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* This lecture, like the preceding one, is based on Mr. J. H.
Stobart’s, The  Grandeur that was Rome.
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We have heard much talk of how disastrous the result would have been if Carthage, not Rome, had won.  But Carthage was a far and belated outpost of West Asia and of a manvantara that had ended over a century before:—­there was no question of her winning.  Though we see her only through Roman eyes, we may judge very well that no possibility of expansion was left in her.  There was no expansive force.  She threw out tentacles to suck in wealth and trade, but was already dead at heart.  All the greatness of old West Asia was concentrated, in her, in two men:  Hamilcar Barca and his son:  they shed a certain light and romantic glory over her, but she was quite unworthy of them.  Her prowess at any time was fitful:  where money was to be made, she might fight like a demon to make it; but she was never a fighting power like Rome.  She won her successes at first because her seat was on the sea, and the war was naval, and sea-battles were won not by fighting but by seamanship.  If Carthage had won, they say;—­but Carthage could not have won, because the cycles were for Rome.  You will note how that North African rim is tossed between European and West Asian control, according to which is in the ascendant.  Now that Europe’s up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries’ time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized.  But West Asia, early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia, drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic.  Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt and Phoenician colonies.  As for its own native races, they belong, I suppose, to the fourth, the Iberian Sub-race; and now in the days of our fifth Sub-race (the Aryan), seem out of the running for wielding empires of their own.

So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed a little; the course of history would have been much the same.  Rome might have been destroyed by Hannibal; she would have been rebuilt when Hannibal had departed; then gone on with her expansion, perhaps in other directions,—­and presently turned, and come on Carthage from elsewhere; or absorbed her quietly, and let her do the carrying trade of the Mediterranean ’under the Roman flag’ as you might say,—­or something of that sort.  Rome eradicated Carthage for the same reason that the Spaniards eradicated the Moors:  because the West Asian tide, to which Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and the European tide was flowing high.  Hamilcar indeed, and Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx which a West Asian town in Africa