174 A Short History of The World for peace. All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of Syra- cuse, was ceded to the Romans. For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both had trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again, threatened Rome — which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices to the Gods ! — and were routed at Telamon. Rome pushed forward to the Alps, and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to lUyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less recu- perative power. Finally, an act of intolerable aggression, Rome seized and annexed the two revolting islands. Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river Ebro. To that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any cros- sing of the Ebro by the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of war against the Romans. At last in 218 B.C. the Carthaginians, provoked by new Roman aggressions, did cross this river under a young general named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant commanders in the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain over the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls against the Romans, and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for fifteen years. He in- flicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at Lake Trasimere and at Cannae, and throughout all his Italian campaigns no Roman army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army had landed at Marseilles and cut his communications with Spain ; he had no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally the Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numid- ians at home, were forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa, a Roman army crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experi- enced his first defeat under its walls at the battle of Zama (202 b.c.) at the hands of Scipio Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended this Second Punic War. Carthage capitulated ; she sur- rendered Spain and her war fleet ; she paid an enormous indemnity and agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia where later, being in danger of falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he took poison and died. For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at peace. And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused and divided Greece, invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch, at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still
