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!" Some one 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.
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