In setting forth this part of my work I may preface it with what most writers of history have professed at the very outset of their whole undertaking: that I am about to write of a war the most memorable of all that were ever waged—the war which the Carthaginians under the command of Hannibal waged with the Roman people. For neither did states or peoples mightier in resources ever bring their arms to bear against one another, nor had these very combatants at any time so great a strength or vigor; and the arts of war that they brought against each other were not unknown but already tried in the First Punic War; and so changeful was the fortune of the war and so doubtful was Mars that those who at last conquered had come the nearer to ruin. With hatreds, too, almost greater than their strength did they contend: the Romans indignant that the conquered should of their own accord bring arms against their conquerors, the Carthaginians because they believed that over the conquered there had been a lordship of arrogance and greed. There is a story, besides, that Hannibal, when about nine years old, while childishly coaxing his father Hamilcar that he might be taken into Spain—at the time when, the African war being finished, his father was offering sacrifice before carrying his army across thither—was led up to the altar and, with his hands laid upon the sacred things, bound by an oath to be, as soon as ever he could, the enemy of the Roman people. There gnawed at the man of mighty spirit the loss of Sicily and Sardinia: for Sicily, he held, had been surrendered through too hasty a despair of the cause, and Sardinia, in the midst of the African disorder, had been filched away by the fraud of the Romans, with a tribute laid upon it besides.

Galled by these cares, he so bore himself in the African war—which came hard upon the recent peace with Rome and lasted five years—and then through nine years in the enlarging of the Punic dominion in Spain, that it was plain he was turning over in his mind a war greater than the one he was waging, and that, had he lived longer, the Carthaginians would have carried arms into Italy under Hamilcar’s leadership, even as they carried them under Hannibal’s. The most timely death of Hamilcar and the boyhood of Hannibal put off the war. Between father and son, Hasdrubal held the command some eight years—attached at first to Hamilcar, men say, in the flower of his youth, then taken for a son-in-law on account of other gifts of his temper, and, because he was a son-in-law, set in command by the strength of the Barcine faction, which among the soldiery and the commons counted for more than a little, though by no means with the goodwill of the leading men. He, conducting his affairs more by counsel than by force, enlarged the Carthaginian state rather by his hospitalities with the petty kings and by winning new peoples through the friendship of their chieftains than by war and arms. Yet his peace brought him no greater safety; a certain barbarian cut him down openly, in anger for a master whom Hasdrubal had put to death; and, seized by the bystanders, he wore no other face than if he had got clean away—nay, even when he was being torn with torments, his look was such that, joy overmastering his pains, he wore even the semblance of one who laughed. With this Hasdrubal, because he had been of a marvelous art in stirring up peoples and joining them to his command, the Roman people had renewed the treaty—that the boundary of either empire should be the river Ebro, and that to the Saguntines, set midway between the dominions of the two peoples, their freedom should be preserved.

As to Hasdrubal’s successor there was no doubt who it would be; for the soldiers’ first vote, by which young Hannibal had straightway been carried into the headquarters and hailed commander with one mighty shout and the assent of all, was followed also by the favor of the commons. This youth, scarcely yet of age, Hasdrubal had summoned to him by letter, and the matter had even been debated in the senate. When the Barcines pressed that Hannibal might be schooled in soldiering and succeed to his father’s resources, Hanno, leader of the rival faction, said: "Hasdrubal seems to ask what is fair; and yet I, for my part, hold that what he seeks ought not to be granted." When he had turned all eyes upon himself in wonder at a verdict so two-sided, he went on: "The flower of his youth, which Hasdrubal himself yielded up to the father of Hannibal for his enjoyment, he thinks may by just right be demanded back from the son; but it least becomes us to school our youth, by way of a soldier’s apprenticeship, to the lusts of our commanders. Or do we fear this—that the son of Hamilcar may too late behold an immoderate command and the show of his father’s kingship, and that we may be slow to make ourselves the slaves of the son of that king to whose son-in-law our armies were left as a heritage? For my part I hold that this youth ought to be kept at home, under the laws, under the magistrates, taught to live on equal terms with the rest, lest at some time this little fire kindle a vast conflagration."

A few, and well-nigh all the best men, agreed with Hanno; but, as commonly happens, the greater part outvoted the better. Hannibal, sent into Spain, from the very first moment of his coming drew the whole army to himself: the old soldiers believed that Hamilcar in his youth had been given back to them; they saw the same vigor in the countenance, the same force in the eyes, the same cast and lineaments of the face. Then in a little while he so wrought that his father counted for least of all in winning him favor. Never was the selfsame genius more apt for the two most opposite tasks, obeying and commanding. And so you could not easily have discerned whether he were dearer to the general or to the army; neither would Hasdrubal more gladly set any other in charge wherever something was to be done with courage and energy, nor did the soldiers under any other leader feel more confidence or daring. Boldness to the utmost in the seizing of dangers, judgment to the utmost in the midst of the dangers themselves. By no toil could his body be wearied or his spirit overcome. Of heat and cold his endurance was equal; the measure of his food and drink was fixed by natural need, not by pleasure; his waking and his sleeping hours were marked off neither by day nor by night—what time was left over from the doing of his work was given to rest, and that rest courted neither by a soft couch nor by silence. Many often saw him, wrapped in a soldier’s cloak, lying on the ground among the watches and outposts of the men. His dress was nothing to mark him out among his fellows: his arms and horses were what caught the eye. Of horsemen and foot alike he was by far the first; first he went into battle, last he withdrew when the fight was joined. These so great virtues of the man were matched by monstrous vices: inhuman cruelty, a perfidy more than Punic, nothing of truth, nothing of the sacred, no fear of the gods, no oath, no scruple. With this temper of virtues and vices he served three years under Hasdrubal as commander, leaving undone nothing that ought to be done or seen by one who was to be a great leader.

But from the day on which he was declared commander, as though Italy had been decreed to him as his province and the war with Rome laid upon him, holding that nothing must be put off, lest some mischance overtake him too, as it had his father Hamilcar and then Hasdrubal while they delayed, he resolved to make war upon the Saguntines. And because, in besieging them, Roman arms would beyond a doubt be set in motion, he first led his army into the borders of the Olcades—a people beyond the Ebro, rather within the sphere than under the sway of the Carthaginians—that he might seem not to have aimed at the Saguntines, but to have been drawn into that war by the very sequence of events, the neighboring peoples being subdued and his conquests joined one to another. Cartala, a wealthy city and the head of that people, he stormed and sacked; and, struck with the dread of it, the lesser states received his rule with a tribute laid upon them. His army, victorious and rich with booty, was led down into New Carthage for winter quarters. There, by sharing out the spoil with a free hand and by paying off the arrears of wages with good faith, he made fast to himself the hearts of all his citizens and allies; and at the first of spring the war was pushed forward against the Vaccaei. Hermandica and Arbocala, their cities, were taken by force. Arbocala was long defended by the valor and the numbers of its townsmen; the fugitives from Hermandica, when they had joined themselves to the exiles of the Olcades—the people subdued the summer before—roused the Carpetani, and, falling upon Hannibal as he came back from the Vaccaei, threw his column, heavy with plunder, into disorder not far from the river Tagus. Hannibal held off from battle, and, pitching his camp above the bank, when there was first quiet and silence from the enemy, crossed the stream by a ford; and, having drawn a rampart along in such a way that the enemy might have room to cross, he resolved to fall upon them as they came over. To his horsemen he gave order that, when they saw the foe entered into the water, they should attack the encumbered column; on the bank he posted his elephants—forty there were. Of the Carpetani, with the additions of the Olcades and Vaccaei, there were a hundred thousand—an unconquerable line, had they fought on a level field. And so, fierce by nature and trusting in their numbers, and believing that the enemy had given way in fear, and reckoning that it was only the river between them that delayed their victory, they raised a shout and, without any man’s command, plunged into the stream, each where it was nearest to him. And from the further bank a vast force of cavalry was sent down into the river, and in the mid-channel the clash was joined on terms by no means equal, since there the footsoldier, unsteady and scarcely trusting to the ford, could be overthrown even by an unarmed horseman with his horse driven recklessly on, while the horseman, free in body and arms, his horse firm even through the very eddies, plied his work at close quarters and at a distance. A great part were swallowed by the river; some, carried by the swirling stream upon the enemy, were crushed by the elephants. The hindmost, for whom retreat to their own bank was the safer, when out of their scattered panic they were gathering into one body, before in so great a terror they could recover their spirits, Hannibal, entering the river in a hollow square, made to flee from the bank; and, laying waste their fields, within a few days he received the Carpetani too into surrender. And now all beyond the Ebro, save the Saguntines, was the Carthaginians’.

With the Saguntines there was as yet no war; but already, that war might have its pretext, quarrels were being sown with their neighbors, chiefly with the Turdetani. And when there was at hand the very man who was the sower of the suit, and it was plain that no contest of right but force was being sought, envoys were sent from Saguntum to Rome to beg help against a war now beyond doubt impending. The consuls then at Rome were Publius Cornelius Scipio and Tiberius Sempronius Longus. When they had brought the envoys into the senate and laid the matter of state before it, and it had been resolved to send commissioners into Spain to look into the affairs of the allies—who, if the cause should seem worthy to them, were both to warn Hannibal to keep his hands from the Saguntines, allies of the Roman people, and to cross over to Carthage in Africa and there lay before them the complaints of the allies of the Roman people—while this embassy was decreed but not yet sent, word came, sooner than all had looked for, that Saguntum was under siege. Then the matter was laid afresh before the senate; some, decreeing Spain and Africa as provinces to the consuls, held that the war should be waged by land and sea; others had bent the whole war upon Spain and Hannibal; there were those who held that so great a matter ought not to be set in motion rashly, and that the commissioners should be awaited from Spain. This last counsel, which seemed the safest, prevailed, and the envoys—Publius Valerius Flaccus and Quintus Baebius Tamphilus—were sent the more speedily to Saguntum, to Hannibal, and thence to Carthage, if the war were not broken off, to demand the leader himself in punishment for the broken treaty.

While the Romans make these preparations and deliberate, already Saguntum was being besieged with the utmost might. That city was by far the most wealthy beyond the Ebro, set about a mile from the sea. Its people are said to have sprung from the island of Zacynthos, with a sprinkling, too, of a stock of Rutulians from Ardea; but in a short time they had grown to such great wealth, whether by the fruits of the sea or of the land, or by the increase of their numbers, or by the strictness of a discipline through which they kept their faith to their allies even to their own destruction. Hannibal, entering their borders with a hostile army, and laying waste the fields everywhere, assailed the city on three sides. There was an angle of the wall that sloped toward a valley flatter and more open than the rest about it; against this he set himself to bring up the mantlets, by which the ram might be brought to the walls. But though the ground far from the wall was level enough for the working of the mantlets, yet by no means did the undertaking prosper once it came to the carrying out of the work. A huge tower overhung; the wall, as in a suspected place, had been built up above the measure of the rest in height; and chosen youths, where most of peril and dread was shown, withstood there with the greater force. And at first they drove off the enemy with missiles and would suffer nothing to be safe enough for the besiegers; then their weapons flashed not only from the walls and the tower, but they had spirit even to sally out against the enemy’s posts and works; and in these random skirmishes well-nigh no more Saguntines fell than Carthaginians. But when Hannibal himself, while drawing too incautiously near the wall, fell, struck heavily in the front of the thigh by a javelin, there was such flight and panic round about that the works and the mantlets were within little of being abandoned.

Thereafter for a few days it was a blockade rather than an assault, while the leader’s wound was being healed; and through that time, while there was a respite from fighting, there was no slackening in the preparation of works and engines. And so the war broke out afresh more sharply, and at more points—some places scarce able to bear the works—the mantlets were set going and the ram brought up. The Carthaginian abounded in a multitude of men—for it is believed, with good reason, that he had as many as a hundred and fifty thousand under arms; the townsmen, beginning to be drawn apart in many directions to guard and meet every point, were not sufficient. And so now the walls were being battered by the rams, and many parts were shaken; one stretch, with the ruin running on unbroken, had laid the city bare; three towers in a row, and as much of the wall as lay between them, had fallen with a vast crash. The Carthaginians had believed the town taken by that downfall; and, as though the wall had alike sheltered both sides, from either part there was a rush forward into battle. There was nothing like the random fighting that in the storming of cities is wont to be joined as one side or the other finds its opening, but regular battle-lines, as on an open field, had taken their stand between the ruins of the wall and the houses of the city, parted by a little space. On this side hope, on that despair, goads their spirits—the Carthaginian believing that he had now taken the city if he should strive but a little, the Saguntines setting their bodies before a fatherland stripped of its walls, and no man giving back a foot, lest he let the enemy into the place he had left. And so the more sharply and the more thick-packed both sides fought, the more were wounded, no weapon falling vainly amid the press of arms and bodies. The Saguntines had a missile weapon, the falarica, with a shaft of fir, round in the rest of its length save toward the point, from which the iron stood out; this, just as in the javelin, they bound about, where it was four-square, with tow and smeared it with pitch; and the iron was three feet long, so that it could pierce through both armor and body. But this above all, even had it lodged in the shield and not pierced the body, struck terror, because, when it was sent kindled in the middle and bore, kindled by the very motion, a far greater flame, it forced a man to throw away his arms and offered him naked to the blows that followed.

