History Against the Pagans 1 part 9/24

For if the span of time during which it lasted is inquired into, it was prolonged in its devastation beyond two years; if the depopulation it wrought, a census was decreed to inquire not how many men had perished, but how many had survived; if the violence with which it afflicted, the Sibylline books are witnesses, which answered that it had been imposed by heavenly wrath. But lest the charge of quibbling offend anyone—that, although the Sibyl said the gods were angry, we seem to have said it was heavenly wrath—let him hear and understand that these things, even though they mostly come about through the aerial powers, nevertheless do not at all come about without the will of almighty God. At the same time Caparronia, a Vestal virgin, guilty of unchastity, perished by hanging:

her corrupter and the slaves privy to it were visited with punishment. Behold, in continuous succession, what things and how great we reckon to have happened, very many in each single year, among which assuredly rare are the years—or almost none—in which nothing sad was done; and this, although the same writers, with the task rather of praising set before them, sang of the multitudes of miseries, lest they should offend those to whom and concerning whom these things were written, and seem rather to terrify their hearers by the examples of past things than to instruct them. But we, moreover, placed at the very end of the ages, cannot know the evils of the Romans except through those who praised the Romans.

From which it is given to understand how great those things must have been which were suppressed out of zeal because of their horror, when such great things are found that could thinly trickle out amid the praises. And since from this point the Punic wars now follow, the matter itself requires that of Carthage—which is found to have been founded by Elissa seventy-two years before the city of Rome—and of its disasters and domestic evils, as Pompeius Trogus and Justinus express them, at least a few things be reported. The Carthaginians always had among themselves a homebred and intestine evil, namely discord, by whose unhappy agitation they never spent any times either prosperous abroad or quiet at home. But when, among their other evils, they were also troubled by a pestilence, they used homicides as remedies:

for they sacrificed human beings as victims and brought to the altars the age of childhood—an age which would provoke even the pity of enemies. Concerning this kind of sacred rites—nay rather of sacrileges—what ought best to be discussed I do not find. For if certain demons dared to enjoin rites of this sort, that satisfaction be made for the deaths of men by the killing of men, it had to be understood that they were being hired as labourers and helpers of the pestilence, so that they themselves might kill those whom the pestilence had not seized: for the custom is that sound and uncorrupted victims be offered, so that those demons did not allay diseases but anticipated them.

And so the Carthaginians, with the gods turned away because of sacrifices of this kind—as Pompeius Trogus and Justinus confess, but as is established among us, because of their presumption and impiety, with God angered—after they had long fought unhappily in Sicily, when the war was transferred to Sardinia, were again still more unhappily defeated. On account of which they ordered their leader Mazeus and the few soldiers who had survived to go into exile. The exiles, seeking pardon through envoys and being repulsed, surrounded their homeland with war and siege. There then Mazeus, leader of the exiles, hung his own son Carthalo, a priest of Hercules, upon a cross beneath the eyes of his homeland, just as he was, with his purple robes and fillets, because he had met him clad in purple as though insulting him. After a few days he took the city itself;

and after he had cruelly lorded it there, very many of the senators having been killed, he himself was slain. These things were done in the times of Cyrus, king of the Persians. After these things, indeed, when Himelco, king of the Carthaginians, was waging war in Sicily, he suddenly lost his army to a horrible plague. Nor was there delay: with the people falling in droves through diseases, each one quickly seized, soon dead, was now not even buried; and when the messenger of this calamity had filled Carthage, stunned by sudden grief, the city was thrown into confusion no otherwise than if it had been captured. Everything resounded with wailings, doors everywhere were shut, all public and private business was suspended; all ran down to the harbour and questioned the few who, having survived the disaster, were disembarking from the ships, about their own people.

