Part 20

It would seem that population in those days partook of the nature of corn; for however thoroughly a people might be cut down and thrashed in one year, there was always an abundant supply for the sword of an enemy to go to work upon in the year following. The Gauls were accordingly to be found in full force within twelve months after their having been destroyed, and the consul, C. Flaminius, killed them all over again; but they still were numerous enough in body, and sufficiently poor in spirit, to acknowledge the sovereignty of their conquerors.

While the attention of Rome had been divided among her numerous foes, the remnant of the Carthaginians had been expanding with the usual rapidity, and had extended to Spain, where, under Hamilcar Barca, a Carthaginian empire was in the course of being established. Hamilcar's policy towards the Spaniards was bold and rather original, for he determined to win their affections by thoroughly beating them. Every blow he aimed produced a favourable impression, and the Spaniards were as ready as so many spaniels to lick the hands that were continually smiting them.

The system of Hamilcar was followed after his death by his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, who ruled in Spain for eight years, and who proved so good a ruler, that matters were kept as straight as could be desired. He was, however, assassinated at last by some culprit, who has eluded the vigilance of the historical detectives, for not even Niebuhr, who stands acknowledged as A 1, has been able to lay his finger on the criminal.

Hasdrubal was succeeded by the son of Hamilcar Barca, a young man, named Hannibal, whose precocity as a lad was exemplified by an awful oath, which he took at nine years old, under the direction of his father. Whether it was judicious of a parent to teach his son to swear, is a question for the moralist; but whether a child of nine could have understood the nature of an oath, is usually a question for a judge; and any intelligent reader may safely act as a judge in the matter alluded to.

The biographers of Hannibal have endeavoured to prove that he was that precocious nuisance, an infant prodigy, because, at the age of nine, he expressed a desire to accompany his father to the wars; though there is scarcely an infant of those tender years who, if asked "whether he would like to go with his papa," would not answer "yes," as a matter of course, without having the slightest notion where he might be going to. Young Hannibal is said to have learned the art of war in the camp, and to have gone into arms before he could be considered fairly out of them. Before leaving Carthage, his father administered to him a soldier's oath, and the boy swore like a trooper that he would be Rome's implacable enemy.

On succeeding to the command in Spain, he was twenty-six years old--a proof that promotion had been very rapid in his case; and, although merit may have had something to do with his rise, there can be little doubt that he owed much to interest. Adopting the policy of his predecessor, he attempted to engrave his name in the hearts of the Spaniards by the agency of the sword; and he may be said to have literally thrust himself upon them, though they were often bored to death by his too pointed attentions. All the South of Spain was under his thumb, with the exception of Saguntum, which had hitherto slipped through his fingers. He proceeded, therefore, to take it immediately in hand, when the Saguntines sent for assistance to Rome, whose Senate resolved unanimously that Hannibal could not attack the place; but when a copy of the resolution reached him, he had already begun besieging the city. He sent word to the ambassadors who brought the intelligence out, that they would display a sad want of intelligence if they ventured to come too near to him; and, as he had no time to go to them, they had better retire. Acting upon his suggestion, they repaired to Carthage, where they demanded that Hannibal should be given up; and there being some hesitation among the Carthaginian Senate, Q. Fabius, one of the Roman ambassadors, made a fold in his toga as if he had some mystery wrapped up in it. "Here," he exclaimed, "is either peace or war, whichever you prefer;" to which the Senate, in a spirit rather military than civil, replied, "Whichever you think proper." Fabius, throwing back his toga, and assuming an imposing attitude, exclaimed, "Then I offer you war;" when the Punic Senators, taking up his last word, raised through the senate-house a shout of "War," which, vibrating through every pillar, was conveyed by every post, and echo sent back an immediate answer.

This was a declaration of that Second Punic War, for which Hannibal began to prepare when Saguntum, after having held out for eight months, was starved into submission. Though rich in the precious metals, and particularly in silver, the Saguntines experienced the bitter truth, that to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth, is but an empty gratification, after all, when the spoon has nothing in it. Hannibal sacked the city, and converted into baggage all the loose silver he could find, which he kept in hand for the purpose of glutting the avarice of his troops, whose valour depended materially on other people's metal.

The battle of Saguntum was signalised by the introduction of a weapon called the Falarica, which was in one respect a species of firearm,--for its point was covered with flaming pitch and tow, that, when pitched with effect, carried fire into the ranks of an enemy. It was, perhaps, fortunate, that inventive ingenuity had not gone very far among a people who seemed only disposed to throw away the little they possessed of it, in the form of destructive missiles.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] Diod. 5.

[46] Aretæus de Morb. diut. Cur. i.

