waited him. The Carthaginians,
indignant and filled with revenge, it is said, exposed the hero to a
burning sun, with his eyelids cut off, and rolled him in a barrel lined
with iron spikes.

(M842) The embassy having thus failed, the attack on the fortresses, which
alone linked Africa with Sicily, was renewed. The siege of Lilybaeum lasted
till the end of the war, which, from the mutual exhaustion of the parties,
now languished for six years. The Romans had lost four great fleets, three
of which had arms on board, and the census of the city, in the seventeenth
year, showed a decrease of forty thousand citizens. During this interval
of stagnation, when petty warfare alone existed, Hamilcar Burca was
appointed general of Carthage, and in the same year his son Hannibal was
born, B.C. 247.

(M843) The Romans, disgusted with the apathy of the government, fitted out
a fleet of privateers of two hundred ships, manned by sixty thousand
sailors, and this fleet gained a victory over the Carthaginians,
unprepared for such a force, so that fifty ships were sunk, and seventy
more were carried by the victors into port. This victory gave Sicily to
the Romans, and ended the war. The Roman prisoners were surrendered by
Hamilcar, who had full powers for peace, and Carthage engaged to pay three
thousand two hundred talents for the expenses of the war.

(M844) The Romans were gainers by this war. They acquired the richest
island in the world, fertile in all the fruits of the earth, with splendid
harbors, cities, and a great accumulation of wealth. The long war of
twenty-four years, nearly a whole generation, was not conducted on such a
scale as essentially to impoverish the contending parties. There were no
debts contracted for future generations to pay. It was the most absorbing
object of public interest, indeed; but many other events and subjects must
also have occupied the Roman mind. It was a foreign war, the first that
Rome had waged. It was a war of ambition, the commencement of those
unscrupulous and aggressive measures that finally resulted in the
political annihilation of all the other great powers of the world.

But this war, compared with those foreign wars which Rome subsequently
conducted, was carried on without science and skill. It was carried on in
the transition period of Roman warfare, when tactics were more highly
prized than strategy. It was by a militia, and agricultural generals, and
tactics, and personal bravery,