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Subsequently to the great extensions of territory in Etruria, Latium, and Campania, in the fifth century the effective burgesses numbered, on an average, 250,000; immediately before the first Punic war, 280,000 to 290,000. II. VI. Battle of Sentinum II. VII. Commencement of the Conflict in Lower Italy II. VII. Quaestors of the Fleet
Aristotle, who died about fifty years before the commencement of the first Punic war, describes the constitution of Carthage as having changed from a monarchy to an aristocracy, or to a democracy inclining towards oligarchy, for he designates it by both names.
As early as the time of the first Punic war, a consul was bold enough to jest at the auspices in public. They finally reached the absurd extreme of enacting a law, by the terms of which a popular assembly was obliged to disperse, if it should occur to a higher magistrate merely to look into the heavens for signs of the approach of such a storm.
These chronicles and registers on the one hand, and the hymns, laws, and formulas of various kinds on the other, formed the only written literature existing in the times before the Punic wars. Besides these, there, were a few speeches, such as that of Ap. Much importance has been assigned by Niebuhr and others to the ballad literature that clustered round the great names of Roman history.
The story of the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the military standpoint, reads for Rome almost like a nightmare, with its long succession of apparently easy victories turning one by one into defeats; but when we add to this that other chronicle, of which Livy is equally fond, the long lists of portents and prodigies sent by the angered gods, and when we realise that to the masses of the people the wrath of the gods was more terrible and just as real as the hostility of Hannibal, then we have not the heart to reproach them for their religious frenzy.
He had not the full authority over the Punic forces in that country which his brother and his father had previously exercised. The faction at Carthage, which was at feud with his family, succeeded in fettering and interfering with his power; and other generals were from time to time sent into Spain, whose errors and misconduct caused the reverses that Hasdrubal met with.
We learn from Nepos that the first book comprised the regal period; the second and third were devoted to the origin and primitive history of each Italian state; the fourth and fifth embraced the Punic wars; the last two carried the history as far as the Praetorship of Servius Galba, Cato's bold accusation of whom he inserted in the body of the work.
He says, that before the first Punic war the Romans had no thought of the sea; that Sicily was the first country, out of Italy, in which they ever landed; and that, when they went to that island to assist the Mamertines, the vessels which they employed in that expedition were hired, or borrowed from the Tarentines, the Locrians, &c.
These elements were threefold: the natural spiritual reaction resulting from the excesses of the period of the Second Punic War; the fascination of the Orient, exhibited to Rome in the cult of the Magna Mater; and the new gift which Greece now made to Rome, the knowledge of her literature, especially of her philosophy.
The East, Carthage and Sicily had been the successive homes of this system, and the Punic ideal reached Rome just at the moment when the tendency of the free peasantry to quit their holdings as unprofitable, or to sell them to pay their debts, opened the way for the organisation of husbandry on the grand Carthaginian model.
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