After the wretched ones understood about the disaster of their kin, those others being silent or groaning, then throughout the whole shore were heard the voices of those beating their breasts, then the howlings and tearful laments of the unhappy mothers. Amid these things the commander himself comes forth from his ship, ungirt, in a sordid and servile tunic; at the sight of him the wailing throngs are joined together; he too, stretching his hands to heaven, now accuses and bewails his own, now the public misfortune; at last, crying out through the city, having finally entered his house, he dismissed with a final address all who followed him weeping, and then, with the doors bolted and even his sons shut out, ended his grief and his life with the sword. These things were done in the times of Darius.

After these things Hanno, a certain Carthaginian who with his private resources surpassed the strength of the commonwealth, drank in the desire of seizing the sovereignty. For this purpose he thought a useful plan was this: that, under the pretence of his only daughter's wedding, he should poison amid the cups all the senators whose dignity he reckoned would stand in the way of his undertakings. This affair, betrayed through his servants, was avoided without vengeance, lest in so powerful a man the matter, once known, should make more trouble than it had as a mere thought. Eluded in this design, Hanno prepares to attempt the crime by another contrivance: he stirs up the slaves, by whom he might suddenly overwhelm the unwary city. But when he understood that, before the day appointed for the slaughter, he had been betrayed and forestalled, he seized a certain stronghold with twenty thousand armed slaves.

There, while he was stirring up the Africans and the king of the Moors, he was captured, and first beaten with rods, then with his eyes gouged out and his hands and legs broken—as though punishment were exacted from each several limb—he was put to death in the sight of the people. His body, torn with lashes, was fixed to a cross; his sons and all his kindred were given over to punishment, lest anyone of that same family should ever contemplate either imitating or avenging him. These things were done in the times of Philip. After these things the Carthaginians, when they had learned that the city of Tyre, the author of their origin, had been captured and overthrown by Alexander the Great, fearing his future passage into Africa, sent a certain Hamilcar, surnamed Rhodanus, a man preeminent in eloquence and shrewdness, to investigate the deeds of Alexander.

He, received by Parmenion as though a deserter, and thereafter admitted into the king's service, reported everything to his fellow-citizens by means of tablets written on and then smeared over with wax. When, after Alexander's death, he had returned to Carthage, they put him to death, as though he had sold the city to the king, not only with an ungrateful spirit but even with a cruel envy. Then, when they were waging continual and never sufficiently prosperous wars against the Sicilians, and had surrounded with a siege the city of Syracuse—then the most flourishing of Sicily—they were ensnared by the wondrous cunning of Agathocles, king of Sicily, and brought to the extremity of despair.

For when Agathocles was being besieged at Syracuse by the Carthaginians, and saw himself a match neither for war by the equipment of his forces nor able to endure the siege by the sufficiency of his supplies, with a well-foreseen and better-concealed plan he crossed over into Africa with his army. There he discloses to his men what he is contriving, then teaches them what needs to be done. At once, with one accord, they first burn the ships in which they had come, that there might be no hope of retreat; then, while he laid low everything against which he had directed himself, and set fire to country houses and strongholds, he encountered a certain Hanno with thirty thousand Carthaginians. Him, with two thousand of his own men, he slew; but he himself lost only two in that battle.

By this battle, with the spirits of the Africans incredibly broken and those of his own men immensely heightened, he stormed cities and strongholds, drove off immense booty, and butchered many thousands of the enemy. He then pitched his camp at the fifth milestone from Carthage, so that they might watch from the walls of the city itself the losses of their most opulent possessions, the devastation of their fields, and the burnings of their country houses. To the present evils a sadder report is added. For it is announced that in Sicily too the army of the Africans had been destroyed together with its commander, whom in fact Andro, the brother of Agathocles, had overwhelmed while he was incautious and almost at leisure. With this rumour spread through all Africa, not only the tributary cities but even the allied kings began to fall away from them.

Among them the king of the Cyrenians too, Ophellas, made a pact with Agathocles for fellowship in the war, while he ardently aspired to the kingdom of Africa. But after they had joined their armies and camps into one, ensnared by Agathocles through flatteries and treachery, he was killed. The Carthaginians, with forces gathered from every side, blazed into war. Agathocles, having Ophellas' forces with him, engages with them, and overcomes them with much blood of both armies and in a grievous battle. By the crisis of this contest so great a despair was brought upon the Carthaginians that, had not a sedition arisen in Agathocles' army, Hamilcar, the leader of the Carthaginians, would have deserted to him with his army.

