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    build, in lieu of this their fortified sea-port, an inland town,
    not less than ten miles' distance from the sea, only it must have no
    walls or fortifications of any kind. As soon as the inhabitants were
    gone, Carthage, the consuls said, was to be destroyed.

    The announcement of this entirely unparalleled and intolerable
    requisition threw the whole city into a phrensy of desperation. They
    could not, and would not submit to this. The entreaties and
    remonstrances of the friends of the hostages were all silenced or
    overborne in the burst of indignation and anger which arose from the
    whole city. The gates were closed. The pavements of the streets were
    torn up, and buildings demolished to obtain stones, which were
    carried up upon the ramparts to serve instead of weapons. The slaves
    were all liberated, and stationed on the walls to aid in the defense.
    Every body that could work at a forge was employed in fabricating
    swords, spear-heads, pikes, and such other weapons as could be formed
    with the greatest facility and dispatch. They used all the iron and
    brass that could be obtained, and then melted down vases and statues
    of the precious metals, and tipped their spears with an inferior
    pointing of silver and gold. In the same manner, when the supplies of
    flax and hempen twine for cordage for their bows failed, the beautiful
    sisters and mothers of the hostages cut off their long hair, and
    twisted and braided it into cords to be used as bow-strings for
    propelling the arrows which their husbands and brothers made. In a
    word, the wretched Carthaginians had been pushed beyond the last limit
    of human endurance, and had aroused themselves to a hopeless
    resistance in a sort of phrensy of despair.

    The reader will recollect that, after the battle with Masinissa,
    Hasdrubal lost all his influence in Carthage, and was, to all
    appearance, hopelessly ruined. He had not, however, then given up the
    struggle. He had contrived to assemble the remnant of his army in the
    neighborhood of Carthage. His forces had been gradually increasing
    during these transactions, as those who were opposed to these
    concessions to the Romans naturally gathered around him. He was now in
    his camp, not far from the city, at the head of twenty thousand men.
    Finding themselves in so desperate an emergency, the Carthaginians
    sent to him to come to their succor. He very gladly obeyed the
    summons. He sent around to all the territories still subject to
    Carthage, and gathered fresh troops, and collected supplies of arms
    and of food. He advanced to the relief of the city. He compelled the
    Romans, who were equally astonished at the resistance they met with
    from within the walls, and at this formidable onset from without, to
    retire a little, and intrench themselves in their camp, in order to
    secure their own safety. He sent supplies of food into the city. He
    also contrived to fit up, secretly, a great many fire-ships in the
    harbor, and, setting them in flames, let them drift down upon the
    Roman fleet, which was anchored in supposed security in the bay. The
    plan was so skillfully managed that the Roman ships were almost all
    destroyed. Thus the face of affairs was changed. The Romans found
    themselves disappointed for the present of their prey. They confined
    themselves to their encampment, and sent home to the Roman senate for
    new re-enforcements and supplies.

    In a word, the Romans found that, instead of having only to effect,
    unresisted, the simple destruction of a city, they were involved in
    what would, perhaps, prove a serious and a protracted war. The war
    did, in fact, continue for two or three years--a horrible war, almost
    of extermination, on both sides. Scipio came with the Roman army, at
    first as a subordinate officer; but his bravery, his sagacity, and the
    success of some of his almost romantic exploits, soon made him an
    object of universal regard. At one time, a detachment of the army,
    which he succeeded in releasing from a situation of great peril in
    which they had been placed, testified their gratitude by platting a
    crown of _grass_, and placing it upon his brow with great ceremony and
    loud acclamations.

    The Carthaginians did every thing in the prosecution of this war that
    the most desperate valor could do; but Scipio's cool, steady, and
    well-calculated plans made irresistible progress, and hemmed them in
    at last, within narrower and narrower limits, by a steadily-increasing
    pressure, from which they found it impossible to break away.

    Scipio had erected a sort of mole or pier upon the water near the
    city, on which he had erected many large and powerful engines to
    assault the walls. One night a large company of Carthaginians took
    torches, not lighted, in their hands, together with some sort of
    apparatus for striking fire, and partly by wading and partly by
    swimming, they made their way through the water of the harbor toward
    these machines. When they were sufficiently near, they struck their
    lights and set their torches on fire. The Roman soldiers who had been
    stationed to guard the machines were seized with terror at seeing all
    these flashing fires burst out suddenly over the surface of the water,
    and fled in dismay. The Carthaginians set the abandoned engines on
    fire, and then, throwing their now useless torches into the flames,
    plunged into the water again, and swam back in safety. But all this
    desperate bravery did very little good. Scipio quietly repaired the
    engines, and the siege went on as before.

    But we can not describe in detail all the particulars of this
    protracted and terrible struggle. We must pass on to the closing
    scene, which as related by the historians of the day, is an almost
    incredible series of horrors. After an immense number had been killed
    in the assaults which had been made upon the city, besides the
    thousands and thousands which had died of famine, and of the exposures
    and hardships incident to such a siege, the army of Scipio succeeded
    in breaking their way through the gates, and gaining admission to the
    city. Some of the inhabitants were now disposed to contend no longer,
    but to cast themselves at the mercy of the conqueror. Others, furious
    in their despair, were determined to fight to the last, not willing to
    give up the pleasure of killing all they could of their hated enemies,
    even to save their lives. They fought, therefore, from street to
    street, retreating gradually as the Romans advanced, till they found
    refuge in the citadel. One band of Scipio's soldiers mounted to the
    tops of the houses, the roofs being flat, and fought their way there,
    while another column advanced in the same manner in the streets below.
    No imagination can conceive the uproar and din of such an assault upon
    a populous city--a horrid mingling of the vociferated commands of the
    officers, and of the shouts of the advancing and victorious
    assailants, with the screams of terror from affrighted women and
    children, and dreadful groans and imprecations from men dying maddened
    with unsatisfied revenge, and biting the dust in an agony of pain.

