the Carthaginians was acknowledged; they were to be masters of the whole tract of country within the Punic canal, (what its extent was, is uncertain;) to give up Italy, Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia, and likewise all their ships but thirty, probably triremes, and to deliver up the prisoners of war: how much was asked by way of payment for the expenses of the war, is uncertain. Livy says that the annalists stated the numbers very differently: the exact numbers which we meet with in the later Greek writers (fifteen hundred talents in Appian), are taken from these statements, between which Livy does not venture to decide. The latter mentions also a great quantity of corn. On these conditions, the rulers of Carthage were resolved to make peace; but quite different was the feeling of the restless, unruly populace, who fiercely raved against the peace, without, however, being willing to shed a drop of their own blood. These were in despair. After having gloriously fought for so long, were they, it was said, to declare themselves vanquished, while Hannibal was still alive? for the great mass of the people certainly looked upon him as an idol. In the meanwhile, the government carried its point, and a truce was concluded, and ambassadors sent to Rome. There the peace was accepted on condition that Hannibal should leave Italy. But the Carthaginians now heard that Hannibal was really going to evacuate Italy, and they thought that they might try a different tack. The peace was all but sworn to, when a large Roman fleet, which had arrived with provisions, but had not yet landed them, was driven from its moorings by a storm. Carthage had for a long time been in want of food, and the people murmured at this supply being allowed to go to the enemy, when the gods themselves were against them, and they could take it if they liked; so they embarked in a riotous manner, and cut out the Roman ships, which, relying on the truce, had cast anchor there. Scipio on this sent envoys to remonstrate, and to demand satisfaction. This, however, was not to be had, such was the general fermentation, and the Roman emissaries got away with great difficulty; it was only under the protection of a guard, that they managed to return to their ship, which—contrary, it is true, to the wish of the government—was chased by a Carthaginian vessel, and had to save itself, by running ashore. This story reminds one of the murder of the French ambassadors at Rastadt. All hope of peace was now utterly gone, and the Carthaginian ambassadors were commanded to withdraw from Rome.

Mago had landed from Spain at Genua, had taken it, and was trying to change Liguria into a Carthaginian province; just as the Romans had spread in Spain from one single place. Yet he made but little progress in the Apennines and in the Alps, as he had to deal with a host of unmanageable petty tribes. Although indeed he got reinforcements and money, his means at first were inconsiderable; yet he always obliged the Romans to employ some forces against him. Once he defeated them in the country of the Insubrians: so that, if he had not now been recalled, he would certainly have given them a great deal of trouble. He embarked, but died of the wounds which he had received in that engagement.

Hannibal had likewise had positive orders to embark, and one cannot understand why the Romans did not do their utmost to destroy his fleet: he reached Africa without an accident. Against Carthage itself, the Romans were not able to undertake anything: it was too strong a town. Nor had Scipio as yet taken any other city that was fortified, though he was master of many open places. Hannibal landed near Adrumetum; he had taken with him all those whom he could find in Bruttium able to bear arms, and he had embodied among his troops all the Roman and Italian deserters, whose only chance of life depended on the war with Rome. His army consisted of about forty thousand men. Yet when he beheld the state of things at Carthage, he made an attempt to negotiate; for he saw how unlikely it was that the war would be successfully carried on, and he knew well that, if a battle were lost, the city would obtain a peace from which it might never recover. Scipio likewise was very anxious for peace; for he was always afraid that they would not prolong his imperium. The conditions which Hannibal offered, were too low, as he demanded for the Carthaginians the sovereignty over Africa, leaving indeed to the Romans the countries which they had conquered, but refusing everything else; Scipio still wished to keep to the former conditions, with a trifling compensation for the wrong which had been done. All was spoilt at last by the folly of the Carthaginian people, who, now that Hannibal was come, thought that Scipio’s army would be destroyed like that of Regulus; and thus the famous battle of Zama was brought on (550). Hannibal, according to the testimony of Polybius, here also displayed the qualities of a great general. He drew up his army in three lines. The foremost was formed of a medley of foreign troops enlisted from among the most opposite races; behind these were placed the Carthaginian citizens, who only took up arms in times of the utmost need, but were forced by these very circumstances to be brave; behind these again, as a reserve, were the Italians whom he had brought over, and they were a considerable body: in front of the whole were eighty elephants, and on the wings were the cavalry. This is the only battle in which Hannibal made use of elephants. The Romans were set in their usual array of hastati, principes, and triarii, save only that Scipio left large spaces between each of these three divisions, whereas otherwise they were so placed behind each other, that the maniples of the one always covered the intervals between two maniples of the others. In these wide spaces, as well as in front of the lines, he put the light troops, that when the elephants approached, they might hurl their missiles at them, and then, should they enter these open lanes, assail them with javelins. On the wings, he set the Numidian and Roman horse. The result of the battle shows that this cavalry was now superior, in quality at least, to that of the Carthaginians; for the latter was soon put to flight. The object with regard to the elephants was partly attained, as most of them ran right through these lanes, although there were some, who turned themselves sideways upon the men who were armed with javelins. Now began the shock between the hastati and the Carthaginian mercenaries, who, after a gallant fight, were forced to throw themselves upon the Carthaginian phalanx behind them, but were driven back again by these upon the Romans; so that they were trampled down between the two. The hastati, however, had to give way before the Carthaginians; Scipio then made them fall back, and the principes and the triarii move sideways towards the wings, so as to attack the Carthaginians in the flank: this had the fullest success. The Italians alone fought with desperate courage; but the Carthaginian cavalry had been all destroyed, and the Romans burst upon the Carthaginian rear, on which the rout became such, that nearly the whole of the army was cut to pieces. Hannibal himself escaped with a small handful of men to Adrumetum.

