ty was beyond doubt that of
attaching themselves to Massinissa and of converting him from
the oppressor into the protector of the Phoenicians. But neither
the national section of the patriots nor the section with Libyan
tendencies attained the helm; on the contrary the government remained
in the hands of the oligarchs friendly to Rome, who, so far as they
did not altogether renounce thought of the future, clung to the single
idea of saving the material welfare and the communal freedom of
Carthage under Roman protection. With this state of matters the
Romans might well have been content. But neither the multitude, nor
even the ruling lords of the average stamp, could rid themselves of
the profound alarm produced by the Hannibalic war; and the Roman
merchants with envious eyes beheld the city even now, when its
political power was gone, possessed of extensive commercial
dependencies and of a firmly established wealth which nothing could
shake. Already in 567 the Carthaginian government offered to pay up
at once the whole instalments stipulated in the peace of 553--an offer
which the Romans, who attached far more importance to the having
Carthage tributary than to the sums of money themselves, naturally
declined, and only deduced from it the conviction that, in spite of
all the trouble they had taken, the city was not ruined and was not
capable of ruin. Fresh reports were ever circulating through Rome as
to the intrigues of the faithless Phoenicians. At one time it was
alleged that Aristo of Tyre had been seen in Carthage as an emissary
of Hannibal, to prepare the citizens for the landing of an Asiatic
war-fleet (561); at another, that the council had, in a secret
nocturnal sitting in the temple of the God of Healing, given audience
to the envoys of Perseus (581); at another there was talk of the
powerful fleet which was being equipped in Carthage for the Macedonian
war (583). It is probable that these and similar reports were founded
on nothing more than, at most, individual indiscretions; but still
they were the signal for new diplomatic ill usage on the part of Rome,
and for new aggressions on the part of Massinissa, and the idea gained
ground the more, the less sense and reason there was in it, that the
Carthaginian question would not be settled without a third Punic war.

Numidians

While the power of the Phoenicians was thus sinking in the land of
their choice, just as it had long ago succumbed in their orig