feat of his brother, who was advancing from Spain to aid him, completely destroyed all chances of his success. "I see the doom of Carthage," groaned the chieftain, when the head of the unfortunate Hasdrubal was thrown into his camp in Apulia. But he did not yet give up the field. Once, in fact, he appeared before Rome, but it was an act of mere bravado on his part. His army was small, and he was unprovided with material for a siege. Rome was strongly fortified, and would have laughed all his toils to scorn. He flitted from place to place, the Romans never daring to meet him in the field; and after a few years the needs of his own country, that was lying at the mercy of Scipio, called him home. As explanatory of his defeat at Zama, it must be remembered that he had only raw and inexperienced troops—many of them the merchants and the young patricians of Carthage, unaccustomed to toil—to pit against the experienced legions of Scipio. The fact that he made as good defence as he did alone justifies the homage which is still paid to the genius of Hannibal.
Did Cæsar pause on the Rubicon? No, we answer, despite the assertions of many to the contrary. Why should he have paused? What reason was there for his doing so? We know none. Yet Plutarch says that he paused, enumerating the calamities which the passage of that river would bring upon the world, and the reflections that might be made upon it by posterity. At last exclaiming, "The die is cast!" he drove his horse into the stream, and Rome was free no more. The tale reads like a passage from a romance, and is evidently a fiction. Although rhetorical writers of later times have delighted to refer to this dramatic scene somewhat in the style of J. Sheridan Knowles, there are both critical and internal evidence that it is a fraudulent piece of history, either written for dramatic effect, or intended as a libel on Cæsar.
Let us glance at the authorities. Several writers give us the history of that interesting and important epoch. First of all is the unrivalled narrative of the great commander himself, who wrote as ably as he fought battles or practised state-craft. Yet Cæsar, in his Commentaries, makes no mention of this incident. His simple narrative reads, that at nightfall he left Ravenna secretly, crossed the Rubicon in the night, and at daybreak entered Ariminum. Of Livy's history of this age, we have only the Epitomes; but these Epitomes form a complete, though of course far from a detailed, narrative. Yet in them is no allusion to Cæsar's halting at the Rubicon. If such an event had happened, Livy must have known of it, for he lived in the succeeding generation; and, if he had heard of it, there is no reason why he should not have recorded it. Nor do Dion Cassius or Velleius, in their histories,—the former living in the time of Alexander Severus, the latter in that of Tiberius,—seem to know any thing about such an incident.
Suetonius, in his "Lives of the Cæsars," was the first to mention it. Who was Suetonius? He was a Roman biographer who lived in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, one hundred and thirty years after our era, and was the author of the "Lives of the First Twelve Cæsars," in eight books. They have little critical value, and abound in details and anecdotes of a questionable character. The next author who speaks of the incident is Plutarch, whom we
