A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
32.ROME AND CARTHAGE
It was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was beginning his reign in Behar and Shi- Hwang-ti was a little child, the Museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind heard only vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world.
Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and Semite was
to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our
history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted
traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality in, and
exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts and
controversies of to-day.
The First Punic War began in 264 B.C. about the pirates of Messina. It
developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily except the
dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was
at first with the Carthaginians. They had great fighting ships of what
was hitherto an unheard-of size, quinqueremes, galleys with five banks
of oars and a huge ram. At the battle of Salamis, two centuries
before, the leading battleships had only been triremes with three
banks. But the Romans, with extraordinary energy and in spite of the
fact that they had little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild
the Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with
Greek seamen, and they invented grappling and boarding to make up for
the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to
ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him and
the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Mylæ (260 B.C.) and at
Ecnomus (256 B.C.) the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They
repulsed a Roman landing near Carthage but were badly beaten at
Palermo, losing one hundred and four elephants there—to grace such a
triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had never seen before.
But after that came two Roman defeats and then a Roman recovery. The
last naval forces of Carthage were defeated by it last Roman effort at
the battle of the Ægatian Isles (241 B.C.) and Carthage sued for peace.
All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of Syracuse, was ceded
to the Romans.
HANNIBAL
HANNIBAL
Bust in the National Museum at Naples
_Photo: Mansell_
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
Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts
in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less recuperative 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 crossing 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 inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at
Lake Trasimere and at Cannæ, 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 Numidians at home, were
forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa, a Roman army
crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experienced 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 surrendered 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 under the Ptolemies, and
Pergamum and most of the small states of Asia Minor into “Allies,” or,
as we should call them now, “protected states.”
Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly regaining
something of her former prosperity. Her recovery revived the hate and
suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the most shallow and
artificial of quarrels (149 B.C.), she made an obstinate and bitter
resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed (146 B.C.). The street
fighting, or massacre, lasted six days; it was extraordinarily bloody,
and when the citadel capitulated only about fifty thousand of the
Carthaginian population remained alive out of a quarter of a million.
They were sold into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately
destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown as a sort of
ceremonial effacement.
Map: The Extent of the Roman Power & its Alliances about 150 B.C.
So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and cities
that had flourished in the world five centuries before only one little
country remained free under native rulers. This was Judea, which had
liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under the rule of the
native Maccabean princes. By this time it had its Bible almost
complete, and was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish
world as we know it now. It was natural that the Carthaginians,
Phoenicians and kindred peoples dispersed about the world should find a
common link in their practically identical language and in this
literature of hope and courage. To a large extent they were still the
traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had been submerged
rather than replaced.
Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the centre of
Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 B.C.; and after various
vicissitudes of quasi- independence and revolt was besieged by them in
70 A.D. and captured after a stubborn struggle. The Temple was
destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 A.D. completed its destruction,
and the Jerusalem we know to-day was rebuilt later under Roman
auspices. A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter Capitolinus, stood in the
place of the Temple, and Jews were forbidden to inhabit the city.