into the Carthaginian treasury the sum of a talent daily.1 The tribute levied on the conquered Africans was paid in kind, as is the case with the rayahs of Turkey to the present day, and its apportionment and collection were doubtless liable to the same abuses and gave rise to the same enormities as those of which Europe has lately heard so much. Hence arose that universal disaffection, or rather that deadly hatred, on the part of her foreign subjects, and even of the Phoenician dependencies, towards Carthage, on which every invader of Africa could safely count as his surest support. Hence the ease with which Agathocles, with his small army of fifteen thousand men, could overrun the open country, and the monotonous uniformity with which he entered, one after another, two hundred towns, which Carthaginian jealousy had deprived of their walls, hardly needing to strike a blow. Hence, too, the horrors of the revolt of the outraged Libyan mercenaries, supported as it was by the free-will contributions of their golden ornaments by the Libyan women, who hated their oppressors as perhaps women only can, and which is known in history by the name of the "War without Truce," or the "Inexpiable War."

3

It must, however, be borne in mind that the inherent differences of manners, language, and race between the native of Africa and the Phoenician incomer were so great; the African was so unimpressible, and the Phoenician was so little disposed to understand, or to assimilate himself to his surroundings, that, even if the Carthaginian government had been conducted with an equity, and the taxes levied with a moderation which we know was far from being the case, a gulf profound and impassable must probably have always separated the two peoples. This was the fundamental, the ineradicable weakness of the Carthaginian Empire, and in the long run outbalanced all the advantages obtained for her by her navies, her ports, and her wellstocked treasury; by the energies and the valour of her Livy, xxxiv. 62. 2 Diod. Sic. xx. 17 ad fin. 3 Polyb. i. 72 4-5.

I

DISAFFECTION OF SUBJECT RACES.

45

citizens; and by the consummate genius of three, at least, of her generals. It is this, and this alone, which in some measure reconciles us to the melancholy, nay the hateful termination of the struggle, on the history of which we are about to enter:

Men are we, and must grieve when e'en the name
Of that which once was great has passed away.

But if under the conditions of ancient society, and the savagery of the warfare which it tolerated, there was an unavoidable necessity for either Rome or Carthage to perish utterly, we must admit, in spite of the sympathy which the brilliancy of the Carthaginian civilisation, the heroism of Hamilcar and Hannibal, and the tragic catastrophe itself call forth, that it was well for the human race that the blow fell on Carthage rather than on Rome. A universal Carthaginian empire could have done for the world, as far as we can see, nothing comparable to that which the Roman universal empire did for it. It would not have melted down national antipathies, it would not have given a common literature or language, it would not have prepared the way for a higher civilisation and an infinitely purer religion. Still less would it have built up that majestic fabric of law which forms the basis of the legislation of all the states of Modern Europe and America.

CHAPTER II.

CARTHAGE AND SICILY.

(735-310 B.C.)

Wars between Carthage and Sicilian Greeks-First appearance of Greeks in Sicily--Their gradual spread-Battle of Himera-Second Carthaginian invasion of Sicily-Third invasion and its incidents-Exploits of Dionysius-Siege of Motye-Fourth invasion-Strange vicissitudes and possible importance of the conflict-Comparative merits of Greek and Carthaginian rule in Sicily-Conflicting stories about Hamilcar at Himera-River Halycus fixed as boundary-Timoleon-Magnificent Carthaginian armament - Battle of Crimesus - Agathocles invades Africa and threatens Carthage.

BEFORE we enter on the history of the long struggle between the Romans and Carthaginians for the possession of Sicily, it is necessary to give some account of the less known and much longer series of wars which had been waged for the same object between the Carthaginians and the Greeks. Our knowledge of these wars comes to us, as was to be expected, exclusively from Greek sources; and the same caution with which we receive from the Roman writers indiscriminate charges of cruelty and of bad faith against their formidable antagonists in the Punic wars, is necessary, perhaps even more necessary, here. If we cannot often prove that the charges brought are groundless, we can, at least, always remember that they are one-sided. The light thrown by the Sicilian wars on the inner life of the Carthaginians is scanty enough, but where our materials are so meagre, we must make the best of even that little; and some facts, at least, come out which are alike interesting and suggestive.

