us--called Dentatus, because
he had been born with teeth in his mouth--a stout, plain old Roman, very
stern, for when he levied troops against Pyrrhus, the first man who
refused to serve was punished by having his property seized and sold. He
then marched southward, and at Beneventum at length entirely defeated
Pyrrhus, and took four of his elephants. Pyrrhus was obliged to return
to Epirus, and the Roman steadiness had won the day after nine years.

Dentatus had the grandest triumph that had ever been known at Rome,
with the elephants walking in the procession, the first that the Romans
had ever seen. All the spoil was given up to the commonwealth; and when,
some time after, it was asserted that he had taken some for himself, it
turned out that he had only kept one old wooden vessel, which he used in
sacrificing to the gods.

The Greeks of Southern Italy had behaved very ill to Pyrrhus and turned
against him. The Romans found them so fickle and troublesome that they
were all reduced in one little war after another. The Tarentines had to
surrender and lose their walls and their fleet, and so had the people of
Sybaris, who have become a proverb for idleness, for they were so lazy
that they were said to have killed all their crowing-birds for waking
them too early in the morning. All the peninsula of Italy now belonged
to Rome, and great roads were made of paved stones connecting them with
it, many of which remain to this day, even the first of all, called the
Appian Way, from Rome to Capua, which was made under the direction of
the censor Appius Claudius, during the Samnite war.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE FIRST PUNIC WAR.

264-240.

We are now come to the time when Rome became mixed up in wars with
nations beyond Italy. There was a great settlement of the Phoenicians,
the merchants of the old world, at Carthage, on the northern coast of
Africa, the same place at which Virgil afterwards described AEneas as
spending so much time. Dido, the queen who was said to have founded
Carthage when fleeing from her wicked brother-in-law at Tyre, is thought
to have been an old goddess, and the religion and manners of the
Carthaginians were thoroughly Phoenician, or, as the Romans called them,
Punic. They had no king, but a Senate, and therewith rulers called by
the name that is translated as judges in the Bible; and they did not
love war, only trade, and spread out their settlements for this purpose
all over the coast of the M