414 HISTOKY OF GREECE. No man can now read the account of this wholesale massacre, without horror and repugnance. Yet we cannot doubt, that among all the acts of Hannibal's life, this was the one in which he most gloried ; that it realized, in the most complete and emphatic man ner, his concurrent inspirations of filial sentiment, religious obliga- tion, and honor as a patriot ; that to show mercy would have been regarded as a mean dereliction of these esteemed impulses ; and that if the prisoners had been even more numerous, all of them would have been equally slain, rendering the expiatory fulfilment only so much the more honorable and efficacious. In the Cartha- ginian religion, human sacrifices were not merely admitted, but passed for the strongest manifestation of devotional fervor, and were especially resorted to in times of distress, when the necessity for propitiating the gods was accounted most pressing. Doubtless the feelings of Hannibal were cordially shared, and the plenitude of his revenge envied, by the army around him. So different, sometimes so totally contrary, is the tone and direction of the moral sentiments, among different ages and nations. In the numerous wars of Greeks against Greeks, which we have been unfortunately called upon to study, we have found few or no examples of any considerable town taken by storm. So much the more terrible was the shock throughout the Grecian world, of the events just recounted ; Selinus and Himera, two Grecian cities of ancient standing and uninterrupted prosperity, had both of them been stormed, ruined, and depopulated, by a barbaric host, within the space of three months. 1 No event at all parallel had occurred since the sack of Miletus by the Persians after the Ionic revolt (495 B. c.), 2 which raised such powerful sympathy and mourning in Athens. The war now raging in the JEgean, between Athens and Sparta with their respective allies, doubtless contrib- uted to deaden, throughout Central Greece, the impression of calamities sustained by Greeks at the western extremity of Sicily. But within that island, the sympathy with the sufferers was most acute, and aggravated by terror for the future. The Carthaginian general had displayed a degree of energy equal to any Grecian officer throughout the war, with a command of besieging and bat- tering naachinery surpassing even the best equipped Grecian citiea 1 Xenoph. Hellen. i, 1, 37. * Herodot. vi, 28.
