From Chesterton's Everlasting Man, one of the greatest things Chesterton ever wrote and of which I've ever read, his account of the Punic Wars and the fall of Carthage, as distinguished from the boring, lifeless historical accounts in the school textbooks:
...As if to make the world's supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods to destroy.
Hannibal
marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war with him felt
as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies sank to right and
left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and more were sucked into the
horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more went forth only to fall in ruin at
his touch. The supreme sign of all disasters, which is treason, turned tribe
after tribe against the falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable
enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their great leader
the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole
world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic
Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the
brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like
hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and miscellaneous peoples;
and the grace of Baal went before them.
The
Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth unearthly
prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant or that stars
fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical grasp of what had
really happened than the modern historian who can see nothing in it but a
success of strategy concluding a rivalry in commerce. Something far different
was felt at the time and on the spot, as it is always felt by those who
experience a foreign atmosphere entering their own like a fog or a foul savour.
It was no mere military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry,
that filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming
unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with his
appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with
his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing
veils, whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate. The burning of
the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines, were something more than
actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and
fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is
far beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in darkness
under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a wind from beyond
all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The door of the Alps was
broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn sense, it was Hell let loose.
The war of the gods and demons seemed already to have ended; and the gods were
dead. The eagles were lost, the legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained
but honour and the cold courage of despair.
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| Virgo Vestalis Maxima |
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad and sane outlook of practical men of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end, there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances, another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal's brother and flung his head, with Latin fury, into Hannibal's camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.
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| Hannibal |
Why do men entertain this queer idea that
what is sordid must always overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some
dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a
man is dull so long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all
chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they
are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, the
first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea about what world
they are living in. And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear
and therefore that the very heart of the world is evil. They believe that death
is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must be stronger than living
things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and
rivers and forces of nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at
tea-tables or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or
Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is
the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage.
The Punic power fell because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to
real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the
mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies what every practical soldier
calls the morale of an army. It fancies that money will fight when men will no
longer fight. So it was with the Punic merchant princes. Their religion was a
religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could
they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were
hopeless? Their religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they
understand that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force?
Their philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they were
weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage war even when
they are weary of it? In a word, how should they understand the mind of Man,
who had so long bowed down before mindless things, money and brute force and
gods who had the hearts of beasts? They awoke suddenly to the news that the
embers they had disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking
everywhere into flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was
outnumbered, that Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it
into Africa. Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last
fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The
name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon
the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the
destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundation centuries after
found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion.
For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had
followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch
had eaten his children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had
been defeated after all. But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost
defeated by the dead. Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose afterwards
to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and fundamentally
natural. Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and humiliation through
which she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of Europe?
She came to stand alone in the midst of an empire because she had once stood
alone in the midst of a ruin and a waste. After that all men knew in their
hearts that she had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected
of men. And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible
light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner
or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is
certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very
different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome.
We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine
things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved
into its own vices and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page;
but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any
man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to
eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been
expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went
astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were
ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival.
They remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men;
and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we never
needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the groves of
Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our thoughts of our human past
are not wholly harsh. If the passage from heathenry to Christianity was a
bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to those who kept that heathenry human.
If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can
think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were
and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly
the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid
on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered
without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness the
twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods rejoice
when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est Carthago.
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