And here we may note a point in which Rome seems to have been like our own country, of which {173} Napoleon I. complained that she always won "the last battle of a war." Many times we see her very hardly pressed, with the enemy at the gates of the city; but she goes on fighting and she wins the last battle, the battle which counts and which settles the result in her favour. This was more particularly so in the Second Punic War, which began in 219 B.C. Carthage had very great trouble with her own mercenary troops at the end of the first war against Rome; they demanded their pay, which was long overdue. That matter was largely settled by such heavy fighting between them and the Carthaginians themselves that comparatively few of the mercenaries were left alive at the end of it to receive pay, if there had been any for them. In the years that followed, Carthage became rich and prosperous. She had a large trade with the interior of Africa as well as with all the coast cities round the Mediterranean. She worked mines in Spain, and in order to draw more wealth from that rich and fertile country she gradually made herself mistress of a great part of it, and it was the capture by Carthage of Saguntum, a city in southern Spain, which was in the Roman alliance, that led to the outbreak in 219 B.C. of the Second Punic War. [Sidenote: Hannibal] The Carthaginian general who captured Saguntum, and thus provoked this greatest of the three Punic Wars, was Hannibal, perhaps the most famous leader of armies in all history. In telling this story of the world in mere outline, as I am trying to tell it, it is impossible to speak of any of the details of his extraordinary campaign. He had his army there in southern Spain. He marched with it, {174} meeting no very serious opposition, through Spain into that northern part of Italy which was then part of Gaul, and he thence descended into southern Italy and into the very heart of the Roman country itself. He won three great victories over the Roman armies on the way, and finally, a fourth, at Cannæ, in the autumn of 216 B.C., three years after he set out from Spain; and after Cannæ Rome herself seemed to lie at his mercy. [Illustration: HANNIBAL.] Why he did not at once press on and lay siege to the city is one of the puzzles of history. His army had been continuously marching and fighting; he may have thought that it needed rest. Almost certainly he expected further forces to be sent him from Carthage. But these forces did not come. [Sidenote: Battle of Zama]