When the struggle had long hung in the balance, and the Saguntines, because they were holding out beyond hope, had risen in spirit, while the Carthaginian, because he had not conquered, was as good as conquered, the townsmen of a sudden raise a shout and drive the enemy into the ruins of the wall; then, while he was hampered and in disorder, they thrust him out, and at the last, routed and put to flight, they force him back into his camp. Meanwhile word came that envoys had arrived from Rome; and men were sent by Hannibal to meet them at the sea, to say that they could not approach in safety amid the arms of so many peoples so unbridled, and that Hannibal, in so great a crisis of affairs, had no leisure to hear embassies. It was plain that, not being admitted, they would go straightway to Carthage. He therefore sent letters and messengers ahead to the chiefs of the Barcine faction, that they might prepare the minds of their party, lest the other side should be able in any way to gratify the Roman people.

And so, except that they were admitted and heard, this embassy too was empty and of no effect. Hanno alone, against the whole senate, pleaded the cause of the treaty in a great silence—out of respect for his authority, not with the assent of the hearers—calling to witness the gods, the arbiters and witnesses of treaties, that they should not stir up a war of Rome against Saguntum: he had warned them, he had foretold, that they should not send the offspring of Hamilcar to the army; the shades of that man, his stock, knew no rest, nor would the Roman treaties ever be at peace so long as any of the blood and name of Barca survived. "A youth burning with desire of kingship, and seeing one only way to it—if by sowing war out of war he live girt about with arms and legions—him you sent to the armies, as though offering fuel to the fire. You have nourished, then, this conflagration in which you now burn. Your armies beleaguer Saguntum, from which they are barred by the treaty; soon the Roman legions will beleaguer Carthage, under the leadership of those same gods through whom in the former war the broken treaties were avenged. Is it the enemy, or yourselves, or the fortune of either people that you do not know? Envoys coming from your allies and on behalf of allies your good commander did not admit into his camp; he overthrew the law of nations; yet these men, driven from a place from which not even the envoys of enemies are barred, have come to you. Restitution is demanded under the treaty; let there be no fraud of the state: they require the author of the wrong and the man charged with the crime. The more mildly they proceed, the more slowly they begin, the more I fear that, when they have begun, the more stubbornly they will rage. Set before your eyes the Aegates Islands and Eryx, and all that you suffered by land and sea through four-and-twenty years. Nor was the leader then a boy, but the father himself, Hamilcar, a second Mars, as those men will have it; but we had not, by the treaty, kept our hands off Tarentum—that is, off Italy—even as now we keep them not off Saguntum; therefore gods and men prevailed, and the very thing that was disputed in words, which people had broken the treaty, the issue of the war, like an impartial judge, gave the victory to the side on which the right stood. Now Hannibal brings up his mantlets and towers against Carthage; he shakes the walls of Carthage with the ram. The ruins of Saguntum—would that I might prove a false prophet—will fall upon our own heads, and the war taken up with the Saguntines must be waged with the Romans. Shall we, then, give up Hannibal? someone will say. I know that my authority in that matter is light, by reason of my feud with his father; but I rejoiced that Hamilcar perished for this cause—that, were he alive, we should already have war with the Romans—and this youth, as the fury and firebrand of this war, I hate and detest; nor only ought this expiation for the broken treaty be given up, but, if no one demands him, he ought to be carried off to the farthest bounds of sea and land, banished to a place whence neither his name and fame can reach to us, nor he stir up the order of a state at peace. Thus I give my judgment: that envoys be sent at once to Rome to satisfy the senate; others, to tell Hannibal to withdraw his army from Saguntum, and to give up Hannibal himself to the Romans under the treaty; a third embassy I decree for the making of restitution to the Saguntines."

When Hanno had finished his speech, there was no need for anyone of them all to contend against him in argument: so nearly was the whole senate Hannibal’s, and they charged that Hanno had spoken more bitterly than Valerius Flaccus, the Roman envoy. The answer was then given to the Roman envoys that the war had arisen from the Saguntines, not from Hannibal; that the Roman people did unjustly, if it set the Saguntines before the most ancient alliance of the Carthaginians. While the Romans waste time in sending embassies, Hannibal, because he had his soldiery worn out with battles and works, granted them a rest of a few days, with pickets set to guard the mantlets and the other works. Meanwhile he kindled their spirits, now by goading their anger against the enemy, now with the hope of rewards; but when before the assembly he proclaimed that the plunder of the captured city should be the soldiers’, they were all so fired that, had the signal been given at once, it seemed that no force could withstand them. The Saguntines, even as they had had rest from fighting, neither provoking nor provoked, for some days, so they had never ceased, by night or by day, from their work, that they might rebuild a new wall on the side where the town lay laid open by the ruins. Thereupon an assault somewhat more savage than before fell upon them, nor could they well know to what point first or chiefly to carry aid, when everything was loud with diverse outcries. Hannibal himself was present, urging them on, where a movable tower, overtopping all the city’s defenses in height, was being driven forward. And when this, with catapults and ballistas set in order through all its stories, had stripped the walls of their defenders, then Hannibal, thinking the moment come, sends some five hundred Africans with mattocks to undermine the wall from its base; nor was the work hard, since the rubble was not bound fast with lime but daubed between with mud, after the fashion of ancient building. And so it fell more widely than where it was being cut, and through the openings of the ruin columns of armed men advanced into the city. They seize a height too, and, with catapults and ballistas gathered there, ring it with a wall, that they might have, within the very city, a fortress like a citadel overhanging it; and the Saguntines draw an inner wall across, from the part of the city not yet taken. On both sides they fortify and fight with the utmost might; but by guarding the inner part the Saguntines daily make their city smaller. At the same time the want of all things grew with the long siege, and the expectation of help from without dwindled, since the Romans, their one hope, were so far off, and all about them was the enemy’s. For a little while, nevertheless, the sudden departure of Hannibal against the Oretani and Carpetani revived their stricken spirits—two peoples who, dismayed by the harshness of the levy, had detained his recruiting-officers and so shown a fear of revolt; but, overborne by Hannibal’s swiftness, they let fall the arms they had taken up.

Nor was the siege of Saguntum the slacker, Maharbal son of Himilco—whom Hannibal had set in charge—pushing the matter so briskly that neither his own men nor the enemy felt that the leader was away. He both fought several successful actions and with three rams shattered a good stretch of the wall, and showed Hannibal, on his coming, all things strewn with fresh ruins. And so the army was straightway led to the citadel itself, and a fierce battle, with much slaughter on both sides, was begun, and a part of the citadel taken. Then a slender hope of peace was tried, through two men, Alco a Saguntine and Alorcus a Spaniard. Alco, without the knowledge of the Saguntines, thinking that he might move something by entreaty, when he had crossed by night to Hannibal, after his tears moved nothing and harsh conditions, such as from an angry conqueror, were offered, of a pleader became a deserter and stayed with the enemy, declaring that any man would die who treated of peace upon those terms. And the demand was this: that they should make restitution to the Turdetani, and, all their gold and silver delivered up, go forth from the city, each with a single garment, and dwell where the Carthaginian should bid. These terms of peace Alco declaring that the Saguntines would not accept, Alorcus—affirming that spirits are conquered when all else is conquered—undertook to be the broker of that peace; and he was at that time a soldier of Hannibal’s, but in the public faith a friend and guest of the Saguntines. Having openly delivered his weapon to the enemy’s guards, he crossed the fortifications and was brought to the Saguntine praetor—for so the praetor himself bade. And when at once a throng of every kind of men had gathered there, the rest of the multitude being put aside, the senate was granted to Alorcus, whose speech was of this sort:

"If your fellow-citizen Alco, even as he came to Hannibal to beg for peace, had likewise brought back from Hannibal to you the terms of peace, this journey of mine would have been needless, by which I have come to you neither as Hannibal’s spokesman nor as a deserter; but since he has stayed with the enemy, either through your fault or his own—his own, if he feigned fear; yours, if there is danger among you for those who report the truth—I, that you might not be ignorant that there are for you some terms of safety and of peace, have come to you for the sake of the old bond of guest-friendship that is between me and you. And that it is for your own sake, and no other’s, that I speak what I speak to you, let even this be the proof: that neither while you withstood with your own strength, nor while you hoped for help from the Romans, did I ever make mention of peace among you. Now that you have no hope from the Romans, and your own arms and walls no longer defend you well enough, I bring you a peace more needful than fair. Of which there is some hope on this condition only, if, even as Hannibal as conqueror offers it, so you, as the conquered, hear it; if you reckon what is lost not as a loss—since all things are the conqueror’s—but count whatever is left to you as a gift. The city, which he holds in great part demolished and well-nigh wholly taken, he takes from you; the fields he leaves, meaning to assign a place where you may build a new town. All the gold and silver, public and private, he bids be brought to him; your persons and those of your wives and children he keeps inviolate, if unarmed, with two garments apiece, you are willing to go forth from Saguntum. This the conquering enemy commands; this, grievous and bitter though it be, your fortune counsels you. For my part I do not despair that, when the power over all has been put into his hands, he will remit somewhat of these demands; but even these, I judge, must be endured, rather than that you should suffer your bodies to be butchered, your wives and children seized and dragged before your eyes by the law of war."

When, to hear these things, the multitude had little by little gathered round and the assembly of the people was mingled with the senate, of a sudden the chief men, withdrawing apart before any answer was given, gathered all the silver and gold from the treasury, public and private, into the forum, and, casting it into a fire hastily made for the purpose, threw themselves, most of them, headlong into the same. While from this a panic and trembling had spread through the whole city, another uproar besides is heard from the citadel. A tower, long battered, had fallen, and through the breach of its ruin a cohort of the Carthaginians, having made a rush, when it had given the signal to the commander that the city was stripped of its wonted posts and watches, Hannibal, thinking that in such an opening there must be no delay, assailing the city with all his strength, took it in a moment, the signal being given that all the grown men should be slain. Which command, cruel though it was, was yet found by the very event to be well-nigh necessary; for whom could one have spared of those who either, shut up with their wives and children, burned their houses over their own heads, or, in arms, made no end of the fight until they died?

The town was taken with vast booty. Although the most part had been spoiled on purpose by its owners, and in the slaughter anger had made scarce any distinction of age, and the captives had become the soldiers’ plunder, yet it is agreed that a good sum of money was realized from the price of the things sold, and that much costly furniture and raiment was sent to Carthage. Some have written that Saguntum was taken in the eighth month after the siege was begun; that thence Hannibal withdrew into winter quarters at New Carthage; and that in the fifth month after he set out from Carthage he came into Italy. If these things are so, it could not have been that Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius were the consuls to whom both the Saguntine envoys were sent at the beginning of the siege, and who in their own magistracy fought with Hannibal, the one at the river Ticinus, both somewhat later at the Trebia. Either everything was somewhat shorter, or Saguntum was not begun to be besieged but taken at the beginning of the year in which Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius were consuls. For the battle at the Trebia cannot have fallen into the year of Gnaeus Servilius and Gaius Flaminius, because Gaius Flaminius entered upon his consulship at Ariminum, elected by Tiberius Sempronius the consul, who, after the battle at the Trebia, when he had come to Rome to hold the consular elections, returned, the elections finished, to the army in winter quarters.

At about the same time both the envoys who had returned from Carthage reported at Rome that all was hostile, and the destruction of Saguntum was announced; and so great a grief at once, and pity for the allies undeservedly destroyed, and shame at help not brought, and anger against the Carthaginians, and fear for the sum of things—as though the enemy were already at the gates—seized the fathers, that, troubled by so many stirrings of the mind at one time, they trembled rather than took counsel: for never, they thought, had a fiercer or more warlike enemy met them, nor had the Roman state ever been so slothful and unwarlike. The Sardinians and Corsicans, the Histri and Illyrians, had rather provoked than exercised the arms of Rome, and with the Gauls there had been tumult rather, in truth, than war: but the Carthaginian, a veteran foe, victorious always through three-and-twenty years of the hardest campaigning among the peoples of Spain, schooled to a most relentless leader, fresh from the destruction of a most wealthy city, was crossing the Ebro; he was dragging with him so many peoples of Spain, roused up; he would set in motion the Gallic nations, ever greedy of arms; with the whole world a war must be waged, in Italy and before the walls of Rome.

The provinces had already been named beforehand for the consuls; then they were bidden draw lots. To Cornelius fell Spain, to Sempronius Africa with Sicily. Six legions were decreed for that year, and as many of the allies as should seem good to the consuls themselves, and as large a fleet as could be made ready. Four-and-twenty thousand Roman foot were enrolled and eighteen hundred horse; of the allies, forty thousand foot and four thousand four hundred horse; ships, two hundred and twenty quinqueremes and twenty light galleys launched. Then it was put to the people whether they willed and ordered that war be declared upon the Carthaginian people; and for the sake of that war a public supplication was held throughout the city, and the gods were entreated that what war the Roman people had ordered might turn out well and happily. Between the consuls the forces were thus divided: to Sempronius were given two legions—these were of four thousand foot apiece and three hundred horse—and of the allies sixteen thousand foot, eighteen hundred horse; warships a hundred and sixty, light galleys twelve. With these forces of land and sea Tiberius Sempronius was sent into Sicily, to cross thence into Africa if the other consul should be enough to keep the Carthaginian from Italy. To Cornelius fewer forces were given, because Lucius Manlius, the praetor, was himself also being sent into Gaul with no feeble garrison; and chiefly the number of Cornelius’s ships was lessened: sixty quinqueremes were given—for they did not believe the enemy would come by sea or fight in that quarter of the war—and two Roman legions with their own due cavalry and fourteen thousand allied foot, with sixteen hundred horse. Two Roman legions and ten thousand allied foot, a thousand allied horse and six hundred Roman, the province of Gaul, turned to that same Punic war, held.

