|The Failure of Carthage|
The army which Hannibal led recognised the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies must receive a wage, must be “volunteer”; and meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome “interfered with business”; on this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her was made.
The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister. The Italian confederation was true because it reposed on other than economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat. The very Gauls in Hannibal’s army, for all their barbaric anger against Rome, were suspected by their Carthaginian employers, and in Rome itself an exalted resolve, quite alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was the only result of misfortune.
Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber nomads, whose vague sense of cousinship with the Italians was chiefly shown in their contempt for the merchant cities, harassed Carthage perpetually; and when at last the Roman armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage fell. For somewhat more than fifty years she continued to live without security of territory or any honour, harassed by the nomad kings whom she dared not strike because they were the allies of Rome. She was still enormous in her wealth and numbers, it was only her honour that was gone; if indeed she had ever comprehended honour as did her rival.
|The Destruction of Carthage|
The lapse of time brought no ease. There was something in the temper of Asia that was intolerable to the western people. They saw it always ready to give way and then to turn and strike. They detested its jealous and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed dangerous to them. The two great struggles, at the close of which Rome destroyed as one destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the same family, Carthage and Jerusalem. A pretext was chosen: Carthage was abject, yielded three hundred hostages, and even all her arms. Only the matter of her religion moved her and the order to remove the site of the town. To this Carthage opposed a frenzy which delayed for three years the capture of the city; but when it was taken it was utterly destroyed. Every stone was removed, the land was left level, and suddenly, within a very few years of that catastrophe, every influence of Carthage disappeared. It was in this way that the first great power of the Orient upon the Maghreb was extinguished.
This final act of Rome was accomplished within a hundred and fifty years of the Nativity. The life of a man went by, and little more was done. It was close upon our era before the Roman habit took root in Africa, a century more before the Maghreb was held with any complete organisation. By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals had come in to ruin it.
|The Roman Monuments|
There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years during which Rome was to bring up this land into the general unity of Western Europe. There is no other portion of the world Rome governed, not even Southern Gaul, where her genius is more apparent. In that short interval of daylight—a tenth of the known history of the Maghreb—Rome did more than had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to do in seven hundred more.