For which offence, by order of the Carthaginians, he was fixed to a gibbet in the middle of the forum and offered a cruel spectacle to his own people. Then, when after the death of Agathocles the Carthaginians were laying waste Sicily with a fitted-out fleet, having been often defeated by Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, summoned from Italy, in battles by land and sea, at last they turned to the Roman wars. O grief, do those who complain of recent things read these accounts of olden times? Nay, they read them and reckon them not with fairness but with rivalry. For they are pricked by that greatest and unutterable abyss which not even they themselves discern, not on account of evil times but on account of Christian times; and there is a derivation of an envious ulcer, so that whatever is done under what they hold execrable may seem more atrocious:

just as even among us it is often wont to be seen by the eyes of enemies, that those whom they execrate do nothing not crooked, nothing not slipshod, nothing in word or deed but to their own wounding—and this, moreover, quite simply; for envy so warps the captive heart that by nature it does not see what is straight; of whose number these men are, but far more wretched because they are enemies of God and therefore enemies of the truth—of whom, weeping, we say these things, and whom, mercifully, if they will suffer it, we reprove, that we may heal them—who see these things with a vitiated eye, and therefore the things they see seem to them double, and, confounded by the darkness of wickedness, they fall into this, that by seeing less they see more, while nevertheless they cannot see that which is, as it is.

men who reckon a father's scourges heavier than an enemy's flames; who call God—who coaxes, admonishes, and redeems—more bitter than the devil who persecutes, lords it over them, and slaughters them; and yet, if they understood that He is a father, they would rejoice in His chastisement, and if the fruit of instruction were foreseen, the discipline would be tolerable, and for the sake of the hope which now has been given to the nations, but formerly had not been, they would count their burdens lighter, even though they suffered heavier ones. And yet they can learn contempt of miseries even from their own people, among whom the greatest evils were esteemed as the greatest goods, only that they might attain the renowned and illustrious glory of fame:

from these one is given to infer how much we, to whom blessed eternity is promised, ought to endure for the sake of life, since those men were able to endure so much for the sake of fame. In the year 483 from the founding of the City—that is, in the consulship of Appius Claudius and Quintus Fabius—the Romans sent aid to the Mamertines, whose city Messana was a noble city of Sicily, against Hiero, king of Syracuse, and the Carthaginian forces joined to Hiero; and they sent the consul Appius Claudius with an army. He so swiftly overcame the Syracusans and Carthaginians that the king himself, terrified by the magnitude of events, confessed that he had been conquered before he had even engaged. Then, his strength broken and his confidence lost, when as a suppliant he begged for peace, he obtained it, being fined two hundred talents of silver by order of the consuls.

The consuls encircled Agrigentum, a city of Sicily, and the Carthaginian garrisons within it, with siege-works and a rampart. And when the elder Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander, shut in by that siege, had been reduced to the utmost destitution, Hanno, a new commander of the Carthaginians, unexpectedly came up with one thousand five hundred cavalry, thirty thousand infantry, and thirty elephants as well, and for a little while delayed the storming of the city. But the city was straightway taken. The Carthaginians were conquered and crushed in a very great battle, eleven elephants were brought into the Romans' power, and all the people of Agrigentum were sold under the crown into slavery; the elder Hannibal, making a sally with a few men, fled away. In the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius Asina and Gaius

