136 FALL OF CARTHAGE. 



and home, in Africa for glory and revenge. Carthage 

 was a city of merchants, who paid men to fight for 

 them, and whose army was dissolved as soon as 

 the exchequer was exhausted. Rome could fight to 

 its last man : Carthage could fight only to its last 

 dollar. At the beginning of both wars the Cartha- 

 ginians did wonders ; but as they became poor they 

 became feeble ; their strength dribbled out with their 

 gold ; the refusal of Alexandria to negotiate a loan 

 perhaps injured them more deeply than the victory of 

 Scipio. 



The fall of the Carthaginian empire is not a matter 

 for regret. Outside the walls of the city existed hope- 

 less slavery on the part of the subject, shameless ex- 

 tortion on the part of the officials. Throughout Africa 

 Carthage was never named without a curse. In the 

 time of the mercenary war, the Moorish women, taking 

 oath to keep nothing back, stripped off their gold 

 ornaments and brought them all to the men who were 

 resisting their oppressors. That city, that Carthage, 

 fed like a vulture upon the land. A corrupt and 

 grasping aristocracy, a corrupt and turbulent populace, 

 divided between them the prey. The Carthaginian 

 customs were barbarous in the extreme. When a 

 battle had been won they sacrificed their handsomest 

 prisoners to the gods ; when a battle had been lost, 

 the children of their noblest families were cast into 

 the furnace. Their Asiatic character was strongly 

 marked. They were a people false and sweet- worded, 

 effeminate and cruel, tyrannical and servile, devout 

 and licentious, merciless in triumph, faint-hearted in 

 danger, divinely heroic in despair. 



Let us therefore admit that, as an imperial city, 

 Carthage merited her fate. But henceforth we must 