These things being thus arranged, that all due forms might be observed before the war, they send into Africa envoys of the elder rank—Quintus Fabius, Marcus Livius, Lucius Aemilius, Gaius Licinius, Quintus Baebius—to inquire of the Carthaginians whether it was by public counsel that Hannibal had besieged Saguntum; and, if they should acknowledge it, as it seemed they would, and defend it as done by public counsel, to declare war upon the Carthaginian people. When the Romans had come to Carthage, and the senate was granted them, and Quintus Fabius had inquired nothing beyond the one thing that was charged him, then one of the Carthaginians spoke: "Headlong, Romans, and the earlier was your embassy too, when you demanded Hannibal as one besieging Saguntum by his own counsel; but this embassy of yours is so far milder in words, harsher in substance. For then Hannibal was both accused and demanded; now from us both a confession of guilt is wrung, and from men confessed restitution is forthwith required. But I would hold that the question is not whether Saguntum was besieged by private or by public counsel, but whether by right or by wrong; for ours is this inquiry and animadversion upon our own citizen, what he did by our authority or his own: with you there is but one matter to be argued, whether it was lawful under the treaty. Therefore, since it pleases you to distinguish what the commanders do by public counsel and what of their own accord, there is between us and you a treaty struck by Gaius Lutatius the consul, in which, while provision was made for the allies of both, nothing was provided concerning the Saguntines—for they were not yet your allies. ’But by the treaty struck with Hasdrubal the Saguntines are excepted.’ Against which I shall say nothing save what I have learned from you. For you, because Gaius Lutatius the consul struck the first treaty with us, when it had been struck neither by the authority of the fathers nor by the people’s command, denied that you were bound by it; and so another treaty was struck afresh by public counsel. If your treaties do not bind you unless struck by your authority or your command, neither could the treaty of Hasdrubal, which he struck without our knowledge, bind us. Cease, then, to make mention of Saguntum and the Ebro, and let your mind at length bring forth what it has long been laboring with." Then the Roman, making a fold of his toga, said: "Here we carry to you war and peace; take whichever you please." At this word it was shouted back, no less fiercely, that he should give whichever he would; and when he again, the fold let fall, said that he gave war, they all answered that they accepted it, and with the same spirits with which they accepted it they would wage it.

This direct inquiry and declaration of war seemed more in keeping with the dignity of the Roman people than to wrangle in words over the law of treaties—both before, and most of all now that Saguntum had been destroyed. For if it were a matter of verbal disputation, what comparison was there between the treaty of Hasdrubal and the earlier treaty of Lutatius, which was altered—when in the treaty of Lutatius it had been expressly added that it should hold good if the people approved, while in the treaty of Hasdrubal no such reservation had been made, and by the silence of so many years it had been so confirmed, the maker living, that not even when its author was dead was anything altered? And yet, even if one stood by the earlier treaty, sufficient provision had been made for the Saguntines by the exception of the allies of both; for there was added neither "those who then were" nor "that none be afterward taken in." And since it was lawful to take in new allies, who would think it fair either that any should be received into friendship for no deserving, or that those received should not be defended in good faith—only that the allies of the Carthaginians should not be tempted to revolt, nor, of their own accord falling away, be received? The Roman envoys, as had been charged them at Rome, crossed over from Carthage into Spain to approach the states, that they might lure them into alliance or turn them from the Carthaginians. They came first to the Bargusii, by whom they were kindly received, because the Punic rule was wearisome to them; and they roused many peoples beyond the Ebro to a longing for new fortune. Thence they came to the Volciani, whose answer, famous through Spain, turned the rest of the peoples from the Roman alliance. For thus the eldest of them answered in the council: "What modesty is this, Romans, that you should ask us to set your friendship before the Carthaginians’, when those who did so—the Saguntines—you, their allies, betrayed more cruelly than the Carthaginian enemy destroyed them? Seek allies, I counsel, where the Saguntine disaster is unknown; to the peoples of Spain the ruins of Saguntum will be a lesson at once mournful and signal, that no man trust to the faith or the alliance of Rome." Then, bidden to depart at once from the borders of the Volciani, they got no kinder words from any council of Spain thereafter. And so, having traversed Spain in vain, they cross into Gaul.

Among these a new and terrible sight met them, that the men came armed into the council—for so was the custom of the nation. When, with words extolling the glory and valor of the Roman people and the greatness of its empire, they had begged that they would not grant the Carthaginian, as he made war upon Italy, a passage through their fields and cities, such a laughter, with an uproar, is said to have arisen that the young men were scarce quieted by the magistrates and the elders; so foolish and shameless did the demand appear—to think that, lest the Gauls let the war pass over into Italy, they themselves should turn it upon themselves and throw their own fields, in place of others’, to be laid waste. When the uproar was at last stilled, answer was given to the envoys that there was neither service of the Romans toward them nor wrong of the Carthaginians for which they should take up arms either for the Romans or against the Carthaginians; on the contrary, they heard that men of their own race were being driven from their land and the borders of Italy by the Roman people, and were paying tribute and suffering all else unworthy. Much the same was said and heard in the other councils of Gaul, nor did they hear anything hospitable or peaceable enough until they came to Massilia. There all things were learned from their allies, sought out with care and good faith: that the minds of the Gauls had been preoccupied already by Hannibal; but that not even to him would the nation be tame enough—so fierce and untamed were their tempers—unless from time to time the minds of the chieftains were won by gold, of which that people is most greedy. So, having traversed the peoples of Spain and Gaul, the envoys return to Rome not so very long after the consuls had set out for their provinces. They found the whole state roused into expectation of war, the report being now firm enough that the Carthaginians had already crossed the Ebro.

Hannibal, when Saguntum was taken, had withdrawn into winter quarters at New Carthage; and there, when he had heard what was done and decreed at Rome and at Carthage, and that he was himself not only the leader but also the cause of the war, and had shared out and sold off the remnants of the plunder, thinking that nothing must be put off longer, he calls together the soldiers of the Spanish race. "I believe, comrades," he said, "that you yourselves perceive that, now all the peoples of Spain are pacified, we must either end our soldiering and disband our armies, or carry the war into other lands; for thus will these nations flourish in the goods not of peace only but of victory, if we seek booty and glory from other peoples. Therefore, since a far-off campaign is at hand and it is uncertain when you shall see your homes and what each holds dear there, if any of you wishes to visit his own, I grant him leave. At the first of spring I bid you be present, that, the gods well aiding, we may begin a war of vast glory and plunder." The grant, freely offered, of visiting their homes was welcome to wellnigh all, longing as they already were for their own and feeling the longing reach farther into the future. Through the whole time of winter the rest, between toils either already drained or soon to be drained, renewed their bodies and spirits to bear all things afresh; at the first of spring they assembled to the proclamation. Hannibal, when he had reviewed the auxiliaries of all the nations, set out for Gades, paid his vows to Hercules, and bound himself by new vows, should the rest fall out prosperously. Then, dividing his cares between the carrying and the warding off of war, lest, while he himself sought Italy by the land route through Spain and the Gauls, Africa should lie bare and open to the Romans from Sicily, he resolved to make it firm with a strong garrison; and in its stead he sought reinforcement for himself out of Africa, chiefly of light javelin-men, so that, with Africans in Spain and Spaniards in Africa—each soldier likely to be the better far from home—they might serve as it were bound by mutual pledges. Thirteen thousand eight hundred and fifty targeteer foot he sent into Africa, and eight hundred and seventy Balearic slingers, and twelve hundred horse drawn from many peoples. These forces he bade be partly a garrison for Carthage, partly distributed through Africa. At the same time, recruiting-officers being sent into the states, four thousand chosen youths were enrolled, to be both a garrison and hostages, and bidden led to Carthage.

And thinking that Spain too must not be neglected—and that the less because he was not unaware that it had been gone about by the Roman envoys to win over the minds of the chieftains—he assigns that province to his brother Hasdrubal, a man of energy, and makes him strong chiefly with African garrisons: of African foot eleven thousand eight hundred and fifty, of Ligurians three hundred, of Balearics five hundred. To these auxiliaries of foot were added horsemen of the Liby-Phoenicians, a stock mingled of Punic and African, four hundred and fifty, and Numidians and Moors dwelling by the Ocean to the number of eighteen hundred, and a small band of Ilergetes from Spain, two hundred horse; and, that no kind of land-force might be lacking, one-and-twenty elephants. A fleet, besides, was given for the guarding of the sea-coast, because in that quarter in which they had conquered it could be believed that the Romans would then too do their work: fifty quinqueremes, two quadriremes, five triremes; but fitted and manned with oarsmen were two-and-thirty quinqueremes and five triremes. From Gades the army returned to Carthage, to its winter quarters; and setting out thence he leads it past the city of Onusa along the sea-coast to the Ebro. There the story is that there was seen by him, in his sleep, a youth of godlike form who said that he had been sent by Jupiter as a guide into Italy for Hannibal; that he should therefore follow, and nowhere turn his eyes away from him. At first, in fear, looking nowhere about or behind, he followed; then, by the curiosity of man’s nature, when he turned over in his mind what that might be which he was forbidden to look back upon, he could not master his eyes; then he saw behind him a serpent of marvelous size moving on amid a vast wreck of trees and brushwood, and after it a stormcloud following with a crash of the sky. Then, when he asked what that bulk was, or what the prodigy meant, he heard that it was the laying waste of Italy; he should go on farther and inquire no more, and let the fates lie in their secret.

Glad at this vision, he crossed the Ebro with his forces in three divisions, having sent ahead men to win, by gifts, the minds of the Gauls through whose country the army was to be led, and to spy out the passes of the Alps. Ninety thousand foot, twelve thousand horse, he led across the Ebro. The Ilergetes then, and the Bargusii and Ausetani, and Lacetania, which lies under the Pyrenees, he subdued; and over all this coast he set Hanno, that the defiles which join the Spains to the Gauls might be in his power. Ten thousand foot were given to Hanno for the holding of the region, and a thousand horse. After the army had begun to be led across through the Pyrenean pass, and a surer rumor of the Roman war had spread among the barbarians, three thousand Carpetanian foot turned their march away from there. It was agreed that they were moved not so much by the war as by the length of the journey and the insuperable crossing of the Alps. Hannibal, because to recall them or to hold them by force was a doubtful matter, lest the fierce spirits of the rest also be provoked, sent home above seven thousand men, whom he had himself perceived to be wearied of soldiering, feigning that the Carpetani too had been dismissed by him.

Then, lest delay and idleness should disquiet their spirits, with the rest of his forces he crosses the Pyrenees and pitches camp by the town of Iliberris. The Gauls, although they heard that war was being carried into Italy, yet, because the report was that the Spaniards beyond the Pyrenees had been subdued by force and strong garrisons set over them, in fear of slavery and roused to arms, several peoples gather at Ruscino. When this was reported to Hannibal, fearing delay rather than war, he sent spokesmen to their chieftains: he himself wished to confer with them; and either let them come nearer to Iliberris, or he would advance to Ruscino, that the meeting might be the easier from close at hand; for he would gladly receive them in his camp, and would himself come to them without hanging back; since he had come into Gaul as a guest, not an enemy, and would not draw his sword before he had come into Italy, if the Gauls would let him. So much by messengers; but when the Gallic chieftains, straightway moving their camp to Iliberris, came without reluctance to the Carthaginian, won by his gifts they let his army pass through their borders, in good peace, past the town of Ruscino.

Into Italy meanwhile nothing further than that Hannibal had crossed the Ebro had been carried to Rome by the envoys of the Massilians, when, just as though he had already crossed the Alps, the Boii, with the Insubres stirred up, revolted—not so much for their old angers against the Roman people as because they ill brooked that lately, about the Po, the colonies of Placentia and Cremona had been planted in Gallic land. And so, snatching up arms of a sudden, and making a rush upon that very land, they wrought such terror and tumult that not the rural multitude only, but even the Roman commissioners themselves, who had come to assign the land, distrusting the walls of Placentia, fled for refuge to Mutina—Gaius Lutatius, Gaius Servilius, Marcus Annius. (The name of Lutatius is beyond doubt; for Annius and Servilius some annals have Manius Acilius and Gaius Herennius, others Publius Cornelius Asina and Gaius Papirius Maso. This too is doubtful, whether the envoys sent to remonstrate with the Boii were maltreated, or whether the attack was made upon the commissioners measuring out the land.) When they were besieged in Mutina, and the nation, rude in the arts of storming cities and most sluggish at military works, sat slack before walls untouched, a pretense was begun of treating about peace; and the envoys, called out by the chiefs of the Gauls to a parley, are seized—not only against the law of nations, but with the breaking even of the faith that had been given for that occasion—the Gauls declaring that they would not let them go unless the hostages were given back to them. When this was reported of the envoys, and Mutina and its garrison were in peril, Lucius Manlius the praetor, fired with anger, leads his column at the run toward Mutina. There were then woods about the road, most of the country uncultivated. There, setting out without scouting, he plunges into an ambush and with much slaughter of his men hardly got out into the open plains. There a camp was fortified, and, because the Gauls lacked hope to assail it, the soldiers’ spirits were restored, though it was agreed well enough that about five hundred had fallen. Then the march was begun afresh, nor, while the column was led through open ground, did the enemy appear; but when the woods were again entered, then, attacking the rearmost, with great trembling and panic of all, they slew seven hundred soldiers and carried off six standards. There was an end of the Gauls’ terrifying and the Romans’ fear when they got out of the trackless and entangled glade. Thereafter, in open places easily guarding their column, the Romans pushed on to Tannetum, a village near the Po. There they kept themselves safe, for the time, by a rampart and by supplies from the river and even by the help of the Brixian Gauls, against an enemy’s multitude growing day by day.

