After the battle of Cannae had rendered hopeless any further contest in the field, the war in Italy degenerated into a mere succession of attempts to gain possession of fortified towns. Hannibal's total want of siege artillery left him no resource for this but stratagem or internal assistance, and in gaining both his great capacity was eminently conspicuous. Capua, Beneventum, Tarentum, and a great many others, were successively wrested or won from the Romans; and it at one period seemed exceedingly doubtful whether, in this war of posts and stratagems, the Carthaginian would not prevail over them, as he had done in the field. This war, and from the influence of the same necessity in both cases, much resembled the wars of the League and Henry IV. in France; and the military conduct of Hannibal bore alternately a striking resemblance to the skill and resources of the chivalrous king of Navarre, and the bold daring of the emperor Napoleon. The gallant irruption, in particular, of the Carthaginian general, by which he relieved Capua when closely besieged by the Roman forces, bears, as Arnold has observed, the most remarkable resemblance to the similar march of Napoleon from Silesia to relieve Dresden, when beset by the Allied armies under the command of Schwartzenberg in 1813. Nor did the admirable skill of the consul Nero--who took advantage of his interior line of communication, and brought a decisive superiority of force from the frontiers of Apulia to bear on the army which Hamilcar had led across the Pyrenees and the Alps, to aid his brother in the south of Italy, and thus decide the war in Italy--bear a less striking analogy to Napoleon's cross marches from Rivoli to the neighbourhood of Mantua in 1796, to the able movement of the Archduke Charles on the Bavarian plains to the banks of the Maine, which proved the salvation of Germany in 1796, or to the gallant irruption of Napoleon, first into the midst of Blucher's scattered columns on the plains of Champagne, and then against the heads of Schwartzenberg's weighty columns at the bridge of Montereau in 1814, during his immortal campaign in France.