a general, was no longer applicable; the new system of war demanded the employment of generals who had a military training and a military eye, and every burgomaster had not those qualities.  The arrangement was however still worse, by which the chief command of the fleet was treated as an appanage to the chief command of the land army, and any one who chanced to be president of the city thought himself able to act the part not of general only, but of admiral too.  The worst disasters which Rome suffered in this war were due not to the storms and still less to the Carthaginians, but to the presumptuous folly of its own citizen-admirals.

Rome was victorious at last.  But her acquiescence in a gain far less than had at first been demanded and indeed offered, as well as the energetic opposition which the peace encountered in Rome, very clearly indicate the indecisive and superficial character of the victory and of the peace; and if Rome was the victor, she was indebted for her victory in part no doubt to the favour of the gods and to the energy of her citizens, but still more to the errors of her enemies in the conduct of the war—­errors far surpassing even her own.

Notes for Chapter ii

1.  II.  V. Campanian Hellenism

2.  II.  VII.  Submission of Lower Italy

3.  The Mamertines entered quite into the same position towards Rome as the Italian communities, bound themselves to furnish ships (Cic.  Verr. v. 19, 50), and, as the coins show, did not possess the right of coining silver.

4.  II.  VII.  Submission of Lower Italy

5.  II.  VII.  Last Struggles in Italy

6.  The statement, that the military talent of Xanthippus was the primary means of saving Carthage, is probably coloured; the officers of Carthage can hardly have waited for foreigners to teach them that the light African cavalry could be more appropriately employed on the plain than among hills and forests.  From such stories, the echo of the talk of Greek guardrooms, even Polybius is not free.  The statement that Xanthippus was put to death by the Carthaginians after the victory, is a fiction; he departed voluntarily, perhaps to enter the Egyptian service.

7.  Nothing further is known with certainty as to the end of Regulus; even his mission to Rome—­which is sometimes placed in 503, sometimes in 513—­is very ill attested.  The later Romans, who sought in the fortunes and misfortunes of their forefathers mere materials for school themes, made Regulus the prototype of heroic misfortune as they made Fabricius the prototype of heroic poverty, and put into circulation in his name a number of anecdotes invented by way of due accompaniment—­incongruous embellishments, contrasting ill with serious and sober history.

8.  The statement (Zon. viii. 17) that the Carthaginians had to promise that they would not send any vessels of war into the territories of the Roman symmachy—­and therefore not to Syracuse, perhaps even not to Massilia—­sounds credible enough; but the text of the treaty says nothing of it (Polyb. iii. 27).