Part 14

Hannibal had likewise had positive orders to embark, and one cannot understand why the Romans did not do their utmost to destroy his fleet: he reached Africa without an accident. Against Carthage itself, the Romans were not able to undertake anything: it was too strong a town. Nor had Scipio as yet taken any other city that was fortified, though he was master of many open places. Hannibal landed near Adrumetum; he had taken with him all those whom he could find in Bruttium able to bear arms, and he had embodied among his troops all the Roman and Italian deserters, whose only chance of life depended on the war with Rome. His army consisted of about forty thousand men. Yet when he beheld the state of things at Carthage, he made an attempt to negotiate; for he saw how unlikely it was that the war would be successfully carried on, and he knew well that, if a battle were lost, the city would obtain a peace from which it might never recover. Scipio likewise was very anxious for peace; for he was always afraid that they would not prolong his _imperium_. The conditions which Hannibal offered, were too low, as he demanded for the Carthaginians the sovereignty over Africa, leaving indeed to the Romans the countries which they had conquered, but refusing everything else; Scipio still wished to keep to the former conditions, with a trifling compensation for the wrong which had been done. All was spoilt at last by the folly of the Carthaginian people, who, now that Hannibal was come, thought that Scipio’s army would be destroyed like that of Regulus; and thus the famous battle of Zama was brought on (550). Hannibal, according to the testimony of Polybius, here also displayed the qualities of a great general. He drew up his army in three lines. The foremost was formed of a medley of foreign troops enlisted from among the most opposite races; behind these were placed the Carthaginian citizens, who only took up arms in times of the utmost need, but were forced by these very circumstances to be brave; behind these again, as a reserve, were the Italians whom he had brought over, and they were a considerable body: in front of the whole were eighty elephants, and on the wings were the cavalry. This is the only battle in which Hannibal made use of elephants. The Romans were set in their usual array of _hastati_, _principes_, and _triarii_, save only that Scipio left large spaces between each of these three divisions, whereas otherwise they were so placed behind each other, that the maniples of the one always covered the intervals between two maniples of the others. In these wide spaces, as well as in front of the lines, he put the light troops, that when the elephants approached, they might hurl their missiles at them, and then, should they enter these open lanes, assail them with javelins. On the wings, he set the Numidian and Roman horse. The result of the battle shows that this cavalry was now superior, in quality at least, to that of the Carthaginians; for the latter was soon put to flight. The object with regard to the elephants was partly attained, as most of them ran right through these lanes, although there were some, who turned themselves sideways upon the men who were armed with javelins. Now began the shock between the _hastati_ and the Carthaginian mercenaries, who, after a gallant fight, were forced to throw themselves upon the Carthaginian phalanx behind them, but were driven back again by these upon the Romans; so that they were trampled down between the two. The _hastati_, however, had to give way before the Carthaginians; Scipio then made them fall back, and the _principes_ and the _triarii_ move sideways towards the wings, so as to attack the Carthaginians in the flank: this had the fullest success. The Italians alone fought with desperate courage; but the Carthaginian cavalry had been all destroyed, and the Romans burst upon the Carthaginian rear, on which the rout became such, that nearly the whole of the army was cut to pieces. Hannibal himself escaped with a small handful of men to Adrumetum.

Nothing else was now thought of in Carthage, but peace. It was the great Hannibal who principally negociated it, and accepted the conditions, which of course were much harder than the former ones; the eagerness, however, of Scipio to hurry on the peace, was the saving of Carthage. Her independence was acknowledged; the towns and provinces which had belonged to the Carthaginians in Africa before the war, they were indeed still to keep as subjects; but in this there was trickery, as they were to prove, what they had possessed. Instead of thirty triremes being left to them, as at first, only ten were now allowed them; they had to deliver over their elephants, and were no more to tame any; they were to pay ten thousand Euboïc talents (15,000,000 dollars) within fifty years; to give a hundred and fifty hostages to be chosen by the Romans themselves, (which was very hard, as hostages were so badly treated among the ancients;) and to yield up all the Roman prisoners and deserters, and likewise the unfortunate Italians who had come over with Hannibal. Whether these were all put to death as rebels, or sold for slaves, is not told us by Livy, who indeed says not a word about the whole of this article: Appian has given the account of it, and therefore so did Polybius likewise. They were moreover to acknowledge Masinissa as king of the Numidians within the boundaries prescribed by the Romans; to conclude a passive alliance offensive and defensive, with the Romans, on whom, however, it was not to be binding; and to feed and keep the Roman soldiers for six months longer. In Africa, they might wage war only with the consent of the Romans; out of Africa, not at all; and they were not to enlist mercenaries anywhere in Europe.

