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Plato Profile Directory 18
Page 04
Twenty-three years elapsed between the First and Second Punic Wars. The power of Carthage, though crippled, was not destroyed; and Hamilcar returned home, burning with hatred against Rome, and determined to renew the war upon a favorable opportunity. But a new and terrible danger threatened Carthage upon her own soil. The mercenary troops, who had been transported from Sicily to Africa at the conclusion of the war, being unable to obtain their arrears of pay, rose in open mutiny. Their leaders were Spendius, a runaway Campanian slave, and Matho, a Libyan. They were quickly joined by the native Libyans, and brought Carthage almost to the brink of destruction. They laid waste the whole country with fire and sword, made themselves masters of all the towns except the capital, and committed the most frightful atrocities. Carthage owed her safety to the genius and abilities of Hamilcar. The struggle was fierce and sanguinary, but was at length brought to a successful issue, after it had lasted more than three years, by the destruction of all the mercenaries. It was called the War without Peace, or the Inexpiable War (B.C. 238).
Whether the incoming of these new ideas and practices be thought to constitute progress or not will depend on one's view of the aim of life. If this be as maintained in the previous chapter, then surely the transformation of Japan must be counted progress. That, however, to which I call attention is the fact that the essential requisite of progress is the attainment of new ideas, whatever be their source. Japan has not only taken up a great host of these, but in doing so she has adopted a social structure to stimulate the continuous production of new ideas, through the development of individuality. She is thus in the true line of continuously progressive evolution. Imitating the stronger nations, she has introduced into her system the life-giving blood of free discussion, popular education, and universal individual rights and liberty. In a word, she has begun to be an individualistic nation. She has introduced a social order fitted to a wide development of personality.
The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire, and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England. Mabuse, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller--all were there at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until the beginning of the eighteenth century--that century so dead in art over all the rest of Europe.
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