The question who was the greatest general that ever lived has been a fruitful source of discussion, and Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon have each found numerous and ardent supporters. Without decrying the signal abilities of these chiefs, it must nevertheless be remembered that each commanded a homogeneous army and had behind him a compact nation the most warlike and powerful of his time. The adversaries also of the Greek and the Roman were in the one instance an effete power already falling to pieces by its own internal weakness, and in the other, for the most part, scattered tribes of barbarians without unity of purpose or military discipline. Even in his civil wars Cæsar's armies were veterans, and those of the commonwealth were, comparatively speaking, recruits. But when the reader of these pages carefully considers the story of Hannibal's campaign in Italy, what does he find? Two nations--one Caucasian, young, warlike above all its contemporaries, with a record behind it of steady aggrandizement and almost unbroken victory, a nation every citizen of which was a soldier. On the other side, a race of merchants Semitic in blood, a city whose citizens had long since ceased to go to war, preferring that their gold should fight for them by the hands of mercenaries of every race and clime--hirelings whose ungoverned valour had proved almost as deadly to their employers and generals as to their enemies. Above all, the same battle had been joined before when Rome was weaker and Carthage stronger, and Carthage had already shown her weakness and Rome her strength.
And now in this renewed war we see a young man, aided only by a little group of compatriots, welding together army of the most heterogeneous elements--Spaniards, Gauls, Numidians, Moors, Greeks--men of almost every race except his own. We see him cutting loose from his base of supplies, leaving enemies behind him, to force his way through hostile races, through unknown lands bristling with almost impassable mountains and frigid with snow and ice. We see him conquering here, making friends and allies there, and, more wonderful than all, holding his mongrel horde together through hardships and losses by the force of his character alone. We see him at last descending into the plains of Italy. We see him not merely defeating but annihilating army after army more numerous than his own and composed of better raw material. We see him, unaided, ranging from end to end of the peninsula, none 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.