It seems to us, when we read how Capua, the noblest of her allied cities, opened her gates and made common cause with the enemy, how twelve of the thirty colonies of the Latin name refused their contingents of men and money; how all the north of Italy, then Cisalpine Gaul, from the Var to the Rubicon, was in tumultuous arms against her; how all the proud and magnificent cities of La Puglia and Calabria were leagued with the terrible invader; it seems, I say, as if one superadded call on her resources must have remained unanswered; one more war-trumpet blown by a new enemy must have sounded her death-note. And there was one moment when it appeared that this contingency was close at hand. In the year of the city 540, while all the south of Italy was in arms with Hannibal from Capua down to the Gulf of Taranto, and all the north was in that tumultuous state of disorganization which with Celtic populations is ever the herald of coming insurrection, Sardinia suddenly broke out into armed and open rebellion. Sicily, also, in which Hiero, the fast and faithful friend of Rome, had lately died at a very advanced age, rejected the Roman alliance, and a war of extermination was raging in that beautiful island between the partisans of the two rival powers, and the forces which each could spare from the home conflict to aid its faction. At this crisis, Philip of Macedon, the descendant of Alexander, and at that time the most powerful of European princes, entered into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Hannibal, and would in the course of that very summer have crossed the Adriatic and invaded Italy with some five-and-twenty thousand men, sixteen thousand of whom were the hitherto unconquered phalanx, provided with that arm, in the greatest possible perfection, the want of which had robbed Hannibal of the fruits of all his great pitched battles—I mean an efficient artillery. In this respect the Greeks were unsurpassed; the Greek engineers were the wonder of the world, as was subsequently shown at the siege of Syracuse; and how great soever the superiority of the Romans to the Carthagenians in this arm of service, it was as nothing to the skill of the Greek artillerists, and the excellence of the Greek machinery. What this combination might—I should rather say might not—have effected, it were difficult to show; more difficult to show how Rome could have resisted it. For my part, having examined the question in all its lights, I am of opinion that, had this alliance gone into effect, and Philip acted with energy and steadiness of purpose equal to his bravery and ambition, Marcellus never would have taken Syracuse, nor Scipio conquered Spain; but that from both those countries triumphant reinforcements would have poured in to Hannibal, over the Alps, across the Straits of Messina, that an Italian Tama would have sealed the doom of Rome, and a Punic ploughshare razed the foundations of the capitol.