In these days sober students of history wisely leave the oft-told stories of war and battle, and busy themselves rather with questions of social life, public and private economy, and the history of religion, morals and scientific inquiry. But there are a few wars, great struggles of nation against nation, which will always have an absorbing interest: partly because of their dramatic character, partly because of their far-reaching consequences; and the long fight between Rome and Carthage is assuredly one of these. On the Carthaginian side it produced two of the most extraordinary men, father and son, of whom history has anywhere to tell; and on the Roman side it gives us a vivid picture of the most marvellous endurance during long years of extreme peril that we can find in the annals of any people. And probably no war was ever so pregnant of results for good and ill alike. It welded the whole of Italy south of the Alps into a united country under the rule of Rome, and launched the Romans on a new career of conquest beyond the sea; it laid the foundations of the Roman Empire as we now think of that great system. Yet it left Italy in a state of economic distress from which it is hardly untrue to say that she has never fully recovered, and it changed the character of the Roman people, rich and poor alike, for the worse rather than the better. In order to see clearly how it came about, we must once more look at the map of Italy; a map of modern Italy will do well enough. Let the reader remember that as yet Rome had control only over the central and southern parts of the whole of what is now the kingdom of Italy, and that two other parts of that kingdom, which every Italian now regards as essential to its unity, were in other hands. These were: first, the great alluvial plain of the river Po (Padus); secondly, the island of Sicily: strategically speaking, these lie on the two flanks of the Roman dominion, to north and south respectively. Any power holding central Italy, to be safe from invasion, must be in possession of these two positions, as a long series of wars has clearly shown, beginning with the two now to be sketched. The magnificent plain of the Po, stretching from the great Alpine barrier to the Apennines which look down on the Gulf of Genoa, the richest land in all Italy, was then in the hands of warlike Gallic tribes, who had settled there before the time when they struck southward and captured Rome itself; these might again become a serious danger, as indeed they proved to be in this very war. The island of Sicily was, and had long been, a bone of contention between the Greek settlers who had long ago built cities on the most favourable points of its coast, and the traders of the Phœnician city of Carthage just opposite to it on the coast of Africa. Sicily was rich in harbours, and like the plain of the Po, also rich in corn, olive, and vine; and the Greeks had held on to it so persistently that with the recent help of