CHAPTER XII

ROME AND CARTHAGE

I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am afraid that I have been obliged to speak rather slightingly of that beautiful lady for whose sake you will have heard that the Trojan War was fought, the lady about whom Homer sang. I have made my excuses for that disrespectful treatment.

There is another famous lady of whom Virgil, the great Latin poet, sings--Queen Dido, of Carthage. His story goes that Æneas, the Trojan, escaping over-sea after the fall of Troy, was swept by storms into Carthage, where Dido entertained him pleasantly. From her court he went to Italy, and from him the Romans were said to be descended. The Æneid--that is, the story of Æneas--is the name of Virgil's poem in which this tale is told. You may believe as much or as little of it as you like, for there is no evidence at all that it is true; but it is a fine tale, finely told.

Then there is the story about Romulus and Remus and the good old wolf-mother, and the rest of it--all very pleasant too. But I do not think that you need believe any more of that either than you like.

[Sidenote: The Gauls in Rome]

They are not very ancient stories, nothing like as old as some of the stories about Egypt and Babylonia for which there is plenty of evidence. A thousand {165} years or so B.C. could cover them all. Yet for what was really going on round about what came to be called Rome we have very little evidence until a great deal later. One other pretty tale certainly has some truth in it--the story that the Gauls came down upon Rome, and that the Capitol, or strong citadel, on which the sentries must have gone to sleep, was only saved by the alarm being given by some geese. There may be some doubt as to whether the geese really were there, and were the city's saviours, for it is possible that this too, like other tales, may have seemed to the poets to be a pretty story to tell, and they may have told it to please their hearers without inquiring closely into its truth; but however it may have been about the geese, there is no doubt at all about the Gauls. They were there, and in terrible numbers, and they only consented to go away on being bribed to do so with an immense sum of money. So it is not a very dignified appearance that this great Rome makes on her first appearance in our story--saved from Gauls, in the first instance, by geese, and in the second place by bribes! This happened in 390 B.C.

[Illustration: GALLIC WARRIORS. (From the British Museum.)]

By Gaul we generally understand France--the Gallic, or Gaulic nation. But Gaul at that time was the name of the country not only of what we now call France, but of a great deal of the north of what we call Italy. So the Gauls had not very far to come to reach Rome. Although the Capitol, the citadel, was saved from the Gauls at this time, the Gauls destroyed the city completely, and after their retirement the Romans set about its rebuilding.

You will see, of course, that I have only told you, so far, who the Romans were not. I have not told you who they were. But I have a very good reason for {166} that. I have not told you, and I am not going to tell you, because I do not know.

Rome has been called the City of the Seven Hills, because it is built on those seven hills which stand above the River Tiber that runs out westward into the Mediterranean Sea. What we do know is that peoples from the neighbouring country came and settled themselves on one or other of these hills. They were peoples of different origins. The most civilised, in the earliest days of this settlement, were from the district called Etruria. They were Etruscans. The Sabines were another of these peoples. And there were Latins from Latium, in which district Rome itself was situated.

These peoples became united into one state under rulers of the Latin race, and that, in very few words, appears to have been the origin of the Roman nation. The Etruscans seem at first to have been pushed off the hills into the plains by the others, and there was frequent fighting between the plain people and the hill people. For their protection from the attacks from the plains, the early kings of Rome built walls round the seven hills; but the Etruscans, though they had given way at first to the Latins and Sabines, must have come back as conquerors. They were a powerful people. They imposed their own kings upon the Romans, and Romans and Etruscans together became the strongest nation in the country.

Probably the Romans never were satisfied with their Etruscan kings, who seem to have governed with great severity. More than a hundred years before the Gauls came upon them, which was in 390 B.C., they successfully rebelled, drove out the kings and set up a republic. The Etruscans strove to restore them, and the struggle went on until a very important victory was gained by {167} the Roman republican armies at Veii. The Romans had never been so strong in Italy before, and although the attack of the Gauls threatened them with destruction only six years later, those barbarians, after a seven months' siege of the Capitol, went back and made no attempt at establishing their power permanently. The Romans rebuilt their walls and their houses. They were engaged in almost perpetual fighting with other peoples, of whom we should notice particularly the Samnites, in one or other part of Italy. Now and again they met with reverses, but on the whole they prevailed and extended their authority over the countries that they conquered. The aid of the Romans was sought by now one and now another people who found themselves pressed by hostile neighbours; and the help was given in consideration that those who were helped should regard their helper for ever after as their master.

