on the land.  This legend is without foundation for the Roman navy had long endured.  This is the Roman account of this war:  the Roman consul Duillius had vanquished the Carthaginian fleet at Mylae (260); a Roman army had disembarked in Africa under the lead of Regulus, had been attacked and destroyed (255); Regulus was sent as a prisoner to Rome to conclude a peace, but persuading the Senate to reject it, he returned to Carthage where he perished by torture.  The war was concentrated in Sicily where the Carthaginian fleet, at first victorious at Drepana, was defeated at the AEgates Islands; Hamilcar, besieged on Mount Eryx, signed the peace.

The second war (from 218 to 201) was the work of Hannibal.

The third war was a war of extermination:  the Romans took Carthage by assault, razed it, and conquered Africa.

These wars had long made Rome tremble.  Carthage had the better navy, but its warriors were armed adventurers fighting not for country but for pay, lawless, terrible under a general like Hannibal.

=Hannibal.=—­Hannibal, who directed the whole of the second war and almost captured Rome, was of the powerful family of the Barcas.  His father Hamilcar had commanded a Carthaginian army in the first Punic war and had afterwards been charged with the conquest of Spain.  Hannibal was then but a child, but his father took him with him.  The departure of an army was always accompanied by sacrifices to the gods of the country; it was said that Hamilcar after the sacrifice made his infant son swear eternal enmity to Rome.

Hannibal, brought up in the company of the soldiers, became the best horseman and the best archer of the army.  War was his only aim in life; his only needs, therefore, were a horse and arms.  He had made himself so popular that at the death of Hasdrubal who was in the command of the army, the soldiers elected him general without waiting for orders from the Carthaginian senate.  Thus Hannibal found himself at the age of twenty-one at the head of an army which was obedient only to himself.  He began war, regardless of the senate at Carthage, by advancing to the siege of Saguntum, a Greek colony allied with Rome; he took this and destroyed it.

The glory of Hannibal was that he did not wait for the Romans, but had the audacity to march into Italy to attack them.  As he had no fleet, he resolved to advance by land, through the Pyrenees, crossing the Rhone and the Alps.  He made sure of the alliance of the Gallic peoples and penetrated the Pyrenees with an army of 60,000 men, African and Spanish mercenaries, and with 37 war-elephants.  A Gallic people wished to stop him at the Rhone, but he sent a detachment to pass the river some leagues farther up the stream and to attack the Gauls in the rear; the mass of the army crossed the river in boats, the elephants on great rafts.

He next ascended the valley of the Isere and arrived at the Alps at the end of October; he crossed them regardless of the snow and the attacks of the mountaineers; many men and horses rolled down the precipices.  But nine days were consumed in attaining the summits of the Alps.  The descent was very difficult; the pass by which he had to go was covered with ice and he was compelled to cut a road out of the rock.  When he arrived in the plain, the army was reduced to half its former number.