Smashing Scipio on the Ticinus and Sempronius on the Trebua, he went into winter quarters on the Upper Po, where he contracted the ophthalmia which cost him an eye. In the following spring he resumed his southward march, annihilating the army with which the consul Flaminius sought to check him. Rome he did not venture to attack, deeming his decimated force too weak to justify the venture, and therein he committed his fatal error. But at Cannæ, on the second of August, 216 B.C., he turned suddenly upon Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had closed in upon his rear, and out of a Roman army numbering seventy-six thousand men, seventy thousand perished in the awful slaughter. Again the road to Rome was open to Hannibal, but without the reinforcements which he had asked from Carthage, he did not dare to attack, though he once stood within three miles of the city’s walls. For thirteen years he held his ground in southern Italy, winning victories of which he was too weak to take advantage and straining his eyes seaward in quest of the troop-laden galleys which never came. But, while Hannibal was being kept at bay near Capua, the arms of Rome had not been idle elsewhere. Under Publius Scipio—who in later years was destined to gain imperishable fame as Scipio Africanus—a Roman army had invaded Spain and, defeating the small Carthaginian force which garrisoned the peninsula, had undone all the work that Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal had accomplished. Crossing over into Africa, Scipio sought to form an alliance with Syphax, king of the Massæsylians, whose capital was Cirta, the modern Constantine. But, thanks to the influence of his beautiful Carthaginian wife, Sophonisba, daughter of Hasdrubal Giscon (whom Scipio had defeated in Spain), Syphax remained faithful to Carthage. Sophonisba’s marriage to Syphax, however, cost Carthage the allegiance of another great Numidian chieftain, Masinissa, to whom she had been betrothed. Piqued by this rejection, the haughty Berber deserted Carthage, for which he had always fought, and became the stanch ally of Rome. Yet how strangely does history reverse itself! For some years later, when the kingdom of Syphax, who had been defeated and had died in captivity, had been given to Masinissa by the Romans, and that chieftain came riding into his new capital, Cirta, in triumph, there was the widowed Sophonisba, beautiful as ever, awaiting him at the entrance to the citadel. The lovely creature threw herself at the feet of the conqueror and begged with tears in her eyes that she be not handed over to her hereditary enemies, the Romans. So he married her, for he loved her still and doubted not that she would be safe under his protection. But when Scipio heard of it he bitterly upbraided Masinissa for having betrayed his Roman allies by marrying a Carthaginian. More, he demanded Sophonisba’s surrender, for he wanted her to grace his triumph when he returned to Rome. Whereupon Masinissa, who