Duilius being consuls, when the elder Hannibal was laying waste the maritime coast of Italy with a fleet of seventy ships drawn up for battle, the Romans on their part ordered a fleet to be built and equipped. This the consul Duilius swiftly accomplished; for within sixty days from the felling of the trees, a fleet of one hundred and thirty ships was launched and rode at anchor. The other consul, Cornelius Asina, made for the island of Lipara with sixteen ships; there, summoned by Hannibal as if to a parley for peace, he was seized by Punic treachery and put to death in chains. When the other consul Duilius heard this, he set out against Hannibal with thirty ships. When the naval battle had been joined, Hannibal, having lost the ship in which he was being carried, was taken off in a skiff and fled;

thirty-one of his ships are reported taken, thirteen sunk, three thousand men slain, seven thousand captured. Afterward, in the consulship of Gaius Aquilius Florus and Lucius Cornelius Scipio, the Carthaginians appointed Hanno, substituted in Hannibal's place, to command the fleet for the defense of Sardinia and Corsica; he, conquered by the consul Scipio and his army lost, plunged himself into the thickest of the enemy and there was killed. In the same year three thousand slaves and four thousand naval allies conspired for the destruction of the city of Rome, and had not the timely disclosure of the plot forestalled the design, the city, left without garrison, would have perished by servile hands. In the year next after this, the consul Calatinus, making for Camerina, a city of Sicily,

rashly led his army into a defile which the Carthaginian forces had long since blocked beforehand. And when there was no means at all either of resisting or of escaping, he was delivered by the courage and labor of Calpurnius Flamma, who with a chosen band of three hundred men seized a hill held by the enemy and by his fighting drew all the Carthaginians upon himself, until the Roman army crossed the beleaguered defile with the enemy not pressing it. All three hundred were slain in that fight; Calpurnius alone, though pierced with many wounds and covered over with corpses, escaped. The elder Hannibal, again set by the Carthaginians over a fleet, engaged the Romans unsuccessfully in a naval battle and was conquered; and when a mutiny arose in his own army, he perished, buried under a heap of stones.

The consul Atilius, ranging over the renowned Sicilian islands of Lipara and Melita (Malta), overthrew them. The consuls, ordered to transfer the war into Africa, made for Sicily with three hundred and thirty ships; Hamilcar, the Carthaginian commander, and Hanno, set over the fleet, met them. When the naval battle had been joined, the Carthaginians were put to flight and lost sixty-four ships. The victorious consuls were ferried over into Africa, and the very first of all cities, Clipea, they received in surrender. Then, making for Carthage, they laid waste three hundred strongholds or more, and carried their hostile standards round about Carthage. The consul Manlius, departing from Africa with the victorious fleet, brought back to Rome twenty-seven thousand captives together with enormous spoils.

Regulus, having obtained the Carthaginian war by lot, while marching with his army, pitched camp not far from the river Bagrada; there, when a serpent of marvelous size was devouring very many of his soldiers as they went down to the river out of the necessity of drawing water, Regulus set out with his army to subdue the beast.

But since the javelins availed nothing against its back, and every cast of weapons was vain—for they slid off the dreadful lattice of its scales as off a slanting tortoise-shell of shields, and, in a marvelous manner, lest they should wound its body, were repelled by the body itself—and since besides he saw a great multitude crushed by its bite, trampled by its charge, and even killed by its pestilential breath, he ordered the ballistae to be brought up; by these a hurled stone, dashed against its spine, dissolved the framework of its whole body. For such is the nature of the serpent that, although it seems to lack feet, yet by its ribs and scales—which it has arranged in like fashion from the top of its throat down to the bottom of its belly—it is so equipped that it leans upon its scales as upon claws and upon its ribs as upon legs.

