food.  Although his youth had been spent in the camp, he possessed such culture as belonged to the Phoenicians of rank in his day; in Greek, apparently after he had become a general, he made such progress under the guidance of his confidant Sosilus of Sparta as to be able to compose state papers in that language.  As he grew up, he entered the army of his father, to perform his first feats of arms under the paternal eye and to see him fall in battle by his side.  Thereafter he had commanded the cavalry under his sister’s husband, Hasdrubal, and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his talents as a leader.  The voice of his comrades now summoned him—­the tried, although youthful general—­to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law had lived and died.  He took up the inheritance, and he was worthy of it.  His contemporaries tried to cast stains of various sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous.  But though anger and envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents.  Laying aside wretched inventions which furnish their own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants, particularly Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the Samnite, were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding him which may not be justified under the circumstances, and according to the international law, of the times; and all agree in this, that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthusiasm, caution and energy.  He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care.  By an unrivalled system of espionage—­he had regular spies even in Rome—­he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair, in order to procure information on some point or other.  Every page of the history of this period attests his genius in strategy; and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution, and in the unparalleled influence which as a foreign exile he exercised in the cabinets of the eastern powers.  The power which he wielded over men is shown by his incomparable control over an army of various nations and many tongues—­an army which never in the worst times mutinied against him.  He was a great man; wherever he went, he riveted the eyes of all.

Rupture between Rome and Carthage