[47] The first public exhibition of the kind at Rome took place B.C. 244, at the funeral of the father of Marcus and Decius Brutus; but the Ædiles carried out the idea on what they considered a grand scale, and immense numbers of gladiators were sacrificed for the "amusement" of the people.

[48] It may be hinted to the student that the Dying Gladiator in the Museum at Rome is no gladiator, but a Gaul; and the collar round his neck, supposed to be a mark of disgrace, is, in fact, the Torques, a symbol of honour. The sculpture is Greek, and belongs to a period of Art long previous to the introduction of gladiatorial displays.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH.

THE SECOND PUNIC WAR.

We have now arrived at the great historical drama of the Second Punic War, which some authorities have divided into five acts; the principal part being undertaken by Hannibal, and the scenery being laid in Italy, Spain, Sicily, and Africa. The first act opens with the passage of Hannibal over the Alps, which forms one of the most remarkable passages in the life of that renowned soldier. In the second act we arrive at the taking of Capua; and in the third, we see Hannibal on the look-out for reinforcements, which never arrive from his brother Hasdrubal. The fourth act brings us to Italy, from which the Carthaginian commander makes a forced exit; and for the last act of all, the scene is changed to Africa, when the curtain and 20,000 Carthaginians fall together.

Hannibal having resolved on the part he was about to play, called together those who were to act with him in the stirring scenes in which he intended to figure. His company consisted of 90,000 foot, 12,000 horse, and an unrivalled stud of 37 elephants. With this troop he crossed the Pyrenees, by means of slopes, which nature had kindly provided, instead of platforms. The first incident of importance which happened on the way, was a mutiny among those, who, when they arrived at the foot of the mountain, protested against being brought to such a pass; and Hannibal wisely sent the discontented back, that the insubordination might go no further. Forty thousand foot retraced their steps, and 3000 horse backed out, on the opportunity being offered them. With the rest of his army, he reached the banks of the "arrowy Rhone," which he found particularly arrowy when he made an effort to cross; for he did so under a shower of darts from the Gauls, who thus pointedly objected to his progress. The hostility manifested towards the invaders was not simply on account of their appetite for conquest, but their appetite for food was productive of a most inconvenient scarcity. To provide every day for 60,000 soldiers was difficult enough, but there was something awful in the idea of the daily dinner-party being increased by 9000 hungry horses, and nearly 40 healthy elephants. The passage of the Rhone was a matter of considerable difficulty; for the horses stood plunging on the banks of the river, instead of plunging boldly into it. The elephants were still less tractable, and were, after much trouble, pushed or persuaded on to a raft, covered with earth and bushes, to make it resemble dry land; but it no sooner began to move, than the unwieldy animals felt themselves and their confidence seriously shaken. This caused them to crowd together to the edge; and, while taking this one-sided view of their position, they turned the matter over so completely, that they all fell in with one another, and most of them came to the same conclusion. Continuing his journey, Hannibal arrived at the bottom of the Alps, and, coming to the foot of St. Bernard, he extracted from the foot all the corn he could lay his hands upon. The weather was, unfortunately, so severe that the cold nearly broke his army up into shivers; while provisions were so scarce that at one time there seemed to be no chance of anything to eat but ice, and though the air was thoroughly gelid, it was impossible to live on it. Tradition tells us, that when Hannibal came to this point of his journey he found two brothers in the middle of a fight for a crown; but what was the country to which the crown belonged, or whether the article was a mere bauble that had been picked up in the road, or whether the crown was a sum of money representing the stake for which the brothers fought, we have no means of determining. The combatants, at all events, agreed that Hannibal should arbitrate between them; when, adopting the principle of "Age before honesty," he adjudged the article in dispute to the elder of the litigants. The decision did not involve any very remarkable acuteness on the part of the umpire, who seems simply to have sided with the big brother against the little one. The successful claimant was so delighted with the judgment delivered in his favour, that he placed a large stock of clothes, for the army, at the disposal of Hannibal. Some fearful misfits arose from this neglect of the wholesome maxim, "Measures, not men," for there was not a man whose measure could have been properly taken.

It was now time to undertake the ascent of the Alps, and to commence operations on a scale so grand, that all former experience in scaling a height, was little better than useless. Many of the soldiers at the sight of the mountains, instead of rising with the occasion, sunk with it into a fainting state; and others objected to venture into the snow, on the ground that they did not understand the drift of it. Hannibal represented the whole affair as a mere nothing; and added, that the passage over the Alps was not such very up-hill work after all, for that men, women, and even children, had often been quite up to the work he now proposed to cut out for his army. "Soldiers!" he exclaimed, "you have no choice, except between certain famine on one side of the Alps, or fertile plains, which you may see plainly enough in your mind's eye, on the other." Hannibal having made this brief speech, was rewarded with loud cheers; the army followed him, and proceeding to the passes, he found them lined with Gauls; but he tore the lining out in the most merciless fashion.

