The issue of the war was thus decided. From the moment when Rome determined not to give Hannibal a chance of another pitched battle but to confine herself to defensive measures and guerilla warfare, the latter could gain no further success. The fact that by this time he had won a great stretch of territory and was bound to defend it, hampered the mobility to which his successes had hitherto been due; the zenith of his victorious career was passed, he too was obliged to stand on the defensive, and could not avoid being steadily forced from one position after another. And now for the first time the vast strength of the Roman state stood forth in all its imposing majesty; for while defending itself against Hannibal in Italy it was able to take the offensive with absolute success in every other theatre of war, Spain, Sicily, and Greece.
How there arose on the Roman side a statesman and commander of genius in the person of Publius Scipio the Younger, who, after the conquest of Spain carried the war into Africa and there extorted peace, need not be recounted in this place. Rome had gained a complete victory, and with it the dominion over the western half of the Mediterranean; thenceforth there was no power in the world that could oppose her successfully in anything she chose to undertake. The war of Hannibal against Rome is the climax of ancient history; if up to that time the development of the ancient world and of the Christian Teutonic nations of modern times have run substantially on parallel lines, here we come to the parting of the ways. In modern history every attempt made since the sixteenth century to establish the universal dominion of a single nation has come to naught; the several peoples have maintained their independence, and in the struggle political conglomerates have grown into states of distinct nationality, holding the full powers of their dominions at their own disposal to the same extent as was done by Rome only in antique times. On this balance of power among the various states and the nations of which they are composed, and upon the incessant rivalry in every department of politics and culture, which requires them at each crisis to strain every nerve to the utmost if they are to hold their own in the struggle, depends the modern condition of the world and the fact that the universal civilisation of modern times keeps its ground and (at present at least) advances steadily, while the leadership in the perpetual contest passes from nation to nation.
In ancient times, on the contrary, the attempt to establish a balance of power came to naught in the war of Hannibal; and from that time forward there is but one power of any account in the world, that of the Roman government, and for that very reason this moment marks first the stagnation, and then the decline, of culture. The ultimate result which grows out of this state of things in the course of the following centuries is a single vast civilised state in which all differences of nationality are abolished. But this involves the abolition of political rivalry and of the conditions vital to civilisation; the stimulus to advance, to outstrip competitors, is lacking; all that remains to be done is to keep what has already been gained, and, here as everywhere, that implies the decline and death of civilisation.
Rome herself, and with her the whole of Italy, was destined while endeavouring to secure the fruits of victory to experience to the full its disastrous consequences. She was dragged into a world-policy from which there was no escape, however much she might desire it; a return to the old Italian policy, with its circumscribed agrarian tendencies, had become impossible. Thus it comes about that the havoc wrought in Italy by the war of Hannibal has never been made good to this day, that the wounds it inflicted on the life of the nation have never been healed or obliterated. The state of Italy and the embryo Italian nation never came to perfection because the levelling universal empire of Rome sprang up and checked them.
There is no need to tell here how the preponderance of Rome made itself felt in political matters throughout the world immediately after the war with Hannibal, or how within little over thirty years all the states of the civilised world were subject to her sway. It is only necessary to point out that the ultimate result, the world-wide dominion of Rome, ensued inevitably from this preponderance of a single state, and was by no means consciously aimed at by Rome herself. All she desired was to shape the affairs of her neighbours as best consorted with her own interests and to obviate betimes the recurrence of such dangers as had menaced her in the case of Hannibal. Her ambition went no further; above all (though she kept Spain because there was no one to whom she could hand it over) she exhibited an anxious and well-grounded dread of conquests beyond sea. But she did not realise that by reducing all neighbouring states to helplessness and impotence she deprived them of the faculty of exercising the proper functions of a state. Thenceforth they existed only by the good will of Rome; they found themselves constrained to appeal to Roman arbitration in every question, and involved Rome perpetually in fresh complications, while at the same time they felt most bitterly their dependence on the will of an alien and imperious power.
Thus Rome found herself at last under the necessity of putting an end to this state of things, first in one quarter and then in another, and undertaking the administration herself. In so doing she proceeded on no definite plan, but acted as chance or the occasion determined, letting other portions of her dominions get on as best they could, until matters had come to a crisis fraught with the utmost peril to Rome, and the only solution lay in a great war. For Rome, as for the world in general, it would have been far better if she had embarked on a career of systematic conquest.
Finally, let us briefly point out the effects of the policy of Rome on the development of civilisation. Rome and Italy assimilate more and more of the culture of Greece, and the latter, in its Latin garb, ultimately gains dominion over the entire West. Simultaneously, on the other hand, in the East a retrograde movement sets in. Rome strives by every means in her power to weaken the Seleucid empire, her perfidious policy foments every rebellion against it and places obstacles of all kinds in the way of its lawful sovereign. Thus, after a struggle of more than thirty years’ duration, all the East on the hither side of the Euphrates is lost to that empire. And although the Arsacid empire which succeeded it was neither nationalist nor hostile in principle to Hellenism, yet the mere fact that its centre was no longer on the Mediterranean but Babylonia, and that the connection of the Greek cities of the East with the mother-country was severed from that time forth, put an end to the spread of Hellenism and paved the way for the retrograde movement. It had already gained a firm footing in the Mediterranean; the support given by Antiochus IV, surnamed Epiphanes, to the Hellenising tendencies of certain Jews had driven the nationalist and religious party in Judea into revolt, and the disintegration of the empire by Roman intrigues gave them a fair field and enabled them to maintain their independent position. In the Lagid empire, about the same time, Ptolemy VII, surnamed Euergetes II, finally abandoned the old paths and the maxims of an earlier day, broke away from the Greeks, expelled the scholars of Alexandria, and sought to rely upon the Egyptian nationalist element among his subjects.
I shall not here trace beyond this point the broad outlines of the development of the ancient world. How the general situation reacted destructively upon the dominant nation; how the attempt to create afresh the farming class, which had been the backbone of Italy’s military prowess and consequently the foundation of her supremacy, resulted in the Roman revolution; how in that catastrophe, and the fearful convulsions that accompanied it, the embryo world-wide empire sought its appropriate form, and ultimately found in it the principate; and how the constitution was gradually transformed from a modified revival of the old Roman Republic to a denationalised and absolute universal monarchy—are all matters which must be left to another occasion for treatment.