checks at the hands of Fabius, Fulvius, and Gracchus. But Hannibal and victory seemed to be inseparably bound together; wherever he struck with his own hand he overthrew—north, south, east, and west—he came, he saw, he conquered; his first and last defeat was on the field of Zama. In 215 b.c. we see him encamped on Mount Tifata, scaring the Roman legions, and receiving embassies from Macedon and Syracuse. In 214 b.c. he is offering sacrifice at the Avernus, and preparing to descend on Puteoli. In 213 b.c., after a winter at Salapia, he is entering Tarentum, betrayed by a conspiracy into his hands. In the following year, when the consular armies are gathered like avenging clouds round Capua, Hannibal again appears on the ridge, and descending like a great wind blows them aside. Next he marches through Etruria and destroys the army of Centenius; and then into Apulia and destroys the army of Cneius Fulvius. Finally, in 211 b.c. he crosses the Anio and ravages Latium, pitching his tent under the very walls of Rome, and launching his javelin through her stubborn gates. But if the hounds are staunch and numerous enough, the lion is brought to bay at last. The attack on Rome failed, and Hannibal marched off into Bruttium only to fail in another attack on Rhegium. He returned only to hear that his Italian capital had, after a stern blockade, fallen into the hands of the enemy. Sentence of death, after the Roman fashion, was pronounced on Capua. Several senators took poison before the surrender of the city; all the rest were executed by command of the consul Fulvius; a great portion of the population were sold as slaves, and the rest were draughted beyond the Tiber. Fresh victories of Hannibal marked the two following years; and twelve of the old Latin tribes, worn out, were disposed to give up the struggle, but the others stood firm. Tarentum had again fallen into the hands of the Romans, and Marcellus had returned with the spoils of Syracuse, which Archimedes had defended in vain against his assaults. It was evidently impossible for Hannibal, with his single army, to bring the war to an end. He might win battle after battle, but he had no artillery to take, and no force sufficient to retain possession of, the great towns of Italy. Carthage was at length stimulated to a gigantic effort. Hasdrubal, of the same race and only second to Hannibal himself in fame, had cut to pieces the armies of the two consuls in Spain. Fresh reinforcements were forwarded from Africa; and he prepared to march into Italy and effect a junction with his brother. He crossed the Alps, and arrived at Placentia sooner than was expected by either friend or foe. From this point he sent off a letter to Hannibal, appointing to meet him in Umbria.
It is dangerous to speculate on what might have been; but as far as ordinary calculation can reach, the interception of this letter by the foragers of the consul Nero changed the whole course of after history. Had the two brothers been allowed to unite their forces and combine their military genius, the doom of Rome would have been sealed, and the civilization of Europe given over to the hands of the Phoenician city. Nero, in one of those moments which are decisive of great events, resolved to march with the army with which he had been watching Hannibal and join the other consul in the north. The two together met Hasdrubal with an overwhelming superiority of numbers, and forced him to an engagement (see Hasdrubal). His army was destroyed, and he himself fell fighting like one of his lion race. Nero rushed back to the camp in Apulia, and sent the head of his brother to the great chief who had been wont to treat those of his enemies who had fallen in battle with a magnanimity which the survivors were incapable of appreciating.
In a drama of the second Punic war, the curtain might close on the battle of the Metaurus; it was, to all intents and purposes, decisive. Yet for four years longer, with tactics which only a soldier can estimate, and a perseverance unrivalled in history, Hannibal maintained himself in Bruttium, building vessels from the wood of the forests, and manning them with the sailors of the district. "Here, too," writes Dr. Arnold, "he seems to have looked forward to the renown which awaited him in after times; and as if foreseeing the interest with which posterity would follow his progress in his unequalled enterprise, he recorded many minute particulars of his campaigns on monumental columns erected at Lacinium, a town situated in that corner of Italy which was so long like a new country, acquired by conquest for himself and his soldiers. At length, when it was plain that no new diversion could be effected in his favour, and when the dangerous situation of his country called for his presence as the last hope of Carthage, he embarked his troops without the slightest interruption from the Romans; and moved only by the disasters of others, while his own army was unbroken and unbeaten, he abandoned Italy fifteen years after he had first entered it, having ravaged it with fire and sword from one extremity to the other, and having never seen his numerous victories chequered by a single defeat." The genius of P. Scipio, matched against the incompetence of the generals who had succeeded Hasdrubal in his command of the Carthaginian armies, had brought to a successful termination the war in Spain. Crossing to Africa he had enlisted the services of Massinissa, a powerful African chief, and was pressing on towards Carthage in a course of victories when Hannibal came to meet him at Zama. The romanticizing biographers have transmitted an account of an interview said to have been held between the two generals on the day before the battle. We are the less interested in the truth of this report, that the interview led to nothing. If Metaurus was the Leipsic, Zama was the Waterloo of the war. The Carthaginians were utterly defeated; twenty thousand were slain, as many taken prisoners, and the conditions signed of a humiliating peace. Hannibal was now forty-five years of age; the enterprise of his life was frustrated, but he did not despair of the commonwealth, and entered with undiminished zeal on a new arena of action. The energy and forethought with which he discharged the civil duties of a citizen, excited the jealousy of his rivals in the government, and roused the suspicion of the Romans. They accused Hannibal of disturbing the peace, and demanded his expulsion from Carthage. Enmity within and without compelled him at last to abandon the state he had served so long. He took refuge with Antiochus, king of Syria, and that monarch was indebted to him for advice in his contest with Rome. That war having terminated unfavourably, the exile found his last retreat at the court of Prusias, the king of Bithynia. The Romans, centuries after, used the name of Hannibal to terrify children with. No wonder they could not breathe freely as long as he lived. They sent to Prusias demanding the surrender of his guest, and when that king was unable or unwilling to refuse the demand, Hannibal felt that his hour was come. He took poison and died at Nicomedia, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. The poison was contained in a ring which he had carried about with him many years—
" Cannarum vindex, et tanti sanguinis ultor."
Judging Hannibal by our only source of information, the testimony of his implacable enemies, we find no loftier name in the annals of war. All the praise that can be bestowed upon a soldier, must be meted in large measure to him. He knew how to command and how to obey; how to gather and how to hold fast an army. The impulsive Gaul, the stubborn Spaniard, the wild Numidian, joined in acknowledging his personal power. The spell of his presence bound into a compact mass those motley elements. The resolution with which he restrained their fervour, was no less notable than the fire with which he led them to victory. But he had more than the merits of a soldier. His patience, prudence, fortitude, and devotion would have made him great among the great in any country, in any time, in any path of life. The sum of his crimes, according to the Roman historians, lay in his being a cruel enemy. His massacres after Thrasymene, and the slaughter of the prisoners after Cannæ, transcend the licence of modern warfare; but those were times when humanity was not ranked high among the virtues, and the zeal of patriotism was unchecked by any thought of universal brotherhood. Least of all had the Romans a right to complain of an adversary whose worst barbarity only equalled their own—whose occasional generosity might have been contrasted with their systematic injustice. Rome conquered in the strife, because Rome was greater than Carthage; but until the time of Cæsar, there is no Roman whose star does not pale before the sun of Hannibal.—J. N.
HANNO, a celebrated Carthaginian navigator, who made a voyage of discovery along the western coast of Africa, but at what precise period is unknown. Learned critics assign different dates, varying from one thousand to three hundred years before the Christian era. The account of the voyage is preserved in a Greek record, entitled the Periplus of Hanno, which begins by stating that, "having been ordered by the Carthaginians to navigate beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to found there Liby-Phœnician cities, he sailed with a fleet of sixty ships of fifty oars