When this sudden tumult was carried to Rome, and the fathers learned that the Punic war was increased besides by a Gallic one, they bid Gaius Atilius the praetor bear help to Manlius with one Roman legion and five thousand allies, enrolled by the consul in a fresh levy; and he, without any struggle—for the enemy had withdrawn in fear—came through to Tannetum. And Publius Cornelius, a fresh legion enrolled in place of the one that had been sent with the praetor, set out from the city with sixty warships and came along the coast of Etruria and the Ligurians, and thence past the Salyan mountains, to Massilia, and pitches camp at the nearest mouth of the Rhône—for the river runs down into the sea divided into several—scarcely yet believing well enough that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenees. But when he perceived that he was already plotting the crossing of the Rhône too, uncertain at what place to meet him, and his soldiers not yet sufficiently recovered from the tossing of the sea, he sends ahead meanwhile three hundred chosen horse, with Massilian guides and Gallic auxiliaries, to explore all things and view the enemy from a safe place. Hannibal, the rest pacified by fear or by bribe, had now come into the land of the Volcae, a strong nation. They dwell on either bank of the Rhône; but distrusting that the Carthaginian could be kept off from the nearer land, that they might have the river for a defense, with wellnigh all their people carried across the Rhône, they held the further bank in arms. The other dwellers by the river Hannibal lured—and those very men whom their own seats had kept on the hither side—with gifts, to gather and build boats from every quarter; and at the same time they themselves were eager that the army should be ferried over and their region relieved as soon as might be of so great a press of men crowding it. And so a vast force of boats and craft hastily made for the neighbors’ use was gathered; and other new ones the Gauls, beginning, hollowed out of single trees, and then the soldiers themselves, drawn on at once by the plenty of timber and by the easiness of the work, made shapeless troughs in haste, in which to carry over themselves and their goods, caring for nothing save that they should float on the water and bear burdens.

And now, all being made ready enough for the crossing, the enemy from the further side, holding the whole bank with horsemen and men, struck terror. To turn them aside, he bids Hanno son of Bomilcar, at the first watch of the night, go a day’s march up the river with a part of his forces, chiefly the Spaniards, and, as soon as he could, having crossed the stream as secretly as possible, lead his column round, that, when there was need, he might fall upon the enemy from the rear. The Gauls given as guides for this point out that some five-and-twenty miles above, the river, poured about a small island, where it was divided into a broader and therefore shallower channel, showed a crossing. There, timber being hastily felled, rafts were made on which horses and men and other burdens might be ferried over. The Spaniards, with no trouble, casting their clothes upon skins and lying themselves upon their shields set on top, swam the river. And the rest of that army, ferried across on joined rafts, a camp being pitched near the river, was refreshed by a single day’s rest after the night march and the labor of the work, their leader being intent on carrying out his plan at the fit time. Setting out the next day, from a high place they signal by smoke that they had crossed and were not far off; and when Hannibal received this, not to fail the moment, he gives the signal for crossing. The foot now had their craft ready and fitted; the horse, mostly because of their horses, swam beside them. A line of ships, sent across higher up to break the force of the river coming against them, gave a calm below to those crossing in the craft; a great part of the horses were drawn swimming by thongs from the sterns, save those which, saddled and bridled, that they might be of use to the rider the moment he stepped out upon the bank, they had set on board the ships.

The Gauls run to meet them on the bank with diverse howlings and the singing of their fashion, shaking their shields above their heads and brandishing javelins in their right hands, although from the other side too there was terror in so great a host of ships with the mighty roar of the river and the diverse shouting of sailors and soldiers, both those who strove to break through the river’s force and those who from the other bank cheered on their fellows crossing. Already enough dismayed by the uproar before them, a more terrible shout assailed them from the rear, the camp having been taken by Hanno. Soon he himself too was at hand, and a double terror beset them round, both from the great force of armed men issuing from the ships onto land and from the line pressing them unforeseen from the rear. The Gauls, after they were beaten back, having tried to make force both ways, break through where the way seemed most open, and in their panic flee scattered, each to his own village. Hannibal, the rest of his forces ferried over at leisure, now scorning the Gallic tumults, pitches camp. Of the crossing of the elephants there were, I believe, divers plans; at least the memory of the thing done is varied. Some relate that the elephants being gathered at the bank, the fiercest of them, provoked by its keeper, when it pursued him as he fled swimming into the water, drew the herd after it—the very rush of the river sweeping each to the further bank as the ford failed it fearing the depth. But it is the more agreed that they were ferried across on rafts; and as that was the safer plan beforehand, so, the thing done, it is the more credible. One raft, two hundred feet long, fifty wide, they stretched from the land out into the river, which, lest it be borne down by the current, they bound with several strong cables to the upper part of the bank, and floored it, earth being thrown on, in the manner of a bridge, that the beasts might step on boldly as upon solid ground. A second raft, equally wide, a hundred feet long, fit for crossing the river, was coupled to this; then three elephants, with the females going before, were driven over the steady raft as along a road; and when they had passed onto the smaller one fastened to it, straightway, the bonds by which it was lightly tied being loosed, it is hauled by several swift boats to the further bank; and so, the first being landed, others then were fetched back and ferried over. They were not at all alarmed so long as they were driven as it were along an unbroken bridge; their first panic was when, the raft loosed from the rest, they were swept into the deep. There, pressing one another, the outermost giving way from the water, they made some show of trembling, until their very fear brought them quiet as they gazed about at the water. Some even, in their rage, fell into the river; but, steadied by their very weight, their drivers thrown off, by searching out the fords step by step they made their way onto land.

While the elephants are being ferried across, Hannibal meanwhile had sent five hundred Numidian horsemen toward the Roman camp to spy out where and how great the forces were and what they were preparing. This troop of horse the three hundred Roman horsemen sent, as was said before, from the mouth of the Rhône fall in with. The battle is fought more savagely than the number of the fighters would suggest; for, besides many wounds, there was even slaughter wellnigh equal on both sides, and the flight and panic of the Numidians gave the victory to the Romans, already quite wearied. Of the victors, about a hundred and sixty fell, and not all Romans but part Gauls; of the vanquished, more than two hundred. This beginning and at once omen of the war foretold to the Romans, as a prosperous issue of the whole, so a victory by no means bloodless and of a doubtful struggle. When, the matter so done, each side’s men returned to their own leader, Scipio could fix on no resolve save to take his own attempts from the plans and undertakings of the enemy; and Hannibal, uncertain whether to bend his begun march toward Italy or to join hands with the Roman army that had first offered itself, was turned from a present battle by the coming of the Boian envoys and of the chieftain Magalus, who, affirming that they would be guides of his march and partners of his peril, hold that Italy ought to be assailed with the war whole, his strength nowhere first wasted. The multitude feared the enemy indeed, the memory of the former war not yet blotted out; but more they feared the measureless march and the Alps, a thing dreadful by report, especially to the untried.

And so Hannibal, after the resolve was fixed in him to go on and seek Italy, an assembly being called, works upon the soldiers’ minds in divers ways, by chiding and by exhorting: he wondered what sudden terror had come upon hearts always undismayed. Through so many years they had served victorious, nor had they departed from Spain before all the peoples and lands that two opposite seas embrace were the Carthaginians’; then, indignant that whoever had besieged Saguntum the Roman people demanded to be given up to them as for a crime, they had crossed the Ebro to blot out the name of the Romans and to set the world free. Then it had seemed long to no man, when they were bending their march from the setting to the rising of the sun: now, after they see by far the greater part of the journey measured out—the Pyrenean pass surmounted among the fiercest of peoples, the Rhône, so great a river, crossed though so many thousands of Gauls would have barred it, the very force of the stream itself subdued—now that they have the Alps in sight, of which the one side is Italy’s, are they to halt wearied in the very gateway of the enemy? What did they think the Alps to be other than heights of mountains? Let them imagine them higher than the ridges of the Pyrenees: surely no lands touched the sky, nor were any insuperable to the race of man. The Alps indeed were inhabited and tilled, brought forth and nourished living things; they were passable to a few, and passable also to armies. Those very envoys whom they saw had not crossed the Alps borne aloft on wings. Nor had their ancestors even been natives, but newcomers, settlers of Italy, who had often safely crossed these very Alps in vast columns, with their children and wives, in the manner of migrants. To a soldier under arms, carrying with him nothing but the implements of war, what was trackless or unsurmountable? That Saguntum might be taken, what of peril, what of toil, had been drained through eight months? Now that they sought Rome, the head of the world, could anything seem so rough and steep as to stay their enterprise? The Gauls had once taken what the Carthaginian despaired even of approaching; let them therefore either yield in spirit and valor to a nation so many times in these days conquered by them, or look for the end of their march in the plain that lies between the Tiber and the walls of Rome.

Roused by these exhortations, he bids them refresh their bodies and make ready for the march. On the next day, setting out, he makes for the interior of Gaul up the bank of the Rhône—not because the way to the Alps was straighter, but believing that the farther he withdrew from the sea, the less would the Roman be in his path, with whom, before he had come into Italy, he had no mind to join hands. On the fourth day’s march he came to the Island. There the Isère and the Rhône, running down from different Alps, after embracing a good stretch of country flow together into one in the midst of the plains; the name of the Island was given to it. The Allobroges dwell near, a nation second even then to none of the Gallic peoples in resources or in fame. Then it was at discord. Brothers were contending for the kingship; the elder, Braneus by name, who had ruled before, was being driven out by the younger and by the band of the younger men, who could do less by right but more by force. When the most timely arbitrament of this quarrel had been laid before Hannibal, made the judge of the kingship—since such had been the mind of the senate and the chief men—he restored the rule to the elder. For this service he was aided with provisions and a plenty of all things, chiefly of clothing, which the Alps, of ill fame for their cold, forced him to provide. The quarrels of the Allobroges settled, when he was now making for the Alps, he set his march not by the straight line, but bent to the left into the Tricastini; thence, by the farthest edge of the territory of the Vocontii, he stretches into the Tricorii, the way nowhere hampered until he came to the river Druentia. This too, an Alpine stream, is by far the hardest to cross of all the rivers of Gaul; for though it carries a vast weight of water, yet it bears no ships, because, confined by no banks, flowing in several channels at once and never the same, ever making new fords and new pools—and for the same reasons the way is uncertain to the footman too—and, besides, rolling gravelly stones, it offers nothing steady or safe to one entering it; and then by chance, swollen with rains, it made vast tumult for those crossing, when, above all else, they were disordered by their own trepidation and by uncertain shoutings.

Publius Cornelius the consul, about three days after Hannibal moved from the bank of the Rhône, had come in a hollow square to the enemy’s camp, meaning to make no delay in fighting; but when he sees the fortifications deserted, and that he could not easily overtake men so far gone ahead, he returned to the sea and his ships, that so he might the more safely and easily meet Hannibal as he came down from the Alps. Yet, that Spain—the province he had drawn by lot—might not be bare of Roman help, he sent his brother Gnaeus Scipio with the greatest part of his forces against Hasdrubal, not only to guard the old allies and win new ones, but also to drive Hasdrubal out of Spain. He himself, with quite scanty forces, makes again for Genua, meaning to defend Italy with the army that was about the Po. Hannibal, from the Druentia, by a march mostly over level ground, came to the Alps in good peace with the Gauls who dwell in those parts. Then, although the matter had been forestalled by report, by which things uncertain are wont to be carried beyond the truth, yet the height of the mountains seen from near at hand, and the snows wellnigh mingled with the sky, the shapeless huts set upon the crags, the flocks and beasts of burden shriveled with cold, the men unshorn and unkempt, all things living and lifeless stiff with frost, and the rest, fouler to see than to tell, renewed their terror. As they climbed the first slopes, there appeared the mountaineers, overhanging them, seated upon the heights, who, had they beset the more hidden valleys, rising suddenly to battle would have wrought vast flight and slaughter. Hannibal bade the standards halt; and, having sent Gauls ahead to view the ground, when he learned that there was no passage that way, he pitches camp in the most extended valley he can amid all that broken and precipitous country. Then, through those same Gauls—who differed not much in tongue and manners—when they had mingled in the parleys of the mountaineers, being told that the pass was beset only by day, and that by night each slipped away to his own hut, at the first light he climbed the heights, as though about to force the narrows openly and by day. Then, the day spent in feigning something other than what was preparing, when they had fortified a camp in the same place where they had halted, as soon as he perceived that the mountaineers had come down from the heights and the watches were relaxed, having made, for show, more fires than befitted the number of those staying, and leaving the baggage with the cavalry and the greatest part of the foot, he himself with the light-armed—every keenest man among them—swiftly issues from the narrows and posts himself upon those very heights which the enemy had held.

Then, at first light, the camp was moved and the rest of the column began to advance. The mountaineers, at a signal given, were now gathering from their strongholds to their wonted station, when of a sudden they catch sight of some of the enemy holding their own citadel above their heads, others passing by on the road. Both things at once cast before their eyes and minds fixed them motionless for a little; then, when they saw the trembling in the narrows, and the column thrown into disorder by its own tumult, the horses above all stampeded, thinking that whatever terror they themselves should add would be enough for destruction, down the broken crags hard by, trackless and pathless as they were inured to them, they rush. Then indeed the Carthaginians were assailed at once by the enemy and by the unfairness of the ground, and there was more of a struggle among themselves, each striving that he himself should escape the danger first, than with the enemy. And the horses above all made the column dangerous, which, terrified by the discordant shouts that the groves too and the echoing valleys swelled, trembled, and, struck or wounded by chance, were so maddened that they made a vast wreck both of men and of baggage of every kind; and the throng, since the narrows were headlong and sheer on both sides, hurled many into an immeasurable depth, some even armed; and beasts with their loads, after the manner of an avalanche, rolled down. Foul as these things were to see, yet Hannibal stood a little while and held back his men, lest he increase the tumult and the trembling; then, after he saw the column broken, and that there was danger lest he should have led across an army stripped of its baggage to no purpose, though unhurt, he runs down from the higher ground, and, when by the very onset he had routed the enemy, he increased the tumult among his own too. But that tumult in a moment of time, after the roads were freed by the flight of the mountaineers, is stilled, and soon all were led across not at leisure only but wellnigh in silence. Then he takes a stronghold, which was the head of that region, and the little villages lying about, and with the captured grain and cattle fed his army for three days; and, because they were hindered neither by the mountaineers, dismayed at first, nor greatly by the ground, he made in those three days a good piece of the way.

