A Short History of Spain

cities. Now Hamilcar determined, by placating, and by bribes, and if necessary by force, to take possession of the Peninsula for his own purposes

heir immense resources, and by promises of increased prosperity won the confidence and sy

of the boy to his oath made a great deal of history. He took up the task when his father laid it down, inaugurated the second Punic war (218-201

upon that city. At all events its antiquity was greater even than that of the Phenician cities in Spain, and after being long forgotten by the Greeks it had drifte

nds! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal who fears

g down the besiegers from the walls. They had no repeating rifles nor dynamite guns, but they had the terrible falaric, a shaft of fir with an iron head a yard long, at the point of which was a mass of burning tow, which had been dipped in pitch. When a breach was ma

ed to surrender, the chief men of the city kindled a great fire in the market-place, into which they then threw all the silver and gold in

re, and its destruction was one of the thrilling tragedies of ancient history. On its site there exists

ry. To the people of Tyre and of Greece, the twin "Pillars of Hercules" had marked the limit beyond which there was nothing; and those two columns, Gibraltar and Ceuta, with the legend ne plus ultra entwined about them, still s

nly twenty-four years old, stood up in the Roman Forum and offered to fill the undesired post; and, in 210 B.C., Scipio "the Younger"-and the

rmining him with his native allies; and to make that people realize to what hard taskmasters the

Carthaginian movement, sent his fleet to blockade the city, and planned his moves with such precisio

without a siege. Not one of the inhabitants was spar

rs later-to read of 276 golden bowls which were brought to Scipio's tent

edge of their fidelity to Carthage. Now Scipio held these pledges, and they were a menace and a promise. They were Roman slav

over the inhabitants, and so moved were they by this unexpected gen

one occasion he said: "Never call me king. Other nations may revere that name, but no

they felt the grandeur of the words, though they could not quite understand them. They we

d, was surrendered to the Romans, and the entire Spani

eninsula was organized into a Roman province, thenceforth known in history

and a suicide. His nation had not a single ship upon the seas, nor a foot of territory upon the earth, and the great city

ntrenched in their own impregnable mountain fastnesses, were brave, warlike, independent tribes, which had never known anything but freedom, whose names even, Rome had not yet heard. The stern virtue and nobility of Scipio proved a delusive promise. Rome had not an easy task, and other and brutal methods were to be employed in subd

cy was making of their new possession a fighting ground for the civil war which was then raging at Rome; and partisans of Marius and of Sylla were using and slaughtering the native tribes in their own desperate stru