CHAP. XXI.

SCIPIO INVADES AFRICA.

175

U.O. 550.

began his operations by laying siege to Utica. There appears to have been no disposition on the part either of the nation or of their mercenary soldiers to revolt against the Carthaginian government. Scipio found no ally except Massinissa, and he was a fugitive with only a few hundred horsemen, having been expelled from his own realm by Syphax. His knowledge of the country and of the people may have been valuable, and it was by his counsel perhaps that Scipio set fire to the huts of the Numidians and Carthaginians, constructed of the lightest materials, successively on the same day. The effect of this stroke seems to have been prodigious. The armies of the enemy were thrown into utter confusion, and routed with immense slaughter. Massinissa followed up the blow by the capture of Syphax, which neutralized at once the alliance of Numidia. But Scipio sustained a reverse in the loss of his fleet, and the Uticans continued to defend themselves, and compelled him at last to raise the siege. For a moment at least he contemplated making terms with Carthage, and arranged an armistice while envoys were sent from Africa to Rome. But the Roman Senate, now exulting in the defeat of Mago, and the recall just announced of Hannibal from Italy, would listen to no accommodation. The envoys of Carthage returned without even a hearing. Hannibal reluctantly quitted the land in which he had waged war for so many years and gained such glorious victories to so little purpose; but on quitting it he suspended in the temple of Juno, on its extreme point, the Lacinian promontory, a number of brazen tablets inscribed with the principal events of the contest in the Greek and Punic languages. These records were seen by the historian Polybius, and may have served perhaps in some degree to correct the boastful figments of the Roman annalists. But too much of the conduct and the character of Hannibal must always remain veiled to us. The Romans persisted in depicting him as a monster of perfidy and cruelty, and undoubtedly his mode of making war was to the full as barbarous as that which generally prevailed at the time. The account of his massacring the Italian soldiers who refused to follow him into Africa is indeed frightful if true, but it hardly exceeded some of the acknowledged atrocities of the Romans themselves.

U.C. 551.

Hannibal sailed from Crotona in the autumn of 203, under cover of the armistice which had been concluded, and while it seemed still possible that a permanent peace might be established. The Romans were evidently glad to let him go and bear his laurels with him untarnished. He came to land, not at Carthage, but at Leptis, and spent the winter at Hadrumetum. The greater part of another year intervened, and yet we hear nothing of warlike operations between the great generals who now con

fronted each other. At last a pitched battle was fought somewhere to the west of Carthage on the banks of the river Bagradas, to which the name of Zama has been attached, but which is supposed to have really occurred at two or three days' journey from that place. Nor is the date of the battle definitely noted, which may however be aptly inferred from the circumstance recorded that it was fought on the day of an eclipse of the sun, such as is U.c. 552. found to have taken place on the 19th of October. This B.U. 202. would be a small matter but for the vast importance of the fortunes which were decided in that famous conflict. The disposition of Scipio's forces seems to have deviated in some particulars from that which was usual with the Romans; but the event was no doubt decided more by the indomitable valor of the legions when well led and confident in their commander than by any superiority of the one chief over the other. It ended in the entire rout and destruction of the Carthaginian army, the flight of Hannibal, and the virtual conclusion of the long struggle between the rival republics. Scipio was at once advanced to the highest pinnacle of military glory as the conqueror of the conqueror of Trasimenus and Cannæ.

There remained, however, a yet higher glory to achieve, and Scipio made it his own by his moderation and generosity. Carthage lay at last at the feet of Rome; there hardly wanted a second U.o. 553. victory over the son of Syphax a few days later to reduce 10. 201. her to abject submission. The question now arose at Rome and among the chiefs of the triumphant legions how this detested and still dangerous enemy should be treated. Many there were who vehemently urged her entire destruction, after the manner of Veii, or the treatment little less severe which had been inflicted on Capua and Tarentum. But Scipio alone withstood the clamor of his vengeful countrymen, partly, we may hope, from a feeling of humanity, partly, it has been surmised, from the liberal policy of not leaving Rome without a rival to teach her still to content herself by the law of nations, and refrain from the gratification of an inordinate ambition. He abstained from demanding the delivery of Hannibal into his hands, and allowed Carthage to retain her laws at home and her sway over the territories she claimed as her own in Africa. She was required to surrender all her ships but ten, all her elephants, and no doubt her other munitions of war, and to engage to make no war even in Africa without the permission of the Romans. Hannibal himself proved to his countrymen the necessity of submission. Having established Massinissa in dignity and power, as a vigilant outpost at the gates of Carthage, Scipio transported his army across the sea, traversed the southern half of the peninsula with an immense concourse of

CHAP. XXI.

THE POPULARITY OF SCIPIO.

