the soldiers from the ships and relieve this town. With the army thus set free, he was able to conquer some towns, as for instance Macella, and to put other friendly cities in a state of defence. CHAP. III. SECOND PERIOD, 261-255 B.C. of Hamil car. Since the fall of Agrigentum, the command of the Carthaginian troops in Sicily had been in the hands of Operations Hamilcar not the celebrated Hamilcar the father of Hannibal,' but a man not unlike his namesake in enterprising spirit and ability. It was probably owing to him that during these years the Carthaginians did not lose Sicily. He succeeded in so far counteracting the effect of the Roman victories at Agrigentum and Mylæ as to make it doubtful to which side the fortune of war was turning. These exploits of Hamilcar cannot be given in detail, as the report of Philinus, who wrote the history of the war from the Carthaginian point of view, has been lost," and as the order of time in which the events succeeded each other is also doubtful.3 Still, the grand form of Hamilcar stands out in such bold relief that we recognise in him one of the greatest generals of that period. In the outset he sacrificed a part of his mutinous mercenaries after the manner which we have already seen applied by Dionysius and Hiero. He sent them to attack the town of Entella, after having first warned the Roman garrison of their approach, and thus attained a double advantage, inasmuch as he got rid of the inconvenient mercenaries, and, as despair made them fight bravely, he inflicted considerable injury on the Romans. This faithless proceeding, which, as we have seen, was by no means unheard of or exceptional, shows how dangerous for both sides was the relation between mercenaries and their commanders. On the one side, instead of patriotism, faithfulness, and devotion, we find among the soldiers a spirit of rapacity, 1 Zonaras (viii. 10) erroneously supposes him to be the father of the great Hannibal. We derive our information chiefly from the confused fragments of Diodorus (xxiii. fr. 9). Polybius passes over a good deal in silence, either for the sake of brevity, or from partiality for the Romans. Diodorus (loc. cit.) seems to refer everything to the year after the conquest of Agrigentum, which is certainly a mistake. BOOK Destruc- Eryx by Victory of hardly restrained by military discipline; on the other we observe cold calculation and heartlessness, which saw in a soldier no kinsman, citizen, or brother, but an instrument of war purchasable for a certain sum, and worthy of no considerations but those which called for the preservation of valuable property. With quite as much harshness, though with less cruelty, Hamilcar treated the inhabitants of the old town of Eryx. This town of the Clymi, at first friendly to the Punians and then subject to them, appears to have been exposed to the attacks of the Romans because it was not situated immediately on the coast. Hamilcar razed it to the ground, and sent the inhabitants away to the neighbouring promontory, Drepana, where he built a new fortified town, which, with the neighbouring town of Lilybæum, formed as it were a common system of defence, and subsequently proved its strength by a long-continued resistance to the persevering attacks of the Romans. Of the venerable town of Eryx there remained only the temple of Venus, the building of which was attributed to Eneas, the son of the goddess. After Hamilcar had thus covered his retreat, he proceeded at Therma. to the attack. We have already heard of the siege of Segesta. The victory of the Romans at Mylæ saved Segesta, after it had been driven to the utmost distress. But in the neighbourhood of Thermæ,' Hamilcar succeeded in inflicting a great blow. He surprised a portion of the Roman army, and killed 4,000 men. The consequences of the victory at Mylæ appear to have been confined to the raising of the siege of Segesta. The Romans did not succeed in taking the little fortress of Myttistratum (now 2 Therma was a town built by the Carthaginians near the site of the ancient city of Himera, which they had destroyed (Diodorus, xiii. 59 ff. 79). 2 According to Diodorus, (xxiii. fr. 9), 6,000 men. Polybius (i. 24, §§ 3, 4) excuses and extenuates the defeat of the Romans. He says that the allies suffered the loss, not the Roman legions; for a dispute had broken out between these two classes of troops concerning the place of honour, and the allies had taken up a separate position, where they were surprised and cut to pieces by the Carthaginians. CHAP. III. SECOND PERIOD, B.C. called Mistrella) on the northern coast of Sicily. In spite of the greatest possible exertions, they had to retreat, at the end of a seven months' siege, with heavy losses.' They lost, further, a number of Sicilian towns, the greater 261-255 part of which, it appears, went over voluntarily to the Carthaginians. Among these is mentioned the important town of Camarina in the immediate neighbourhood of Syracuse, and even Enna, in the middle of the island, the town sacred to Ceres and Proserpina (Demeter and Persephone) the protecting goddesses of Sicily. The hill Camicus, where the citadel of Agrigentum stood, fell also again into the power of the Carthaginians, who would indeed, according to the report of Zonaras, have again subdued the whole of Sicily if the consul of 259, C. Aquillius Florus, had not wintered in the island, instead of returning to Rome with his legions, according to the usual custom after the end of the summer campaign. successes of the In the following year fortune began once more to smile Renewed on the Romans. Both consuls, A. Atilius Calatinus and C. Sulpicius Paterculus, went to Sicily. They succeeded Romans. in retaking the most important of the places which had revolted, especially Camarina and Enna, together with Myttistratum,3 which had just been so obstinately defended. 