Nothing else was now thought of in Carthage, but peace. It was the great Hannibal who principally negociated it, and accepted the conditions, which of course were much harder than the former ones; the eagerness, however, of Scipio to hurry on the peace, was the saving of Carthage. Her independence was acknowledged; the towns and provinces which had belonged to the Carthaginians in Africa before the war, they were indeed still to keep as subjects; but in this there was trickery, as they were to prove, what they had possessed. Instead of thirty triremes being left to them, as at first, only ten were now allowed them; they had to deliver over their elephants, and were no more to tame any; they were to pay ten thousand Euboïc talents (15,000,000 dollars) within fifty years; to give a hundred and fifty hostages to be chosen by the Romans themselves, (which was very hard, as hostages were so badly treated among the ancients;) and to yield up all the Roman prisoners and deserters, and likewise the unfortunate Italians who had come over with Hannibal. Whether these were all put to death as rebels, or sold for slaves, is not told us by Livy, who indeed says not a word about the whole of this article: Appian has given the account of it, and therefore so did Polybius likewise. They were moreover to acknowledge Masinissa as king of the Numidians within the boundaries prescribed by the Romans; to conclude a passive alliance offensive and defensive, with the Romans, on whom, however, it was not to be binding; and to feed and keep the Roman soldiers for six months longer. In Africa, they might wage war only with the consent of the Romans; out of Africa, not at all; and they were not to enlist mercenaries anywhere in Europe.

Some fools in Carthage wanted to speak against these conditions; but Hannibal seized hold of one Gisgo, and dragged him down from the platform on which he was haranguing. An outcry was raised about the violation of the liberty of the citizen; Hannibal, however, justified himself, saying that ever since his ninth year, he had been for six and thirty years away from his country, and therefore was not so accurately acquainted with the law; that, moreover, he deemed the peace to be necessary. All men of sense had become aware that the peace was now unavoidable, and that matters would have taken a different turn, if Hannibal had been supported at the right time.

Scipio now evacuated Africa; all the Carthaginian ships of war were brought to sea, and there set fire to. Thus ended, after sixteen years, the second Punic war and the rivalry of Carthage. Rome had made an immense booty.[30]

THE MACEDONIAN WAR.[31]

Immediately after the battle of Cannæ, Philip III. of Macedon had sent ambassadors to Hannibal, and had concluded a treaty, which fell, by chance, into the hands of the Romans. Even without this accident, it could not have been kept secret, not at least for any length of time. By this treaty, of which we certainly read in Polybius a genuine text, and of which the form is not at all Greek, but quite foreign, undoubtedly Carthaginian, the two states had not after all bound themselves to much. Hannibal secured to Philip in case of victory, that the Romans were to give up their possessions beyond the Adriatic, Corcyra, Apollonia, Epidamnus, the colony of Pharus, the Atintanians (an Epirote people), Dimalus, and the Parthinian Illyrians; and in return for this, Philip was to let the Carthaginians have the supremacy over Italy. Had Philip then been what he became in his riper years, this alliance would have proved dangerous to the Romans. But they, with that perseverance and heroic courage which distinguished them in the whole war, sent out a fleet under the prætor M. Valerius Lævinus, to protect Illyria, and to raise a party against him in Greece. Hostilities began in the year 537, or 538 (Lævinus not being a consul, the commencement is not quite certain), and the war lasted until the peace of P. Sempronius 548. This war was carried on very sluggishly on the side of the Romans, and Philip, who had to limit his exertions only to the few points on the mainland of Illyria, could have made himself master of these, had he not managed his affairs quite as feebly. His conduct then gives us quite a different idea of his powers from that which we are led to form afterwards. Had he given to Hannibal but ten thousand Macedonians as auxiliaries, Rome would have been in a sad plight; but he was too vain to do so.

Philip was at that time very young, hardly in his twenty-first or second year. His father Demetrius II. had left him at his death yet a child, and had given him for guardian an uncle, or elder cousin, Antigonus Epitropus (likewise called Doson). This Antigonus showed a conscientiousness which, considering the time in which he lived, really awakens our wonder; he seems to have taken as much care of the education of his ward, as of his rights: of this we see the traces in Philip, especially in the first years of his reign, in which he is said to have been very amiable. But there was something bad-hearted in him, which soon shook off that influence: like an eastern youth, he then wallowed in lust. Yet he was endowed with remarkable talents; he was highly gifted as a general, and he had courage and skill, to employ and to increase the resources of his empire. In the war against the Romans under Flamininus, he displayed much ability; and when in the peace he had lost part of his kingdom, he cleverly took advantage of circumstances to be set up again by Rome herself. Thus he managed to leave behind to his son a power, such as he himself had never possessed before.

