The Romans had to fight against peoples of the same race as themselves, as vigorous and as brave as they. Some who were not content to obey they exterminated. The rich plains of the Volscians became a swampy wilderness, uninhabitable even to the present time, the gloomy region of the Pontine marshes. In the land of the Samnites there were still recognizable, three hundred years after the war, the forty-five camps of Decius and the eighty-six of Fabius, less apparent by the traces of their intrenchments than by the solitude of the neighborhood. =The Punic Wars.=--Come into Sicily, Rome antagonized Carthage. Then began the Punic wars (that is to say, against the Phœnicians). There were three of these wars. The first, from 264 to 241, was determined by naval battles; Rome became mistress of Sicily. It was related that Rome had never had any war-ships, that she took as a model a Carthaginian galley cast ashore by accident on her coast and began by exercising her oarsmen in rowing on the land. This legend is without foundation for the Roman navy had long endured. This is the Roman account of this war: the Roman consul Duillius had vanquished the Carthaginian fleet at Mylæ (260); a Roman army had disembarked in Africa under the lead of Regulus, had been attacked and destroyed (255); Regulus was sent as a prisoner to Rome to conclude a peace, but persuading the Senate to reject it, he returned to Carthage where he perished by torture. The war was concentrated in Sicily where the Carthaginian fleet, at first victorious at Drepana, was defeated at the Ægates Islands; Hamilcar, besieged on Mount Eryx, signed the peace. The second war (from 218 to 201) was the work of Hannibal. The third war was a war of extermination: the Romans took Carthage by assault, razed it, and conquered Africa. These wars had long made Rome tremble. Carthage had the better navy, but its warriors were armed adventurers fighting not for country but for pay, lawless, terrible under a general like Hannibal. =Hannibal.=--Hannibal, who directed the whole of the second war and almost captured Rome, was of the powerful family of the Barcas. His father Hamilcar had commanded a Carthaginian army in the first Punic war and had afterwards been charged with the conquest of Spain. Hannibal was then but a child, but his father took him with him. The departure of an army was always accompanied by sacrifices to the gods of the country; it was said that Hamilcar after the sacrifice made his infant son swear eternal enmity to Rome.