The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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well nigh a generation of warfare, Rome stood forth victorious, mistress of Sicily, presently mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, seized of her first provincial dominion, rich in the faithful alliance of the first and worthiest of her long line of dependent kings. The rival power came out of the strife, not crushed, hardly weakened, but driven to transfer her energies to a new sphere, to seek in a new land the means of dealing a blow at Rome in the heart of her own Italy.
The choice of that new sphere of Carthaginian energy, the exploits of the house of Hamilkar, the line of the sons of Thunder, of itself opens a new and important, though as yet a secondary, page in the history of Europe. The time has come for the most western of her three peninsulas to play its part in the general affairs of the world. But the peninsula which was not wholly Mediterranean, which had two of its three sides washed by the outer Ocean, was never to play such a part as the elder peninsulas which felt only the waters of the inland sea. A day was to come in ages still far distant when Spain should be a ruling power in Italy and in Greece. But Spain never was to be what Italy or what Greece had been, nor what Italy was to be again. For several centuries her fate was to be a great and flourishing dependency of Rome, which, when it had once fully accepted the dependent relation, was to be less disturbed either by civil wars or by foreign invasion than any other province of the West. And now her fate was a strange one, but a fate which the wonderful cycles of history brought back again after more than nine hundred years. Spain was to be as Sicily. One phase of the Eternal Question was twice to be whether the most western land of Europe should be a part of the Western or the Eastern world. Rome had to win the land from the grasp of the Phœnician; its own sons had in after ages to win it back from the grasp of the Saracen. For the moment the third of the great peninsulas was to be in turn the stronghold of either side, to be the arsenal where Carthage first gathered up her strength for the attempted overthrow of Rome, and where Rome then gathered up her strength for the more than attempted overthrow of Carthage.
The Punic Wars form a kind of episode in the history of Europe, just as the presence of a Punic people in the Western Mediterranean is of itself an anomaly and in some sort an episode. The existence of the Carthaginian power hindered what we might have looked on as the natural course of history for the three great European peninsulas. When Rome had become the undisputed head of Italy, the next growth of her power might have been looked for in the direction of the Gaul and of the Greek. The headship of Italy had been won by driving back a Greek invasion, an invasion from a Greek land within sight of Italy, and that headship might be looked on as imperfect till it was further spread over Sicily at one end and Cisalpine Gaul at the other. Sicily was at once fought for, and in the end won; but it had to be won from the intruding Carthaginian. When the first Punic War was over, the eyes of Rome were again drawn beyond the Po and beyond the Hadriatic. The conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was begun; the Illyrian wars led to the first establishment of Rome as an influence, as a power, in the Eastern peninsula. Protector, mistress in all but name, of Korkyra, Epidamnos, and Apollônia, Rome has become an element in the affairs of Greece herself as well as in those of Greek colonies in Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul. She has won the jealousy of Macedonia, the good will of the free states of Greece. That is, she has taken the first steps towards bringing Greek friends and Greek enemies alike, first under her influence and then under her dominion.
