ABSTRACT
To Polybios the question why Rome won the war and Carthage lost seems primarily to have been a moral one. Thus, towards the beginning of his account, he says that the two states were, among other things, “ still uncorrupted in morals” (13.12), and at the end he declares that they were a match for each other in “enterprise, loftiness of spirit and, above all, ambi tion for supremacy” (64.5). But then he adds that “as men the Romans were not a little, but far superior, on the whole” , though he rates Hamilcar as the best general. Here he was presumably thinking of the difference between citizen soldiers and mercenaries (cf. 6.52), and one wonders whether he was right (see below).