They came thence to another people, thronged with cultivators, as among mountaineers. There he was wellnigh circumvented, not in open war but by his own arts, fraud and ambush. Elders, the chief men of the strongholds, come as spokesmen to the Carthaginian, declaring that, taught by the misfortunes of others—a profitable example—they preferred to try the friendship rather than the force of the Carthaginians; therefore they would obey his commands; let him take provisions and guides of the march, and hostages for the faith of their promises. Hannibal, thinking that they must neither be rashly trusted nor harshly handled, lest, repulsed, they become open enemies, when he had answered kindly, took the hostages they gave, used the provisions they had themselves brought down onto the road, and follows their guides with his column drawn up by no means as among a pacified people. The van was elephants and cavalry; he himself came after, with the flower of the foot, watchful, anxious about everything. When they had come into a narrower way, on one side subject to a ridge overhanging above, the barbarians, rising on every side from ambush, fall on front and rear, attack at close quarters and from afar, and roll down huge rocks upon the column. The greatest press of men weighed upon the rear. Against these the line of foot, wheeling about, made it beyond doubt that, had the rear of the column not been made firm, a vast disaster would have been suffered in that pass. Then too they came to the utmost of peril and wellnigh to destruction; for while Hannibal hesitates to send his column down into the narrows, because, as he was himself a guard to the cavalry, he had not left any help in like manner to the foot from the rear, the mountaineers, running across by the slopes, broke through the middle of the column and beset the way, and one night was spent by Hannibal without his cavalry and his baggage.

On the next day, the barbarians now running between with less spirit, the forces were joined and the pass surmounted, not without loss, yet with a greater destruction of beasts than of men. Thereafter the mountaineers, now fewer, ran together after the manner of brigandage rather than of war, now upon the van, now upon the rear, as either the place gave opportunity or those who had gone ahead or lagged behind made some occasion. The elephants, as they were driven with great delay along the narrow and precipitous ways, so they made the column, wherever they advanced, safe from the enemy, because to men unused to them there was fear in approaching nearer. On the ninth day they came to the ridge of the Alps, through trackless places for the most part and by wanderings, which either the treachery of the guides made, or, when there was no trust in them, valleys rashly entered upon by men guessing the way. For two days a standing camp was kept on the ridge, and rest given to soldiers worn out with toil and fighting; and some beasts of burden, which had fallen among the crags, by following the column’s tracks came through into the camp. To men wearied with the weariness of so many ills, a fall of snow also—the constellation of the Pleiades now setting—added vast terror. When at first light the standards were moved and the column advanced slackly over all things filled with snow, and sloth and despair stood out on every face, Hannibal, going ahead of the standards, on a certain promontory whence there was a prospect far and wide, bade the soldiers halt, and shows them Italy and the plains about the Po lying beneath the Alpine mountains; and that they were then crossing the walls not of Italy only but of the very city of Rome; the rest would be level and downward; with one battle, or at most a second, they would have the citadel and head of Italy in their hand and power. The column then began to advance, the enemy now attempting nothing more than petty thieving as occasion served. But the way was much harder than it had been in the ascent—as most of the Alps are toward Italy shorter so they are steeper; for wellnigh the whole way was sheer, narrow, slippery, so that they could neither keep themselves from slipping, nor could those who had stumbled a little cling fast, fallen, to their footing, and one fell upon another, and the beasts upon the men.

They came then to a rock far narrower, and with rocks so sheer that a lightly-equipped soldier could scarce, feeling his way and holding by his hands the bushes and roots that jutted about, let himself down. The place, by nature already steep, had been broken away by a recent slide of the earth to a depth of fully a thousand feet. There, when the cavalry had halted as at the end of the road, to Hannibal wondering what stayed the column it is announced that the rock was impassable. Then he himself went off to view the place. It seemed beyond doubt that he must lead his column round by the trackless and untrodden ways about, however long the circuit. But that way proved insuperable; for, while over the old untouched snow there lay new of a moderate depth, the feet of those treading easily found footing in it, soft and not deep; but when it had been melted away by the passing of so many men and beasts, they trod upon the bare ice beneath and the flowing slush of the melting snow. There was a foul struggle there, the ice, slippery, not receiving the footstep, and on the slope the more quickly failing the feet, so that, whether they helped themselves in rising by their hands or by their knees, the very props slipping, they fell again; nor were there stems or roots about by which any man might strain himself up with foot or hand; so they only rolled about on the smooth ice and the slushy snow. The beasts of burden sometimes cut even into the lowest snow as they trod, and, falling, by the harder flinging of their hoofs in their struggling broke clean through, so that most of them stuck fast, as though caught in a trap, in the hard ice frozen deep.

At last, the beasts and men wearied to no purpose, a camp was pitched on the ridge, the place for that very thing being cleared with the utmost difficulty; so much snow had to be dug out and carried away. Thence the soldiers, led to make a way through the rock, by which alone a road could be, when the stone had to be cut, by felling and lopping the huge trees about make a vast pile of timber; and this, when a force of wind fit for making fire had arisen, they kindle, and rot the glowing rocks by pouring on vinegar. So the rock, scorched by the fire, they open with iron, and ease the slopes by gentle windings, so that not only the beasts of burden but the elephants too could be brought down. Four days were spent about the rock, the beasts wellnigh consumed by famine; for the heights are mostly bare, and, if there is any fodder, the snows cover it. The lower parts have certain sunny hills and brooks near woods, and places now more worthy of human tillage. There the beasts were sent out to fodder, and rest given to the men, wearied with road-making. Thence in three days they came down to the level, the country now milder, and the tempers of the dwellers too.

In this manner chiefly was Italy reached, in the fifth month from New Carthage, as some authorities are, the Alps surmounted in fifteen days. How great forces Hannibal had when he had crossed into Italy is by no means agreed among the authorities. Those who put it highest write that there were a hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse; those who put it lowest, twenty thousand foot and six thousand horse. Lucius Cincius Alimentus, who writes that he was himself taken prisoner by Hannibal, would move me most as an authority, did he not confound the number by adding in the Gauls and Ligurians; with these, eighty thousand foot and ten thousand horse were brought in—though it is more like the truth that these flowed in within Italy, and so some authorities are; but he says besides that he had heard from Hannibal himself that, after he had crossed the Rhône, he had lost thirty-six thousand men and a vast number of horses and other beasts. The Taurini, Half-Gauls, were the nearest people to him when he came down into Italy. Since this is agreed among all, the more I wonder that it should be disputed by what way he crossed the Alps, and that it should be commonly believed that he crossed by the Pennine—and that thence the name was given to that ridge of the Alps—while Coelius says he crossed by the ridge of Cremo; both which passes would have brought him down not among the Taurini but through the Salassi, mountaineers, to the Libuan Gauls. Nor is it like the truth that those ways into Gaul lay open then; and assuredly those that lead to the Pennine would have been blocked by half-German tribes. Nor, by Hercules, was the name given to these mountains—if perchance that moves anyone—from any crossing of the Carthaginians, as the Seduni Veragri, dwellers of that ridge, know, but from him whom, hallowed on the topmost peak, the mountaineers call Penninus.

Most opportunely for the beginnings of his enterprise, war had been stirred up by the Taurini, the nearest people, against the Insubres. But Hannibal could not arm his army to be a help to either side, feeling most, in his very recovery, the ills it had drawn on before; for ease after toil, plenty after want, cleanliness after filth, told variously upon bodies grimed and wellnigh made savage by foulness and wasting. This was the reason for Publius Cornelius the consul, when he had come to Pisa by ship and had received from Manlius and Atilius an army of recruits, trembling under its fresh disgraces, to hasten to the Po, that he might join hands with the enemy while not yet recovered. But when the consul came to Placentia, Hannibal had already moved from his standing camp and had taken by storm one city of the Taurini, the head of that people, because they would not come of their own will into friendship; and he would have joined to himself the Gauls dwelling by the Po, not by fear only but even by goodwill, had not the consul, by his sudden coming, overborne them while they were watching for a time to revolt. And Hannibal moved out of the country of the Taurini, thinking that the Gauls, uncertain which side to follow, would follow the one that was present. Now the armies were wellnigh in sight, and the leaders had come together, not yet well enough known to one another, yet each already imbued with a certain admiration of the other. For the name of Hannibal, even before the destruction of Saguntum, was already most famous among the Romans, and Hannibal believed Scipio a man of mark by this very thing, that he had been chosen above all to be leader against him; and they had increased the opinion of one another—Scipio, because, left behind in Gaul, he had met Hannibal when he had crossed into Italy, Hannibal both by so daring an attempt as the crossing of the Alps and by its accomplishment. Scipio, however, was first to cross the Po, and, his camp moved to the river Ticinus, before he led out into the line, for the sake of exhorting his soldiers began a speech of this kind.

"If I were leading into the line, soldiers, that army which I had with me in Gaul, I should have spared to speak before you; for what would it profit to exhort either those horsemen who had splendidly conquered the enemy’s cavalry at the river Rhône, or those legions with which, following this very enemy as he fled, I held his confession of yielding and shirking the fight as good as a victory? Now, because that army, enrolled for the province of Spain, is doing its work there, under my brother Gnaeus Scipio and under my auspices, where the senate and people of Rome willed it to do its work—I, that you might have a consul for leader against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, have offered myself to this voluntary contest; and a new commander before new soldiers must make a few words. That you may not be ignorant of the kind of war nor of the enemy, you must fight, soldiers, with those whom in the former war you conquered by land and sea, from whom you exacted tribute for twenty years, from whom you hold Sicily and Sardinia, taken as the prizes of war. There will be, then, in this contest that spirit in you and in them which is wont to be in victors and in vanquished. And now they are about to fight not because they dare but because they must—men of whom wellnigh more have perished than survive; unless you believe that those who shirked battle with their army unhurt have got more hope now that they have lost two-thirds of their foot and horse in the crossing of the Alps. ’But they are few indeed, yet vigorous in mind and body, whose strength and force scarce any power could withstand.’ Nay, they are the likenesses, the shadows of men, worn out with hunger, cold, filth, and squalor, bruised and crippled among the rocks and crags; their joints frostbitten besides, their sinews stiff with snow, their limbs shriveled by the frost, their arms shattered and broken, their horses lame and feeble. With such cavalry, with such infantry, you are to fight; you have the last remnants of an enemy, not an enemy; and I fear nothing more than that, when you have fought, it may seem to anyone that the Alps conquered Hannibal. But so perhaps it was fitting, that, when the gods themselves had begun and wellnigh finished the war, without any human aid, against a leader and a people who broke the treaty, we, who next after the gods were wronged, should complete what was begun and wellnigh finished.

"I do not fear that anyone will think I speak these things magnificently for the sake of exhorting you, while I am myself otherwise affected in mind. It was open to me to go into Spain, my province, whither I had already set out, with my own army, where I should have my brother as partner of my counsel and comrade of my peril, and Hasdrubal rather than Hannibal for enemy, and beyond doubt a lesser bulk of war; yet, as I was sailing past the coast of Gaul, at the report of this enemy I went ashore, sent my cavalry ahead, and moved my camp to the Rhône. In a cavalry battle, in the one part of my forces to which fortune gave it to join hands, I routed the enemy; the column of foot, which was being driven hastily in the manner of men fleeing, because I could not overtake it by land, returning to my ships, with all the speed I could, by so great a circuit of sea and land, I met this enemy, to be feared as he is, wellnigh at the roots of the Alps. Do I seem, while I was shunning a contest, to have fallen in with him unforeseeing, or to meet him in his tracks, to provoke and drag him to the decision? It is a pleasure to make trial whether the earth has suddenly brought forth other Carthaginians in these twenty years, or whether they are the same who fought at the Aegates Islands and whom, valued at eighteen denarii a head, you let go from Eryx; and whether this Hannibal is the rival of the journeys of Hercules, as he himself gives out, or one left by his father a tributary and a payer of tribute and a slave of the Roman people. Whom, did not his Saguntine crime drive him on, he would surely look back—if not to his conquered country, at least to his house and his father and the treaties written by the hand of Hamilcar, who, bidden by our consul, withdrew his garrison from Eryx, who, chafing and grieving, accepted the heavy terms laid upon the conquered Carthaginians, who, departing from Sicily, covenanted to pay tribute to the Roman people. And so I would have you, soldiers, fight not only with that spirit with which you are wont against other enemies, but with a certain indignation and anger, as though you saw your own slaves suddenly bearing arms against you. We might have killed them, shut up at Eryx, by the utmost punishment of men, by famine; we might have crossed with our victorious fleet into Africa and within a few days, without any contest, destroyed Carthage. We granted pardon to their prayers, let them out of the siege, made peace with the conquered, then held them under our protection when they were hard pressed by the African war. In return for these benefits they come, following a frenzied youth, to assail our country. And would that this contest were for your honor only, and not for your safety. It is not for the possession of Sicily and Sardinia, about which the dispute once was, but for Italy that you must fight. Nor is there another army behind us which, unless we conquer, could withstand the enemy; nor are there other Alps, while they surmount which fresh forces might be made ready. Here we must stand, soldiers, as though we fought before the walls of Rome. Let each man think that he is protecting with his arms not his own body but his wife and his little children; nor let him brood on his domestic cares only, but again and again reflect in his mind that the senate and people of Rome now look to our hands: such as our force and valor shall be, such thereafter shall be the fortune of that city and of the Roman empire."

