daring to meet him with opposing standards, and the greatest general
of Rome winning laurels because he knew enough to recognise his own
hopeless inferiority. All stories of reverses other than those of mere
detachments may pretty safely be set down as the exaggeration of Roman
writers. Situated as was Hannibal, the loss of one marshalled field
would have meant immediate ruin, and ruin never came when he fought
in Italy. On the contrary, without supplies save what his sword could
take, without friends save what his genius and his fortune could win,
he maintained his place and his superiority not for one or for two but
through fourteen years, during all which time we hear no murmur
of mutiny, no hint of aught but obedience and devotion among the
incongruous and unruly elements from which he had fashioned his
invincible army; and at the end we see him leaving Italy of his own
free will, at the call of his country, to waste himself in a vain
effort to save her from the blunders of other leaders and from the
penalty of inherent weakness, which only his sword had so long warded
off.

When I consider the means, the opposition, and the achievement--a
combination of elements by which alone we can judge such questions
with even approximate fairness--I can not but feel that of all
military exploits this invasion of Italy, which we shall read of here,
was the most remarkable; that of all commanders Hannibal has shown
himself to be the greatest. Some of Livy's charges against him as a
man are doubtless true. Avarice was in his blood; and cruelty also,
though it ill became a Roman to chide an enemy on that score. Besides,
Livy himself tells how Hannibal had sought for the bodies of the
generals he had slain, that he might give them the rites of honourable
sepulture; tells it, and in the next breath relates how the Roman
commander mutilated the corpse of the fallen Hasdrubal and threw the