30.28
All
through this time there was a growing tension of feeling, hopes and fears
alike were becoming stronger. Men could not make up their minds whether
they had more to rejoice over in the fact that at the end of sixteen years
Hannibal had finally evacuated Italy and left the unchallenged possession of
it to Rome, or more to fear from his having landed in Africa with his military
strength unimpaired. "The seat of danger," they said, "is changed, but not the
danger itself. Quintus Fabius, who has just died, foretold how great the
struggle would be when he declared in oracular tones that Hannibal would
be a more formidable foe in his own country than he had been on alien soil.
Scipio has not to do with Syphax, whose subjects are undisciplined
barbarians and whose army was generally led by Statorius, who was little
more than a camp menial, nor with Syphax's elusive father-in-law, Hasdrubal
nor with a half-armed mob of peasants hastily collected from the fields. It is
Hannibal whom he has to meet, who was all but born in the headquarters of
his father, that bravest of generals; reared and brought up in the midst of
arms, a soldier whilst still a boy, and when hardly out of his teens in high
command. He has passed the prime of his manhood in victory after victory
and has filled Spain and Gaul and Italy from the Alps to the southern sea
with memorials of mighty deeds. The men he is leading are his
contemporaries in arms, steeled by innumerable hardships such as it is hardly
credible that men can have gone through, bespattered, times without
number, with Roman blood, laden with spoils stripped from the bodies, not
of common soldiers only, but even of commanders-in-chief. Scipio will meet
many on the field of battle who with their own hands have slain the praetors,
the commanders, the consuls of Rome, and who are now decorated with
mural and vallarian wreaths after roaming at will through the camps and
cities of Rome which they captured. All the fasces borne before Roman
magistrates today are not so many in number as those which Hannibal might
have had borne before him, taken on the field of battle when the
commander-in-chief was slain." By dwelling on such gloomy
prognostications they increased their fears and anxieties. And there was
another ground for apprehension. They had been accustomed to seeing war
going on first in one part of Italy and then in another without much hope of
its being soon brought to a close. Now, however, all thoughts were turned
on Scipio and Hannibal, they seemed as though purposely pitted against each
other for a final and decisive struggle. Even those who felt the greatest
confidence in Scipio and entertained the strongest hopes that he would be
victorious became more nervous and anxious as they realised that the fateful
hour was approaching. The Carthaginians were in a very similar mood.
When they thought of Hannibal and the greatness of the deeds he had done
they regretted that they had sued for peace, but when they reflected that they
had been twice worsted in the open field, that Syphax was a prisoner, that
they had been driven out of Spain and then out of Italy, and that all this was
the result of one man's resolute courage, and that man Scipio, they dreaded
him as though he had been destined from his birth to be their ruin.