177

the people who had witnessed so many of his rival's victories, and entered Rome in the most splendid of triumphs. Scipio received from the soldiers and citizens the illustrious name of Africanus, being the first Roman, if we except the dubious instance of Coriolanus, who was honored with a titular designation from the place or people he had conquered. His statue was placed, in triumphal robes and crowned with laurel, in the temple of Jupiter. Voices were not wanting to declare that he was himself a genuine descendant of the Olympian deity. It is said, indeed, that the people were ready to offer him the consulship for life. In thus lavishing on their hero both divine and human honors they had advanced already very near to the temper of the Imperial epoch. As for Scipio himself, the offer, if really made, could not tempt him to abandon his usual moderation. But it seems, indeed, possible that at that crisis of the Roman polity a true patriot might have accepted the post of a constitutional sovereign, and done much to check the downward progress of public life which became now marked and rapid. At least, at a later period, when the opportunity for any such prudent and temperate solution had passed away, Cicero takes a melancholy pleasure in representing another Scipio, the immediate descendant of the elder Africanus, as praising in a limited monarchy the best ideal of government. Had the nobles been left to work out the character they had justly inherited of loyal citizens and patriots, this is the consummation of their political career to which they might actually have been led; but their course, however temperate and prudent, was rudely intercepted by the torrent of national corruption which in less than another halfcentury broke down every moral barrier.

8*

CHAPTER XXII.

The good fortune of the Romans traced to the superiority of their character and the merits of their policy.-Eagerness of the Italians to combat at their side. Rome confronted with Greece.-State of the Grecian world after the breaking up of Alexander's empire.-Feebleness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta.—The Achæan League; the Ætolians; the Macedonians.

THE fortune of war is proverbial, and every warlike people has passed perhaps more than once through a crisis when a slight and apparently casual turn of affairs might have changed its greatest successes into irreparable ruin. The Romans were devout believers in Fortune; there was no deity in their celestial hierarchy to whom they paid their vows more assiduously; they were apt to ascribe to the special Fortune which they so constantly invoked their repeated preservation from imminent peril to their empire and nation. They were never tired of recurring to the happy chance by which, as they supposed, they were saved from destruction by the Etruscans under Porsena, by the Volscians under their own Caius Marcius, from the Gauls under Brennus, from the Samnites under Pontius, from the Greeks under Pyrrhus, and from the Carthaginians under Hannibal. It was mere affectation, indeed, to represent themselves as providentially saved at a later period from the craft of Jugurtha or Mithridates, or even from the impetuous assault of the Cimbri and Teutones. But their earlier enemies had been truly formidable, and of all the struggles for existence in which they were ever engaged there was none in which they came so near to ruin as in that with the great commander whom Scipio overthrew at Zama. It was a true instinct that made a late poet of the empire select the war with Hannibal as the most critical epoch of Roman history. There was no doubt a moral reason for the successes of the Romans. The Romans owed their final triumphs over the Gauls, the Italians, and the Africans far more to their own merits than to any defect in their opponents. We may trace this superiority, first, to the strength and firmness of their character, which endued them with confidence in themselves, still more with confidence in one another; to the power of command over themselves and not less of command over others; to the mutual sympathy and brotherly feeling nurtured by the perils they had encountered and the triumphs they had won to

CHAP. XXII.

SUPERIORITY OF THE ROMANS.

179

gether, and to a consciousness of natural fitness to rule and an imperial destiny to accomplish. The vaunted patriotism of the Romans, which was undoubtedly both sincere and active, may be resolved into a sense of dependence upon one another and independence of all besides, which taught them to regard their city as the centre of their universe. To the last the genuine Roman never quitted Rome even for a few months without a wrench to his feelings; to be banished from Rome for years overwhelmed him with desolation. Death and exile he designated alike by the name of capital punishment.

It may well be believed that neither the Gauls, the Etruscans, nor the Carthaginians possessed the peculiar moral qualities which thus formed the basis of the Roman fortunes. The Gauls were semi-barbarians with no political instincts or common views; the Etruscans were slaves driven to the field of battle by an effete and debased aristocracy; the Carthaginians were eminently traders and speculators, who made their public interests subservient to private ends, and were corrupted as a nation by personal selfishness. But besides these defects, none of these peoples had learned the secret of Roman success in the adoption of the races they conquered, and the fusion of their own national life with that of the great mass of their subjects. Every colony of Roman citizens which was planted on the coasts or in the interior of Italy became a nucleus around which there rapidly grew a semi-Romanized population, eager to imitate the manners of Rome, and proud to accept from it the first rudiments of its national life. Every Latin colony, and next to these every Italian colony, receiving a certain foretaste of the full Roman franchise, was gradually prepared for admission to all the fulness of its privileges, and taught to regard itself as an inchoate member of the race which ruled throughout the peninsula. It was no blind chance that saved Rome from Pyrrhus or Hannibal, but this principle of assimilation, whencesoever derived, which baffled the calculations of both invaders, and rendered the Italian ally no less determined an opponent than the Roman himself.

We can trace, indeed, the way in which this principle worked in multiplying the arms of the Romans and supplying them with inexhaustible vigor. From the moment that the legions were converted from an annual conscription for a few months into a standing force, enrolled for permanent service, and quartered on every frontier of an ever-extending empire, the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Italians from all the conquered territories threw themselves impetuously into their ranks, and rejoiced to exchange their provincial insignificance for the excitement of a military career under the Roman standards. The spirit of the Roman and the auxiliary was equally fed by the hopes of plunder and advancement. The sack