2 Polybius (i. 24, § 11) mentions only the final conquest of Myttistratum two years later, after it had, as he says, stood a protracted siege. Diodorus alone (xxiii. fr. 9) states that a previous siege ended with the retreat of the Romans from the place. Polybius betrays here as elsewhere a partiality for the Romans, which is no doubt due, at least in part, to the authorities whom he consulted. At the siege of Camarina the Roman army ran great risk of being annihilated or captured. It was saved by the self-devotion of a military tribune and 400 men (Livy, epit. 17; Zonaras, viii. 12; Gellius, iii. 7). Cato, who, in his historical work Origines, compares the exploit of this tribune to that of Leonidas at Thermopyla, laments that the Roman hero earned but scanty praise, while the deed of Leonidas was celebrated all over Greece by historians, poets, sculptors, and the whole nation. The brave tribune has indeed been hardly treated, for we do not even know his name. Whilst Cato calls him Q. Cadicius, the annalist Claudius Quadrigarius calls him Laberius, and Livy Marcus Calpurnius. Camarina resisted all the attacks of the Romans until at length Hiero supplied his allies with engines for the siege (Diodorus, loc. cit). It is noteworthy that Polybius says nothing of all this. * Polybius, i. 24, §§ 9-12. Littana (Diodorus, xxiii. fr. 9.)—probably identical BOOK Expedition Corsica. At the conquest of this town, which had cost them so much, the resentment among the Roman soldiers was such that, after the secret retreat of the Carthaginian garrison, they fell on the helpless inhabitants, and murdered them without mercy, until the consul put an end to their ferocity by promising them, as part of their spoil, all the men whose lives they would spare. The inhabitants of Camarina were sold as slaves. We do not read that this was the fate of Enna; but this town could not expect an easier lot, unless it redeemed its former treason by now betraying the Carthaginian garrison into the hands of the Romans. From these scanty details we can form some idea of the indescribable misery which this bloody war brought upon Sicily. The successes of Hamilcar in Sicily, in the year 259, of Scipio to were, it appears, to be attributed in part to the circumstance that the Romans after the battle of Mylæ had sent L. Cornelius Scipio, one of the consuls of the year 259, to Corsica, in the hope of driving the Carthaginians quite out of the Tyrrhenian sea. On this island the Carthaginians had, as far as we know, no settlements or possessions. Still they must have had in the town of Aleria a station for their fleet, whence they could constantly alarm and threaten Italy. Aleria fell into the hands of the Romans, and thus the whole island was cleared of the Carthaginians. From thence Scipio sailed to Sardinia; but here nothing was done. Both Carthaginians and Romans avoided an encounter, and Scipio returned home. This expedition to Corsica and Sardinia, which Polybius, probably on account of its insignificance and its failure, does not even mention, was for the Cornelian house a sufficient occasion to celebrate Scipio as a conqueror and hero. They were justified in with Hippana, mentioned by Polybius, (i. 24, § 10)—was likewise taken, as also the hill Camicus near Agrigentum, and the town of Erbessus. An attempt of the consul Atilius to seize the island of Lipara failed. How little the later compilers of historical compendiaries are to be trusted may be seen from the statements of Aurelius Victor (39) and Florus (ii. 2), that Drepana and Lilybæum were taken by the Romans. Zonaras, viii. 11. CHAP. III. SECOND PERIOD, B.C. saying that he took Aleria; and as the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Corsica followed, he might be regarded as the conqueror of Corsica, though in truth Corsica was not occupied by the Romans till after the peace with 261-255 Carthage. Accordingly these exploits are noticed on the second grave-stone in the series of monuments belonging to the family of the Scipios, with the first of which we have already become acquainted.' From this modesty, which confined itself to the real facts, we cannot help inferring that the inscription was composed shortly after the death of Scipio, when the memory of his deeds was fresh, and a great exaggeration could hardly be ventured upon. If it had not been so, and if the inscription had had a later origin, there is nothing more certain than that in this, as in that of the father, great untruths would have been introduced. This becomes quite evident from the additions which we find in later authors, and which can have originated only in the family traditions of the Scipios. Valerius Maximus, Orosius, and Silius Italicus 2 mention a second campaign of Scipio in Sardinia, in which he besieged and conquered Olbia, defeated Hanno, the Carthaginian general, and displayed his magnanimity by causing his body to be interred with all honours. He then gained possession without difficulty of a number of hostile towns by a peculiar stratagem, and finally, as the Capitoline fasti testify, 1 See vol. i. p. 459. The following is the epitaph (Orelli, Inscript. Latin. Select. n. 552):— Hone oino ploirume consentiont R(omae) Luciom Scipione. Filios Barbati Consol censor aidilis hic fuet a(pud vos) Compare Ritschl, Rheinisches Museum, 1854. ? Valerius Maximus, v. 1, 2. Orosius, iv. 7. Silius Italicus, vi. 671. Traits of generosity and a chivalrous disposition seldom met with among the Romans we shall frequently find in the history of the Scipios. They are quite characteristic of this particular family, and their insertion into the history of Rome seems to be owing to a writer of poetic imagination. Perhaps we can here trace the hand of the poet Ennius, who was a client of the Scipios. |