gness to submit to any terms that the senate might propose
for arresting the war. The senate replied that they were willing to
make a treaty with the Carthaginians, on condition that the latter
were to surrender themselves entirely to the Roman power, and bind
themselves to obey such orders as the consuls, on their arrival in
Africa with the army, should issue; the Romans, on their part,
guarantying that they should continue in the enjoyment of their
liberty, of their territorial possessions, and of their laws. As
proof, however, of the Carthaginian honesty of purpose in making the
treaty, and security for their future submission, they were required
to give up to the Romans three hundred hostages. These hostages were
to be young persons from the first families in Carthage, the sons of
the men who were most prominent in society there, and whose influence
might be supposed to control the action of the nation.

The embassadors could not but consider these as very onerous terms.
They did not know what orders the consuls would give them on their
arrival in Africa, and they were required to put the commonwealth
wholly into their power. Besides, in the guarantee which the Romans
offered them, their _territories_ and their _laws_ were to be
protected, but nothing was said of their cities, their ships, or their
arms and munitions of war. The agreement there, if executed, would put
the Carthaginian commonwealth wholly at the mercy of their masters, in
respect to all those things which were in those days most valuable to
a nation as elements of power. Still, the embassadors had been
instructed to make peace with the Romans on any terms, and they
accordingly acceded to these, though with great reluctance. They were
especially averse to the agreement in respect to the hostages.

This system, which prevailed universally in ancient times, of having
the government of one nation surrender the children of the most
distinguished citizens to that of another, as security for the
fulfillment of its treaty stipulations, was a very cruel hardship to
those who had to suffer the separation; but it would seem that there
was no other security strong enough to hold such lawless powers as
governments were in those days, to their word. Stern and rough as the
men of those warlike nations often were, mothers were the same then as
now, and they suffered quite as keenly in seeing their children sent
away from them, to pine in a foreign land, in hopeless