The empire of Macedon, during the latter days of Antigonus Gonatas, had fallen into decay: the Ætolians had risen, the Achæans had made themselves free. Under Demetrius, it was going down hill still faster. From this condition, it only recovered in the last years of the guardianship of Antigonus, and that by the treason of old Aratus, who sacrificed the whole glory of a well-spent life; for he chose, rather to yield up Corinth and the liberty of Greece, and to make the Achæans sink into utter insignificance, than to let Cleomenes have that authority in the state, which was due to him, and without which the Lacedæmonians could not have joined the Achæan league. Philip, in the beginning of his reign, had, in conjunction with the Achæans, undertaken a war against the Ætolians, by which the latter were considerably humbled, important fortresses in Thessaly having been taken from them and their estimation in Greece lowered. They were obliged to agree to a disadvantageous peace, yet they still kept their independence. When Philip leagued himself with Hannibal, and began the war with the Romans, Greece was at peace. Thessaly, with the exception of that part which was Ætolian, Phocis, Locris, Eubœa with Chalcis, Corinth, Heræa, and Aliphera were well affected to Macedon, and had Macedonian garrisons. The Achæans were nominally free and united, but in reality dependent on their allies the Macedonians; so were likewise the Bœotians and Acarnanians. The Ætolians, who were hostile, were free, and had a territory of considerable extent. In Lacedæmon, at that time one revolution followed upon another: it was subjected to a nominal king, probably a son of Eudamidas; but soon afterwards Machanidas seized upon the government. The Syrian kings ruled over Western Asia, with the exception of Caria and Samos, which, as well as the Hellespont, Chersonesus, and the towns on the southern coast of Thrace, belonged to Egypt. Chios, Lesbos, and Byzantium formed together a confederacy of free cities. Rhodes was free, the mistress of the sea, and powerful; she was a friend of the Romans, without being actually allied with them. Egypt and Syria were at war with each other. The former retained Cœlesyria when the peace was made; but she lost the northern fortresses of Phœnicia to Syria. The Athenians were on friendly terms with the Romans; in their enfeebled state they kept aloof from all political activity. There was peace everywhere; the eyes of Greece were already very much turned towards Rome.

One would have thought that under these circumstances Philip might have undertaken something of importance against Rome; yet he did not exert himself. In the beginning of the contest, there were only little skirmishes going on, and he had some success; he overcame the Atintanians, and also the Ardyæans in the north of Illyricum, who were under the protection of Rome. About the fourth year of the war, the Romans made an alliance with the Ætolians, and from that time, unhappily for Greece, they became enterprising in those parts. They sent over indeed but one legion, in fact, only marines; but they also had a fleet in those seas, which was of some consequence, as the Macedonians had scarcely any at all. Through the Ætolians, the Romans also became connected with Attalus, who having begun with the small realm of Pergamus, had conquered Lydia, and created a rich principality. The Roman fleets of Lævinus, and after him of Sulpicius, were a real curse for ill-fated Greece. The treaty with the Ætolians stipulated, that of all the places beyond Corcyra which they should conquer together, the soil should belong to the Ætolians, the inhabitants with their goods and chattels to the Romans. Such a stipulation is indeed not unheard of; yet it shows what the Ætolians really were. After the Lamian war, they deserve praise; but all that happened afterwards, shows them to have been morally barbarians: their language may indeed have been partly Greek. This treaty had the saddest consequences. The Roman fleet made its appearance off the Greek coast; Ægina, Dyme, Oreus, were taken, and the whole population swept away by the Romans. These two last places the Ætolians were not able to keep; but Ægina with its harbour they sold to Attalus for thirty talents,—that noble Greek island to a prince of Pergamus! These atrocities drew upon the Ætolians and Romans the abhorrence of the whole of Greece. Philip, who thereby became popular, penetrated with the Greeks, for the first time, into Ætolia, and requited them in their own country for their devastations. The Ætolians, abandoned by the Romans, concluded a very disadvantageous peace. Philip made considerable conquests. Two or three years afterwards, (Livy’s chronology here is very little to be relied on,) about 548, the Romans also by means of Tib. Sempronius concluded a peace with Philip, beneath the conditions of which some great disadvantage again is veiled. Not only the country of the Atintanians, which had become subject to them,—a district not unimportant of itself, but of very great consequence on account of the pass of Argyrocastro, through which Philip had now a free passage between the Roman territory and the then republic of Epirus,—was by it expressly ceded to Philip, but also the country of the Ardyæans. The Romans, of course, had this mental reservation, that the time would not be long before they would break this peace, and gain back what they had lost. This is one of the few instances in which the Romans renounced part of their possessions. One ought to have remembered this, when such violent reproaches were made against Jovian, who, to save his army, ceded a tract of country to the Persians: there was an outcry at the time, as if such a thing had never happened before in the history of Rome. Aurelian had yielded Dacia to the Goths; Hadrian had given up the conquests of Trajan in the east; not to mention the peace with the Volscians in the earliest times.

