“I was driven by the wind,” replied Hanno.

“You are like a rhinoceros trampling on his dung:  you are displaying your own folly! be silent!” And they began to indulge in recriminations respecting the battle of the Aegatian islands.

Hanno accused him of not having come to meet him.

“But that would have left Eryx undefended.  You ought to have stood out from the coast; what prevented you?  Ah!  I forgot! all elephants are afraid of the sea!”

Hamilcar’s followers thought this jest so good that they burst out into loud laughter.  The vault rang with it like the beating of tympanums.

Hanno denounced the unworthiness of such an insult; the disease had come upon him from a cold taken at the siege of Hecatompylos, and tears flowed down his face like winter rain on a ruined wall.

Hamilcar resumed: 

“If you had loved me as much as him there would be great joy in Carthage now!  How many times did I not call upon you! and you always refused me money!”

“We had need of it,” said the chiefs of the Syssitia.

“And when things were desperate with me—­we drank mules’ urine and ate the straps of our sandals; when I would fain have had the blades of grass soldiers and made battalions with the rottenness of our dead, you recalled the vessels that I had left!”

“We could not risk everything,” replied Baat-Baal, who possessed gold mines in Darytian Gaetulia.

“But what did you do here, at Carthage, in your houses, behind your walls?  There are Gauls on the Eridanus, who ought to have been roused, Chanaanites at Cyrene who would have come, and while the Romans send ambassadors to Ptolemaeus—­”

“Now he is extolling the Romans to us!” Some one shouted out to him:  “How much have they paid you to defend them?”

“Ask that of the plains of Brutium, of the ruins of Locri, of Metapontum, and of Heraclea!  I have burnt all their trees, I have pillaged all their temples, and even to the death of their grandchildren’s grandchildren—­”

“Why, you disclaim like a rhetor!” said Kapouras, a very illustrious merchant.  “What is it that you want?”

“I say that we must be more ingenious or more terrible!  If the whole of Africa rejects your yoke the reason is, my feeble masters, that you do not know how to fasten it to her shoulders!  Agathocles, Regulus, Coepio, any bold man has only to land and capture her; and when the Libyans in the east concert with the Numidians in the west, and the Nomads come from the south, and the Romans from the north”—­a cry of horror rose—­“Oh! you will beat your breasts, and roll in the dust, and tear your cloaks!  No matter! you will have to go and turn the mill-stone in the Suburra, and gather grapes on the hills of Latium.”

They smote their right thighs to mark their sense of the scandal, and the sleeves of their robes rose like large wings of startled birds.  Hamilcar, carried away by a spirit, continued his speech, standing on the highest step of the altar, quivering and terrible; he raised his arms, and the rays from the candelabrum which burned behind him passed between his fingers like javelins of gold.