[46] [Roman colonies were essentially similar to the cleruchies of Athens.]
CHAPTER X. THE FIRST PUNIC WAR
Carthage clears the Alps, Rome traverses the seas, the two peoples, personified in two men Hannibal and Scipio, wrestle and are desperate to terminate the struggle. ’Tis a duel à outrance, a fight to the death. Rome totters, she utters a cry of anguish: Hannibal ad portas! But she rises again, uses the limits of her strength in a last blow, throws herself on Carthage and effaces her from the world.—Victor Hugo.
A taste of blood whets the appetite of a nation no less than of an animal. It is notorious that the love of power grows with its acquisition. It was inevitable then that the Romans, after beating off their eastern enemy, should turn their eyes more and more jealously towards their one remaining rival in the west—namely, Carthage. A certain amount of antagonism there had doubtless been all along between Rome and Carthage, but there was a long time during which the Italian city had hardly achieved strength enough to excite a real jealousy on the part of a community of such recognised power as Carthage. And even now there was no possibility that Rome could claim to compete with her rival on the sea. Inheriting the traditions of her mother city, Tyre, Carthage was pre-eminently a commercial city. She occupied that pre-eminence of the western Mediterranean that Tyre so long held in the East, and she was little disposed to accept without a struggle the rivalry of a people of another land and race. It was inevitable then that a war to the death must sooner or later determine the question of mastery so soon as Rome had achieved a degree of power which enforced her recognition as an actual rival of Carthage. The contest was precipitated—as might have been expected—by the condition of things in Sicily, an island which lay intermediate between the territories of the two powers, and thus almost of necessity became a bone of contention between them. In the early days, indeed, it was the Greeks and Carthaginians who disputed over Sicily, and perpetually quarrelled there, but now after the death of Agathocles, the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, and the defeat of Pyrrhus, it became clear that Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily must look for aid in future to Rome rather than to Greece. But the acceptance of such an alliance on the part of Rome virtually implied war with Carthage, and such a war broke out actively only a few years after the expulsion of Pyrrhus from Italy. It required indeed a series of three most memorable wars, extending over a period of more than a century, finally to decide the fate of Carthage.
The first of these wars—in some sense perhaps the most important, yet as regards its results by far the least striking in itself—lasted some twenty-three years. It was fought out largely in Sicily itself by the Romans who were, for the most part, successful and in the end entirely victorious; and on the sea, where the fleets of the Romans were for a long time quite unable to compete with their rivals; the same dogged pertinacity, however, that had made Rome mistress of Italy and that had brought about the final triumph over Pyrrhus, stood them in good stead in the new effort to create a powerful navy—an effort which was at last crowned with such complete success that in the final decisive battle at the Ægatian Islands, the fleet of Carthage was entirely destroyed and dispersed. At last Carthage sued for peace, acknowledging the supremacy of Rome in Sicily and giving up all claim to that island.
The events that followed illustrate not merely the inertia of long-established institutions in the way in which Carthage rallied from her defeat and returned again and again to the contest, but they illustrate even more strikingly the influence which individual great men have in history. There have been philosophers who have contended that great statesmen and great warriors are rather the result of the opportunity of their times than a directing influence; but it is hard for any one who attentively considers the course of history to overlook the fact that the great man, even though in some sense called forth by the necessities of the time, yet may put his stamp in a most definitive way upon the trend of future events. So it was, for example, with Alexander; so it was with Pyrrhus; and so it was now with a group of great Carthaginians including Hamilcar Barca, his son-in-law Hasdrubal, and most notably of all, the son of Hamilcar, the famous but ill-fated warrior Hannibal.