Some fools in Carthage wanted to speak against these conditions; but Hannibal seized hold of one Gisgo, and dragged him down from the platform on which he was haranguing. An outcry was raised about the violation of the liberty of the citizen; Hannibal, however, justified himself, saying that ever since his ninth year, he had been for six and thirty years away from his country, and therefore was not so accurately acquainted with the law; that, moreover, he deemed the peace to be necessary. All men of sense had become aware that the peace was now unavoidable, and that matters would have taken a different turn, if Hannibal had been supported at the right time.

Scipio now evacuated Africa; all the Carthaginian ships of war were brought to sea, and there set fire to. Thus ended, after sixteen years, the second Punic war and the rivalry of Carthage. Rome had made an immense booty.[30]

THE MACEDONIAN WAR.[31]

Immediately after the battle of Cannæ, Philip III. of Macedon had sent ambassadors to Hannibal, and had concluded a treaty, which fell, by chance, into the hands of the Romans. Even without this accident, it could not have been kept secret, not at least for any length of time. By this treaty, of which we certainly read in Polybius a genuine text, and of which the form is not at all Greek, but quite foreign, undoubtedly Carthaginian, the two states had not after all bound themselves to much. Hannibal secured to Philip in case of victory, that the Romans were to give up their possessions beyond the Adriatic, Corcyra, Apollonia, Epidamnus, the colony of Pharus, the Atintanians (an Epirote people), Dimalus, and the Parthinian Illyrians; and in return for this, Philip was to let the Carthaginians have the supremacy over Italy. Had Philip then been what he became in his riper years, this alliance would have proved dangerous to the Romans. But they, with that perseverance and heroic courage which distinguished them in the whole war, sent out a fleet under the prætor M. Valerius Lævinus, to protect Illyria, and to raise a party against him in Greece. Hostilities began in the year 537, or 538 (Lævinus not being a consul, the commencement is not quite certain), and the war lasted until the peace of P. Sempronius 548. This war was carried on very sluggishly on the side of the Romans, and Philip, who had to limit his exertions only to the few points on the mainland of Illyria, could have made himself master of these, had he not managed his affairs quite as feebly. His conduct then gives us quite a different idea of his powers from that which we are led to form afterwards. Had he given to Hannibal but ten thousand Macedonians as auxiliaries, Rome would have been in a sad plight; but he was too vain to do so.

Philip was at that time very young, hardly in his twenty-first or second year. His father Demetrius II. had left him at his death yet a child, and had given him for guardian an uncle, or elder cousin, Antigonus Epitropus (likewise called Doson). This Antigonus showed a conscientiousness which, considering the time in which he lived, really awakens our wonder; he seems to have taken as much care of the education of his ward, as of his rights: of this we see the traces in Philip, especially in the first years of his reign, in which he is said to have been very amiable. But there was something bad-hearted in him, which soon shook off that influence: like an eastern youth, he then wallowed in lust. Yet he was endowed with remarkable talents; he was highly gifted as a general, and he had courage and skill, to employ and to increase the resources of his empire. In the war against the Romans under Flamininus, he displayed much ability; and when in the peace he had lost part of his kingdom, he cleverly took advantage of circumstances to be set up again by Rome herself. Thus he managed to leave behind to his son a power, such as he himself had never possessed before.

