In truth, such was the prostration of the strength of Rome by these terrible defeats, that the republic was gone but for the jealousy of the Carthaginian government, which hindered them from sending any efficient succours to Hannibal, and the unconquerable spirit of the Roman aristocracy, which rose with every disaster which ensued, and led them to make efforts in behalf of their country which appear almost superhuman, and never have been equalled by any subsequent people on earth. Republican as he is in his ideas, Arnold, with his usual candour as to facts, admits, in the strongest manner, those prodigious efforts made by the patricians of Rome on this memorable occasion; and that the issue of the contest, and with it the fate of the civilized world, depended on their exertions. Out of 270,000 men, of whom the citizens of Rome consisted before the war, no less than seventy thousand were in arms in its fourth year. No such proportion, has ever since been heard of in the world. One in a hundred of the whole population is the utmost which experience has shown a state is capable of bearing, for any length of time, in her regular army. "As Hannibal," says he, "utterly eclipses Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit, and wisdom, and power of Rome. The senate, which voted its thanks to its political enemy Varro, 'because he had not despaired of the commonwealth,' and which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused to send their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than the conqueror of Zama. Never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered; his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations, and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can, in one generation, effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead; and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe."[30]