Excerpt from Le Collectionneur: A Collector's Portrait Another African people, the Car thaginians, also had the collecting mania. It is certain that after the battle of Cannae Hannibal gathered the gold rings of Roman knights left on the field and filled three Attic medimns with them, - these were the dekalitres of the time. The glorious trophies were buried afterward under the ruins of Carthage. Now and then the Arabs find some of them and make ear-rings of them. One of my friends, a Turkish cavalryman, cleverin argument, bought one of these heroic relics from a Jew of Constan tine; he will die in the persuasion that he possesses the Signet-rings of zemilius Paulus and Terentius Varro. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.