Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 1.djvu/43

 HANNIBAL 17 the tide turned. His niggardly, short-sighted countrymen denied him the sup- port without which success was impossible. As his veterans were lost to him he had no means of filling their places, while the Romans could put army after army into the field. But through the long years during which he maintained a hopeless struggle in Italy he was never defeated. Nor did one of his veterans desert him ; never was there a murmur of disaffection in his camp. It has been well said~"that his victories over his motley followers were hardly less wonderful than his victories over nature and over Rome. Hannibal spent the winter of 216-215 B.C. at Capua, where his men are said to have been demoralized by luxurious living. When he again took the field the Romans wisely avoided a pitched battle, though the Carthaginians overran Italy, capturing Locri, Thurii, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other towns. In 211 B.C. he marched on Rome, rode up to the Colline gate, and, it is said, flung his spear over the walls. But the fall of Capua smote the Italian allies with dismay, and ruined his hopes of recruiting his ever-diminishing forces from their ranks. In 210 B.C. he overcame the praetor Fulvius at Herdonea, and in the following year gained two battles in Apulia. Thereafter, he fell upon the consuls Crispinus and Marcellus, both of whom were slain and their forces routed, while he almost an- nihilated the Roman army which-was besieging Locri. In 207 B.C. his brother Hasdrubal marched from Spain to his aid, but was surprised, defeated, and slain at the Metaurus by the consul Nero. By the barbarous commands of Nero, Hasdrubal's head was flung into the camp of Hannibal, who had been till then in ignorance of his brother's doom. The battle of the Metaurus sealed the fate'of 11 the lion's brood " of the great house of Hamilcar. But for four years Hanni- bal stood at bay in the hill-country of Bruttium, defying with his thinned, army every general who was sent against him, till in 202 B.C., after an absence of fifteen years, he was recalled to Africa to repel the Roman invasion. In the same year he met Scipio at Zama ; his raw levies fled, and in part went over to the enemy ; his veterans were cut to pieces where they stood, and Carthage was at the mercy of Rome. So ended the Second Punic War the war, as Arnold so truly said, of a man with a nation, and the war which is perhaps the most wonderful in all his- tory. Three hundred thousand Italians had fallen, and three hundred towns had been destroyed in the struggle. Peace being made, Hannibal turned his genius to political toils. He amended the constitution, cut down the power of the ignoble oligarchy, checked corrup- tion, and placed the city's finances on a sounder footing. The enemies whom he made by his reforms denounced him to the Romans, and the Romans demanded that he should be surrendered into their hands. Setting out as a voluntary exile. Hannibal visited Tyre, the mother-city of Carthage, and then betook himself to the court of Antiochus, at Ephesus. He was well received by the king, who nevertheless rejected his advice to carry the war with Rome into Italy. On the conclusion of peace, to avoid being given up to the Romans, he repaired to Pru sias, king of Bithynia, for whom he gained a naval victory over the king of Per- gamus. The Romans again demanding that he should be surrendered, he baffled z