any part either to take up a position or to advance.  Whichever way you turn your eyes, all is hostility and danger.  Do you trust in the Numidians and Syphax?  Let it suffice to have trusted in them once.  Temerity is not always successful, and the fraudulent usually pave the way to confidence in small matters, that when an advantageous opportunity occurs, they may deceive with great gain.  Your father and uncle were not cut off by the arms of their enemies till they were duped by the treachery of their Celtiberian allies; nor were you yourself exposed to so much danger from Mago and Hasdrubal, the generals of your enemies, as from Indibilis and Mandonius, whom you had received into friendship.  Can you place any confidence in Numidians after having experienced a defection in your own soldiers?  Syphax and Masinissa would rather that they themselves should have the rule in Africa than the Carthaginians, but that the Carthaginians should rather than any other state.  At present emulation and the various causes of dispute existing between them incite them against each other, because the fear of any foreign enemy is remote.  But show them the Roman arms and a body of troops, natives of another country, and they will run together as if to extinguish a common conflagration.  These same Carthaginians defended Spain in a different manner from that in which they will defend the walls of their capital, the temples of their gods, their altars, and their hearths; when their terrified wives will attend them on the way to the battle, and their little children will run to them.  What, moreover, if the Carthaginians, feeling sufficiently secure in the harmony subsisting in Africa, in the attachment of the sovereigns in alliance with them, and their own fortifications, should, when they see Italy deprived of the support of yourself and your army, themselves assuming an offensive attitude, either send a fresh army out of Africa into Italy, or order Mago, who, it is certain, having passed over from the Baleares, is now sailing along the coast of Liguria and the Alps, to form a junction with Hannibal.  Without doubt, we should be thrown into the same state of alarm as we were lately, when Hasdrubal passed over into Italy; that Hasdrubal, whom you, who are about to blockade, not Carthage only, but all Africa with your army, allowed to slip out of your hands into Italy.  You will say that he was conquered by you.  For that very reason I should be less willing, not on account of the commonwealth only, but of yourself, that, after having been defeated, he should be allowed to march into Italy.  Suffer us to ascribe to your prudence all the successful events which have happened to you and the empire of the Roman people, and to impute all those of an adverse nature to the uncertain chances of war and to fortune.  The more meritorious and brave you are, so much the more do your country and all Italy desire to retain you as their protector.  You cannot even yourself pretend to deny, that where