On reaching the Valley of the Tarentaise, Hannibal was offered guides, whom, however, he distrusted; and refusing, therefore, to be led away by specious promises, he sent his baggage by way of experiment; intending, when he heard of the safe arrival of his soldiers' trunks, to despatch by the same route their entire body. When the elephants came within a stone's throw of the Gauls, the latter hurled down rocks in vast masses on the affrighted beasts, and snowballed them with the snow from the loftiest part of the mountains. The assailants, however, completely missed their aim, for Hannibal threw himself upon them, and succeeded in completely crushing them.

It was a fine October morning when the Carthaginian general set out to cross the Alps by the road over the Little St. Bernard, and after a nine days' march, which was at that time a nine days' wonder, he reached the top of the mountain. The fatigue endured by Hannibal and his army cannot be described, and the toils of the journey were aggravated by the chance of their falling into the toils and snares of the enemy. Little passed their lips in the shape of food, and very little passed their lips in a contrary direction, for they were afraid to speak, lest their words should disturb the impending avalanche. The way was rugged, save where it was carpeted by the snow; but even where it was trodden hard enough to serve as a sort of track or guide, they could scarcely trust to it, for it gave them the slip every now and then in the most unsatisfactory manner. On the tenth day they began their descent: and they, perhaps, little thought at the moment that in quitting the top of the Alps they were coming down to posterity. The two first days slid away merrily enough over the ice and snow, but on the third they arrived at a point where the ground had slipped out of its place, and left to the enterprising travellers a far from eligible opening.

The shifting of the earth had, in fact, put them to the most perplexing shifts, for the old road had perversely gone out of its way to baffle the travellers, and lay at the distance of 1000 feet below them. As Hannibal looked down upon the chasm, his spirits fell for a moment; but he speedily rallied, and determined, rather than allow his army to perish with cold, that he would make a way with them. Nature, however, opposed him by means of a mass of rock; and as he and Nature were at variance, he began to think how he could best split the difference. How he made his way cannot be confidently stated, though several of the learned,[49] who have gone deeply into the subject, have come out of it in opposite directions; and the authorities cannot be said to clash, for they are as wide apart as possible. Tradition, who never fails to take a trenchant way of getting through a difficulty, settles the point at once, by attributing to vinegar the success of Hannibal's scheme; but the vinegar must have been sharp indeed to have cut asunder the rocks which barred the progress of the illustrious traveller.

It is difficult, also, to conceive how he could have carried with him the liquid in sufficient abundance to enable him to accomplish the object he had in view, and we are inclined to the belief that it was by continued assiduity, rather than by a mere acid, that the wondrous task was effected. A good-sized cruet full of vinegar would produce no impression on a common pebble, and when we imagine how many hogsheads after hogsheads must have been necessary to moisten the rocks through which Hannibal passed, it can only be the sheerest pig-headedness that would still obstinately adhere to the supposition we have stated.

The passage of Hannibal over the Alps may be regarded literally as one of the grandest passages in history. Though subsequent generals have, in some degree, generalised the achievement, the special merit of it belongs to the Carthaginian leader, whose superiority over his followers consists in the fact that they did but find the way, while he might have claimed the credit of making it. The exploit of Napoleon has been compared to that of Hannibal, though the former, after all, did but follow what had been, for two thousand years, a beaten track; the latter being the individual who beat originally a track for himself, and thoroughly vanquished every obstacle.

At length, after having nearly lost himself in the Alps, Hannibal found himself, at the end of a journey of fifteen days, in the plain of Turin. On mustering his army, he discovered that considerable reductions had taken place in it; for the foot, which had stood at 50,000 when he crossed the Rhone, had now dwindled to less than half the number. He had lost 3000 horse, and his stock of elephants had materially diminished--the few that remained having become so thin, that there was a striking falling off in the material as well as the numbers of the body. So little had his visit been expected, that the Romans were not prepared for it; and Scipio, who ought to have been waiting at the foot of the Alps, did not arrive at Pavia until Hannibal had had time to recruit himself after his late fatigue. Here both armies met, and Scipio gave battle; but Hannibal's cavalry gave it to him in a sense more familiar than satisfactory. In the course of the engagement, the Roman general received a wound, which wound him up to the highest pitch of rage; and he would have exposed himself to certain death, if his son had not valiantly rushed between him and the enemy.

