of government given to the "allies" and municipia in Italy proper. Unfortunately, Rome proved unable to devise a new form of government, and she fell back upon the idea of praefectures (§ 340). The new acquisitions became strictly subject possessions of Rome, and they were ruled much as the praefectures were in Italy.

Sicily, the first possession outside of Italy (241 B.C.), was managed temporarily by a Roman praetor; but in 227, when some semblance of order had been introduced into Sardinia and Corsica, the Senate adopted a permanent plan of government for all these islands. Two additional praetors, it was decided, should be elected each year, one to rule Sicily, the other for the two other islands. The two governments received the name of provinces.

1

This was the beginning of the provincial system that was to spread finally far beyond these "suburbs of Italy." Soon afterward Cisalpine Gaul was organized in a like manner, though it was not given the title of a province until much later.

IV. THE SECOND PUNIC WAR (SOMETIMES STYLED "THE WAR FOR SPAIN "2), 218-202 B.C.

370. Occasion. Carthage was not ready to resign the sovereignty of the Western Mediterranean without another struggle. Rome's policy of "blunder and plunder" in seizing Sardinia gave her excuse enough to renew the contest if she could find leaders and resources. These were both furnished by the great Barca family.

Hamilcar Barca had been the greatest general and the only hero of the First Punic War. From Rome's high-handed treachery in Sardinia he imbibed a deathless hatred for that state; and immediately after putting down the War of the Mercenaries he began to prepare for another conflict. Το

1 The features of the system are treated in §§ 414-417.

2 Spain was the important territory that passed to Rome as a result of the war, but the struggle did not begin as a war for Spain.

offset the loss of the great Mediterranean islands, he sought to extend Carthaginian dominion over Spain. The mines of that country, he saw, would furnish the needful wealth, and its hardy tribes, when disciplined, would make an infantry which might meet even the legions of Rome.

371. Hannibal. When Hamilcar was about to cross to Spain, in 236, he swore his son Hannibal at the altar to eternal hostility to Rome, Hannibal was then a boy of nine years. He followed Hamilcar to the wars, and, as a youth, became a dashing cavalry officer and the idol of the soldiery. He used his camp leisure to store his mind with all the culture of Greece. At twenty-six he succeeded to the command in Spain. In rare degree he possessed the ability to secure the devotion of fickle, mercenary troops. He was a statesman of a high order, and possibly the greatest captain in history. The Second Punic War takes its keenest interest from his dazzling career, and even the Roman historians called that struggle the "War with Hannibal."

No friendly pen has left us a record of Hannibal. Roman annalists, indeed, have sought to stain his fame with envious slander. But, through it all, his character shines out chivalrous, noble, heroic.' Says Colonel Dodge: "Putting aside Roman hate, there is not in history a figure more noble in purity, more radiant in patriotism, more heroic in genius, more pathetic in its misfortunes."

372. Hannibal at Saguntum; Rome declares War, 218 B.C. - Hannibal continued the work of his great father in Spain. He made the southern half of that rich land a Carthaginian province and organized it thoroughly. Then he rapidly carried the Carthaginian frontier to the Ebro, collected a magnificent army of over a hundred thousand men, and besieged Saguntum, an ancient Greek colony near the east coast.

1 On Hannibal, read Mommsen, II, 243-245; Ihne, II, 147-152, 170, 190, 191, 251; Smith's Rome and Carthage; and, if accessible, Dodge's Hannibal, 614653.

Fearing Carthaginian advance, Saguntum had sought Roman alliance; and now, when Carthage refused to recall Hannibal, Rome, in alarm and anger, declared war (218 B.C.).

373. Hannibal's Invasion of Italy to Cannae. The Second Punic War (218-202 B.C.) was somewhat shorter than the First, but it was an even more strenuous struggle. Rome had intended to take the offensive: indeed, she dispatched one consul in a leisurely way to Spain, and started the other for Africa by way of Sicily. But Hannibal's audacious rapidity threw into confusion all his enemy's plans. In five months he had crossed the Pyrenees and the Rhone, fighting his way through the Gallic tribes; forced the unknown passes of the Alps, under conditions that made it a feat paralleled only by Alexander's passage of the Hindukush; and, leaving the bones of three fourths his army between the Ebro and the Po, startled Italy by appearing in Cisalpine Gaul, with twentysix thousand "heroic shadows."

With these "emaciated scarecrows" the same fall he swiftly destroyed two hastily gathered Roman armies at the Ticinus and at the Trebia. Then the recently pacified Gallic tribes rallied turbulently to swell his ranks. The following spring he crossed the Apennines, caught a Roman army of forty thousand men, blinded with morning mist, near Lake Trasimene, and annihilated it, and then carried fire and sword through Italy.

374. Cannae. The wary Roman dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, adopted the wise tactics of delay,' to wear out Hannibal and to gain breathing time for Rome. But popular demagogues murmured that the Senate protracted the war to gain glory for the aristocratic generals, and the following summer the new consuls were given ninety thousand men far the largest army Rome had ever put in the field with orders to crush the daring invader. The result was the battle

1 From which we get the term "Fabian Policy." Fabius was given the nickname "Cunctator" (Laggard) by the Roman populace.

of Cannae "a carnival of cold steel, a butchery, not a battle." Hannibal lost six thousand men. Rome lost sixty thousand dead and twenty thousand prisoners. A consul, a fourth of the senators, nearly all the officers, and over a fifth of the fighting population of the city, perished. The camps of her two armies fell into Carthaginian hands, and Hannibal sent home a bushel of gold rings from the hands of fallen Roman nobles.1

375. Fidelity of the Latins and Italians to Rome. The victory, however, yielded little fruit. Hannibal's only real chance within Italy had been that brilliant victories might break up the Italian confederacy and bring over to his side the subjects of Rome. Accordingly, he freed his Italian prisoners without ransom, proclaiming that he warred only on Rome and that he came to liberate Italy.

The mountain tribes of the south, eager for plunder, did join him, as did one great city, Capua. Three years later, too, a cruel Roman blunder drove some of the Greek towns into his arms. But the other cities-colonies, Latins, or Alliesclosed their gates as resolutely as Rome herself, and so gave marvelous testimony to the excellence of Roman rule and to the national spirit it had fostered. 376. Rome's Grandeur in Disaster. - Rome's own greatness showed grandly in the hour of terror after Cannae, when any other people would have given up the conflict in despair. A plot among some faint-hearted nobles to abandon Italy was stifled in the camp; and the surviving consul, Varro, courageously set himself to reorganize the pitiful wreckage of his army. Before the end of the year, another army under a new

1 Special reports: (1) The heroic story of the marvelous passage of the Alps; (2) Trasimene; (3) Cannae. (Good accounts of these battles, with excellent maps, are given in How and Leigh.) (4) Why did Hannibal not attack Rome itself after Cannae? (5) Hannibal in South Italy after Cannae.

2 Varro had been elected in a bitter partisan struggle, as the champion of the democratic party, against the unanimous opposition of the Aristocracy. With undoubted merits in personal character, he had proved utterly lack