It was arranged that he should hold a position independent of the governing corporations -- his antagonists called it an unconstitutional monarchical power, Cato calls it a dictatorship--and that he could only be recalled and placed upon his trial by the popular assembly.( 2) Even the choice of a successor was to be vested not in the authorities of the capital, but in the army, that is, in the Carthaginians serving in the array as gerusiasts or officers, who were named in treaties also along with the general; of course the right of confirmation was reserved to the popular assembly at home.

Whether this may or may not have been a usurpation, it clearly indicates that the war party regarded and treated the army as its special domain.
The commission which Hamilcar thus received sounded but little liable to exception.

Wars with the Numidian tribes on the borders never ceased; only a short time previously the "city of a hundred gates," Theveste (Tebessa), in the interior had been occupied by the Carthaginians.

The task of continuing this border warfare, which was allotted to the new commander-in-chief of Africa, was not in itself of such importance as to prevent the Carthaginian government, which was allowed to do as it liked in its own immediate sphere, from tacitly conniving at the decrees passed in reference to the matter by the popular assembly; and the Romans did not perhaps recognize its significance at all.
Hamilcar's War Projects The Army The Citizens Thus there stood at the head of the army the one man, who had given proof in the Sicilian and in the Libyan wars that fate had destined him, if any one, to be the saviour of his country.

Never perhaps was the noble struggle of man with fate waged more nobly than by him.
The army was expected to save the state; but what sort of army?
The Carthaginian civic militia had fought not badly under Hamilcar's leadership in the Libyan war; but he knew well, that it is one thing to lead out the merchants and artisans of a city, which is in the extremity of peril, for once to battle, and another to form them into soldiers.