The Romans now began to rate each other for having underrated the strength of the foe; and Tib. Sempronius was recalled from Africa, where he was wasting his time by wasting the coast in the most unprofitable manner. Hannibal pitched his camp on the banks of the Trebia, where, among the bushes, he found for his army a convenient ambush. Sempronius had by this time joined Scipio, who was still a great invalid, and being generally indisposed, was not at all disposed for battle. Sempronius, on the other hand, thinking he should obtain all the glory that was to be acquired, felt eager for the fight; and Hannibal, from the other side of the river, assumed the most provoking attitude, in order to tempt the Romans to come after him.

At length, some of the guards became so irritated, that they volunteered into the cold-stream, and plunged into the icy river. There happened to be at the moment a fall of snow, which was taken by the wind into the faces of the soldiers, who, nevertheless, fought with bravery, though in appearance they seemed to exhibit a mass of white feathers. The Romans, though nearly frozen to death, were not only cool and collected, but eagerly sought, in the hope of warming themselves, the heat of the battle. They were, however, completely beaten, and retired to Placentia, from which the Consuls, with much self-complacency, sent to Rome an account of the battle, in which they attributed to the wind the blow they had sustained, and, plausibly suggesting the ice as the cause of their failure, they endeavoured to slip out of it.

Hannibal determined to pass the winter as quietly as he could, but he appears, according to the authorities,[50] to have indulged in a little masquerading, for the purpose of deceiving the Cisalpine Gauls, who more than once conspired to kill him. He would frequently change his dress; and he appears to have had a large assortment of wigs, in one or other of which he was accustomed to disguise himself. Sometimes he would appear in hair of the richest brown, and at other times it was of the reddest dye; so that the people were puzzled to understand how the same head could, on one day, appear covered with the luxuriant chestnut, and on another day, disfigured with an untidy bunch of carrots. On one occasion, when a conspiracy against him was ripe, he came to the council with a limping gait, and thus saved himself from a much more serious hobble.

In the spring of the next year, the Consul, C. Flaminius, was sent to Ariminum with an army, and Hannibal started for Etruria. This expedition--if expedition is the proper term for an affair so extremely slow--lasted three days and three nights; the soldiers proceeding through marsh and morass, through thick and thin, to the end of their journey. The Spaniards went first, who picked their way, followed by the Gauls, who stuck in the mud, and were spurred on by the swords of the Numidians, who followed. All the horses were knocked up, and Hannibal, to whom all the glory of the march has been given, endured the least of the fatigue, for, while the common soldiers were wading through the mud, their chief was elevated on the back of the only surviving elephant.

The advantages of a high position were, in this instance, strikingly exemplified, for if Hannibal had moved in the humbler walks on this occasion, the probability is, that he could not have walked at all; but that, sinking in the marshes, he would have gone down--in a swamp--to posterity. He, himself, lost the use of one of his eyes, though, indeed, he exhibited throughout this disastrous affair an unusual amount of shortsightedness. After reaching Fæsulæ, now Fiesole, near Florence, he made for Rome, and Flaminius made after him as far as Cortona; but Hannibal, turning sharp round the corner of the Lake Trasimenus; ran unperceived up the heights, getting round to the rear of the Roman general, who thought the foe was still in front of him. While Flaminius was pressing forward, Hannibal and his forces fell upon him right and left, as well as behind, and a fog coming on at the time added to the perplexity of the Consul, by preventing him from seeing his danger. A fight in a fog is one of the most dismal pictures that can be described, if, indeed, it can be called a picture at all, when nothing can be seen, and the whole is a mere daub, caused by a fearful brush between two conflicting armies. Such was the fury of the fight, that it is said an earthquake, which happened at the time, was unperceived by the combatants; and, indeed, so shocking was the carnage, that a shock of nature might have sunk by its side into comparative insignificance. 15,000 Romans were slain, and those who are always ready to prophecy after an event, began to see clearly in certain omens that had happened some time before, the cause of all that had lately happened.

A shower of stones had fallen at Picenum, but it does not appear whether those who told the story of the stones had a hand in throwing them. In Gaul a wolf had swallowed the sword of a sentinel; and in Cœre the answers of the oracle were suddenly written in smaller characters--a proof only that the oracle had got from text into round-hand--the ordinary result of improved penmanship.

The battle had undoubtedly been fearful in its results, for Flaminius himself was slain; and 15,000 Romans having been cut to pieces, were thrown into a brook, which still bears the name of Sanguinetta, from its being turned into the colour of blood, though the statement is too extravagant to have the colour of probability. The horrors of the war were great enough without the aid of exaggeration, and though the instances of suffering were no doubt great, we are inclined to doubt the story, that the Numidians went without their allowance of wine, in order to wash the feet of their horses; for, though the animals might have been unable to do without their hock, they could surely have dispensed with their Falernian.