HAMILCAR AND HANNIBAL

SICILY WOULD NATURALLY BE THE place in which Carthage would first seek to establish a foreign dominion. At its nearest point it was not more than fifty miles distant; its soil was fertile, its climate temperate; it was rich in several valuable articles of commerce. We have seen that, in the treaty which was made with Rome about the end of the sixth century B.C., the Carthaginians claimed part of the island as their own. It is probable that this part was then less than it had been. For more than two hundred years the Greeks had been spreading their settlements over the country; and the Greeks were the great rivals of the Phoenicians. If they were not as keen traders and trade was certainly held in less estimation in Athens, and even in Corinth, than it was in Tyre and Carthage—they were as bold and skilful as sailors, and far more ready than their rivals to fight for what they had got or for what they wanted. The earliest Greek colony in Sicily was Naxos, on the east coast, founded by settlers from Euboea in 735. Other Greek cities sought room for their surplus population in the same field; and some of the colonies founded fresh settlements of their own. The latest of them was Agrigentum on the south coast, which owed its origin to Gela, itself a colony of Cretans and Rhodians. As the Greeks thus spread westward the Carthaginians retired before them, till their dominions were probably reduced to little more than a few trading ports on the western coast of the island. As long, indeed, as they could trade with the new comers they seemed to be satisfied. They kept up, for the most part, friendly relations with their rivals, allowing even the right of intermarriage to some at least of their cities.

But in point of fact they were only waiting their opportunity and the opportunity came when the Persians invaded Greece for the second time. Some historians tell us that it was agreed by the two powers that a combined effort should be made, that, while Persia was attacking the mother-country of Greece, Carthage should attack its important colonies in Sicily. Others insist that there is no proof of any such agreement having been made. It is not easy to see what proof we could expect to find. But there is nothing, I think, improbable about it. The Phoenician admirals in the service of the Great King, who had refused to obey Cambyses when he ordered them to sail against their kinsmen in Carthage, may very well have managed a matter of this kind. Anyhow it is clear that Carthage knew that the opportunity had come,, and eagerly seized it. One of the families of Mago, Hamilcar by name, was appointed commander-in-chief. He set sail from Carthage with a force which when it had been joined by auxiliaries gathered from Sicily and elsewhere, amounted, it is said, to three hundred thousand men. There would have been even more had not the squadron which conveyed the chariots and the cavalry been lost in a storm. The number is probably exaggerated—the numbers in ancient history are seldom trustworthy—but we may take as genuine the list of the nations from which the army was recruited. The land-force consisted, we hear, of Phoenicians, Libyans, Sardinians, Corsicans, Iberians, Ligyes, and Helisyki. The first four names need little explanation. The Phoenicians were native Carthaginians and men of kindred race from the mother- country of Phoenicia, from Cyprus and from other settlements on the Mediterranean shore. Sardinia, we know from its mention in the treaty of 509, belonged to Carthage; Corsica had probably been since acquired. The Iberians were Spaniards, over whose country Carthage was gaining some influence. The Ligyes were the Ligurians from the northwest of the Italian peninsula; the Helisyki may have been Volscians, neighbors of Rome on the south-east and for some time its most formidable enemies.

Hamilcar reached Panormus (now Palermo) in safety with the main body of his fleet “The war is over,” he is reported to have said, thinking that only the chances of the sea could have saved Sicily from such an army as his. At Panormus he gave his army three days’ rest, and repaired his ships. Then he marched on Himera. There he dragged his ships on shore, and made a deep ditch and a rampart of wood to protect them. His forces he divided between two camps. The crews of his fleet occupied one, his soldiers the other. The two covered the whole of the west side of the city. A force from the city which encountered his advance guard was driven in, and Theron, the tyrant of Agrigentum, who had been appointed to take command of the garrison by Gelon of Syracuse, the most powerful monarch in the island, sent off in hot haste for help to his chief Gelon had everything ready, and marched at once with an army far greater than any other Greek state could then have raised, fifty thousand infantry and five thousand horse. After thoroughly fortifying the camp which he had pitched near the city, he sent out his cavalry to attack the foraging parties of the Carthaginians. These suffered a signal defeat; and the people of Himera now grew so confident that they actually threw open the gateways which, in their determination to make a desperate resistance, they had at first bricked up.