The empire of Macedon, during the latter days of Antigonus Gonatas, had fallen into decay: the Ætolians had risen, the Achæans had made themselves free. Under Demetrius, it was going down hill still faster. From this condition, it only recovered in the last years of the guardianship of Antigonus, and that by the treason of old Aratus, who sacrificed the whole glory of a well-spent life; for he chose, rather to yield up Corinth and the liberty of Greece, and to make the Achæans sink into utter insignificance, than to let Cleomenes have that authority in the state, which was due to him, and without which the Lacedæmonians could not have joined the Achæan league. Philip, in the beginning of his reign, had, in conjunction with the Achæans, undertaken a war against the Ætolians, by which the latter were considerably humbled, important fortresses in Thessaly having been taken from them and their estimation in Greece lowered. They were obliged to agree to a disadvantageous peace, yet they still kept their independence. When Philip leagued himself with Hannibal, and began the war with the Romans, Greece was at peace. Thessaly, with the exception of that part which was Ætolian, Phocis, Locris, Eubœa with Chalcis, Corinth, Heræa, and Aliphera were well affected to Macedon, and had Macedonian garrisons. The Achæans were nominally free and united, but in reality dependent on their allies the Macedonians; so were likewise the Bœotians and Acarnanians. The Ætolians, who were hostile, were free, and had a territory of considerable extent. In Lacedæmon, at that time one revolution followed upon another: it was subjected to a nominal king, probably a son of Eudamidas; but soon afterwards Machanidas seized upon the government. The Syrian kings ruled over Western Asia, with the exception of Caria and Samos, which, as well as the Hellespont, Chersonesus, and the towns on the southern coast of Thrace, belonged to Egypt. Chios, Lesbos, and Byzantium formed together a confederacy of free cities. Rhodes was free, the mistress of the sea, and powerful; she was a friend of the Romans, without being actually allied with them. Egypt and Syria were at war with each other. The former retained Cœlesyria when the peace was made; but she lost the northern fortresses of Phœnicia to Syria. The Athenians were on friendly terms with the Romans; in their enfeebled state they kept aloof from all political activity. There was peace everywhere; the eyes of Greece were already very much turned towards Rome.

One would have thought that under these circumstances Philip might have undertaken something of importance against Rome; yet he did not exert himself. In the beginning of the contest, there were only little skirmishes going on, and he had some success; he overcame the Atintanians, and also the Ardyæans in the north of Illyricum, who were under the protection of Rome. About the fourth year of the war, the Romans made an alliance with the Ætolians, and from that time, unhappily for Greece, they became enterprising in those parts. They sent over indeed but one legion, in fact, only marines; but they also had a fleet in those seas, which was of some consequence, as the Macedonians had scarcely any at all. Through the Ætolians, the Romans also became connected with Attalus, who having begun with the small realm of Pergamus, had conquered Lydia, and created a rich principality. The Roman fleets of Lævinus, and after him of Sulpicius, were a real curse for ill-fated Greece. The treaty with the Ætolians stipulated, that of all the places beyond Corcyra which they should conquer together, the soil should belong to the Ætolians, the inhabitants with their goods and chattels to the Romans. Such a stipulation is indeed not unheard of; yet it shows what the Ætolians really were. After the Lamian war, they deserve praise; but all that happened afterwards, shows them to have been morally barbarians: their language may indeed have been partly Greek. This treaty had the saddest consequences. The Roman fleet made its appearance off the Greek coast; Ægina, Dyme, Oreus, were taken, and the whole population swept away by the Romans. These two last places the Ætolians were not able to keep; but Ægina with its harbour they sold to Attalus for thirty talents,--that noble Greek island to a prince of Pergamus! These atrocities drew upon the Ætolians and Romans the abhorrence of the whole of Greece. Philip, who thereby became popular, penetrated with the Greeks, for the first time, into Ætolia, and requited them in their own country for their devastations. The Ætolians, abandoned by the Romans, concluded a very disadvantageous peace. Philip made considerable conquests. Two or three years afterwards, (Livy’s chronology here is very little to be relied on,) about 548, the Romans also by means of Tib. Sempronius concluded a peace with Philip, beneath the conditions of which some great disadvantage again is veiled. Not only the country of the Atintanians, which had become subject to them,--a district not unimportant of itself, but of very great consequence on account of the pass of Argyrocastro, through which Philip had now a free passage between the Roman territory and the then republic of Epirus,--was by it expressly ceded to Philip, but also the country of the Ardyæans. The Romans, of course, had this mental reservation, that the time would not be long before they would break this peace, and gain back what they had lost. This is one of the few instances in which the Romans renounced part of their possessions. One ought to have remembered this, when such violent reproaches were made against Jovian, who, to save his army, ceded a tract of country to the Persians: there was an outcry at the time, as if such a thing had never happened before in the history of Rome. Aurelian had yielded Dacia to the Goths; Hadrian had given up the conquests of Trajan in the east; not to mention the peace with the Volscians in the earliest times.