Philip, after having concluded peace with the Romans, allied himself with Antiochus the Great against the infant Ptolemy Epiphanes, the child of the unworthy Ptolemy Philopator. The Egyptian kings since Philadelphus and Euergetes, were in possession of extensive districts and strongholds on the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor, as far as the coast of Thrace: Lycia at least was subject to their supremacy. As under Ptolemy Philopator the empire had already fallen into utter decay, and his infant successor was growing up under the charge of an unworthy guardian, Antiochus and Philip took advantage of the moment. Egypt had since the rise of the Alexandrine empire been on friendly terms with Rhodes, and the Rhodians had a strong interest in being friends with Alexandria, as they had much more to fear from Macedon than from Egypt; they therefore defended Epiphanes. Yet their power was no match for that of Macedon and Syria; especially as the wretched Egyptian government hardly did anything, but on the contrary let the allies, among whom, besides Rhodes, there were also Byzantium, Chios, and Attalus of Pergamus, bear the whole brunt of the war. The two kings were therefore most successful. Philip conquered for himself the whole of the Thracian coast; Perinthus, Ephesus, and Lycia, fell to the lot of Syria, although the allies of the Egyptians had shortly before had some success in a sea-fight near Chios.

Philip had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Even from Crete, where Macedon had never before exercised any influence, he was applied to for his mediation.

The immediate cause, or at least the pretext for the second Macedonian war, was afforded to the Romans by the distress of Athens. That city was utterly impoverished and decayed; but it kept up a sort of independence, and as early as about twenty-five years after the first Illyrian war, it had made an alliance with the Romans, and had granted them isopolity.[32] Perhaps the Romans received the gift with a smile; yet such bright rays of her old departed glory still lingered upon Athens, that on her side at least, there was nothing ridiculous in the proffer. Pausanias tells us, that among the cenotaphs for those who had been slain, there were also some for the men belonging to three triremes, who had fallen in battle abroad as allies of the Romans; but he does not give the date. It is not likely that this was a figment of the Athenians; the time may have been that of the second Illyrian war, as they were keen enough to see that they might gain the Romans by sending them a few ships. During the first Macedonian war, they very wisely kept neutral; but in the last years of the war of Hannibal they got involved in hostilities with Philip. The murder of two young Acarnanians who had intruded when the Eleusinian mysteries were celebrated, led their countrymen to call upon Philip for help. He had long wished to get possession of Athens, and he now savagely devastated the whole of Attica to the very walls of the city: all the temples in the Athenian territory were pulled down, and even the tombs were demolished. The Athenians betook themselves to the Rhodians, to Attalus, and in general to all the allies of that suddenly decayed Alexandrine empire, which had once been so highly blooming under Euergetes; yet their hopes were chiefly bent upon the Romans. In Rome there was much consultation what to do. The senate and the leading men, who already had unbounded views of extending the Roman power, would not have hesitated for a moment to declare war, and the more so, as they were likewise eager to make up for what they had lost by the unfortunate issue of the former one: but the people, who were most wretchedly off, and longed for rest, threw out the first motion for a war.

It is a most erroneous thing, for one to believe that a constitution remains the same, so long as its outward forms still last. When alterations have taken place in the distribution of property, in public opinion, and in the way in which people live, the constitution, even without any outward change, may become quite different from what it was, and the self-same form may at one time be democratical, and at another aristocratical. This internal revolution is hardly ever traced by modern writers of history, and yet it is one of those very things which in history ought to be particularly searched into. That strange and wonderful preponderance of the oligarchy of wealth existed already at that time in Rome, and the many—who generally speaking have neither judgment nor a will of their own—now decree the very things which they did not wish. Here indeed we have one of the first and most remarkable symptoms of this: the people, contrary to their own wishes, vote for the war with Philip. It was the great misfortune of Rome, that after the war of Hannibal, there was no great man who had the genius to restore the constitution in accordance with its spirit. For great states always decline and fall, because, after great exertions, everything is left to the blind spirit of the age, and no healing of what is diseased is attempted.

The Romans now, with great zeal, sent ambassadors to Philip to demand indemnification for the Athenians, and cessation of all hostilities against the allies of Rome, to the number of whom Ptolemy also belonged. Philip clearly saw that this was but a pretext to raise a quarrel, and he had bitterly to repent of not having taken better advantage of the war with Hannibal. In the year 552, the war was decreed, and the command was given to the consul P. Sulpicius Galba, who had already made a campaign before in those parts, though not of the most glorious kind, as he devastated Dyme, Oreus, and Ægina. It must have been resolved upon late in the season, and as the consul besides fell ill, nothing more could be undertaken that year: Galba’s expedition therefore entirely belongs to the year which followed his consulship, a fact which is overlooked by Livy. Villius, the next consul, was only present at the seat of war for a very short period, towards the end of his time of office.