For it is not like a worm—which has no rigidity of spine, and unfolds its motion by gradually stretching out in a straight line the contracted parts of its little body, and contracting again the parts stretched out—but rather, with alternating efforts it sways its sinuous sides about, so that along the outer curvature of its spine it extends the rigid edge of its ribs, while, since its ribs are by nature straight at the top, it sets fast the claws of its scales; and by doing this in turn and swiftly, it not only glides over level ground but even climbs over convex surfaces, furnished with as many footholds as it has ribs. The reason for this, then, is that, if it be struck by any blow on any part of its body, from belly to head, it is rendered feeble and cannot keep its course;

because wherever that blow falls, it dislocates the spine, by which the feet formed of the ribs and the movement of the body were directed. Hence this serpent too, which for so long had withstood so many javelins unwounded, yielded, made feeble, to the blow of a single stone, and soon, hemmed in by missiles, was easily overpowered. Its hide, however, was carried off to Rome—they say it was one hundred and twenty feet in length—and for some time was a marvel to all. Regulus waged a most savage war against three commanders—that is, two men named Hasdrubal and Hamilcar summoned from Sicily—in which seventeen thousand of the Carthaginians were slain, five thousand captured, eighteen elephants led away, and eighty-two towns passed into surrender to the Romans.

The Carthaginians, broken by wars and emptied out by disasters, sued to Regulus for peace. But when they had heard the intolerable and harsh conditions of the peace, deeming it safer to die in arms than to live in misery, they resolved to procure with money not only the help of Spaniards and Gauls, of which they already had a great deal, but even of Greeks. And so they summoned Xanthippus, king of the Lacedaemonians, with auxiliaries, and set him over the war as general. Xanthippus, having inspected the Carthaginian forces and led them out into the plain, with his array changed far for the better, joined battle with the Romans. There was an immense ruin of Roman strength there: for thirty thousand Roman soldiers were laid low in that encounter at that time.

That famous general Regulus was captured with five hundred men and cast into chains, and only in the tenth year of the Punic War furnished the Carthaginians a notable triumph. Xanthippus, conscious of so bold a deed and fearing a reversal of unstable fortunes, straightway migrated out of Africa into Greece. So then the consuls Aemilius Paulus and Fulvius Nobilior, having heard of the captivity of Regulus and the disaster of the Roman army, were ordered to cross into Africa with a fleet of three hundred ships, and made for Clipea. Thither the Carthaginians came at once with an equal fleet, and the naval contest could not be deferred. One hundred and four Carthaginian ships were sunk, thirty captured with their fighting men, and besides, thirty-five thousand of their soldiers were slain;

but of the Romans, nine ships being sunk, eleven hundred soldiers perished. The consuls pitched camp at Clipea. Two Carthaginian commanders named Hanno again assembled there with a great army, and when battle was joined they lost nine thousand soldiers. But—since at that time among the Romans prosperity was never long-lasting, and successes of whatever kind were straightway overwhelmed by great masses of misfortunes—when the Roman fleet was returning toward Italy laden with booty, it was wrecked by an unspeakable shipwreck: for out of three hundred ships, two hundred and twenty perished, and eighty were scarcely saved by throwing their cargoes overboard.

Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general, sent with an army into Numidia and Mauretania, after he had acted in hostile and bloody fashion against all—because they were said to have willingly received Regulus—condemned the rest to a fine of a thousand talents of silver and twenty thousand oxen, and fastened the chief men of all the peoples to the gibbet. In the third year—as untamed fury always quickly forgets its perils—the consuls Servilius Caepio and Sempronius Blaesus, having crossed into Africa with two hundred and sixty ships, laid waste the whole maritime coast that lies about the Syrtes, and, advancing into the interior, after capturing and overthrowing very many cities, carried off enormous booty to the fleet.

Then, as they were returning toward Italy, near the promontory of Palinurus—which juts out into the deep from the Lucanian mountains—dashed upon the rocks, they wretchedly lost one hundred and fifty cargo-ships and the noble booty so cruelly acquired. For once, at Rome, the enormity of their miseries conquered their most shameless greed: for the senators, now thoroughly weary of the maritime venture, decreed that no fleet of more than sixty ships should be kept for the defense of Italy; yet straightway, driven by untamed greed, they broke that very decree.

