dixitque tandem perfidus Hannibal: “cerui, luporum præda rapacium, sectamur ultro quos opimus fallere et effugere est triumphus * * * * * “Carthagini iam non ego nuntios mittam superbos. occidit, occidit spes omnis et fortuna nostri nominis Hasdrubale interempto.”[11] This was in 207: in 206 Scipio won a decisive victory in Spain and in 205 made a counter-invasion upon the coast of Carthage. It was only “a forlorn hope of volunteers and disrated companies,” but it caused the recall of Hannibal and gained valuable African allies for Rome. The last scene of the duel was the victory of Zama in 202 in which Scipio won his title of Africanus and became the hero and saviour of Rome.[12] Carthage ceded Spain and the Spanish islands, lost her whole war-fleet, came under Roman suzerainty and agreed to pay an enormous indemnity. But her end was not yet. For another fifty years she was permitted to exist on sufferance in humiliation and agony. Now, frightful as had been the losses of Rome in this seventeen-years’ conflict, and great as was her exhaustion, she proceeded in the very year following the peace with Carthage to enter upon a fresh series of campaigns. The Gauls of the north made a desperate revolt, sacked Piacenza and invested Cremona, but the Romans quickly brought them to reason. The Gauls could not, of course, receive any of the rights of citizenship as yet, but they received back their independence, and were left free of tribute to act as a bulwark against their northern cousins. There was incessant fighting in Spain also. In Sardinia there were perpetual slave-drives, until the market was glutted with slaves, and the phrase was begotten “as cheap as a Sardinian.” How could the senate at such a moment declare a fresh war with the greatest of European powers? Was it under pressure of that greedy commercial party at Rome of which we are beginning to hear so much? The suggestion is absurd. There were hard knocks and little money to be got from Macedon; and it is difficult to conceive how any powerful commercial interests could have arisen at Rome during the seventeen years of the Hannibalic War. If ever there was a nation whose early history declined the economic interpretation it was the Romans. Even when the Romans had conquered Macedon they shut down the famous gold mines because they did not know how to manage them! Nor, I think, was it any large-minded _Welt-politik_ which led Rome into the Second Macedonian War. Doubtless Philip and the Greeks were dangerous and uncomfortable neighbours, and no doubt it was true that Philip of Macedon and Antiochus of Syria had formed a compact to divide up the realms of the boy-king of Egypt. But the war could probably have been postponed for years by negotiation. Philip did not want to fight Rome: he had not even