This the consul before the Romans. Hannibal, thinking that his soldiers should be exhorted by deeds rather than by words, his army drawn round for the spectacle, set in the midst captive mountaineers in chains, and, Gallic arms thrown down before their feet, bade an interpreter ask whether any, if he were freed of his bonds and as victor received arms and a horse, would fight it out with the sword. When to a man they all demanded the sword and the fight, and the lot was cast for it, each wished himself the one whom fortune should choose for that contest, and, as each man’s lot fell out, eager, exulting with joy among those who congratulated him, with the dancing of his fashion he snatched up the arms in haste. But when they fought, such was the temper of their spirits, not among men of the same condition only but even among the onlookers generally, that the fortune of those who died well was praised no less than of those who conquered.

When, after several pairs had been thus watched, he had dismissed them so affected, an assembly being then called, he is reported to have spoken among them thus: "If, soldiers, you keep, in weighing your own fortune, the same spirit you had a little while ago in the example of another’s lot, we have conquered; for that was not a mere spectacle, but a kind of image, as it were, of your own condition. And I know not whether fortune has not bound about you greater bonds and greater necessities than about your captives. On the right and left two seas shut you in, and you have not a single ship even for escape; about you the river Po, greater and more violent than the Rhône, the Alps press from behind, scarcely crossed by you while whole and vigorous. Here you must conquer or die, soldiers, where you have first met the enemy. And the same fortune which has laid upon you the necessity of fighting sets before you, as victors, prizes than which men are not wont to ask greater even from the immortal gods. If we were to recover by our valor only Sicily and Sardinia, snatched from our fathers, the rewards would yet be ample enough: whatever the Romans, won and heaped up by so many triumphs, possess, all that shall be yours, together with the owners themselves. Up, then, for so rich a wage, take up your arms with the good help of the gods. Long enough, in the waste mountains of Lusitania and Celtiberia, chasing cattle, you have seen no profit of so many toils and dangers of yours; it is time now that you make rich and opulent campaigns and earn great rewards of your labor, after measuring out so great a march through so many mountains and rivers and so many armed peoples. Here fortune has given you the term of your toils; here she will give a worthy wage for your finished service. Nor, because the war is of so great a name, should you reckon the victory so hard; often a despised enemy has made a bloody contest, and famous peoples and kings have been conquered by a very slight turn. For, this one luster of the Roman name removed, what is there for which they should be matched with you? To say nothing of your twenty years’ soldiering, with that valor, with that fortune—from the Pillars of Hercules, from the Ocean and the farthest bounds of the earth, conquering through so many most fierce peoples of Spain and Gaul, you have come hither; you shall fight with an army of recruits, cut to pieces this very summer, conquered, beleaguered by the Gauls, as yet unknown to its own leader and not knowing him. Or shall I match myself—born wellnigh, at least reared, in the headquarters of my father, that most illustrious commander, the subduer of Spain and Gaul, the conqueror of the Alpine peoples and, what is much greater, of the Alps themselves—with this six-months’ general, the deserter of his own army? to whom, if anyone today should show the Carthaginians and the Romans, the standards removed, I hold it certain he would not know of which army he is consul. I do not lightly esteem this, soldiers, that there is none of you before whose very eyes I myself have not often performed some feat of soldiering, to none of whom I, the spectator and witness of his valor, could not recount his own deeds of honor, marked by their times and places. With men praised a thousand times by me and rewarded—I, the foster-son of you all before I was your commander—I shall advance into the line against men unknown to one another and not knowing one another.

"Wherever I have turned my eyes, I see all full of spirit and strength: veteran foot, horsemen of the noblest nations, bridled and unbridled, you most faithful and most valiant allies, you Carthaginians, about to fight both for your country and out of a most just anger. We bring the war, and have come down into Italy with hostile standards, to fight the more boldly and bravely than the enemy as the hope is greater, the spirit greater, of him who brings force than of him who wards it off. Besides, grief, wrong, indignity fire and goad our spirits. They demanded for punishment first me, your leader, then all of you who had besieged Saguntum; and, had we been given up, they would have visited us with the uttermost torments. A nation most cruel and most arrogant makes all things its own and of its own judgment; with whom we should have war, with whom peace, it thinks it fair to set the bounds itself. It circumscribes and shuts us in with boundaries of mountains and rivers which we are not to pass, and yet observes not those boundaries it has set: ’Do not cross the Ebro; have nothing to do with the Saguntines.’ Is Saguntum at the Ebro? ’Stir not a foot anywhere.’ Is it a small thing that you have taken from me my oldest provinces, Sicily and Sardinia? You take the Spains too, and, if I withdraw thence, you will cross into Africa. Will cross, do I say? They have crossed. Two consuls of this year they have sent, the one into Africa, the other into Spain. Nothing anywhere has been left us save what we shall lay claim to by arms. Those may be timid and cowardly who have a place to look back to, whom their own land, their own fields, will receive as they flee by safe and peaceful ways: for you it is necessary to be brave men, and, all things between victory and death being cut off by a fixed despair, either to conquer, or, if fortune wavers, to meet death in battle rather than in flight. If this is settled and fixed in the mind of all, I will say again, you have conquered; no sharper incitement to victory has been given to man by the immortal gods than the contempt of death."

When by these exhortations the spirits of the soldiers on both sides were kindled to the contest, the Romans bridge the Ticinus and set a fort upon it besides for the bridge’s guarding; the Carthaginian, while the enemy were busied with the work, sends Maharbal with a troop of Numidians, five hundred horse, to lay waste the fields of the allies of the Roman people, and bids the Gauls be spared as much as might be and the minds of their chieftains tempted to revolt. The bridge finished, the Roman army was led across into the Insubrian land and encamped five miles from Victumulae. There Hannibal had his camp; and, Maharbal and the horsemen being hastily recalled, when he perceived that battle was at hand, thinking that nothing was ever said and forewarned enough for the exhorting of his soldiers, having called them to an assembly, he proclaims sure rewards in the hope of which they should fight: land he would give, in Italy, Africa, Spain, where each should wish, free of tax to the man who received it and to his children; whoever should prefer money to land, him he would satisfy with silver; whatever of the allies should wish to become citizens of Carthage, he would give them the power; whoever should prefer to return home, he would take care that none of his countrymen should wish to have his lot changed for that man’s. To slaves too, who had followed their masters, he holds out freedom, and that he would render to their masters two slaves apiece in their stead. And that they might know these things would hold good, holding a lamb in his left hand and a flint in his right, he prayed Jupiter and the other gods that, if he broke faith, they would so smite him as he himself had smitten the lamb; and after the prayer he dashed out the beast’s head with the stone. Then indeed all, as though each had been received into his hope with the gods for authors, thinking that only this delay—that they were not yet fighting—stood between them and the winning of what they hoped, demand battle with one heart and one voice.

Among the Romans there was by no means so great an eagerness, terrified besides, beyond all else, by recent prodigies: for a wolf had entered the camp and, having torn those it met, had itself got away unharmed, and a swarm of bees had settled in a tree overhanging the headquarters. These atoned for, Scipio, having set out with his cavalry and his light javelin-men toward the enemy’s camp, to spy out from near at hand how great and of what kind the forces were, falls in with Hannibal, who himself too had gone forward with his horsemen to explore the places around. At first neither side saw the other; then the dust, rising thicker from the advance of so many men and horses, was a sign of the enemy’s approach. Each column halts and made ready for battle. Scipio sets his javelin-men and Gallic horse in the van, the Romans and what was of strength among the allies in support; Hannibal takes his bridled horse into the center, makes firm his wings with Numidians. Scarce had the shout been raised when the javelin-men fled in among the supports and the second line. Then the cavalry battle was for some while doubtful; then, because the foot mingled among them threw the horses into disorder, many slipping from their horses or leaping down where they saw their own pressed and surrounded, the fight had now in great part passed to the foot, until the Numidians who were on the wings, riding round, showed themselves a little in the rear. That panic struck the Romans, and the consul’s wound increased the panic, and his peril, beaten off by the running between of his son, then first coming to manhood. This will be the youth in whose hands is the glory of the finishing of this very war, called Africanus for his signal victory over Hannibal and the Carthaginians. The flight, however, was in disorder chiefly of the javelin-men, whom the Numidians first attacked; the rest of the cavalry, close-packed, taking the consul into their midst and protecting him not only with their arms but even with their bodies, brought him back into the camp, giving way nowhere in panic or in disorder. The glory of the consul’s saving Coelius assigns to a slave, a Ligurian by nation; I would rather it were true of the son, as both more authorities have handed down and report has held.

This was the first battle with Hannibal; from which it easily appeared both that the Carthaginian was the better in cavalry, and that on that account the open plains, such as are between the Po and the Alps, were not fit for the Romans for waging war. And so the next night, the soldiers being bidden gather their baggage in silence, the camp was moved from the Ticinus and there was haste to the Po, that, while the rafts with which he had bridged the river were not yet loosed, he might ferry his forces over without tumult and pursuit by the enemy. They came through to Placentia before Hannibal knew well enough that they had set out from the Ticinus; yet he took about six hundred stragglers on the hither bank of the Po who were slackly loosing the raft. He could not cross by the bridge, since, as the ends were loosed, the whole raft slid down with the current. Coelius is authority that Mago with the cavalry and the Spanish foot swam the river forthwith, that Hannibal himself led his army across by the upper fords of the Po, the elephants being set in a row to break the river’s force. These things would scarce win belief among those who know that stream; for it is not like the truth that the horsemen surmounted so great a force of the river with their arms and horses safe—even granting that all the Spaniards were carried over on inflated skins—and the fords of the Po must have been sought by a circuit of many days, where an army heavy with baggage could be led across. Those authorities weigh more with me who relate that in scarce two days a place was found for bridging the river with a raft; that across it the cavalry and the light-armed of the Spaniards were sent ahead with Mago. While Hannibal, delaying about the river to hear the embassies of the Gauls, ferries over the heavier column of foot, meanwhile Mago and the horsemen press from the crossing of the river toward the enemy at Placentia, one day’s march. Hannibal, a few days after, fortified a camp six miles from Placentia, and on the next day, his line drawn up in sight of the enemy, gave the chance of battle.

On the following night a slaughter was made in the Roman camp by the Gallic auxiliaries, greater, however, in tumult than in substance. About two thousand foot and two hundred horse, the watchmen at the gates being butchered, desert to Hannibal; whom the Carthaginian, having addressed kindly and kindled with the hope of vast gifts, sent off, each to his own state, to tempt the minds of his countrymen. Scipio, thinking that slaughter a sign of the revolt of all the Gauls, and that those tainted by that crime would go to arms as though a madness had been cast upon them, although he was still heavy with his wound, yet at the fourth watch of the following night, setting out with a silent column, moves his camp to the river Trebia, into higher ground and hills more difficult for cavalry. He escaped notice less than at the Ticinus; and Hannibal, having sent first the Numidians, then all his cavalry, would assuredly have thrown the rearmost column into disorder, had not the Numidians, in their greed for plunder, turned aside into the empty Roman camp. There, while they waste time searching all the places of the camp, with no reward worthy enough of the delay, the enemy was let slip out of their hands; and when they had now caught sight of the Romans crossed over the Trebia and measuring out a camp, they slew a few stragglers cut off on the hither side of the river. Scipio, no longer enduring the chafing of his wound jolted on the road, and thinking that his colleague must be awaited—for he had now heard that he too had been recalled from Sicily—fortified a chosen place which seemed safest for a standing camp near the river. And when Hannibal had encamped not far thence, as much elated by his cavalry victory as he was anxious at the scarcity which, as he went through the enemy’s fields with supplies nowhere prepared, took him day by day the harder, he sends to the village of Clastidium, where the Romans had heaped up a great store of grain. There, when they were preparing force, hope was given of betrayal; and indeed for no great price, four hundred gold pieces, Dasius of Brundisium, the commander of the garrison, being corrupted, Clastidium is delivered to Hannibal. It was a granary for the Carthaginians while they sat by the Trebia. Upon the captives from the surrendered garrison, that a name for clemency might be gathered at the beginning of the enterprise, no cruelty was done.