PHOENICIANS AND GREEKS IN SICILY.

47

From very early times, as we have seen, the Phoenicians had occupied every coign of vantage on the coast of Sicily and its adjacent islands, and had from thence carried on their peaceful warfare with the natives of the interior.1 But about the eighth century a still more adventurous and gifted people appeared upon the scene. The Phoenicians, true to their general policy, to attempt to hold nothing by war which they could not hold without it, and to trade with those countries only where trade was its own passport and its own security, retired gradually before the incomers, and would, very possibly, have disappeared altogether from the island, had not Carthage, endowed as she was with all the colonising and commercial aptitudes of Tyre, as well as with a capacity for empire which Tyre never had, stept into the place which the mother-city declined to fill, and entered upon that vigorous and aggressive policy which was one day to make the Western Mediterranean a Carthaginian lake.

But the spread of the Greek colonies in Sicily was not rapid. Naxos and Syracuse, Catana and Leontini had been founded, about B.C. 735, on its eastern coast, for, perhaps, half a century before we hear of the Greeks advancing even as far west as Gela; nor was it till another half century or thereabouts had passed away, that we find them at Himera, and Selinus threatening, or seeming to threaten, the Carthaginians in the western corner of the island to which they had retreated. But Carthage was still peacefully inclined. She loved a quiet life, and it was not till after Mago, about 530 B.C., had extended her home domain in Africa, and till Mago's son Hasdrubal had annexed Sardinia, that any serious attempt was made by her to recover the ground which had been lost.3

At the head of a vast and motley army, drawn from all the countries to which the Carthaginian fleets had access, Hamilcar, the second son of Mago, landed in Sicily in the year 480. The great battle of Himera lasted from morning I Thucyd. v. 2. Thucyd. vi. 3-4. 3 Justin, xix. 1.1-4

2

to evening, and it ended, as we have already seen, in the complete rout of the Carthaginian 3. Hamilcar, who, throughout the battle, had, in his twofold capacity of Shofete and commander-in-chief, been sacrificing to the gods of Carthage, when he found that his efforts were of no avail disappeared, and was seen no more.1 The Carthaginians, with characteristic prudence, fell back once again on the three original Phoenician fortresses of Motye, Parnormus, and Soloeis, and from their retirement there looked on complacently for the next seventy years at the incessant revolutions and counter-revolutions which were as the breath of life to their ever restless yet ever prosperous Greek neighbours.2

At last, in B.C. 410, the half-native and, as it was believed half-Trojan city of Egesta, which, by its appeal to Athens for aid against Selinus, had brought on Sicily and Greece alike the calamities of the Syracusan expedition, made a similar appeal to Carthage, and so kindled the flames of that new war, or rather series of wars, which, with fitful intermissions, devastated the island for a century and a half. The Carthaginians hesitated long, we are told, before renewing the venture which, seventy years before, had ended so disastrously.3 But at last the die was cast. It was an evil day for the Greek cities of Sicily. Hannibal, grandson of the Hamilcar who had fallen at Himera, and therefore, as Diodorus remarks, a born enemy of the Greeks, took the command. Selinus fell almost at the first attack its inhabitants were slaughtered, and its splendid walls and temples levelled with the ground. The majestic columns which it was long thought that nothing but an earthquake could have overthrown, still show, it is said, marks of the Carthaginian crowbars which were used to overturn them. Himera shared the fate of Selinus.5 To a message from the Syracusans begging that he would admit

I Herod. vii. 165–167.

3 Diod. xiii. 43.

5 Ibid. xiii. 56-58.

4

2 Thucyd. vi. 17.

4 Ibid. l. c. : φύσει μισέλλην.