In Greece, the Ætolians just then were very much weakened, but independent, and hostile to Macedon. They possessed Ætolia, part of Acarnania, the country of the Ænianians, that of the Ozolian Locrians, most of Phthiotis, the land of the Dolopians, part of southern Thessaly, and Thermopylæ; and they had isopolity with Lacedæmon, and with a number of distant places in Elis and Messene: yet for the last thirty years they had been going down hill. In the Peloponnesus, the Achæans held Achaia, Sicyon, Phlius, and Argolis, and Arcadia; but in reality they were entirely dependent on the Macedonians, and were protected by them against Ætolia and Lacedæmon. The Lacedæmonians were confined within very narrow limits in their old country, and they had lost their ancient constitution; they had no ephors, perhaps not even a senate, but they were ruled by a tyrant, Nabis, one of the worst of monsters. The Messenians stood apart from the Ætolians and Achæans, and were become sworn foes to the latter; the Eleans were independent, and leagued with the Ætolians; the Bœotians remained independent in appearance only, under the supremacy of Macedon; Corinth, Eubœa, Phocis, Locris, were nominally allies of the Macedonians, but in fact were subject to their rule. Thessaly was held to be a state which had become blended with Macedon. In Epirus, the house of the Æacidæ was extirpated, and the remainder of the people hemmed in by the Ætolians, formed a republic, sometimes under Ætolian, and at other times under Macedonian influence. On the Greek mainland, Athens survived as a mere name, without a connexion belonging to her, an object of Philip’s hate. The Acarnanians were, properly speaking, none of the subjects of the Macedonians, but were only united with them by their common enmity against the Ætolians. The Cyclades had formerly belonged to Egypt, and they were now in an unsettled state. Crete was independent, but torn by factions, owing to which Philip had been called upon to mediate. Chios and Mitylene were free; Rhodes was great and powerful; Byzantium also was free, and allied with Chios and Mitylene: they had taken as little part as possible in all the quarrels; but now they were drawn into them, particularly Chios, and in a league with Attalus. As to their intellectual life, the Greeks were utterly fallen. There were indeed still some schools at Athens; but poesy was dead, and even the art of speech, that last blossom of the Greek spirit, had vanished away, and had sought a new home among the Asiatic peoples which had been hellenized, but without imbibing any of the excellencies of the Greek nation. Most places were mere shadows of what they had been; there were but few indeed which had not been destroyed more than once: of the number of those spared was Corinth, which therefore was the most flourishing of all Greek towns. The Achæans, ever since Aratus, out of spite to the Lacedæmonians, had given over his country into the hands of the Macedonians, were mere clients to their new patrons. Owing to this connexion, which had lasted nearly twenty years, they had many a time received the deepest cause for provocation; but they were on bad terms with their neighbours, and if their patriots had any wish, it was to have their dependence upon Macedon changed into a freer form of clientship; none, however, dreamed of independence. But then many were filled with bitter indignation at the cruelty with which several towns had been laid waste by the Romans. The Ætolians felt inclined to undertake the war; but they did not come to any decision, a misunderstanding having arisen between them and the Romans, whom they reproached with having given them unfounded hopes, whilst, on the other hand, the Romans complained of not having been supported by them in the Illyrian war.

In the first campaign of Sulpicius (553), the Romans could do nothing: they took the bull by the horns, and attacked Macedon from Illyria. Philip kept on the defensive. That part of Illyria, as far as Scutari, is a country of rather low hills, very much like Franconia; in many places it is flat. On the eastern frontier, near Macedon, a ridge of high mountains runs down, which takes in western Macedon, and from Scodrus, or Scardus, reaches southwards to Pindus and Parnassus. This range of mountains, lofty and broad, cold, barren, and naturally poor, is now hardly inhabited any longer; even the valleys are inhospitable. Here are the highlands of Macedon, the true home of the earliest Macedonians, who had formerly held under their own liege-lords, being dependent upon Philip, but at that time were entirely united with Macedon. The Romans found every thing here against them: nearly the whole of the population, consisting as it did of Macedonians, was hostile with the exception of the Epirote Orestians, and provisions were scarce everywhere. Sulpicius therefore retreated, and passed the winter in the fertile country of lower Illyria, near Apollonia and Epidamnus. However carefully historians may disguise the fact, certain it is that his undertaking was a complete failure.

T. Quinctius Flamininus, immediately after his being made consul, in the year 554, led reinforcements across the Adriatic, and changed the whole plan. This time also, the Macedonians had fortified their frontiers, and they kept on the defensive. The principal camp of the king was near what is now Argyrocastro, the old Antigonea, founded by Pyrrhus, where the Aous—so we must read instead of Apsus, in Plutarch’s life of Flamininus—has worn its way between two high ridges of limestone: both these mountain ranges are wild and impassable; they stretch out on one side as far as the Acroceraunian heights, on the other towards Pindus. The place cannot be mistaken from its very nature (fauces Antigoneæ); even to this day, the true road from Illyria into the interior of Epirus passes through it, part of which, on the brink of the river, is cut in the mountains. The Romans had renewed their alliance with the Ætolians, who took up arms and threatened the frontier of Thessaly, but undertook nothing of consequence. Philip was much bent on hindering the Ætolians, now that they were the allies of the Romans, from attacking the Thessalian frontiers in right earnest, and uniting with them; and this he effected by taking up his position near Antigonea. Before this defile, Villius also who, when Flamininus arrived, was still in Greece, had during his proconsulship stood his ground against Philip; yet it was hopeless to attack him in front, and several attempts had miscarried. Perhaps the Romans expected that the Ætolians would compel the Macedonian army to change their position, as otherwise it would be incomprehensible why they should have encamped in that place.

