to belong to the victors and the vanquished.  Nor are they now about to fight because they are daring, but because it is unavoidable; except you can believe that they who declined the engagement when their forces were entire, should have now gained more confidence when two-thirds of their infantry and cavalry have been lost in the passage of the Alps, and when almost greater numbers have perished than survive.  Yes, they are few indeed, (some may say,) but they are vigorous in mind and body; men whose strength and power scarce any force may withstand.  On the contrary, they are but the resemblances, nay, are rather the shadows of men; being worn out with hunger, cold, dirt, and filth, and bruised and enfeebled among stones and rocks.  Besides all this, their joints are frost-bitten, their sinews stiffened with the snow, their limbs withered up by the frost, their armour battered and shivered, their horses lame and powerless.  With such cavalry, with such infantry, you have to fight:  you will not have enemies in reality, but rather their last remains.  And I fear nothing more than that when you have fought Hannibal, the Alps may appear to have conquered him.  But perhaps it was fitting that the gods themselves should, without any human aid, commence and carry forward a war with a leader and a people that violate the faith of treaties; and that we, who next to the gods have been injured, should finish the contest thus commenced and nearly completed.”

41.  “I do not fear lest any one should think that I say this ostentatiously for the sake of encouraging you, while in my own mind I am differently affected.  I was at liberty to go with my army into Spain, my own province, whither I had already set out; where I should have had a brother as the bearer of my councils and my dangers, and Hasdrubal, instead of Hannibal, for my antagonist, and without question a less laborious war:  nevertheless, as I sailed along the coast of Gaul, having landed on hearing of this enemy, and having sent forward the cavalry, I moved my camp to the Rhone.  In a battle of cavalry, with which part of my forces the opportunity of engaging was afforded, I routed the enemy; and because I could not overtake by land his army of infantry, which was rapidly hurried away, as if in flight, having returned to the ships with all the speed I could, after compassing such an extent of sea and land, I have met him at the foot of the Alps.  Whether do I appear, while declining the contest, to have fallen in unexpectedly with this dreaded foe, or encounter him in his track? to challenge him and drag him out to decide the contest?  I am anxious to try whether the earth has suddenly, in these twenty years, sent forth a new race of Carthaginians, or whether these are the same who fought at the islands Aegates, and whom you permitted to defeat from Eryx, valued at eighteen denarii a head; and whether this Hannibal be, as he himself gives out, the rival of the expeditions of Hercules, or one left by his father