The Comic History of Rome

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS WARS OF ROME.

rostrate greatness always offers an inviting mark to upstart littleness; and the story of the Lion couchant kicked by the Jackass rampant, is as old, at least, as the days when Rome, exhausted by her wars with Carthage, was attacked by the imbecile inhabitants of the feeble city of Falerii.

Had the Faliscans dashed their heads deliberately against a brick wall, they could not more effectually have shown how few brains they possessed; and, to carry out the figure of the Lion and the Ass, a switch of the former's tail soon told the latter's story. A few days sufficed to lay the Faliscans in the dust they had so foolishly kicked up, and in the clouds of which we very rapidly lose sight of them.

The Carthaginians had been compelled to evacuate Sicily, and the mercenaries were of course to be paid off in one way or the other. On a former occasion, some of the hired soldiers who had demanded their money were taken to a bank—which proved to be a sand-bank in the sea—where, at the rising of the tide, they, instead of their claims, were subjected to immediate liquidation.[45] The army from Sicily took, however, a firmer stand, and proceeded to Carthage with a determination to do business in the city. It contained, as they knew, the spices and luxuries of India on which they loved to live; the purple of Tyre, which taught them how to dye; and the ebony and ivory which proclaim in black and white the wealth of Ethiopia. The persons who poured into the place formed an assemblage less pleasing than picturesque, for the group comprised all sorts—except the right sort—of characters. Among the mass might be seen the almost naked Gaul, who was outstripped in barbarity by some of the other tribes; the light cavalry of dark Numidians, and men who had their arms in slings; for such were the weapons of the Balearic slingers. The mercenaries, immediately on their arrival in Carthage, proceeded to the Treasury, where they found nobody but Hanno, who in an appropriately hollow speech, announced the emptiness of the public coffers. He regretted the necessity for appearing before them in the character of an apologist; but while admitting how much Carthage owed to the troops, he announced the impossibility of paying them. The State, he said, was heavily taxed, and, he added, with a feeble attempt to be facetious, that he must lay a small tax upon their patience, by getting them to wait for their money. The speaker was at once assailed with imprecations in ten different languages; but he stood firm under the polyglot uproar. The cry of "Down with him!" reached his ears in nearly a dozen different tongues; and when he tried to remonstrate, through the medium of interpreters, the worst interpretation was put on all that was said, and a good understanding seemed quite impossible.

Hanno announcing to the Mercenaries the emptiness of the Public Coffers.

An attempt was then made to stop the mouths of the mercenaries with food; and provisions were sent in abundance; but the only reply was, an unprovisional demand for the money owing. At length the pay had been got together, and was about to be distributed, when an Italian slave, named Spendius, who had probably spent by anticipation all he had to receive, advised his companions to decline the offer, on the ground that if they refused what was due, their policy might obtain for them a large additional bonus. The suggestion was popular with the mercenaries, who held a meeting to discuss the point, and who, to save the time of the meeting, overwhelmed with a shower of stones anybody who rose to speak on either side. The resolution was soon carried; but it was by the aid of what may be termed the casting votes of those who sent up, in the impressive form of a plumper, the first missile they could lay their hands upon. For three years these intestine disturbances raged in Africa, and reduced it to the lowest point of exhaustion, till at length the malady wore itself out, though Hamilcar Barca, by intercepting the supplies of the rebels, assisted greatly in depriving treachery of the food it lived upon.

The pecuniary panic of Carthage spread in nearly every direction, and the mercenaries at Sardinia, affected by the tightness of money, called upon the African colonists to pay with their lives the debt they could not discharge with their pockets. While the Sardinians and Carthaginians were reducing each other to a state of such weakness that neither could make any further effort, Rome stepped in, and like the lawyer between the exhausted litigants, carried off the whole of what they had been fighting for. Sardinia became a Roman province; when Carthage, whose bad faith has passed into a proverb, complained bitterly of the treachery of Rome: for we find the story of the kettle accused of blackness by the pot, is as old as the earliest pothooks employed in the writing of history. Hamilcar, who was the patriotic mouthpiece of the day, declared that he would raise his country; and it must be admitted, to his honour, that he did not take the means employed by self-styled patriots, who pretend to raise a country by stirring it up from the lowest dregs, but he tried to elevate it by all the honourable means in his power.