[Sidenote: Pyrrhus]

It was a little later than 300 B.C. that the Greek city states established along the southern shores of Italy found themselves bothered by the attacks of some inland neighbours and called for the aid of Rome. There was one of these cities, however, and the most important, which repelled the assistance of the Roman Republic, jealous of her growing power. This was Tarentum. And just at the moment when the struggle between the Roman forces and this Greek city, which must inevitably have ended in the defeat of the Greeks, was about to commence, Tarentum found a new ally in Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus.

Epirus, as you may see, is the north-western region of Greece, and the nearest to Italy. Pyrrhus had allied himself by marriage with Ptolemy of Egypt and had made a great effort to gain the throne of Macedonia, {168} but was defeated in that attempt and had to content himself awhile with being king of his own little country of Epirus. It was then that there came to him, and was welcomed by him, a call to their assistance by the people of Tarentum menaced by the Roman armies.

[Sidenote: Pyrrhic victories]

Pyrrhus marched into Italy with a force that was strong in cavalry and also in elephants. The elephants seem to have terrified the Romans, and Pyrrhus won several victories. But though he won victories it was always at so great a cost to his own force that the phrase "a Pyrrhic victory," which you may have heard, is taken even now to mean a victory in which the victor loses more heavily than the vanquished.

We are now, I would have you see, at a point of some particular interest in the great story, for it is the first time that Greek and Roman have been facing each other and fighting each other in any large force and as nation against nation.

Pyrrhus, after his victories, called on Rome to surrender. His army was then on the Roman territory of Latium. Rome replied that she would hold no parley with a foe as long as any of his troops were on her soil. It was a proud reply, worthy of her future greatness, to a victorious enemy at her very gates; but she had formed a strong confederation of several states that acknowledged her as their sovereign and was still formidable. Pyrrhus won another victory, but again gained little by it, and finding that his project did not prosper in Italy itself he went over to Sicily.

He came to that island on the invitation of the Greek city states there, who wished his help to rid them of the Carthaginians, but here again, although he won victories, he could not establish his power. He {169} made himself thoroughly unpopular with the Greeks, who had called him in, by the despotic manner in which he tried to lord it over them, and, what was still worse for him, his attacks on the Carthaginians drove them to make an alliance with the Romans against him. A result of that alliance was that when, after three years of unproductive fighting in Sicily, he went back to the mainland of Italy, his fleet was attacked and severely handled by the Carthaginians. He fought one more battle against the Romans and their confederates, in Italy, but he did not receive much support from the Tarentines or any of the Italian-Greek cities. This time it was not even a "Pyrrhic victory" for him, but a decisive defeat, and he went back to his native Epirus after a six years' absence. He was killed some years later in a political revolution in Greece.

The total result of the enterprise of Pyrrhus was to establish Rome more firmly than ever as the mistress state of Italy, and to bring her into alliance, which was very soon to be broken, with the great sea-power of the Carthaginians.

The story of Rome herself, within the city walls, during all the years from the expulsion of the Etruscan kings down to the date, about 280 B.C., to which we have now come, was one of perpetual struggle between the patricians, the aristocratic party, and the plebs, the party of the people, the populace. The patricians had all the power after the first driving out of the Tarquins, as the Etruscan kings were called, because they had been the chief managers of the revolution against them, but all through the later years the populace grew in power, and took the power out of the hands of the patricians. The constitution of the state became, as we should say, more and more democratic. {170} The power fell more and more into the hands of the "demos," the plebeians, the common people.