Flamininus, who now entered upon the consulship, was a distinguished man, and had moreover been chosen by the people before he was thirty years old, owing to their confidence in his personal qualities. It is indeed a proof of the utter falsehood of the notion that the Romans had only in later times sought to make themselves acquainted with Greek literature, when we find it distinctly stated of men like Flamininus that they were imbued with Greek learning. His conduct towards Greece is not indeed to be approved of in every respect; but he was provoked, when his noble attempt to win her applause, was darkened by the ingratitude of a nation which was already partly degenerated. Had the Greeks been able to suit themselves to the actual state of things, they might have been spared many a sad experience. Flamininus became convinced that it was necessary to try and drive the Macedonians from their vantage ground, and he attained his end by means of that faithlessness then so general in Greece. He tampered with a chieftain belonging to the Epirote republic of the name of Charops; and the latter, being gained over by money and promises, undertook to lead a small Roman division of four thousand men through unknown roads to the rear of the Macedonian army. The Romans did not indeed trust their guides, and they carried them bound along with them; but no treachery was committed, and on the third day they reached the heights above the Macedonians. That day had been appointed for the attack. At sunrise, Flamininus began the battle in front, and thus engaged the attention of the Macedonians; he had already lost a great many men, when the detachment which had gone round the Macedonians, gave the signal with fire from the heights. He now renewed the attack with redoubled vigour: the other Romans fell upon the Macedonians from the rear, and these were panic-struck and fled; so that the Romans by one blow became masters of Epirus, where all the towns opened their gates to them. Philip escaped across mount Pindus into Thessaly. Flamininus did not follow, as he wished first to take advantage of these circumstances, entirely to drive the Macedonians out of Greece. But an expedition to Thessaly had no great results. He united with the Ætolians in Ambracia, and took up his winter-quarters in Phocis, where he besieged the strong town of Elatea.

During the campaign, the combined fleet of Attalus, the Rhodians, and the Romans, was in the Greek seas; they made several undertakings, which, however, led to nothing but the ravaging of unhappy Greece. Thus Chalcis, once so flourishing, was destroyed and pillaged. The Achæans had before been obliged to give up Megara and Corinth to Philip, who had likewise kept Orchomenus without asking their leave; at a later period only, that is to say at the beginning of the second war, he gave it back to them. Had he now after his defeat, likewise restored to them Corinth, they would hardly have forsaken him; for they had an implacable hatred against the Ætolians, and also against the Romans on account of the savage devastations of the former war. But now that Philip had not been able to stand his ground, and all the country as far as Thermopylæ was in the hands of the Romans, the Macedonian party, although certainly still considerable, could not come forward, and the proposal was discussed of concluding an alliance with the Romans. Roman ambassadors appeared at Sicyon; the Achæan strategus Aristænus, a shrewd statesman, took advantage of the disposition which was felt by many to yield to sense and reason, and to dwell on the injuries suffered from Philip; and he got the alliance with him dissolved, though not without difficulty, and another one concluded with the Romans. The restoration of the places of which Philip had stripped them, was promised; Nabis and the Ætolians were not to exercise any hostility against them. It was no longer possible, as Demosthenes once had done, to lead the nation by inspired eloquence and high feeling, but shrewdness had its effect. The Achæans were not warlike, although Philopœmen had done everything he could to make them so. The war with Macedon was very irksome to them; for, although there was only a small Macedonian garrison stationed at Corinth, yet it was able by its allies to do much harm to the neighbouring places in the Peloponnesus. The governor of Corinth, Philocles, even took Argos.

In the meanwhile, Flamininus called upon the Bœotians to enter into the league with Rome; yet they showed themselves wavering, as after a hundred and forty years of the Macedonian yoke, it seemed impossible that that power should have been suddenly broken. It was only by what was almost a stratagem, that Flamininus managed to bring them to that alliance (555). The proconsul (Flamininus’ consular year had expired, but his imperium had been prolonged) appeared before Thebes, and demanded to be let in, that he might negotiate; now he had brought soldiers with him, who came forward whilst he was before the town, and so he marched in without asking leave. The decree which the Bœotians still made, was now but a mere form: there was, however, also a Macedonian garrison in the place.

One hundred and twenty-five years had passed away since the death of Alexander; the proud waves had gone down, and the Greeks no longer deemed themselves to be the people which alone had been called to rule the world. They no longer thought Macedonians upstarts, but they beheld in them their protectors against the Gauls, Scordiscans, Thracians, and other Northern peoples; they looked up to the Macedonian court; Macedonian money also did its work; in short, they acknowledged their leadership. Nor did they indeed any more reckon them to be barbarians. At Pella, Greek was no doubt as much spoken as Macedonian; at court, and among all the educated classes, it was the language in vogue; so that the difference between Hellenes and Macedonians had by this time been effaced.

