mountains and morasses had been powerless to
thwart his progress. Army after army, vastly superior in numbers and
composed of the best fighting men the ancient world ever saw, had come
against him to be broken, scattered, and destroyed. His career through
Italy had been, in the words of Horace, as the rush of the flames
through a forest of pines. But after Cannae the tide turned. His
niggardly, short-sighted countrymen denied him the support 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 annihilated 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 "the lion's brood"--of the great house of Hamilcar. But for
four years Hannibal 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