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 accomplished
now. It is much more probable that the two great generals, on whom
the decision of the political question now devolved, offered and
accepted peace on such terms in order to set just and reasonable
limits on the one hand to the furious vengeance of the victors, on
the other to the obstinacy and imprudence of the vanquished. The
noble-mindedness and statesmanlike gifts of the great antagonists are
no less apparent in the magnanimous submission of Hannibal to what was
inevitable, than in the wise abstinence of Scipio from an extravagant
and insulting use of victory. Is it to be supposed that one so
generous, unprejudiced, and intelligent should not have asked himself
of what benefit it could be to his country, now that the political
power of the Carthaginian city was annihilated, utterly to destroy
that ancient seat of commerce and of agriculture, and wickedly to
overthrow one of the main pillars of the then existing civilization?
The time had not yet come when the first men of Rome lent themselves
to destroy the civilization of their neighbours, and frivolously
fancied that they could wash away from themselves the eternal
infamy of the nation by shedding an idle tear.

Results of the War

Thus ended the second Punic or, as the Romans more correctly called
it, the Hannibalic war, after it h