MATRI MEE,

CUJUS NOMEN VIVÆ

HUIC OPUSCULO PRÆTEXI DEBUERAT,

QUOD MATERNO AMORE INCEPTUM FOVEBAT,

MORTUÆ PERACTUM

AMANTISSIMUS DEDICO.

820626

PREFACE.

THE PAGES which follow are an attempt, within moderate limits, but from a careful study of all the materials which have come down to us, to give as complete a picture as possible of Ancient Carthage and of her two greatest citizens—the only two of whom we have any minute or personal knowledge— Hamilcar Barca and Hannibal. The materials themselves are extremely fragmentary. The medium through which they are presented to us is distorted, and I am only too conscious of my own want of skill in handling them; but, whatever the deficiency of the materials and whatever my own shortcomings, I cannot help feeling that I have worked to ill effect if I have failed to awaken in the minds of my readers something of that enthusiasm for the subject, and that keen desire to pursue it further, which, for some years past, has made the labour I have imposed upon myself a labour of love.

Whether any such enthusiasm or desire can ever be adequately gratified is a different question, and

one which I venture to think does not necessarily affect its intrinsic value. In history, as in other pursuits-more especially, perhaps, in those branches of history in which the present age has made such rapid advances, the study of long-buried seats of empire, of extinct creeds, and of vanished civilisations—the chase is, in a certain sense, worth more than the game, and the effort than the result. If by such studies-by the endeavour to picture to ourselves whole races which have long since disappeared, and altars which have long been overturned-the imagination, as we cannot doubt, is awakened and the sympathies enlarged; if we are driven to take a wider and therefore a truer view of the dealings of God with man; to recognise more frankly amidst the endless diversities of the human race its fundamental and substantial unity; to press more closely home to ourselves those questions which are never old and never new-questions always to be asked and never adequately to be answered—of the Why and the What, the Whence and the Whither of a being who has such grovelling desires and such noble aspirations, whose capacities are so boundless and whose performances are so sorry, who is so great and yet so little, so evanescent and yet so lasting— we may well rest content if we rise from the attempt with a feeling of stimulus rather than of satiety, of unrest rather than repose.

It is possible, indeed, that more extensive excavations on the site of the Byrsa and its neighbourhood

may, hereafter, prove that the Romans did not com plete their work of destruction so thoroughly as they imagined, and that the very rapidity with which they endeavoured to carry out old Cato's resolve-destroying everything at Carthage which they could seewas the means of preserving something at least which they did not see. It is possible that the further discovery of Phoenician inscriptions among the numerous islands and coasts over which the influence of that ubiquitous people once extended may increase our knowledge of the Carthaginian language, and may give us a longer list of Carthaginian proper names. It is possible that Marseilles may contain other tablets like that famous one discovered in 1845, when a house was being pulled down—a tablet which actually fixes the tariff of prices to be paid for the victims offered to Baal-and that the recesses of the Lebanon may still conceal another priceless remnant of Phoenician. antiquity, such as that statue of Baal in a sitting posture, which perished only a few years ago, just before a great Phoenician scholar arrived in the country, and, by a cruel fate which is not without precedent in such matters, heard, at the same moment, of its existence and destruction. If so, we may one day be able to picture to ourselves more vividly that worship of Baal and of Ashtoreth which is as interesting to the student of Biblical as of Carthaginian history. It is possible, once more, that some of the lost books, or fragments of the lost books, of