At first the expansion of Carthage met with nothing more than could amuse its facile energies and increase its contemptuous security: it judged, exploited, or subsidised the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain and Sardinia; it wrangled with the Greek colonies whom perhaps it thought itself “predestined” to rule—for to prophesy was a weakness in the blood from which it sprang. Some two centuries and a half before our era, when these Orientals had had footing for near a thousand and Carthage an existence of six hundred years, Rome moved to the attack. [Sidenote: The Roman Attack] Rome had already achieved and was leading a confederation of the Italian peoples, she had already stamped her character and impressed her discipline upon the most advanced portion of the west, she had for a full generation minted that gold into coin, when she became aware that a city with whom she had often treated and whom she had thought remote, was present: something alien, far wealthier than herself, far more numerous and boasting a complete hold of communications and of the western sea. Between the two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent or despicable to the other. [Sidenote: The Punic Wars] The Roman people were military. They had no love for ships. The sea terrified them: their expansion was by land and their horror of the sea explains much of their history. The very boast of maritime supremacy that Carthage made was a sort of challenge to their genius. They accepted that challenge and their success was complete. Within a hundred years they had first tamed and then obliterated their rival, and the Maghreb re-entered Europe. The first accidents of that conflict were of such a nature as to confirm Carthage in her creed and to lead her on to her destiny. She found, indeed, that the command of the sea was a doubtful thing: the landsmen beat her in the first round; clumsily and in spite of seamanship. But when, as a consequence of such defeat, they landed upon the African soil which she had thought inviolable, there, to her astonishment, she overwhelmed them. The loss of Sicily, to which she consented, did nothing to warn her. She became but the greater in her own eyes: Sicily she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain, an expansion the more imperial that the new province was more distant and far larger, and indefinitely more barbarous than the last. It may be imagined what a bitter patriotism the surprises of the early struggle had bred in the governing class of Carthage. From the moment when, in their unexpected victory, they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to Moloch, this aristocracy had determined upon a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of them undertook the task and undertook it not from the Mother Country but from the Empire. He marched from Spain.