text:  He who grieves over the battle of Zama should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later when Hannibal must in the course of nature have been dead; and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire and prepare them for becoming when that empire was dissolved the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe