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.