With this gloomy and compelling faith and with this political arrangement there went such a social spirit as such things will breed. Not only were the Carthaginians content to be ruled by rich men always, but the very richest were even too proud for commerce; they lived as a gentry upon land and saw, beneath the merchants who were their immediate inferiors (and accustomed, it may be presumed, to purchase superior rank) a great herd of despicable and never laborious poor—incapable of rebellion or of foreign service. The very fields around the city were tilled, not by the Carthaginians, but by the half-breeds who had at least inherited something of western vigour and application.
When the crowd within the walls was too great, a colony would spring from its overflow into some distant harbour: emigrants led by one of those superiors without whom, as it seemed, the Phœnician was unable to act. It would appear that these daughter-nations were as averse to military sacrifice as their parent, and that they depended for their protection upon no effort of their own, but upon the fleet and the treasury of Carthage. In this way was built up a vast domain of colonies, tributaries and naval bases which was sporadic and ill organised in plan, enormous in extent, and of its nature lacking in permanence.
No system more corrupt or more manifestly doomed to extinction could be conceived, nor is it remarkable that when that system disappeared not a trace of it should remain among the millions whom it had attempted to command. Carthage had not desired to create, but only to enjoy: therefore she left us nothing. Her very alphabet was borrowed from our invention. Of seven hundred years during which the Asiatics had dominated Barbary nothing is left. The extinction of their power was indifferent or pleasing to the Mediterranean they had ruled; their language dwindled on through five hundred further years—its literature has been utterly forgotten. A doubtful derivation for the names of Cadiz, of Barcelona, and of Port Mahon, a certain one for Carthagena, are all that can be ascribed to-day to this fanatic and alien people: for they came of necessity into conflict with the Power that was to unify and direct the common forces of Europe.
At first the expansion of Carthage met with nothing more than could amuse its facile energies and increase its contemptuous security: it judged, exploited, or subsidised the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain and Sardinia; it wrangled with the Greek colonies whom perhaps it thought itself “predestined” to rule—for to prophesy was a weakness in the blood from which it sprang. Some two centuries and a half before our era, when these Orientals had had footing for near a thousand and Carthage an existence of six hundred years, Rome moved to the attack.
|The Roman Attack|
Rome had already achieved and was leading a confederation of the Italian peoples, she had already stamped her character and impressed her discipline upon the most advanced portion of the west, she had for a full generation minted that gold into coin, when she became aware that a city with whom she had often treated and whom she had thought remote, was present: something alien, far wealthier than herself, far more numerous and boasting a complete hold of communications and of the western sea. Between the two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent or despicable to the other.
|The Punic Wars|
The Roman people were military. They had no love for ships. The sea terrified them: their expansion was by land and their horror of the sea explains much of their history. The very boast of maritime supremacy that Carthage made was a sort of challenge to their genius. They accepted that challenge and their success was complete. Within a hundred years they had first tamed and then obliterated their rival, and the Maghreb re-entered Europe.
The first accidents of that conflict were of such a nature as to confirm Carthage in her creed and to lead her on to her destiny. She found, indeed, that the command of the sea was a doubtful thing: the landsmen beat her in the first round; clumsily and in spite of seamanship. But when, as a consequence of such defeat, they landed upon the African soil which she had thought inviolable, there, to her astonishment, she overwhelmed them. The loss of Sicily, to which she consented, did nothing to warn her. She became but the greater in her own eyes: Sicily she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain, an expansion the more imperial that the new province was more distant and far larger, and indefinitely more barbarous than the last. It may be imagined what a bitter patriotism the surprises of the early struggle had bred in the governing class of Carthage. From the moment when, in their unexpected victory, they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to Moloch, this aristocracy had determined upon a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of them undertook the task and undertook it not from the Mother Country but from the Empire. He marched from Spain.
The Second Punic War is the best known of campaigns. Every Roman army that took the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy was open to the army of Hannibal, and (wherever that army was present—but only there) at his mercy. In spite of such miracles the Phœnician attempt completely failed. It failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between the Phœnician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the western blood.