The story indeed of Regulus has afforded a noble subject for Horace, which he has embellished with some of the most beautiful strokes of poetry, and that fine ode has propagated and confirmed the belief of it, more perhaps than the writings of all their historians. But as neither Polybius nor Diodorus Siculus makes the least mention of such an event (though the Greeks bore an equal aversion to the Carthaginians) and as the Roman writers from whom we received it, differ greatly in their accounts of it, I cannot help joining in opinion with many learned men, that it was a Roman forgery. The Greek writers accuse them of barbarism and a total ignorance of the _belles lettres_, the study of which was the reigning taste of Greece. Rollin contemptuously affirms, that their education in general amounted to no more than writing and the knowledge of merchants accounts; that a Carthaginian philosopher would have been a prodigy amongst the learned; and then asks, “what would they have thought of a geometrician or astronomer of that nation?” Rollin seems to have put this question too hastily, since it is unanimously confessed; that they were the best ship builders, the ablest navigators, and the most skilful mechanicks at that time in the world: that they raised abundance of magnificent structures, and very well understood the art of fortification; all which (especially as the use of the compass was then unknown) must of necessity imply a more than common knowledge of astronomy, geometry, and every other branch of mathematicks. Let me add too that their knowledge in agriculture was so eminent;[204] that the works of Mago the Carthaginian upon that subject were ordered to be translated by a decree of the senate for the use of the Romans and their colonies. That the education of their youth was not confined to the mercantile part only, must be evident from that number of great men, who make such a figure in their history; particularly Hannibal, perhaps the greatest captain which any age has ever yet produced, and at the same time the most consummate statesman, and disinterested patriot. Painting, sculpture, and poetry, they seem to have left to their more idle and more luxurious neighbours the Greeks, and applied their wealth to the infinitely nobler uses of supporting their marine, enlarging and protecting their commerce and colonies. What opinion even the wiser part of the Romans had of these specious arts, and how unworthy they judged them of the close attention of a brave and free people, we may learn from the advice which Virgil gives his countrymen by the mouth of his hero’s father Anchises.[205] I have endeavoured here to clear the much injured character of this great people from the aspersions and gross misrepresentations of historians, by proofs drawn from the concessions and self-contradictions of the historians themselves.