t, that the military talent of Xanthippus was the
primary means of saving Carthage, is probably coloured; the officers
of Carthage can hardly have waited for foreigners to teach them that
the light African cavalry could be more appropriately employed on the
plain than among hills and forests. From such stories, the echo of
the talk of Greek guardrooms, even Polybius is not free. The
statement that Xanthippus was put to death by the Carthaginians after
the victory, is a fiction; he departed voluntarily, perhaps to enter
the Egyptian service.

7. Nothing further is known with certainty as to the end of Regulus;
even his mission to Rome--which is sometimes placed in 503, sometimes
in 513--is very ill attested. The later Romans, who sought in the
fortunes and misfortunes of their forefathers mere materials for
school themes, made Regulus the prototype of heroic misfortune as
they made Fabricius the prototype of heroic poverty, and put into
circulation in his name a number of anecdotes invented by way of
due accompaniment--incongruous embellishments, contrasting ill with
serious and sober history.

8. The statement (Zon. viii. 17) that the Carthaginians had to promise
that they would not send any vessels of war into the territories of
the Roman symmachy--and therefore not to Syracuse, perhaps even not
to Massilia--sounds credible enough; but the text of the treaty says
nothing of it (Polyb. iii. 27).

Chapter III

The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries

Natural Boundaries of Italy

The Italian confederacy as it emerged from the crises of the fifth
century--or, in other words, the State of Italy--united the various
civic and cantonal communities from the Apennines to the Ionian Sea
under the hegemony of Rome. But before the close of the fifth century
these limits were already overpassed in both directions, and Italian
communities belonging to the confederacy had sprung up beyond the
Apennines and beyond the sea. In the north the republic, in revenge
for ancient and recent wrongs, had already in 471 annihilated the
Celtic Senones; in the south, through the great war from 490 to 513,
it had dislodged the Phoenicians from the island of Sicily. In the
north there belonged to the combination headed by Rome the Latin town
of Ariminum (besides the burgess-settlement of Sena), in the south the
community of the Mamertines in Messana, and as both were nationally of
Italian origin, so both shared in the com