History of Rome

​In the midst of this, both hope and anxiety were growing day by day, and it could not be sufficiently established in men’s minds whether it was more worthy of joy that Hannibal, departing from Italy after sixteen years, had left its vacant possession to the Roman people, or more to be feared that he had crossed over into Africa with his army intact:

​only the place, surely, and not the danger, had been changed; and that Q. Fabius, the prophet of this so great struggle, who had recently died, had not in vain been accustomed to predict that Hannibal would be a more dangerous enemy in his own land than he had been in a foreign one.

​And Scipio would have to do, not with Syphax, a king of uncivilized barbarians, whose armies Statorius, a half-camp-follower, had been accustomed to train, nor with his father-in-law Hasdrubal, a most fleeing general, nor with irregular armies suddenly collected from a half-armed crowd of rustics, but with Hannibal, ​who was almost born in the headquarters of his father, a most brave general, nourished and brought up among arms, once a soldier even as a boy, ​scarcely yet a youth when made general, who, having grown old in winning victories , had filled the Spains, the Gauls, and Italy from the Alps to the strait with the monuments of his mighty deeds. He was leading an army coeval with his own campaigns, hardened by endurance of all hardships, which it could scarcely be believed that men had suffered, drenched a thousand times in Roman blood, and bearing the spoils not only of soldiers but also of generals.

​Many would meet Scipio in the battle-line who had slain with their own hand Roman praetors, generals, and consuls, distinguished by mural and vallar crowns, and who had wandered through captured camps and captured Roman cities.

​There were not as many fasces today for the magistrates of the Roman people as Hannibal could bear before him, captured from the slaughter of generals. By revolving these terrors in their minds, they themselves were increasing their anxieties and fears, ​and also because, although they had been accustomed for several years to wage war before their eyes in various parts of Italy with slow hope, with no near end of finishing the war, Scipio and Hannibal, as generals prepared for the supreme conflict, had aroused the minds of all.

​Even for those who had great confidence in Scipio and hope of victory, the more they directed their minds to that near prospect, the more intense were their anxieties. Nor was the state of mind different among the Carthaginians, ​who, at one moment, looking at Hannibal and the greatness of his achievements, repented of having sought peace; at another moment, when they reflected that they had been twice defeated in battle, ​that Syphax had been captured, that they had been driven from Spain and driven from Italy, and that all these things had been accomplished by the valor and counsel of Scipio alone, shuddered at him as a fated general, born for their destruction.