As the desire of gain is the chief spur to commerce, and as the greatest men in Carthage never thought it beneath them to engage in that lucrative employment, all the historians have represented the whole body of the people as so insatiably fond of amassing wealth, that they esteemed even the lowest and dirtiest means lawful, that tended to the acquisition of their darling object. “Amongst the Carthaginians,” says Polybius, when he compares the manners of that people with those of the Romans, “nothing was infamous that was attended with gain.[198] Amongst the Romans nothing so infamous as bribery,[199] and to enrich themselves by unwarrantable means.” He adds in proof of his assertion, that, “at Carthage all the dignities, and highest employments in the state were openly sold.[200] A practice, he affirms, which at Rome was a capital crime.” Yet but a few pages before, where he inveighs bitterly against the sordid love of money, and rapacious avarice of the Cretans, he remarks that, “they were the only people in the world to whom no kind of gain appeared either infamous or unlawful.”[201] In another place where he censures the Greeks for aspersing Titus Flamius the Roman general, as if he had not been proof against the gold of Macedon, he affirms, “that whilst the Romans preserved the virtuous manners of their forefathers, and had not yet carried their arms into foreign countries, not a single man of them would have been guilty of a crime of that nature.”[202] But though he can boldly assert, as he says, “that in his time many of the Romans, if taken man by man, were able to preserve he trust reposed in them inviolable as to that point, yet he owns he durst not venture to say the same of all.” Though he speaks as modestly as he can to avoid giving offence, yet this hint is sufficient to convince us, that corruption was neither new nor uncommon at that time amongst the Romans. But as I shall resume this subject in a more proper place, I shall only observe from Polybius’s own detail of the history of the Carthaginians, that unless when the intrigues of faction prevailed, all their great posts were generally filled by men of the most distinguished merit. The charge of cruelty is brought against them with a very ill grace by the Romans, who treated even monarchs themselves, if they were so unhappy as to become their prisoners of war, with the utmost inhumanity, and threw them to perish in dungeons, after they had exposed them in triumph to the insults of their own populace.[203]