[Illustration: Hanno announcing to the Mercenaries the emptiness of the Public Coffers.]
An attempt was then made to stop the mouths of the mercenaries with food; and provisions were sent in abundance; but the only reply was, an unprovisional demand for the money owing. At length the pay had been got together, and was about to be distributed, when an Italian slave, named Spendius, who had probably spent by anticipation all he had to receive, advised his companions to decline the offer, on the ground that if they refused what was due, their policy might obtain for them a large additional bonus. The suggestion was popular with the mercenaries, who held a meeting to discuss the point, and who, to save the time of the meeting, overwhelmed with a shower of stones anybody who rose to speak on either side. The resolution was soon carried; but it was by the aid of what may be termed the casting votes of those who sent up, in the impressive form of a plumper, the first missile they could lay their hands upon. For three years these intestine disturbances raged in Africa, and reduced it to the lowest point of exhaustion, till at length the malady wore itself out, though Hamilcar Barca, by intercepting the supplies of the rebels, assisted greatly in depriving treachery of the food it lived upon.
The pecuniary panic of Carthage spread in nearly every direction, and the mercenaries at Sardinia, affected by the tightness of money, called upon the African colonists to pay with their lives the debt they could not discharge with their pockets. While the Sardinians and Carthaginians were reducing each other to a state of such weakness that neither could make any further effort, Rome stepped in, and like the lawyer between the exhausted litigants, carried off the whole of what they had been fighting for. Sardinia became a Roman province; when Carthage, whose bad faith has passed into a proverb, complained bitterly of the treachery of Rome: for we find the story of the kettle accused of blackness by the pot, is as old as the earliest pothooks employed in the writing of history. Hamilcar, who was the patriotic mouthpiece of the day, declared that he would raise his country; and it must be admitted, to his honour, that he did not take the means employed by self-styled patriots, who pretend to raise a country by stirring it up from the lowest dregs, but he tried to elevate it by all the honourable means in his power.