So there was in Carthage a party for peace and a party for war, both, as was natural, associating themselves with the political distinction which already existed between the conservatives and the reformers.

The former found its support in the governing boards, the council of the Ancients and that of the Hundred, led by Hanno the Great, as he was called; the latter found its support in the leaders of the multitude, particularly the much-respected Hasdrubal, and in the officers of the Sicilian army, whose great successes under the leadership of Hamilcar, although they had been otherwise fruitless, had at least shown to the patriots a method which seemed to promise deliverance from the great danger that beset them.

Vehement feud had probably long subsisted between these parties, when the Libyan war intervened to suspend the strife.

We have already related how that war arose.

After the governing party had instigated the mutiny by their incapable administration which frustrated all the precautionary measures of the Sicilian officers, had converted that mutiny into a revolution by the operation of their inhuman system of government, and had at length brought the country to the verge of ruin by their military incapacity--and particularly that of their leader Hanno, who ruined the army--Hamilcar Barcas, the hero of Ercte, was in the perilous emergency solicited by the government itself to save it from the effects of its blunders and crimes.