he permission of Rome--the practical effect of which
was that Carthage became tributary and lost her political
independence. It even appears that the Carthaginians were bound
in certain cases to furnish ships of war to the Roman fleet.

Scipio has been accused of granting too favourable conditions to the
enemy, lest he might be obliged to hand over the glory of terminating
the most severe war which Rome had waged, along with his command, to
a successor. The charge might have had some foundation, had the first
proposals been carried out; it seems to have no warrant in reference
to the second. His position in Rome was not such as to make the
favourite of the people, after the victory of Zama, seriously
apprehensive of recall--already before the victory an attempt to
supersede him had been referred by the senate to the burgesses, and by
them decidedly rejected. Nor do the conditions themselves warrant
such a charge. The Carthaginian city never, after its hands were thus
tied and a powerful neighbour was placed by its side, made even an
attempt to withdraw from Roman supremacy, still less to enter into
rivalry with Rome; besides, every one who cared to know knew that the
war just terminated had been undertaken much more by Hannibal than by
Carthage, and that it was absolutely impossible to revive the gigantic
plan of the patriot party. It might seem little in the eyes of the
vengeful Italians, that only the five hundred surrendered ships of war
perished in the flames, and not the hated city itself; spite and
pedantry might contend for the view that an opponent is only really
vanquished when he is annihilated, and might censure the man who had
disdained to punish more thoroughly the crime of having made Romans
tremble. Scipio thought otherwise; and we have no reason and
therefore no right to assume that the Roman was in this instance
influenced by vulgar motives rather than by the noble and magnanimous
impulses which formed part of his character. It was not the
consideration of his own possible recall or of the mutability of
fortune, nor was it any apprehension of the outbreak of a Macedonian
war at certainly no distant date, that prevented the self-reliant and
confident hero, with whom everything had hitherto succeeded beyond
belief, from accomplishing the destruction of the unhappy city, which
fifty years afterwards his adopted grandson was commissioned to
execute, and which might indeed have been equally well acco