isdom and power of Rome. The
senate, which voted its thanks to its political enemy, Varro, after his
disastrous defeat, 'because he had not despaired of the commonwealth,'
and which disdained either to solicit or to reprove or to threaten or in
any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed
supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honored than the
conqueror of Zama. This we should the more carefully bear in mind
because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than
national; and, as no single Roman will bear comparison to Hannibal, we
are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the
victory was awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the
contrary, never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in
the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage.

"It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be
conquered; his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world; for
great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; and no one
man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can in one generation effect
such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while
by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated
it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body to which magic
power had for a moment given unnatural life: when the charm has ceased,
the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of
Zama should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when
Hannibal must in the course of nature have been dead, and consider how
the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to
consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions
to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized
empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved,
the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe."[61]

[Footnote 61: Arnold.]

It was in the spring of 207 B.C. that Hasdrubal, after skilfully
disentangling himself from the Roman forces in Spain, and after a march
conducted with great judgment and little loss through the interior of
Gaul and the passes of the Alps, appeared in the country that now is the
north of Lombardy, at the head of troops which he had partly brought out
of Spain and partly levied among the Gauls and Ligurians on his way. At
this time Hannibal, with hi