Before the new campaign had begun, but when the Achæans had already declared against him, Philip sought to negotiate. He would not, however, yield to the demand of the Romans that he should evacuate the whole of Greece; and so determined again to try his luck in war, as he had become much more spirited in the course of his reign. These negotiations failed, and the hostile armies marched against each other in the year 555. Thessaly was the natural scene of the campaign of this year, in which Philip had put forth all his strength. If what Livy tells us of his levy be true, and he was indeed able to raise but so small an army, then must the Gauls have dreadfully visited his country. But the statement does not seem to be correct; for if Macedon had any thing of a population, it must easily have furnished a hundred thousand men. The Romans took the field, reinforced by the Ætolians; no other allies are spoken of, and the Ætolians themselves are said not to have been more than a few thousand foot and four or five hundred horse, unless this be another mistake; altogether, we are told, the army of Flamininus consisted of twenty-six thousand men and a small body of horse. The struggle began rather early in the year. The harvest in Thessaly is gathered in about the middle of June, and by that time the battle of Cynoscephalæ must have taken place; for the corn was ripe, but not yet cut, so that the soldiers, when foraging, had only to reap it. The Romans and Macedonians, who were each advancing, fell in with each other at a spot where they were separated only by a range of low hills. This was on the borders of the Thessalian plain, at which the Phthiotic hills gently slope away into Thessaly proper. Here the two armies were marching in the same direction, without knowing it, each believing the other to be far behind: the object on both sides, was to take up their quarters wherever they might find provisions, and they wished to avail themselves of the ripe corn. Both were on their way to Scotussa. It had rained the day before, and in the morning there arose a thick fog; so that they scarcely saw the hills along which they were marching to the right and left, and the Romans chanced to hit upon one which the Macedonians were about to ascend. Philip had no wish whatever to fight; the Roman general also would rather have chosen another battle-field, as the country thereabouts was still too open: the force of circumstances, however, compelled them to engage. The Romans were already on the height when the Macedonians came up; but their number was small, and at first they were driven back, until they got reinforced. This took place on the left of the Macedonian army, and thus both generals became aware of the nearness of the enemy, and quickly sent troops to the help of their own men. With the support of the Ætolians, the Romans gained the upperhand on the hill; but this led the foe to make a grand attack upon them, and they were pushed down again by the whole of the Macedonian left wing. The Macedonians now thought themselves sure of victory, and Philip was obliged to risk a battle, lest he should damp the spirit of his soldiers. He therefore had only to choose the best line for their advance; and, what was bad for the Macedonian phalanx, he had to take up his position on the hill, where the moveable array of the Romans was much more efficient. The description of this battle in Polybius’ fragments is masterly. The whole of the left wing had pressed forward, and had driven the Romans down the hill on the other side; but when the right wing had with great exertion ascended thither, the Roman left wing was already there before it, and thus was this part of the Macedonian army soon defeated. The Ætolian cavalry, to whom this success was owing, went in pursuit of the fugitives. On the left wing of the Romans, which had to encounter the phalanx, the struggle was undecided; at first, they had even the worst of it: the phalanx, which was once sixteen deep, and now fourteen, charged heavily with its immense masses and its terrible sarissæ, the rear ranks pushing those in front with almost irresistible force against the enemy. But the Romans wheeled half round to the right, and drove the Macedonians on the other side up the heights from which they had come down; and in this position, in which the phalanx was not able to move, the battle was won. There is no denying that the Romans owed their victory mainly to the Ætolian cavalry: the rout of the phalanx was the work of these alone. Philip had a narrow escape. The Macedonians lifted up their lances in token of submission; but the Romans, who did not understand this signal, fell upon them, and thus most of them were killed, and the rest taken prisoners. After this overthrow, in which the loss of the Macedonians, according to the lowest estimates, those which Polybius gives, was eight thousand killed, and five thousand prisoners, Philip fled to Larissa, and from thence to Tempe. He had led the whole of his forces into the field, so that he had no reserve left: this was his fatal mistake. He therefore began to negotiate, and after two vain attempts, a truce was agreed upon: he was to send ambassadors to Rome, and in the meanwhile to furnish supplies to the Roman army, and to pay a contribution.

The Romans were inclined to peace, as there had begun to be much ill-blood between them and the Ætolians. These had plundered the Macedonian camp after the battle of Cynoscephalæ, and in consequence dissension had arisen. The Romans were in much greater numbers in that fight than the Ætolians; but the cavalry of the Ætolians had indeed decided the victory, and moreover, in the beginning these had stood the brunt of the battle on the heights, by which the Romans were enabled to make an orderly retreat. As there was no blinking these arguments, the Ætolians, even if they had not been a vain people, might very well have taken to themselves the honour of the victory; and this indeed they did in a way which gave great offence to the sensitive Flamininus, who therefore, immediately after the day was won, tried to cut them out of all its advantages. Throughout the whole of Greece, the Ætolians were sung of as conquerors, and the Romans with their consul looked upon only as auxiliaries: there came out at that time a fine epigram still extant of Alcæus of Messene on the victory of Cynoscephalæ, full of scorn against Philip, in which it is said in plain words that the Ætolians, and with them the Latins under T. Quinctius, had beaten the Macedonians, and that thirty thousand Macedonians had been slain. This insolence the Greeks had dearly to pay for, as Flamininus was provoked by it; yet it would have done them still greater mischief, had any other than he been general. It is difficult to form an idea of the blind infatuation of the Ætolians,—a people, whose territory was not larger than the canton of Berne, and who yet could have been mad enough to think themselves the equals of the Romans: one of their generals, who had a quarrel with Flamininus, told him, that arms would decide it on the banks of the Tiber. The only clue for this is in the character of the southern nations, who, though unable to do anything, fancy that they can do everything. Even so it was with the Spaniards in their relations with the English: they are always talking of the immortal day of Salamanca, on which they beat the French, whereas they did not lose more than one man in that battle. And thus did the Ætolians, without any substantial cause, become at variance with the Romans. It is true that Flamininus was too irritable: he ought to have treated this with contempt, as his mission to give freedom to Greece was such a fine one. Nor were the Romans by any means just to the Ætolians: by the original conditions, these had a right to claim the restoration of all the places which had been taken from them by Philip; but the Romans decided against them, and they either kept the places themselves, or embodied them with other states, or else they left them independent. This would not have happened, unless there had been indeed some provocation; but it made the Ætolians quite furious.