The Romans, as you saw, had made an alliance with the Carthaginians at the time of the invasion of Italy and Sicily by Pyrrhus; but it was a friendship that lasted only a very short while. Our story is now coming to a point at which it will be very largely occupied by wars between these two nations who are now, for the moment, friends. The Romans continually accused the Carthaginians of treachery and of broken faith. The Roman name for the Carthaginians was "Punici," which is somehow derived from the name, Phœnicia, of the country from which, as you know, the colony of Carthage was founded. So bitterly did the Romans resent their acts of treachery that the words "Punica fides," that is to say, Punic, or Carthaginian, faith, were used as a kind of proverb to express a faith or fidelity which was no faith at all--a promise made only to be broken. Probably they were not very true to their engagements; they were a very bold, enterprising people, wonderful sailors, considering the ships that they had. They went round Africa, they planted colonies all along the shores of Spain, they went to the Cassiterides, or tin islands, which are said to have been our own British islands. It is a marvellous record of adventure.

But they do not seem to have been as highly civilised as the Romans, who had been very largely influenced by this time by that civilisation and culture of Greece which we have seen spreading itself very widely. Greece had some influence even with them, for among the temples for the worship of those gods Baal and Astaroth, which they had brought with them from Phœnicia, was a temple to the Greek god {171} Apollo. But in thinking over the whole story of the intercourse and the fighting between Rome and Carthage we ought to remember that it is almost entirely from the Roman point of view that we have the story told. We do not know much of what the Carthaginians might have had to say about the Romans. They might perhaps have said something about broken faith on the Roman side also. It is likely that neither party was very particular about keeping promises which it was more convenient not to keep.

[Sidenote: First Punic war]

However that may be, it was almost inevitable that trouble must break out between them before long; for here was the great and growing land power of Rome on the northern side of the Mediterranean stretching down the long leg of Italy; here was Carthage, with its powerful navy, its determined sailors, and its adventurous courage, on the southern shore; and there was Sicily, supposed to be independent of both, lying like a football just at the very toe of Italy, ready to be kicked, and reaching nearly over to the Carthaginian coast. It was an unfortunate position for that island, and may remind us of the position of Palestine as the bridge between the great ancient empires of Egypt and Babylonia. There is this difference between the positions of the two, that the fighting round about Sicily was sure to be largely naval, an affair of sea-fights. It was not so in Palestine.

Pyrrhus was driven back home to Epirus out of Italy in 275 B.C. In 268 B.C., only seven years later, began the first of those great struggles between Rome and Carthage which are known as the Punic Wars. There were three of these wars, interrupted by truces which--owing, as the Romans said, to the infamous "Punica fides"--never were lasting. The true reason {172} doubtless was that both powers were too masterful in character to endure a rival. One or other had to have the upper hand. There were times in the struggle when it looked very doubtful indeed which would have it.

Sicily was of great importance to the Romans, because they depended much on the supply of corn which it gave them. That was another reason, besides the reason of its position as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two great rivals, why it became their battle-field. If the Carthaginians could get Sicily, they could cut off much of the enemy's food supply. The Romans, for their own preservation, had to make sure of Sicily. It was over the possession of Sicily that this first Punic war broke out.

The Romans had gradually made their fleet stronger and stronger until they were powerful enough to risk a sea battle with the great naval forces of Carthage, and they twice met and beat the navies of Carthage, once in 260 B.C. and again four years later. Thus, having command of the sea, they ventured to send an army into Africa, against Carthage itself, but there they suffered a very heavy defeat and their general was taken captive. The Carthaginians were much aided in this victory by Spartan mercenaries. But the fate of Sicily, where there were both Roman and Carthaginian armies, remained to be decided. The war went on, with varying results, in and around that unfortunate island, with now the one nation and now the other gaining a victory, until a decision was at length reached by a great victory of the Romans in 241 B.C. This war had lasted twenty-seven years.

And here we may note a point in which Rome seems to have been like our own country, of which {173} Napoleon I. complained that she always won "the last battle of a war." Many times we see her very hardly pressed, with the enemy at the gates of the city; but she goes on fighting and she wins the last battle, the battle which counts and which settles the result in her favour.

This was more particularly so in the Second Punic War, which began in 219 B.C.

