Scipio gives peace to Carthage.
It was now in the power of Scipio to march upon Carthage and lay siege to the city, neither protected nor provisioned. But he made no extravagant use of his victory. He granted peace on the terms previously rejected, with the addition of an annual tribute of two hundred talents for fifty years. He had no object to destroy a city after its political power was annihilated, and wickedly overthrow the primitive seat of commerce, which was still one of the main pillars of civilization. He was too great and wise a statesman to take such a revenge as the Romans sought fifty years afterward. He was contented to end the war gloriously, and see Carthage, the old rival, a tributary and broken power, with no possibility of reviving its former schemes, B.C. 201.
Close of the war.
This ended the Hannibalic war, which had lasted seventeen years, and which gave to Rome the undisputed sovereignty of Italy, the conversion of Spain into two Roman provinces, the union of Syracuse with the Roman province of Sicily, the establishment of a Roman [pg 454] protectorate over the Numidian chiefs, and the reduction of Carthage to a defenseless mercantile city. The hegemony of Rome was established over the western region of the Mediterranean. These results were great, but were obtained by the loss of one quarter of the burgesses of Rome, the ruin of four hundred towns, the waste of the accumulated capital of years, and the general demoralization of the people. It might seem that the Romans could have lived side by side with other nations in amity, as modern nations do. But, in ancient times, “it was necessary to be either anvil or hammer.” Either Rome or Carthage was to become the great power of the world.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE MACEDONIAN AND ASIATIC WARS.
Scarcely was Rome left to recover from the exhaustion of the long and desperate war with Hannibal, before she was involved in a new war with Macedonia, which led to very important consequences.
The Greeks had retained the sovereignty which Alexander had won, and their civilization extended rapidly into the East. There were three great monarchies which arose, however, from the dismemberment of the empire which Alexander had founded—Macedonia, Asia, and Egypt—and each of them, in turn, was destined to become provinces of Rome.