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As all our information of Carthage and the Punic wars has been transmitted by Roman authors, so our knowledge of Philip and the war of 1675-6, is derived from partial and in some instances prejudiced sources. Yet it is just to say that our ancestors made no concealment of the facts, although the comments of Mather and Hubbard are often strangely barbarous in spirit.
Among the more intellectual classes the folly of the one set of gods, the darlings of the common people, was felt as keenly as the folly of the others, those who had been worshipped by the men of former days. Philosophy, which had had its share in the breakdown of faith, beginning in the days of the Punic wars, was now offering out of itself a substitute for the faith which it had taken away.
ARE NOT TRAITORS DISTINGUISHED BY PUBLIC HONORS? Is not negligence of morals applauded, sensibility derided, tenderness scoffed, conjugal fidelity jeered, sincerity despised, enviolable friendship treated with ridicule: while seduction, adultery, hard- heartedness, punic faith, avarice, and fraud, stalk forth unabashed, decked in gorgeous array, lauded by the world?
Seeing that he fought in the first Punic war, he cannot have been born later than 495. Cic. His Campanian origin is indicated by Gellius, and his Latin nationality, if proof of it were needed, by himself in his epitaph.
There were various reasons why this fine island should become the scene of servile wars sooner than other portions of the Roman dominions. Upon the final expulsion of the Carthaginians, about the middle of the second Punic War, great changes of property ensued.
He had cast a rapid glance around, as he spoke, and Marcia knew that he divined why the service of tending the door had been left to her a free woman and a guest; yet he was pleased to ignore all inferences, and to attribute her act to some divine will. His words, too, were more than friendly, and, if they covered no snare of Punic faith, augured safety and continued favour.
His principal work, written in Greek, was a history of the first and second Punic war, to which subsequent writers were much indebted. Contemporary with Fabius was Cincius Alimentus, also an annalist of the Punic war, in which he was personally engaged.
And at first, not knowing whither the Carthaginian was going, they had imagined that their own rocks and forts, and the plunder of their cattle and people, were his objects; but afterwards, the report of the Punic war with which Italy was being desolated for now ten years, had convinced them that the Alps were only a passage, and that two very powerful nations, separated from each other by a vast tract of sea and land, were contending for empire and power.
This is expressly attested by the Greek historian Polybius, who was the intimate friend of the younger Africanus, and drew his information respecting the second Punic war from the best possible authorities.
Other passages, showing the same mental force, occur in the Astronomica; one might instance the fine passage on the power of the human eye to take in, within its tiny compass, the whole immensity of the heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo, on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well- worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse, and the great naval battles of the first Punic war.
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