If the first Punic War was in some sort an episode in European history, a check in the expected march of Rome, still more truly can this be said of the second. The Hannibalian War stands out in the history of the world as before all things a strife between a man and a commonwealth, a strife between the first of men and the first of commonwealths. Yet if Hannibal overshadows Carthage, if Carthage seems but an instrument in his hands, we must remember that Hannibal has no being apart from Carthage, that the work that he does is not the work of Hannibal but the work of Carthage. Nor must we let the glory of Hannibal altogether quench the glory of the other members of his house. Rome had to strive against a line of heroes, against the whole lion-brood of the house of Barak. One son of Thunder came after another; what the Grace of Baal began, the Help of Baal came to strengthen. But in our swift œcumenical survey we must be careful of tarrying to do homage even to the greatest of individual men. We have to deal with the results of their actions. The object of the Hannibalian war was the humiliation, the destruction, of Rome. Its effect was to raise Rome higher than ever, to make her in one generation the head of the whole West, before long to be the head of the East also. It brought, as we have seen, the western peninsula into the current of European affairs; it brought it into that current as a stronghold of Roman dominion; it made Rome a power out of Europe; she came out of the struggle more than ever the head of Italy, mistress of all Sicily, advancing to be mistress of Spain, holding a commanding influence in Africa. If she lost Cisalpine Gaul for a season, it was only for a season; the work could be done again, and Rome won an influence in Gaul beyond the Alps which was presently to stand her in good stead. From Eastern Europe her eyes are turned away for a moment, to be turned thither again in another moment with far more steadfastness. That which, but for the check given to the course of things by the great Hannibalian episode, we might have looked for as the next scene of the drama, now actually comes on the stage as an episode within the episode. Under cover as it were of the war with Hannibal, Rome for the first time wages war east of the Hadriatic as the ally of one of the chief Greek powers and as the enemy of another. But if that first war between Rome and Macedonia looks like an episode, if it seems trifling beside the great strife with Hannibal, that was merely because the Macedonian king failed to do what in reason he ought to have done, if he went to war at all. The phalanx and the siege-train of Philip failed to take their place alongside of the horsemen and the elephants of Hannibal. Still the first Macedonian war marks a most important stage in the advance of Rome towards the East. Rome now for the first time measured herself against the resources of a great kingdom, as in the war with Carthage she for the first time measured herself against the resources of a great commonwealth. Rome, Carthage, and Macedonia were now the three great powers of Europe, and Rome had to strive against both the other two at once. It was well indeed for Rome that Macedonia never put forth her full strength while the strength of Carthage was still unbroken. As it was, Hannibal alone, without allies save the barbarians whom he gathered to his standard, after the fearful losses of his Pyrenæan and his Alpine march, was able to win every pitched battle that he fought, and to bring Rome so near to destruction that no power but Rome could have come alive out of the trial.
Never in truth was the Eternal Question so near to its solution, so near to a solution which might have stifled the life of Europe for ever, as when Hannibal debated in his mind whether he should march straight from the field of Cannæ to the gates of Rome. It was a moment like that when it rested on the vote of the polemarch Kallimachos whether the thousands of Athens should meet the tens of thousands of Persia on the day of Marathôn. It is not for us to say whether such a march would have turned the destiny of the world for ever; it is enough that all that formed the life of Europe, all that was to form the life of Christendom, seemed at that moment to hang on the balance. The difficulty is fully to take in that Hannibal and his kinsfolk, the great house and the greatest of its sons, were in truth fighting in the same cause as the mere barbarian destroyers against whom the strife had to be waged at other stages of the long tale. Yet so it is; when we see Rome, with her citizens, colonists, and allies, holding up against the mercenaries of Carthage, when we contrast the votary of Jupiter with the votary of Moloch, we shall soon see on which side it was the abiding interests of mankind truly lay. It was after all in the worthiest of causes that the first of cities was pitted against the first of men. The overthrow of Carthage enabled Rome to go on to the overthrow of Greece; but if Greece was to have a conqueror, it was well that she should have a conqueror who could become a disciple in a way such as the Phœnician never could be. It is hard to name Hannibal along with Attila or even with Abd-al-rahman, yet the day of Zama, or rather the long endurance which made the day of Zama possible, must be set down by the still abiding world of Europe as a great salvation, a crowning mercy, alongside of the work of Aetius and Theodoric and the work of the elder Charles.
How it was that Rome and Europe lived through such a trial, what were the special causes which gave Rome strength to bear up through the most fearful of dangers, it is for special historians of Rome to tell. For us it is enough that Rome came forth out of the struggle mistress of the West, with Carthage spared to live on for rather more than fifty years as a Roman dependency. She was then to perish; her land was to become a Roman province; she was herself, after a hundred