    The more determined of the combatants, with Hasdrubal at their head,
    took possession of the citadel, which was a quarter of the city
    situated upon an eminence, and strongly fortified. Scipio advanced to
    the walls of this fortification, and set that part of the city on fire
    which lay nearest to it. The fire burned for six days, and opened a
    large area, which afforded the Roman troops room to act. When the
    troops were brought up to the area thus left vacant by the fire, and
    the people within the citadel saw that their condition was hopeless,
    there arose, as there always does in such cases, the desperate
    struggle within the walls whether to persist in resistance or to
    surrender in despair. There was an immense mass, not far from sixty
    thousand, half women and children, who were determined on going out to
    surrender themselves to Scipio's mercy, and beg for their lives.
    Hasdrubal's wife, leading her two children by her side, earnestly
    entreated her husband to allow her to go with them. But he refused.
    There was a body of deserters from the Roman camp in the citadel, who,
    having no possible hope of escaping destruction except by desperate
    resistance to the last, Hasdrubal supposed would never yield. He
    committed his wife and children, therefore, to their charge, and these
    deserters, seeking refuge in a great temple within the citadel, bore
    the frantic mother with them to share their fate.

    Hasdrubal's determination, however, to resist the Romans to the last,
    soon after this gave way, and he determined to surrender. He is
    accused of the most atrocious treachery in attempting thus to save
    himself, after excluding his wife and children from all possibility of
    escaping destruction. But the confusion and din of such a scene, the
    suddenness and violence with which the events succeed each other, and
    the tumultuous and uncontrollable mental agitation to which they give
    rise, deprive a man who is called to act in it of all sense and
    reason, and exonerate him, almost as much, from moral responsibility
    for what he does, as if he were insane. At any rate, Hasdrubal, after
    shutting up his wife and children with a furious gang of desperadoes
    who could not possibly surrender, surrendered himself, perhaps hoping
    that he might save them after all.

    The Carthaginian soldiers, following Hasdrubal's example, opened the
    gates of the citadel, and let the conqueror in. The deserters were now
    made absolutely desperate by their danger, and some of them, more
    furious than the rest, preferring to die by their own hands rather
    than to give their hated enemies the pleasure of killing them, set the
    building in which they were shut up in on fire. The miserable inmates
    ran to and fro, half suffocated by the smoke and scorched by the
    flames. Many of them reached the roof. Hasdrubal's wife and children
    were among the number. She looked down from this elevation, the
    volumes of smoke and flame rolling up around her, and saw her husband
    standing below with the Roman general--perhaps looking, in
    consternation, for his wife and children, amid this scene of horror.
    The sight of the husband and father in a position of safety made the
    wife and mother perfectly furious with resentment and anger. "Wretch!"
    she screamed, in a voice which raised itself above the universal din,
    "is it thus you seek to save your own life while you sacrifice ours? I
    can not reach you in your own person, but I kill you hereby in the
    persons of your children." So saying, she stabbed her affrighted sons
    with a dagger, and hurled them down, struggling all the time against
    their insane mother's phrensy, into the nearest opening from which
    flames were ascending, and then leaped in after them herself to share
    their awful doom.

    The Romans, when they had gained possession of the city, took most
    effectual measures for its complete destruction. The inhabitants were
    scattered into the surrounding country, and the whole territory was
    converted into a Roman province. Some attempts were afterward made to
    rebuild the city, and it was for a long time a place of some resort,
    as men lingered mournfully there in huts that they built among the
    ruins. It, however, was gradually forsaken, the stones crumbled and
    decayed, vegetation regained possession of the soil, and now there is
    nothing whatever to mark the spot where the city lay.

    * * * * *

    War and commerce are the two great antagonistic principles which
    struggle for the mastery of the human race, the function of the one
    being to preserve, and that of the other to destroy. Commerce causes
    cities to be built and fields to be cultivated, and diffuses comfort
    and plenty, and all the blessings of industry and peace. It carries
    organization and order every where; it protects property and life; it
    disarms pestilence, and it prohibits famine. War, on the other hand,
    _destroys_. It disorganizes the social state. It ruins cities,
    depopulates fields, condemns men to idleness and want, and the only
    remedy it knows for the evils which it brings upon man is to shorten
    the miseries of its victims by giving pestilence and famine the most
    ample commission to destroy their lives. Thus war is the great enemy,
    while commerce is the great friend of humanity. They are antagonistic
    principles, contending continually for the mastery among all the
    organizations of men.

    When Hannibal appeared upon the stage, he found his country engaged
    peacefully and prosperously in exchanging the productions of the
    various countries of the then known world, and promoting every where
    the comfort and happiness of mankind. He contrived to turn all these
    energies into the new current of military aggression, conquest, and
    war. He perfectly succeeded. We certainly have in his person and
    history all the marks and characteristics of a great military hero. He
    gained the most splendid victories, devastated many lands,
    embarrassed and stopped the commercial intercourse which was carrying
    the comforts of life to so many thousand homes, and spread, instead of
    them, every where, privation, want, and terror, with pestilence and
    famine in their train. He kept the country of his enemies in a state
    of incessant anxiety, suffering, and alarm for many years, and
    overwhelmed his own native land, in the end, in absolute and
    irresistible ruin. In a word, he was one of the greatest military
    heroes that the world has ever known.

    THE END.

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