While the land war had come to a stand at the Trebia, meanwhile about Sicily and the islands hanging over Italy things were done both by Sempronius the consul and before his coming, by land and sea. Twenty quinqueremes with a thousand armed men were sent by the Carthaginians to lay waste the coast of Italy; nine held for Lipara, eight for the island of Vulcan, three the tide turned into the strait. When these were sighted from Messana, twelve ships sent by Hiero, king of the Syracusans—who then by chance was at Messana, awaiting the Roman consul—captured the ships, no man resisting, and brought them into the harbor at Messana. It was learned from the captives that, besides their own twenty ships, of which fleet they themselves were, sent into Italy, five-and-thirty other quinqueremes were making for Sicily, to tempt the old allies; that the chief care was for the seizing of Lilybaeum; and they believed that, by the same storm in which they themselves had been scattered, that fleet too had been driven off to the Aegates Islands. This, as it had been heard, the king writes in full to Marcus Aemilius the praetor, whose province was Sicily, and warns him to hold Lilybaeum with a strong garrison. Forthwith both envoys and tribunes were sent round by the praetor to the states to bend their own men to the care of guarding, and above all to protect Lilybaeum with the apparatus of war; an edict being set forth that the naval allies should bring to the ships ten days’ cooked rations, and that when the signal was given no man should make delay in embarking; and men were sent along the whole coast to watch from the lookouts for the enemy’s fleet drawing near. And so, although the Carthaginians had on purpose delayed the course of their ships, that they might approach Lilybaeum before light, yet it was perceived beforehand, because the moon shone all night and they came with their gear hoisted. Forthwith the signal was given from the lookouts, and in the town the call to arms was raised and there was an embarkation; part of the soldiers were on the walls and at the stations of the gates, part in the ships. And the Carthaginians, because they perceived that they would have to do with men not unprepared, kept off from the harbor until light, the time being spent in taking down their gear and fitting the fleet for battle. When it grew light, they drew their fleet off into the deep, that there might be room for battle and the enemy’s ships a free issue from the harbor. Nor did the Romans shirk the fight, trusting both to the memory of things done about those very places and to the multitude and valor of their soldiers.

When they had been carried out into the deep, the Roman wished to join the fight and to bring his strength to bear at close quarters; the Carthaginian, on the contrary, to elude, and to manage the matter by art, not by force, and to make it a contest of ships rather than of men or arms. For, as they had a fleet abundantly furnished with naval allies, so it was poor in soldiers, and, wherever a ship was grappled, by no means an equal number of armed men fought from it. When this was noticed, both their own multitude increased the spirit of the Romans, and their fewness lessened that of the others. Forthwith seven Punic ships were surrounded; the rest took to flight. There were in the captured ships seventeen hundred soldiers and sailors, among them three nobles of the Carthaginians. The Roman fleet, unhurt, save that one ship only was holed—and that one itself brought back—returned into harbor. After this battle—those who were at Messana not yet knowing of it—Tiberius Sempronius the consul came to Messana. As he entered the strait, King Hiero led out his fleet, arrayed, to meet him, and, crossing from the royal ship to the flagship, having congratulated him that he had come safe with his army and his ships, and prayed for a prosperous and happy crossing into Sicily, then set forth the state of the island and the attempts of the Carthaginians, and promised that with the same spirit with which as a young man he had helped the Roman people in the former war, he, an old man, would help it now; that he would furnish grain and clothing free to the consul’s legions and naval allies; that there was great peril to Lilybaeum and the maritime states, and that with some there would be a wish for revolution. For these reasons it seemed to the consul that he must not delay to make for Lilybaeum with his fleet. And the king and the royal fleet set out together. Sailing thence, they learned that there had been a battle at Lilybaeum, and that the enemy’s ships had been routed and taken.

From Lilybaeum the consul, Hiero with the royal fleet being dismissed and the praetor left to guard the coast of Sicily, himself crossed to the island of Melita, which was held by the Carthaginians. As he came, Hamilcar son of Gisgo, the commander of the garrison, with a little less than two thousand soldiers, and the town with the island, are surrendered. Thence, after a few days, there was a return to Lilybaeum, and the captives, both of the consul and of the praetor, save the men of conspicuous nobility, were sold under the crown. After the consul judged Sicily safe enough on that side, he crossed to the islands of Vulcan, because the report was that the Punic fleet lay there; nor was any of the enemy found about those islands; they had by chance already crossed over to lay waste the coast of Italy, and, the territory of Vibo laid waste, were even terrifying the city. To the consul, as he made again for Sicily, the enemy’s landing in the territory of Vibo is reported, and a letter from the senate concerning the crossing of Hannibal into Italy, and bidding him bear help to his colleague at the first opportunity, is delivered. Anxious at once with many cares, he put his army at once on board ship and sent it to Ariminum by the upper sea; to Sextus Pomponius, his lieutenant, with five-and-twenty warships, he assigned the territory of Vibo and the maritime coast of Italy to guard; for Marcus Aemilius the praetor he filled up a fleet of fifty ships. He himself, the affairs of Sicily settled, coasting along the shore of Italy with ten ships, came through to Ariminum. Thence, setting out with his army, he is joined to his colleague at the river Trebia.

Now both consuls, and whatever there was of Roman strength, set against Hannibal, declared well enough either that the Roman empire could be defended by those forces or that there was no other hope. Yet the one consul, broken by a single cavalry battle and by his wound, preferred that the matter be drawn out; the other, of fresh spirit and therefore the fiercer, suffered no delay. The land that lies between the Trebia and the Po the Gauls then inhabited, in the contest of the two overmighty peoples plainly looking, through an ambiguous favor, to the goodwill of the victor. This the Romans bore with spirit fair enough, only that they should make no stir; but the Carthaginian very ill, declaring again and again that he had come, summoned by the Gauls, to set them free. For that anger, and at the same time to feed his soldiers with plunder, he bade two thousand foot and a thousand horse, mostly Numidians, with some Gauls mingled in, lay waste all the country in turn right up to the banks of the Po. The Gauls, in need of help, when up to that point they had kept their minds in doubt, constrained, turn from the authors of the wrong to those who should be their avengers, and, envoys being sent to the consul, beg the help of the Romans for a land laboring through too great a faith of its tillers toward the Romans. To Cornelius neither the cause nor the time of acting was pleasing, and the nation was suspect to him, both for many faithless deeds and—though other things had grown stale with age—for the recent perfidy of the Boii: Sempronius, on the contrary, held that the greatest bond for keeping the allies in faith was that the first who had needed help should be defended. Then, while his colleague hesitated, he sends his own cavalry, with about a thousand foot, mostly javelin-men, mingled in, to defend the Gallic land across the Trebia. When they had fallen unexpectedly upon the enemy, scattered and in disorder, and most of them besides heavy with plunder, they wrought vast terror and slaughter and flight right up to the camp and outposts of the enemy; whence, beaten back by the multitude pouring out, they again, by the support of their own, restored the battle. Then the fight was changeful between those retreating and those pursuing; and, though at the last they had made the contest equal, yet, since the slaughter of the enemy was the greater, the repute of victory rested with the Romans.

But to none of all did it seem greater and juster than to the consul himself; he was carried away with joy that in the part of the forces in which the other consul had been conquered, in that he had conquered: that the spirits of the soldiers were restored and refreshed, and that there was no one save his colleague who wished the fighting put off; that he, sick in mind rather than in body, through the memory of his wound shuddered at the line and at weapons. But one must not grow old with a sick man. For why should the time be longer deferred or wasted? What third consul, what other army, was awaited? The camp of the Carthaginians was in Italy and wellnigh in sight of the city. They sought not Sicily and Sardinia, taken from the conquered, nor Spain on the hither side of the Ebro, but the Romans were being driven from their fathers’ soil and from the land in which they had been born. "How would our fathers groan," said he, "who were wont to war about the walls of Carthage, if they should see us, their offspring, two consuls and consular armies, cowering in the midst of Italy within our camp, and the Carthaginian making the land between the Alps and the Apennines his own dominion?" These things, sitting by his sick colleague, these things in the headquarters wellnigh in the manner of a public harangue, he urged. He was goaded too by the near time of the elections, lest the war be put off to the new consuls, and by the chance of turning the glory to himself alone while his colleague was sick. And so, Cornelius dissenting to no purpose, he bids the soldiers make ready for the near contest. Hannibal, since he perceived what would be best for the enemy, had scarce any hope that the consuls would do anything rashly and unforeseeingly; but since he knew that the temper of the one—first known by report, then by experience—was hot and fierce, and believed it made fiercer by the successful contest with his raiders, he did not doubt that the fortune of action was at hand. Lest he let slip any moment of it, he was anxious and intent—while the enemy’s soldier was a recruit, while the wound made the better of the leaders useless, while the spirits of the Gauls were vigorous, of whom he knew that a vast multitude would follow the more slackly the farther they were dragged from home. When for these and like reasons he hoped the contest near and longed to bring it on if there were delay, and the Gallic scouts—safer for exploring what he wished, because they served in both camps—had reported that the Romans were ready for battle, the Carthaginian began to look about for a place for an ambush.

There was in the midst a watercourse, shut on either side by very high banks and overgrown round about with marsh-plants and the brushwood and brambles with which untilled ground is commonly clothed. When he himself, riding round, had surveyed with his eyes a place hidden enough to cover even cavalry, "This shall be the place," he said to his brother Mago, "which you shall hold. Choose a hundred men from all the foot and horse, with whom you are to come to me at the first watch; now it is time to refresh the body." So the council was dismissed. Soon Mago was at hand with his chosen men. "I see the flower of the men," said Hannibal; "but, that you may be strong in number too, not in spirit only, choose each of you nine men, like yourselves, from the troops and maniples. Mago will show the place you are to lie in wait; you have an enemy blind to these arts of war." So, Mago being sent off with a thousand horse and a thousand foot, Hannibal at first light bids the Numidian horsemen cross the river Trebia and ride up to the enemy’s gates and, by hurling javelins at the outposts, lure the enemy to battle, then, the contest once joined, by giving way little by little draw them across the river. These were the orders to the Numidians: to the other leaders of foot and horse it was enjoined that they bid all take their morning meal, then, armed and with their horses saddled, await the signal. Sempronius, at the tumult of the Numidians, led out first all his cavalry, fierce in that part of his strength, then six thousand foot, lastly all his forces, greedy of the contest by a plan fixed already beforehand. It was by chance the season of midwinter and a snowy day in places lying between the Alps and the Apennine, exceeding cold also by the nearness of rivers and marshes. Besides this, men and horses being led out in haste, no food taken beforehand, no help applied to keep off the cold, there was no warmth in them, and the nearer they came to the breath of the river, the keener the force of cold blew upon them. But when, pursuing the fleeing Numidians, they entered the water—and it was breast-high, swollen by the night’s rain—then assuredly, when they came out, the bodies of all were so stiff that they had scarce the power to hold their arms, and at the same time they began to fail with weariness and, the day now advancing, with hunger too.

Hannibal’s soldier meanwhile, fires made before the tents and oil sent round through the maniples that they might suppling their joints, and food taken at leisure, when it was announced that the enemy had crossed the river, eager in spirit and body takes up his arms and advances into the line. He sets the Balearics before the standards, and the light-armed, some eight thousand men; then the heavier-armed foot, what was of strength, what of vigor; on the wings he poured round ten thousand horse, and from the wings to either side he set the elephants apart. The consul, his cavalry following in disorder, when they were caught off their guard by the Numidians suddenly making a stand, the signal for retreat being given, recalled them and ringed them about with his foot. There were eighteen thousand Romans, twenty thousand of the allies of the Latin name, and the auxiliaries besides of the Cenomani; that alone of the Gallic nations had remained in faith. With these forces the clash was made. The battle arose from the Balearics; and when the legions withstood them with greater strength, the light-armed was speedily drawn off to the wings, which thing brought it about that the Roman cavalry was forthwith hard pressed. For when four thousand horse could now scarce of themselves withstand ten thousand, and wearied men withstand men for the most part fresh, they were overwhelmed besides by a cloud, as it were, of javelins hurled by the Balearics. Besides this the elephants, towering from the ends of the wings, the horses being terrified above all by the unwonted smell as well as sight, made flight far and wide. The infantry battle was equal in spirit rather than in strength, which the Carthaginian had brought fresh into the fight, his men’s bodies a little before refreshed; against this the Romans’ bodies, fasting and weary and stiff with cold, were numb. Yet they would have stood firm in spirit, had the fight been only with the foot; but the Balearics too, the cavalry driven off, hurled javelins at their flanks, and the elephants had now borne themselves into the very middle of the line of foot, and Mago and the Numidians, as soon as the line, unforeseeing, had been carried past their lurking-place, rising from the rear made vast tumult and terror. Yet, amid so many ills standing round, the line remained for some while unmoved, beyond the hope of all chiefly against the elephants. These the light foot, posted for that very purpose, both turned aside by hurling their pikes, and, pursuing them as they turned, stabbed under the tails, where they take wounds in the softest skin.

And as they were trembling and wellnigh now stampeding upon their own, Hannibal bade them be driven from the midst of the line to the edge, to the left wing, against the Gallic auxiliaries. There they forthwith made a flight beyond doubt; and a new terror besides was added to the Romans when they saw their own auxiliaries routed. And so, when they were now fighting in a ring, about ten thousand men—since they could escape no other way—broke through the middle of the African line, which was strengthened by the Gallic auxiliaries, with vast slaughter of the enemy, and, since there was neither return into the camp, cut off by the river, nor, for the rain, could they discern well enough where to bear help to their own, they pressed straight on to Placentia. Then more sallies were made in every direction; and those who made for the river were either swallowed by the eddies or, in their hesitation to enter, overborne by the enemy. Those who had been scattered in flight here and there through the fields, following the tracks of the retreating column, pressed toward Placentia; for others the fear of the enemy gave the boldness to enter the river, and, having crossed, they came through into the camp. The rain mixed with snow, and the intolerable force of the cold, destroyed many men and beasts and wellnigh all the elephants. The river Trebia was for the Carthaginians the end of pursuing the enemy, and they returned into camp so numbed with cold that they scarce felt the joy of victory. And so, the following night, when the garrison of the camp and what was left—half-armed for the most part out of the rout—of the soldiers were being ferried across the Trebia on rafts, either they perceived nothing, the rain drowning the sound, or, because they could now not stir for weariness and wounds, they feigned not to perceive; and, the Carthaginians keeping quiet, the army was led by Scipio the consul in a silent column to Placentia, thence ferried across the Po to Cremona, lest one colony be burdened with the winter quarters of two armies.

