re are few generals who
have had such successes thrown as it were into their lap by fortune:
in the year 498 he stood precisely where Scipio stood fifty years
later, with this difference, that he had no Hannibal and no
experienced army arrayed against him. But the senate withdrew half
the army, as soon as they had satisfied themselves of the tactical
superiority of the Romans; in blind reliance on that superiority the
general remained where he was, to be beaten in strategy, and accepted
battle when it was offered to him, to be beaten also in tactics.
This was the more remarkable, as Regulus was an able and experienced
general of his kind. The rustic method of warfare, by which Etruria
and Samnium had been won, was the very cause of the defeat in the
plain of Tunes. The principle, quite right in its own province, that
every true burgher is fit for a general, was no longer applicable;
the new system of war demanded the employment of generals who had a
military training and a military eye, and every burgomaster had not
those qualities. The arrangement was however still worse, by which
the chief command of the fleet was treated as an appanage to the chief
command of the land army, and any one who chanced to be president of
the city thought himself able to act the part not of general only, but
of admiral too. The worst disasters which Rome suffered in this war
were due not to the storms and still less to the Carthaginians, but
to the presumptuous folly of its own citizen-admirals.

Rome was victorious at last. But her acquiescence in a gain far less
than had at first been demanded and indeed offered, as well as the
energetic opposition which the peace encountered in Rome, very clearly
indicate the indecisive and superficial character of the victory and
of the peace; and if Rome was the victor, she was indebted for her
victory in part no doubt to the favour of the gods and to the energy
of her citizens, but still more to the errors of her enemies in the
conduct of the war--errors far surpassing even her own.

Notes for Chapter II

1. II. V. Campanian Hellenism

2. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy

3. The Mamertines entered quite into the same position towards Rome
as the Italian communities, bound themselves to furnish ships (Cic.
Verr. v. 19, 50), and, as the coins show, did not possess the right
of coining silver.

4. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy

5. II. VII. Last Struggles in Italy

6. The statemen