he historian asserts,
may have been a young man at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in
which he was eminently distinguished; but it was his good fortune to be
singularly favored by circumstances on more than one occasion, and his
whole career was eminently exceptional to the general current of
Hellenic life.

The Romans, though not braver than the Greeks, were more fortunate in
their military career than the stayers of the march of Persia. Like the
Greeks, they had but few young generals of much reputation. Most of
their conquests, and, indeed, the salvation of their country, were the
work of old leaders. The grand crisis of Rome was in the years that
followed the arrival of Hannibal in Italy; and the two men who did most
to baffle the invader were Fabius and Marcellus, who were called,
respectively, Rome's shield and sword. They were both old men, though
Marcellus may have been looked upon as young in comparison with Fabius,
who was upward of seventy, and who, eight years after his memorable
pro-dictatorship, retook Tarentum and baffled Hannibal. The old
_Lingerer_ was, at eighty, too clever, slow as they thought him at Rome,
to be "taken in" by Hannibal, who had prepared a nice trap for him, into
which he would not walk. Marcellus was about fifty-two when he was
pitted against the victor of Cannae, and he met him on various occasions,
and sometimes with striking success. At the age of fifty-six he took
Syracuse, after one of the most memorable of sieges, in which he had
Archimedes for an opponent. At sixty he was killed in a skirmish,
leaving the most brilliant military name of the republican times, so
highly are valor and energy rated, though in the higher qualities of
generalship he was inferior to men whose names are hardly known.
Undoubtedly, Mommsen is right when he says that Rome was saved by the
Roman system, and not by the labors of this man or that; but it is
something for a country to have men who know how to work under its
system, and in accordance with its requirements; and such men were
Fabius and Marcellus, the latter old enough to be Hannibal's father,
while the former was the contemporary of his grandfather.

The turning point in the Second Punic War was the siege of Capua by the
Romans. That siege Hannibal sought by all means in his power to raise,
well knowing, that, if the Campanian city should fall, he could never
hope to become master of Italy. He marched to Rome in the expectation of
com