Moreover, the consul Cotta, having crossed into Sicily, fought against the Carthaginians and Sicilians in very many battles by land and sea, and left throughout all Sicily heaps of unburied dead, partly of enemies, partly even of allies. In the consulship of Lucius Caecilius Metellus and Gaius Furius Placidus, Hasdrubal, a new commander of the Carthaginians, came from Africa to Lilybaeum with one hundred and thirty elephants and more than thirty thousand cavalry and infantry, and at once joined battle with the consul Metellus near Panormus. But Metellus, fearing the great force of the beasts, first, using great strategy, drove them either into flight or to death, and so easily overcame however great a force of the enemy:

twenty thousand Carthaginians were slain in that battle, twenty-six elephants too were killed, one hundred and four captured and led through Italy, and they furnished the Italic peoples a very great spectacle. Hasdrubal fled with a few men to Lilybaeum, and in his absence was condemned to death by the Carthaginians. After these things the Carthaginians, worn out by so many evils, resolved that peace must be sought from the Romans. For this purpose they thought that Atilius Regulus, formerly a Roman general, whom they had now held captive for five years, ought above all, among other envoys, to be sent; and when peace had not been obtained, and he had returned from Italy, they killed him by cutting off his eyelids, binding him in a machine, and keeping him awake.

Then the other Atilius Regulus and Manlius Vulso, both twice consuls, set out for Lilybaeum with a fleet of two hundred ships and four legions; when the Romans tried to besiege that town, situated on a promontory, they were beaten by Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, who came up against them, and, having lost the greater part of their army, themselves barely escaped. After these, the consul Claudius set out with a fleet of one hundred and twenty ships toward the harbor of Drepanum against the enemy; there he was soon intercepted and overcome by the Carthaginian fleet. He himself indeed fled with thirty ships into the camp at Lilybaeum; all the rest, that is, ninety, were either captured or sunk; eight thousand soldiers are reported slain, twenty thousand captured.

Gaius Iunius too, the colleague of Claudius, lost his entire fleet in a shipwreck. In the following year as well, the Punic fleet crossed into Italy and laid waste very many parts of it far and wide. Meanwhile Lutatius, having been ferried over into Sicily with a fleet of three hundred ships, while he was urging on a battle among the foremost men near the city of Drepanum, was rescued with the utmost difficulty when his thigh had been pierced through and he was already being overwhelmed. Furthermore, the Carthaginians rushed to Sicily with four hundred ships and great forces under the leadership of Hanno.

Nor was Lutatius the slower; rather, he forestalled the Carthaginians' plans with marvelous speed. After the fleets of both sides had taken their stand very near one another at the Aegates islands, with anchors all but interwoven, throughout the whole night, when day broke Lutatius was the first to give the signal for battle. As the fight grew fierce, Hanno, defeated, turned his ship about and was the first leader in flight. A considerable part of his army made for Africa with him, others fled to Lilybaeum; sixty-three Punic ships were captured, one hundred and twenty-five sunk, thirty-two thousand men captured, fourteen thousand slain; but of the Romans twelve ships were sunk. Lutatius then came to the city of Erycina, which the Carthaginians held, and there killed two thousand Carthaginians

when the fight had been joined. Then the Carthaginians, with headlong haste, sent to the consul Lutatius and thereafter to Rome: they begged for peace, which they obtained at once on the conditions previously proposed. And the conditions were these: that they should withdraw from Sicily and Sardinia, and, for the expenses of the war, should pay three thousand Euboic talents of pure silver in equal installments over twenty years. This condition of peace was settled in the twenty-third year from the time when the First Punic War had been begun.

Who, I ask, could in words unfold this single war of two cities, waged through twenty-three years—how many kings of the Carthaginians, how many consuls of the Romans, how many columns of armies, how great a number of ships it drew together, crushed, and destroyed? And only then, if those things seem to have been fully weighed, let judgment be passed on the present. In the year 507 from the founding of the City, a sudden overthrow of Rome herself forestalled the Romans' triumph; for I would not rashly assert when even a moderate gladness has not been overwhelmed at Rome by a most grievous mourning coming suddenly upon it. Indeed, in the consulship of Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Aulus Manlius, diverse disasters of fire and water all but consumed the City.