Carthage had very great trouble with her own mercenary troops at the end of the first war against Rome; they demanded their pay, which was long overdue. That matter was largely settled by such heavy fighting between them and the Carthaginians themselves that comparatively few of the mercenaries were left alive at the end of it to receive pay, if there had been any for them.

In the years that followed, Carthage became rich and prosperous. She had a large trade with the interior of Africa as well as with all the coast cities round the Mediterranean. She worked mines in Spain, and in order to draw more wealth from that rich and fertile country she gradually made herself mistress of a great part of it, and it was the capture by Carthage of Saguntum, a city in southern Spain, which was in the Roman alliance, that led to the outbreak in 219 B.C. of the Second Punic War.

[Sidenote: Hannibal]

The Carthaginian general who captured Saguntum, and thus provoked this greatest of the three Punic Wars, was Hannibal, perhaps the most famous leader of armies in all history.

In telling this story of the world in mere outline, as I am trying to tell it, it is impossible to speak of any of the details of his extraordinary campaign. He had his army there in southern Spain. He marched with it, {174} meeting no very serious opposition, through Spain into that northern part of Italy which was then part of Gaul, and he thence descended into southern Italy and into the very heart of the Roman country itself. He won three great victories over the Roman armies on the way, and finally, a fourth, at Cannæ, in the autumn of 216 B.C., three years after he set out from Spain; and after Cannæ Rome herself seemed to lie at his mercy.

[Illustration: HANNIBAL.]

Why he did not at once press on and lay siege to the city is one of the puzzles of history. His army had been continuously marching and fighting; he may have thought that it needed rest. Almost certainly he expected further forces to be sent him from Carthage. But these forces did not come.

[Sidenote: Battle of Zama]

There were several rival parties in Carthage itself, and it seems likely that there was jealousy of Hannibal's great successes. Whatever the reason, the help he expected was very long in coming. He stayed on in Italy with his army which had been so victorious. The Romans would not come to another fixed battle with him, but they hovered about his army, continually harassing it. Probably it lost much of its fighting force in this time of waiting. It was not until nine years after Cannæ that Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, was sent with an army to his help, and by that time the Romans had so recovered their strength that they met and defeated, on the Metaurus, this army of Hasdrubal's; and it was really this great battle that settled the war. It left Hannibal helpless for any big fighting in Italy. {175} It left the Romans free to make their power firm again in Spain. They were so little troubled by the presence of Hannibal, in his present condition, in Italy, that they again sent a force oversea into Africa. This time their arms were completely successful over the Carthaginians and their African allies. The Carthaginians, in their alarm, recalled Hannibal, to see if his genius could save them. But it was too late. He was defeated in the battle of Zama, in 202 B.C., and therewith came the end of the Second Punic War.

Really it was the end of Carthage as a formidable rival to the power of Rome. In the arrangements which followed she was compelled to give up her fleet, to give up all her claims on Spain, and on the islands in the Mediterranean, and to be content with her possessions in Africa itself.

Again, Rome had won the last battle.

Why she did not meet her doom after Cannæ, we can never know. Had Hannibal pressed forward after that victory the whole course of the great story would probably have been quite different. To what extent the hand of Providence interferes at such moments of the story as these we cannot tell--or to what extent man is allowed to work out his own fortunes without that correcting hand. Undoubtedly there are certain moments when it looks very much as if Providence had actively intervened; and perhaps, in our ignorance, we had better not attempt to say more than that.

For more than fifty years, Rome had no trouble from Carthage, nor can she really have been very seriously troubled when, in 149 B.C., she declared the Third Punic War. Carthage had existed during that half-century as an opulent and large city. She had made alliance with some of the African peoples. There {176} were certain of the Romans who deemed her power dangerous. A pretext for a quarrel was easily found. Rome had now become so powerful that there was no question as to where the battle-fields of this war would be. There was no prospect of a Punic force in Italy or Sicily. The war, which began in 149, lasted for three years, for the Carthaginians within their walls made a desperate resistance which was worthy of their splendid history; but at the last they had to yield. No mercy was shown; the city was destroyed. Carthage ceased to exist.

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