ROME PARVENUE


The Punic War was not forced on Rome. She had no good motive for
it; not even a decent excuse. It was simply that she was
accustomed to do the next thing; and Carthage presented itself
as the next thing to fight,--Sicily, the next thing to be
conquered. The war lasted from 264 to 241; and at the end of it
Rome found herself out of Italy; mistress of Sicily, Sardinia,
and Corsica. The Italian laya center had expanded; Italy had
boiled over. It was just the time when Ts'in at the other end of
the world was conquering China, and the Far Eastern Manvantara
was beginning. Manvantaras do not begin or end anywhere, I
imagine, without some cyclic event marking it in all other parts
of the world.

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* This lecture, like the preceding one, is based on Mr. J. H.
Stobart's, _The Grandeur that was Rome._
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We have heard much talk of how disastrous the result would have
been if Carthage, not Rome, had won. But Carthage was a far and
belated outpost of West Asia and of a manvantara that had ended
over a century before:--there was no question of her winning.
Though we see her only through Roman eyes, we may judge very well
that no possibility of expansion was left in her. There was no
expansive force. She threw out tentacles to suck in wealth and
trade, but was already dead at heart. All the greatness of old
West Asia was concentrated, in her, in two men: Hamilcar Barca
and his son: they shed a certain light and romantic glory over
her, but she was quite unworthy of them. Her prowess at any time
was fitful: where money was to be made, she might fight like a
demon to make it; but she was never a fighting power like Rome.
She won her successes at first because her seat was on the sea,
and the war was naval, and sea-battles were won not by fighting
but by seamanship. If Carthage had won, they say;--but Carthage
could not have won, because the cycles were for Rome. You will
note how that North African rim is tossed between European and
West Asian control, according to which is in the ascendant. Now
that Europe's up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England
hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries'
time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized. But West Asia,
early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia,
drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic.
Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was
European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while
the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt
and Phoenician colonies. As for its own native races, they
belong, I suppose, to the fourth, the Iberian Sub-race; and now
in the days of our fifth Sub-race (the Aryan), seem out of the
running for wielding empires of their own.

So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed
a little; the course of history would have been much the same.
Rome might have been destroyed by Hannibal; she would have been
rebuilt when Hannibal had departed; then gone on with her
expansion, perhaps in other directions,--and presently turned,
and come on Carthage from elsewhere; or absorbed her quietly,
and let her do the carrying trade of the Mediterranean 'under the
Roman flag' as you might say,--or something of that sort. Rome
eradicated Carthage for the same reason that the Spaniards
eradicated the Moors: because the West Asian tide, to which
Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and
the European tide was flowing high. Hamilcar indeed, and
Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to
have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx
which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy's turn
came before Spain's; and all Hamilcar's haughty heroism, and
Hannibal's magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the
admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and
then conquered Samnium and beheaded that noble generous Samnite
Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did
for his reputation what she had done with the Samnite hero's
person: chopped its head off, and dubbed him in perfect
sincerity 'perfidus Hannibal.' Over that corpse she stood, at
the end of the third century B.C., mistress of Italy and the
Italian islands; with proud Carthage at her feet; and the old
cultured East, that had known of her existence since the time of
Aristotle at least, now keenly aware of her as the strongest
thing in the Mediterranean world.

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