rs in that language. As he grew up, he entered
the army of his father, to perform his first feats of arms under the
paternal eye and to see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he
had commanded the cavalry under his sister's husband, Hasdrubal, and
distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his
talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades now summoned him--the
tried, although youthful general--to the chief command, and he could
now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law
had lived and died. He took up the inheritance, and he was worthy of
it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of various sorts on his
character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with
covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures
know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and
stores can hardly have been other than covetous. But though anger and
envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to
mar the pure and noble image which it presents. Laying aside wretched
inventions which furnish their own refutation, and some things which
his lieutenants, particularly Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the
Samnite, were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the
accounts regarding him which may not be justified under the
circumstances, and according to the international law, of the times;
and all agree in this, that he combined in rare perfection discretion
and enthusiasm, caution and energy. He was peculiarly marked by that
inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the
Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected
routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him;
and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented
care. By an unrivalled system of espionage--he had regular spies even
in Rome--he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he
himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair, in order
to procure information on some point or other. Every page of the
history of this period attests his genius in strategy; and his gifts
as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously
displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution, and in the
unparalleled influence which as a foreign exile he exercised in the
cabinets of the eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men
is shown by h