The conclusive battle was not long delayed and Gelon is said to have won it by the help of a curious stratagem. His scouts had intercepted a letter from the people of Selinus to Hamilcar, in which there was a promise that they would send on a day named a force of cavalry to his assistance. Gelon instructed some of his own horsemen to play the part of the cavalry of Selinus. They were to make their way into the naval camp of the Carthaginians, and then to turn against their supposed allies. A signal was agreed upon which they were to show when they were ready to act. Gelon’s scouts were posted on the hills to watch for it, and to communicate it to the main body of his army in the plain. The fight was long and bloody; it lasted from sunrise to sunset, but the Carthaginians had lost heart, and the Greeks were confident of victory. No quarter was given, and by night, one hundred and fifty thousand men (it must surely be an impossible number) had fallen. The rest fled to the hills, and were there compelled by want of water to surrender to the people of Agrigentum. Of the fate of Hamilcar nothing was ever certainly known. Some said that he had been slain by the pretended allies from Selinus; others that, being busy with a great sacrifice at which the fire was piled high to consume the victims whole, and seeing that the fortune of the day was going against him, he threw himself into the flames and disappeared. His body was never found, but the Greeks erected a monument to his memory on the field of battle; and the Carthaginians, though never accustomed to be even commonly just to their beaten generals, paid him, after his death, honors which it became a custom to renew year by year. The rest of the story is curiously tragic. Twenty ships had been kept by Hamilcar to be used as might be wanted, when the rest of the fleet was drawn up. These and these only escaped out of the three thousand vessels of war and commerce, which Hasdrubal had brought with him. But even these did not get safe home. They were overtaken by a storm, and one little boat carried to Carthage the dismal news that their great army had perished. The city was over-whelmed with dismay and grief. An embassy was at once sent to Gelon to beg for peace. Peace was granted, but on hard conditions. Carthage was to pay a ransom of two thousand talents, to build two chapels in memory of the event, and, one writer tells us, to abolish the hideous practice of human sacrifices. If this last condition was ever agreed to, it was certainly not kept.

It has been said, and one would like to believe that the great battle of Himera, by which the Greek colonies in Sicily were relieved from the pressing fear of Carthage, was fought on the very same day on which the Persians were defeated at Salamis.

Carthage could not have been long in recovering from this loss, for we find her able soon afterwards to dictate a treaty to Rome, but she did not meddle with Sicilian affairs for many years. But in 410 a Sicilian town, Egesta invited her aid against their neighbors of Selinus. Both towns were near the Carthaginian settlements; and it was possible that these might suffer, if Selinus, which was said to be the aggressor, were allowed to become too powerful. But probably the desire to avenge the defeat of seventy years before was the chief reason why Carthage promised the help that was asked. It so happened, too, that Hannibal, grandson of the Hamilcar who had perished at Himera, was the senior of the two first magistrates of the city. He had been brought up in exile—for Gisco, his father, had been banished after the defeat of Himera—and at this very city of Selinus. “He was by nature,” says the historian, “a hater of the Greeks,” and he did all he could to persuade his countrymen to undertake the war.

After some negotiations which came to nothing, Hannibal sent a force of 5,000 Africans and 800 Italian mercenaries to Sicily. The army of Selinus, which was busy plundering the territory of their enemies, was surprised, and lost a thousand men and all the booty which it had collected. Selinus now sent to Syracuse to beg for help and Egesta, on her part, made a fresh appeal to Carthage. This appeal was answered in a way that took the Sicilians by surprise. Hannibal had collected a great force of Spaniards and Africans. This he carried to Sicily in a fleet of as many as 1,500 transports, escorted by sixty ships of war. It numbered, according to the smallest estimate, 100,000 men, and was furnished with an...