CHAPTER VI.

THE WINNING OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN,

264-146 B.C.

I. THE RIVALS - ITALY AND CARTHAGE.

356. Italy now One of Five Great Mediterranean States. By 266 B.C. Roman conquest had united all Italy (§ 335). One hundred twenty years more made this united Italy mistress of the Mediterranean lands. For some time the dominion of that world had been held by the three great Greek kingdoms in the East (§ 247) and by Carthage in the West. Now between them stood forth this new power, destined to absorb them all. The existence of Italy as a real force in the world had been revealed by the repulse of Pyrrhus. Eastern Greek scholars had begun at once to study keenly the institutions and history of the new state, but for some time longer its important political relations were with the West.

Plainly the im

357. Carthage the only Rival in the West. mediate rival of Rome was Carthage, although the two powers had just been joined in a close alliance against Pyrrhus. That gallant adventurer had left Italy with the longing exclamation on his lips, "How fair a battle-field we are leaving to the Romans and Carthaginians"; and in less than ten years, the hundred-year conflict began. Carthage was an ancient Phoenician colony on the finest harbor in North Africa. Her government was an oligarchic republic. She had long contended with the Greeks for dominance in the western Mediterranean, and she was now at the height of her power. Polybius called her the richest city in the world. To her

1 An excellent treatment is given in Mommsen, bk. iii. ch. i. favorable view in Ihne, II. 3-21. See also Polybius, bk. i. chs. li.-lvi.

A more

old naval supremacy, she had added recently a vast land dominion, including North Africa (with some three hundred cities and indefinite territory roamed over by the nomads of the interior) and most of Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily. The western Mediterranean she regarded as a Punic Lake: foreign sailors caught trespassing there were cast into the

integrity, and with biting irony they invented the term, "Punic faith," as a synonym for treachery. The slander became embalmed in speech, but it seems baseless. Carthage herself is "a dumb actor on the stage of history"; she once had poetry, oratory, and philosophy, but none of it was to escape Roman hate, to tell us how Carthaginians had thought and felt. Rome wrote the history, and certainly was not generous to her rival; but even from the Roman story, the charge of faithlessness and greed is most apparent against Rome in all the dealings of the two rivals. However, the civilization of Carthage was apparently of an Oriental type; her religion was largely the cruel and licentious worship of the Phoenician Baal and Astarte; her armies were a motley mass of mercenaries

1 From a form of the word Phoenician.

315 paid by the profits of her commerce; and though, like the mother Phoenician states (§ 58), she scattered widely the seeds of a material culture, like them also, as contrasted with Greeks and Romans, she showed no power of assimilating inferior or barbarous nations. The conquests of Rome were to be Romanized, but six centuries of Punic rule had left the Berber tribes of Africa wholly outside Carthaginian society; nor did her briefer rule in Spain or Sicily give promise of better results.

The contrast between the political systems of the two rivals is equally striking. Says Mommsen (II. 155):

"Carthage dispatched her overseers everywhere, and loaded even the old Phoenician cities with a heavy tribute, while her subject tribes were practically treated as state slaves. In this way there was not in the compass of the Carthagino-African state a single community, with the exception of Utica, that would not have been politically and materially benefited by the fall of Carthage; in the Romano-Italic there was not one that had not much more to lose than to gain in rebelling against a government which was careful to avoid injuring material interests, and which never, at least by extreme measures, challenged political opposition."

358. The Issue at Stake. Thus, whatever our sympathy for Carthage and her hero leaders, we must see that the victory of Rome was a necessary condition for the welfare of the human race. It was the conflict of Greece and Persia repeated by more stalwart actors on a western stage (§ 176).

II. THE FIRST PUNIC WAR (THE WAR FOR SICILY).

359. Occasion. -The Roman suzerainty over the Greeks of south Italy led inevitably to relations with the other half of Magna Graecia in Sicily. That great island is really a continuation of the Italian peninsula, and it reaches to within ninety miles of the African coast. A sunken ridge on the bed of the sea shows that it once helped to join the two continents, between which it still forms a stepping-stone. European and African had struggled for this middle land for centuries; and for centuries yet to come it was to be the wrestling ground be tween European Romans and Normans and African Vandals and Moors. In 265 B.C., the island had been divided for two hundred years between Syracuse and Carthage (§§ 155, 168, 174, 217). In that year the "Mamertines," a band of Campanian mercenaries calling themselves Sons of Mars, seized Messana from Hiero II., tyrant of Syracuse. To protect themselves, one faction of the robbers then called in Carthage, and another party appealed to Rome as the protector of the Italian Greeks. Both Syracuse and Carthage were allies of Rome, and it was not easy for that state to find excuse for defending the robbers; but after long deliberation the desire to check Carthage and to extend Roman power outweighed all caution, as well as all moral considerations and the traditions of ancient policy. The senate, indeed, could come to no decisive resolve; but the tribes, to whom it referred the question, felt a masterful consciousness of their power, and, at their vote, in 264 B.C., Roman legions for the first time crossed the seas. Says Mommsen, with his usual glorification of an imperial policy:

"It was one of those moments when calculation fails, and when faith alone in men's own and their country's destiny gives courage to grasp the hand that beckons out of the darkness of the future and to follow it one knows not whither."

360. Strength of the Parties.

Carthage was mistress of a huge but scattered and heterogeneous empire. Rome was