Philip, after having concluded peace with the Romans, allied himself with Antiochus the Great against the infant Ptolemy Epiphanes, the child of the unworthy Ptolemy Philopator. The Egyptian kings since Philadelphus and Euergetes, were in possession of extensive districts and strongholds on the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor, as far as the coast of Thrace: Lycia at least was subject to their supremacy. As under Ptolemy Philopator the empire had already fallen into utter decay, and his infant successor was growing up under the charge of an unworthy guardian, Antiochus and Philip took advantage of the moment. Egypt had since the rise of the Alexandrine empire been on friendly terms with Rhodes, and the Rhodians had a strong interest in being friends with Alexandria, as they had much more to fear from Macedon than from Egypt; they therefore defended Epiphanes. Yet their power was no match for that of Macedon and Syria; especially as the wretched Egyptian government hardly did anything, but on the contrary let the allies, among whom, besides Rhodes, there were also Byzantium, Chios, and Attalus of Pergamus, bear the whole brunt of the war. The two kings were therefore most successful. Philip conquered for himself the whole of the Thracian coast; Perinthus, Ephesus, and Lycia, fell to the lot of Syria, although the allies of the Egyptians had shortly before had some success in a sea-fight near Chios.

Philip had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Even from Crete, where Macedon had never before exercised any influence, he was applied to for his mediation.

The immediate cause, or at least the pretext for the second Macedonian war, was afforded to the Romans by the distress of Athens. That city was utterly impoverished and decayed; but it kept up a sort of independence, and as early as about twenty-five years after the first Illyrian war, it had made an alliance with the Romans, and had granted them isopolity.[32] Perhaps the Romans received the gift with a smile; yet such bright rays of her old departed glory still lingered upon Athens, that on her side at least, there was nothing ridiculous in the proffer. Pausanias tells us, that among the cenotaphs for those who had been slain, there were also some for the men belonging to three triremes, who had fallen in battle abroad as allies of the Romans; but he does not give the date. It is not likely that this was a figment of the Athenians; the time may have been that of the second Illyrian war, as they were keen enough to see that they might gain the Romans by sending them a few ships. During the first Macedonian war, they very wisely kept neutral; but in the last years of the war of Hannibal they got involved in hostilities with Philip. The murder of two young Acarnanians who had intruded when the Eleusinian mysteries were celebrated, led their countrymen to call upon Philip for help. He had long wished to get possession of Athens, and he now savagely devastated the whole of Attica to the very walls of the city: all the temples in the Athenian territory were pulled down, and even the tombs were demolished. The Athenians betook themselves to the Rhodians, to Attalus, and in general to all the allies of that suddenly decayed Alexandrine empire, which had once been so highly blooming under Euergetes; yet their hopes were chiefly bent upon the Romans. In Rome there was much consultation what to do. The senate and the leading men, who already had unbounded views of extending the Roman power, would not have hesitated for a moment to declare war, and the more so, as they were likewise eager to make up for what they had lost by the unfortunate issue of the former one: but the people, who were most wretchedly off, and longed for rest, threw out the first motion for a war.

It is a most erroneous thing, for one to believe that a constitution remains the same, so long as its outward forms still last. When alterations have taken place in the distribution of property, in public opinion, and in the way in which people live, the constitution, even without any outward change, may become quite different from what it was, and the self-same form may at one time be democratical, and at another aristocratical. This internal revolution is hardly ever traced by modern writers of history, and yet it is one of those very things which in history ought to be particularly searched into. That strange and wonderful preponderance of the oligarchy of wealth existed already at that time in Rome, and the many--who generally speaking have neither judgment nor a will of their own--now decree the very things which they did not wish. Here indeed we have one of the first and most remarkable symptoms of this: the people, contrary to their own wishes, vote for the war with Philip. It was the great misfortune of Rome, that after the war of Hannibal, there was no great man who had the genius to restore the constitution in accordance with its spirit. For great states always decline and fall, because, after great exertions, everything is left to the blind spirit of the age, and no healing of what is diseased is attempted.

The Romans now, with great zeal, sent ambassadors to Philip to demand indemnification for the Athenians, and cessation of all hostilities against the allies of Rome, to the number of whom Ptolemy also belonged. Philip clearly saw that this was but a pretext to raise a quarrel, and he had bitterly to repent of not having taken better advantage of the war with Hannibal. In the year 552, the war was decreed, and the command was given to the consul P. Sulpicius Galba, who had already made a campaign before in those parts, though not of the most glorious kind, as he devastated Dyme, Oreus, and Ægina. It must have been resolved upon late in the season, and as the consul besides fell ill, nothing more could be undertaken that year: Galba’s expedition therefore entirely belongs to the year which followed his consulship, a fact which is overlooked by Livy. Villius, the next consul, was only present at the seat of war for a very short period, towards the end of his time of office.