Hanno accused him of not having come to meet him.
“But that would have left Eryx undefended. You ought to have stood out from the coast; what prevented you? Ah! I forgot! all elephants are afraid of the sea!”
Hamilcar’s followers thought this jest so good that they burst out into loud laughter. The vault rang with it like the beating of tympanums.
Hanno denounced the unworthiness of such an insult; the disease had come upon him from a cold taken at the siege of Hecatompylos, and tears flowed down his face like winter rain on a ruined wall.
Hamilcar resumed:
“If you had loved me as much as him there would be great joy in Carthage now! How many times did I not call upon you! and you always refused me money!”
“We had need of it,” said the chiefs of the Syssitia.
“And when things were desperate with me—we drank mules’ urine and ate the straps of our sandals; when I would fain have had the blades of grass soldiers and made battalions with the rottenness of our dead, you recalled the vessels that I had left!”
“We could not risk everything,” replied Baat-Baal, who possessed gold mines in Darytian Gaetulia.
“But what did you do here, at Carthage, in your houses, behind your walls? There are Gauls on the Eridanus, who ought to have been roused, Chanaanites at Cyrene who would have come, and while the Romans send ambassadors to Ptolemaeus—”
“Now he is extolling the Romans to us!” Someone shouted out to him: “How much have they paid you to defend them?”
“Ask that of the plains of Brutium, of the ruins of Locri, of Metapontum, and of Heraclea! I have burnt all their trees, I have pillaged all their temples, and even to the death of their grandchildren’s grandchildren—”
“Why, you disclaim like a rhetor!” said Kapouras, a very illustrious merchant. “What is it that you want?”
“I say that we must be more ingenious or more terrible! If the whole of Africa rejects your yoke the reason is, my feeble masters, that you do not know how to fasten it to her shoulders! Agathocles, Regulus, Copio, any bold man has only to land and capture her; and when the Libyans in the east concert with the Numidians in the west, and the Nomads come from the south, and the Romans from the north”—a cry of horror rose—“Oh! you will beat your breasts, and roll in the dust, and tear your cloaks! No matter! you will have to go and turn the millstone in the Suburra, and gather grapes on the hills of Latium.”
They smote their right thighs to mark their sense of the scandal, and the sleeves of their robes rose like large wings of startled birds. Hamilcar, carried away by a spirit, continued his speech, standing on the highest step of the altar, quivering and terrible; he raised his arms, and the rays from the candelabrum which burned behind him passed between his fingers like javelins of gold.
“You will lose your ships, your country seats, your chariots, your hanging beds, and the slaves who rub your feet! The jackal will crouch in your palaces, and the ploughshare will upturn your tombs. Nothing will be left but the eagles’ scream and a heap of ruins. Carthage, thou wilt fall!”
The four pontiffs spread out their hands to avert the anathema. All had risen. But the marine Suffet, being a sacerdotal magistrate under the protection of the Sun, was inviolate so long as the assembly of the rich had not judged him. Terror was associated with the altar. They drew back.
Hamilcar had ceased speaking, and was panting with eye fixed, his face as pale as the pearls of his tiara, almost frightened at himself, and his spirit lost in funereal visions. From the height on which he stood, all the torches on the bronze shafts seemed to him like a vast crown of fire laid level with the pavement; black smoke issuing from them mounted up into the darkness of the vault; and for some minutes the silence was so profound that they could hear in the distance the sound of the sea.
Then the Ancients began to question one another. Their interests, their existence, were attacked by the Barbarians. But it was impossible to conquer them without the assistance of the Suffet, and in spite of their pride this consideration made them forget every other. His friends were taken aside. There were interested reconciliations, understandings, and promises. Hamilcar would not take any further part in any government. All conjured him. They besought him; and as the word treason occurred in their speech, he fell into a passion. The sole traitor was the Great Council, for as the enlistment of the soldiers expired with the war, they became free as soon as the war was finished; he even exalted their bravery and all the advantages which might be derived from interesting them in the Republic by donations and privileges.
Then Magdassin, a former provincial governor, said, as he rolled his yellow eyes:
“Truly Barca, with your travelling you have become a Greek, or a Latin, or something! Why speak you of rewards for these men? Rather let ten thousand Barbarians perish than a single one of us!”
The Ancients nodded approval, murmuring:—“Yes, is there need for so much trouble? They can always be had?”
“And they can be got rid of conveniently, can they not? They are deserted as they were by you in Sardinia. The enemy is apprised of the road which they are to take, as in the case of those Gauls in Sicily, or perhaps they are disembarked in the middle of the sea. As I was returning I saw the rock quite white with their bones!”
“What a misfortune!” said Kapouras impudently.
“Have they not gone over to the enemy a hundred times?” cried the others.
“Why, then,” exclaimed Hamilcar, “did you recall them to Carthage, notwithstanding your laws? And when they are in your town, poor and numerous amid all your riches, it does
