Dreadful civil war, B. C. 240—237.
3. The impossibility of paying the mercenaries produced a mutiny among the troops, which rapidly grew into a rebellion of the subject nations, who had been most cruelly oppressed during the war. The consequence was a civil war of three years and a half, which probably would have spared the Romans the trouble of destroying Carthage, had not the state been snatched from ruin by the heroism of Hamilcar.
This war, which lasted from 240 to 237, produced lasting consequences to the state; it gave rise to the feud between Hamilcar and Hanno the Great, which compelled Hamilcar to seek for support against the senate by becoming the leader of a democratic faction.
Sardinia is lost, 237.
4. The revolt spread abroad; it reached Sardinia and caused the loss of that most important island, of which the Romans, flushed with power, took possession, in spite of the terms of the peace.
Rise of the house of the Barcas:
5. The influence of the family of the Barcas, supported in their disputes with the senate by the popular party, now got the upper hand in Carthage; and the first fruit of their power was the new and gigantic project of repairing the loss of Sicily and Sardinia by the conquest of Spain; a vast projects upon Spain, country where the Carthaginians already had some possessions and commercial connections. The immediate object of the Barcas was the support of their family and party; but the Spanish silver mines soon furnished the republic with the means of renewing the contest with Rome also.
executed by Hamilcar and Hasdrubal, 237—221.
By treaty with the Romans the Ebro is fixed as the boundary of their possessions in Spain, 226.
Carthagena founded.
Hannibal succeeds to the command of the army, 221;
and begins the second Punic war, 218.
6. During the nine years in which Hamilcar commanded, and in the following eight in which Hasdrubal, his son-in-law and successor, was at the head of the army, the whole of the south of Spain, as far as the Iberus, was brought under subjection to Carthage, either by negotiation or force of arms. The further progress of the Carthaginians was only arrested by a treaty with the Romans, in which the Iberus was fixed upon as a frontier line, and the freedom of Saguntum acknowledged by both powers. Hasdrubal crowned his victories as a general and as a statesman by the foundation of New Carthage, (Carthagena,) which was to be the future seat of Carthaginian power in the newly-conquered country. Hasdrubal having fallen by the hand of an assassin in the year 221, the party of the Barcas succeeded in appointing Hamilcar's son, Hannibal, a young man of one-and-twenty, for his successor. Hannibal found every thing already prepared in Spain for the furtherance of the hereditary project of his family, which was a renewal of the contest with Rome; and the vigour with which this project was pursued, clearly proves how great must have been the preponderance of the Barcine influence, at that time, in Carthage. Had the commonwealth attended to the marine with the same ardour as their great general did to the land service, the fate of Rome would perhaps have been very different.
Second war with Rome, 218—201, (seventeen years,) first in Italy and Spain, afterwards, from 203, in Africa itself. (See the history of this war below, in the Roman history, Book V, Period ii, parag. 6 sqq.)