So great a terror from this disaster was carried to Rome that they believed the enemy would now come against the city of Rome itself with hostile standards, and that there was no hope or help by which to ward force from their gates and walls: one consul conquered at the Ticinus, the other recalled from Sicily, two consuls, two consular armies conquered—what other leaders, what other legions were there to be summoned? Into men so terrified Sempronius the consul came, having crossed, at vast peril, through the enemy’s horsemen scattered everywhere to plunder, by boldness rather than by counsel or by hope of escaping notice or of resisting, if he should not escape notice. He, having held the consular elections—the one thing chiefly needed at the present—returned to winter quarters. The consuls created were Gnaeus Servilius and Gaius Flaminius. But not even the winter quarters were quiet for the Romans, the Numidian horsemen wandering everywhere, and, wherever the ground was too difficult for these, the Celtiberians and Lusitanians. All supplies, therefore, were cut off from every quarter, save those which ships brought up the Po. There was a depot near Placentia, both fortified with great works and strengthened with a stout garrison. In the hope of storming this fort Hannibal set out with his cavalry and light-armed; and, though he had set the greatest store on concealing his attempt for the accomplishing of his hope, attacking by night he did not escape the watchmen. So great a shout was suddenly raised that it was heard at Placentia too. And so toward daybreak the consul was at hand with his cavalry, the legions being bidden follow in a hollow square. Meanwhile a cavalry battle was joined; in which, because the wounded Hannibal withdrew from the fight, terror being cast on the enemy, the garrison was defended splendidly. Then, a rest of a few days being taken and his wound scarce yet well enough healed, he goes on to storm Victumulae. That depot had been the Romans’ in the Gallic war; thence the dwellers round, mingled from every quarter out of the neighboring peoples, had made the fortified place a thronged one, and then the terror of the ravagings had driven most thither from the fields. A multitude of this kind, kindled by the report of the garrison briskly defended at Placentia, snatching up arms goes forth to meet Hannibal. They met on the road as columns rather than lines of battle, and, since on the one side there was nothing but a disordered crowd, on the other the soldier trusting his leader and the leader his soldier, about thirty-five thousand men were routed by a few. On the next day, a surrender being made, they received the garrison within the walls; and, bidden deliver up their arms, when they had obeyed the word, a signal is suddenly given to the victors to plunder the city as though taken by force; nor was any disaster omitted which is wont to seem worth recording to those who write of such a matter; so was every example of lust and cruelty and inhuman arrogance wreaked upon the wretched. These were Hannibal’s winter expeditions.

For no long time thereafter, while the cold was unbearable, rest was given to the soldier; and at the first and doubtful signs of spring, setting out from winter quarters, he leads into Etruria, meaning to join that nation too to him, like the Gauls and Ligurians, either by force or by will. As he crossed the Apennine, so fierce a storm fell upon him that it wellnigh surpassed the foulness of the Alps. When the rain mixed with wind was borne into their very faces, at first, because either their arms had to be let go or, as they struggled against it, they were dashed down, whirled by the eddy, they halted; then, when it now stopped the breath and would not let them draw the air, turned away from the wind, they sat down for a little. Then indeed the sky thundered with a vast sound, and amid the dread crashes fires flashed; caught in their ears and eyes, all were numb with fear; at last, the rain pouring out, when the force of the wind was the more kindled by it, it seemed needful to pitch camp in that very place where they had been caught. But that was the beginning, as it were, of fresh toil; for they could neither unfold anything nor set it up, nor did what was set up remain, the wind tearing all things asunder and snatching them away. And soon the water, lifted by the wind, when it had frozen above over the icy ridges of the mountains, cast down such a weight of snowy hail that, all else let go, the men fell prone, more buried than covered by their own coverings; and so great a force of cold followed that, out of that pitiable wreck of men and beasts, when each wished to lift and raise himself, for a long while he could not, because, the sinews stiff with the chill, they could scarce bend their limbs. Then, when at last by stirring they moved themselves and recovered their spirits, and in a few places fires began to be made, each man, helpless, turned to another’s aid. For two days they stayed in that place as though besieged; many men, many beasts, and elephants too, seven of those that had survived the battle at the Trebia, perished.

Having come down from the Apennine, he moved his camp back toward Placentia, and, having gone forward about ten miles, encamped. On the next day he leads twelve thousand foot, five thousand horse against the enemy; nor did Sempronius the consul—for he had now returned from Rome—shirk the contest. And that day there were three miles between the two camps; on the next day they fought with vast spirits and changeful issue. At the first clash the Roman cause was so far the upper that they not only conquered in the line but pursued the routed enemy into their camp, and soon were even storming the camp. Hannibal, a few defenders set on the rampart and at the gates, took the rest, close-packed, into the middle of the camp, and bids them, intent, await the signal to sally. It was now wellnigh the ninth hour of the day, when the Roman, his soldier wearied to no purpose, after there was no hope of taking the camp, gave the signal for retreat. When Hannibal received this and saw the fight slackened and the withdrawal from the camp, forthwith his horsemen being sent out on right and left against the enemy, he himself with the flower of his foot burst out from the middle of the camp. Scarce any battle would have been more savage or more notable for the destruction of either side, had the day suffered it to be drawn out to a longer space; night parted the fight, kindled with vast spirits. And so the clash was keener than the slaughter, and, even as the battle had been wellnigh equal, so they parted with loss equal. From neither side fell more than six hundred foot and half that number of horse; but the loss was greater to the Romans than the number warranted, because several of the equestrian order, and five military tribunes and three prefects of the allies, were slain. After that battle Hannibal withdrew into the Ligurians, Sempronius to Luca. To Hannibal, as he came into the Ligurians, two Roman quaestors, Gaius Fulvius and Lucius Lucretius, intercepted by an ambush, with two military tribunes and five of the equestrian order, sons for the most part of senators, are handed over—that he might the more believe the peace and alliance with them would hold good.

While these things are done in Italy, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, sent into Spain with a fleet and an army, when, setting out from the mouth of the Rhône and rounding the Pyrenean mountains, he had brought his fleet to Emporiae, his army landed there, beginning from the Laeetani, made all the coast as far as the river Ebro of Roman dominion, partly by renewing alliances, partly by founding new ones. Thence the fame of his clemency, won, availed not only with the maritime peoples but in the interior too, and among the mountaineers, with the now fiercer nations; and not peace only was gotten among them but even an alliance of arms, and several strong cohorts of auxiliaries were enrolled from them. The province on the hither side of the Ebro was Hanno’s; him Hannibal had left for the guarding of that region. And so, thinking that he must meet it before all things were estranged, his camp pitched in sight of the enemy, he led out into the line. Nor did it seem to the Roman that the contest should be put off, since he knew that he must fight with Hanno and Hasdrubal, and would rather deal with them singly and apart than with the two at once. Nor was that struggle one of great contest. Six thousand of the enemy were slain, two thousand taken with the garrison of the camp; for the camp too was stormed, and the leader himself with several chief men is taken; and Cissis, a town near the camp, is stormed. But the plunder of the town was of things of small price, barbaric furniture and cheap slaves; the camp enriched the soldier, not only of that army which had been conquered but of that too which was serving with Hannibal in Italy, wellnigh all their precious things having been left on the hither side of the Pyrenees, lest they should have heavy baggage to carry.

Before the sure report of this disaster came, Hasdrubal, having crossed the Ebro with eight thousand foot, a thousand horse, as though to meet the Romans at their first coming, after he learned that the cause was lost at Cissis and the camp lost, turned his march to the sea. Not far from Tarraco he drove the marines and naval allies, straying and scattered through the fields—as it commonly happens that prosperity breeds carelessness—his cavalry sent everywhere, with great slaughter, with greater flight, to their ships; nor daring to linger longer about those places, lest he be overborne by Scipio, he withdrew across the Ebro. And Scipio, his column hastily driven at the report of new enemies, when he had visited punishment upon a few of the ships’ captains, a moderate garrison left at Tarraco, returned with his fleet to Emporiae. Scarce had he departed when Hasdrubal was at hand, and, the people of the Ilergetes—who had given hostages to Scipio—being impelled to revolt, with the youth of those very men lays waste the fields of the allies faithful to the Romans; then, Scipio being roused from his winter quarters, he again withdraws from all the land on the hither side of the Ebro. Scipio, when with a hostile army he had fallen upon the nation of the Ilergetes, left by the author of their revolt, all being driven into Atanagrum, the city which was the head of that people, besieged it, and within a few days, more hostages than before being demanded, received the Ilergetes, fined in money too, into his sway and dominion. Thence he advances against the Ausetani near the Ebro, themselves also allies of the Carthaginians, and, their city besieged, the Lacetani, who were bringing help to their neighbors by night, when they wished to enter not far now from the city, he caught in an ambush. About twelve thousand were slain; wellnigh all, stripped of their arms, fled scattered everywhere through the fields to their homes; nor did anything else protect the besieged save the winter, unfair to the besiegers. The siege lasted thirty days, through which scarce ever did the snow lie less than four feet deep, and it had so covered the mantlets and sheds of the Romans that this alone was even a protection against the fires several times cast by the enemy. At last, when Amusicus their chieftain had fled to Hasdrubal, they surrender, having covenanted for twenty talents of silver. There was a return to Tarraco for winter quarters.

At Rome, or about the city, many prodigies occurred that winter, or—as is wont to happen when once men’s minds are set upon religion—many were reported and rashly believed: that a freeborn infant of six months had cried "Triumph!" in the vegetable market, and in the cattle-market an ox had of its own accord climbed to the third story and thence, terrified by the uproar of the dwellers, had cast itself down; and that the appearance of ships had shone from the sky; and that the temple of Hope, which is in the vegetable market, had been struck by lightning; and at Lanuvium that a spear had stirred of itself, and a raven had flown down into the temple of Juno and settled on the very couch; and in the territory of Amiternum that in many places shapes of men in white raiment had been seen from afar, and had met with no one; and in Picenum that it had rained stones; and at Caere that the lots had shrunk; and in Gaul that a wolf had snatched a sentinel’s sword from its sheath and carried it off. For the other prodigies the decemvirs were bidden consult the books; but because it had rained stones in Picenum, a nine-day rite was proclaimed; and presently, in atoning for the others, wellnigh the whole state was busied. First of all the city was purified, and full-grown victims slain to the gods to whom it was appointed, and a gift of forty pounds’ weight of gold was carried to Lanuvium to Juno, and the matrons dedicated a bronze image to Juno on the Aventine; and a feast of the gods was ordered at Caere, where the lots had shrunk, and a supplication to Fortune on Algidus; at Rome too both a feast of the gods to Youth and a supplication at the temple of Hercules by name, then by the whole people about all the couches, was proclaimed; and to the Genius five full-grown victims were slain, and Gaius Atilius Serranus the praetor was bidden undertake vows, if the commonwealth should for ten years have stood in the same state. These atonements and vows from the Sibylline books had in great part lightened men’s minds of religious dread.

Of the consuls-designate, the one, Flaminius—to whom by lot had fallen those legions which wintered at Placentia—sent an edict and a letter to the consul, that that army should be at Ariminum in camp on the Ides of March. Here it was his plan to enter on the consulship in his province, mindful of his old contests with the fathers, which, as tribune of the plebs and afterward as consul, he had had—first about the consulship that was being annulled, then about his triumph—hateful also to the fathers for a new law which Quintus Claudius, tribune of the plebs, had carried against the senate and with one only of the fathers, Gaius Flaminius, aiding it, that no senator, or one whose father had been a senator, should have a seagoing ship of more than three hundred amphorae’s burden. That was held enough for carrying the fruits from the fields; all gain seemed unbecoming to the fathers. The matter, pushed through with the utmost contention, had won for Flaminius, the law’s advocate, ill-will among the nobility, favor among the plebs, and thence a second consulship. For these reasons, thinking that they would keep him in the city by feigning auspices and by the delay of the Latin festival and by other consular hindrances, on a pretended journey he went off secretly, a private man, into his province. When this was made known, it stirred fresh anger besides among the already hostile fathers: that Gaius Flaminius was now waging war not with the senate only but with the immortal gods. Made consul before without auspices, when gods and men recalled him from the very battle-line, he had not obeyed; now, through consciousness of those things scorned, he had fled both the Capitol and the solemn pronouncing of vows, lest on the day of entering his magistracy he should approach the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, lest, himself hateful and to himself alone hateful, he should see and consult the senate, lest he should proclaim the Latin festival and perform on the mount the solemn sacrifice to Jupiter Latiaris, lest, having set out under auspices to the Capitol to pronounce his vows, he should go thence, robed for war, with his lictors into his province. He had set out like a sutler, without insignia, without lictors, secretly, by stealth, no otherwise than as if he had changed his soil for the cause of exile. More fittingly, forsooth, for the majesty of his office would he enter on his magistracy at Ariminum than at Rome, and put on the bordered toga in a wayside inn than before his own household gods. All with one voice judged that he must be recalled and dragged back, and compelled, present, to discharge all his duties to gods and men before he went to the army and into his province. On that embassy—for it was resolved that envoys be sent—Quintus Terentius and Marcus Antistius set out, and moved him no more than in his former consulship the letter sent from the senate had moved him. A few days after, he entered on his magistracy; and as he was sacrificing, a calf, already struck, snatching itself from the hands of those offering the sacrifice, bespattered many of the bystanders with its blood; and there was even greater flight and running about at a distance among those who knew not why there was trembling. By most this was taken as an omen of great terror. Then, two legions received from Sempronius, the consul of the year before, two from Gaius Atilius the praetor, the army began to be led into Etruria by the paths of the Apennine.