It was, of course, the policy of the Romans, to restore Greece in such a manner, that the separate nations should balance each other. The peace was concluded in 556, and a most mortifying one for Philip it was. By its terms he was limited to the kingdom of Macedon, which, however, was larger than the old one of that name, as it reached as far as the Nestus, taking in part of Thrace, and many Illyrian and Dardanian tribes, and he had to give up all his places in Greece and on the Thracian coast, and all his conquests in Asia Minor and Caria: these last ought to have been restored to Ptolemy; yet, for appearance’s sake, they got their freedom. Moreover, he had to bind himself to keep no more than five thousand men as a standing army, and only five galleys, and his royal ship; to pay a thousand talents in ten years; and also to give hostages, among whom was his own son Demetrius.

Of this peace the Romans made a generous use. It would be hardly fair to search keenly into their reasons for it; yet it was perhaps that they might leave no vantage ground to Antiochus. Flamininus himself seems to have had very pure motives. The whole of Thessaly, the countries south of Thermopylæ, and the three fortresses, Acrocorinth, Chalcis, and Demetrias, were in the occupation of the Romans, and it was now a question what was to be done with them. Men were not wanting, who never would have sacrificed the positive advantage of the moment for the sake of a fair fame, and who strongly urged that these three places, with some others besides, should still be retained, so as to ensure the dependence of Greece; but Flamininus declared himself against this, and so effectually, that Corinth, the citadel of which had as yet been provisionally held by the Romans, was now already restored to the Achæans. This was the more nobly done, as not only the Ætolians, but also the Achæans, with Philopœmen at their head, claimed to be equal with the Romans; so that it certainly cost Flamininus a struggle with himself to follow his generous impulse. It was lucky for the Greeks, that, in spirit and education, he was a Greek, to which the epigrams on his votive gifts also bear witness.

On the day of the Isthmian games, the decision of the senate was to be made known, from which people expected different things according to their different dispositions. An immense throng was gathered together at Corinth; and there, in the theatre, Flamininus had the decree of the senate proclaimed, by which freedom was granted to all the Greeks. This beautiful moment of enthusiasm gave Greece fifty years of happiness. In the history of the world, fifty years are a long period,—not long enough indeed for a man to go down to his grave without having lived to see evil times; yet to many the sad experience of early youth was requited by a cheerful old age.

The Ætolians did not rejoice with the rest, neither did Nabis of Lacedæmon. The alliance with the latter was a disgrace to Rome. He had made it a condition that he should keep Argos, which he had got Philip to sell to him, and Flamininus was afterwards glad indeed to lay hold of an opportunity of setting aside the treaty, and of waging war against him. Livy is here very explicit, as he copies from Polybius, to whom these events had a peculiar interest. In this war, the tyrant showed himself to be not without ability; but he would have been crushed and Sparta taken, had not Flamininus, guided no doubt by his instructions, followed the baneful policy of not wishing to rid Greece of this source of apprehension, in order that the Achæans might be obliged to make great efforts, and thus want the help of Rome. A large part of Laconia, the district which is now called Maina, was wrested from the grasp of the tyrant, and formed into an independent state, inhabited by the former periœcians; the Achæans got Argos; and Nabis had to pay a war-contribution of a hundred talents down, and of four hundred more within eight years, and also to give his son as a hostage. This did not last long. When Flamininus was absent, the Achæans took advantage of a riot in which Nabis was slain, to unite Sparta with the rest of the Peloponnesus; which was very disagreeable to the Romans, but at that time could not be helped.

The two fortresses, Chalcis and Demetrius, the Romans bound themselves to evacuate, as soon as their affairs with Antiochus stood on a firm footing. Thessaly was made much larger than it had hitherto been; joined with Phthiotis, it formed the Thessalian republic: on the other hand, Perrhæbia and some other districts were detached from it. Orestis, which had fallen away from Macedon, was proclaimed free, and probably united with Thessaly, as I conclude from the list of the Thessalian generals. Magnesia became independent. Eubœa, Locris, Acarnania, Bœotia, Phocis, Athens, Elis, Messene, and Lacedæmon became separate states; the rest of the Peloponnesus and Megara were Achæan. Whilst, however, the Romans called themselves the liberators of Greece, they, in spite of principles which they had publicly professed, yielded up Ægina to Eumenes, the son of Attalus. Athens, down to the times of Sylla, was treated by Rome with peculiar favour: never were the Muses so beneficial to any people. The Romans gave them Scyros, Delos, Imbros, Paros.