labor; it is here that you will finish your glorious warfare, and receive an ample recompense of your completed service. For I would not have you imagine, that victory will be as difficult as the name of a Roman war is great and sounding. It has often happened, that a despised enemy has given a bloody battle; and the most renowned kings and nations have by a small force been overthrown. And, if you but take away the glitter of the Roman name, and what is there wherein they may stand in competition with you! For, (to say nothing of your service in war, for twenty years together, with so much valor and success) from the very pillars of Hercules, from the ocean, from the utmost bounds of the earth, through so many warlike nations of Spain and Gaul, are you not come hither victorious? And with whom are you now to fight? With raw soldiers; and an undisciplined army, beaten, vanquished, besieged by the Gauls the very last summer; an army unknown to their leader, and unacquainted with him.

Or shall I, who was born, I might almost say, but certainly brought up in the tent of my father, that most excellent general; shall I, the conqueror of Spain and Gaul, and not only of the Alpine nations, but, which is greater still, of the Alps themselves; shall I compare myself with this half-year captain? a captain, before whom should one place the two armies without their ensigns, I am persuaded he would not know to which of them he is consul. I esteem it no small advantage, soldiers, that there is not one among you who has not often been an eyewitness of my exploits in war; not one of whose valor I myself have not been a spectator, so as to be able to name the time and places of his noble achievements; that with soldiers, whom I have a thousand times praised and rewarded, and whose pupil I was before I became their general, I shall march against an army of men strangers to one another.

On what side soever I turn my eyes, I behold all full of courage and strength. A veteran infantry; a most gallant cavalry: you, my allies most faithful and valiant; you Carthaginians, whom not only your country's cause, but the justest anger impels to battle. The hope, the courage of assailants, is always greater than of those who act upon the defensive. With hostile banners displayed, you are come down upon Italy: you bring the war. Grief, injuries, indignities, fire your minds, and spur you forward to revenge. First, they demanded me, that I your general, should be delivered up to them; next of all you who had fought at the siege of Saguntum: and we were to be put to death by the extremest tortures. Proud and cruel nation! Every thing must be yours, and at your disposal. You are to

prescribe to us with whom we shall make war, with whom we shall make peace. You are to set us bounds; to shut us up within hills and rivers; but you, you are not to observe the limits which yourselves have fixed! "Pass not the Iberus." What next? "Touch not the Saguntines; Saguntum is upon the Iberus, move not a step towards that city." Is it a small matter, then, that you have deprived us of our ancient possessions, Sicily, and Sardinia? you would have Spain too. Well; we shall yield Spain, and then-you will pass into Africa.-Will pass, did I say?-this very year they ordered one of their consuls into Africa, the other into Spain. No; soldiers; there is nothing left for us but what we can vindicate with our swords. Come on, then. Be men. The Romans may, with more safety, be cowards they have their own country behind them, have places of refuge to fly to, and are secure from danger in the roads thither; but, for you, there is no middle fortune between death and victory. Let this be but well fixed in your minds: and once again, I say you are conquerors.

17. SCIPIO TO THE ROMAN ARMY.

Were you, soldiers, the same army which I had with me in Gaul, I might well forbear saying any thing to you at this time: for what occasion could there be to use exhortation to a cavalry that had so signally vanquished the squadrons of the enemy upon the Rhone; or to legions, by whom that same enemy, flying before them to avoid a battle, did in effect confess themselves conquered? But as these troops, having been enrolled for Spain, are there with my brother Cneus, making war under my auspices, (as was the will of the senate and people of Rome,) I, that you might have a consul for your captain against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, have freely offered myself for this war. You, then, have a new general, and I a new army. On this account, a few words from me to you will be neither improper nor unseasonable.

That you may not be unapprised of what sort of enemies you are going to encounter, or what is to be feared from them, they are the very same, whom in a former war you vanquished both by land and sea: the same from whom you took Sicily and Sardinia, and who have been these twenty years your tributaries. You will not, I presume, march against these men with only that courage with which you are wont to face other enemies! but with a certain anger and indignation, such as you

would feel if you saw your slaves on a sudden rise up in arms against you. Conquered and enslaved, it is not boldness, but necessity, that urges them to battle; unless you can believe that those who avoided fighting when their army was entire, have acquired better hope by the loss of two-thirds of their horse and foot in the passage of the Alps.

But you have heard, perhaps, that though they are few in number, they are men of stout hearts and robust bodies; heroes of such strength and vigor, as nothing is able to resist.-Mere effigies! Nay, shadows of men; wretches emaciated with hunger and benumbed with cold! bruised and battered to pieces among the rocks and craggy cliffs !—their weapons broken, and their horses weak and foundered! Such are the cavalry, and such the infantry, with which you are going to contend; not enemies, but the fragments of enemies. There is nothing which I more apprehend, than that it will be thought Hannibal was vanquished by the Alps before we had any conflict with him. But, perhaps it was fitting it should be so; and that with a people and a leader who had violated leagues and covenants, the gods themselves, without man's help, should begin the war, and bring it to a near conclusion; and that we, who next to the gods have been injured and offended, should happily finish what they have begun.

I need not be in any fear, that you should suspect me of saying these things merely to encourage you, while inwardly I have different sentiments. What hindered me from going into Spain? That was my province, where I should have had the less dreaded Asdrubal, not Hannibal, to deal with. But, hearing, as I passed along the coast of Gaul, of this enemy's march I landed my troops, sent my horse forward, and pitched my camp upon the Rhone. A part of my cavalry encountered and defeated that of the enemy. My infantry not being able to overtake theirs, which fled before us, I returned to my fleet; and with all the expedition I could use in so long a voyage by sea and land, am come to meet them at the foot of the Alps. Was it, then, my inclination to avoid a contest with this tremendous Hannibal? and have I met with him only by accident and unawares? or am I come on purpose to challenge him to the combat? I would gladly try, whether the earth, within these twenty years, has brought forth a new kind of Carthaginians; or whether they be the same sort of men who fought at the Ægates, and whom at Eryx, you suffered to redeem themselves at eighteen denarii per head: whether this Hannibal, for labors and journies, be, as he would be thought, the rival of Hercules; or whether he be, what his father left him, a tributary, a vassal,

a slave of the Roman people. Did not the consciousness of his wicked deed at Saguntum torment him and make him desperate, he would have some regard, if not to his conquered country, yet surely to his own family, to his father's memory, to the treaty written with Amilcar's own hand. We might have starved him in Eryx; we might have passed into Africa with our victorious fleet, and in a few days have destroyed Carthage. At their humble supplication we pardoned them; we released them, when they were closely shut up without a possibility of escaping; we made peace with them when they were conquered. When they were distressed by the African war, we considered them, we treated them as a people under our protection. And what is the return they make us for all these favors? Under the conduct of a hairbrained young man, they come hither to overrun our state, and lay waste our country.-I could wish, indeed, that it were not so; and that the war we are now engaged in, concerned only our own glory, and not our preservation. But the contest at present, is not for the possession of Sicily and Sardinia, but of Italy herself: nor is there behind us another army, which, if we should not prove the conquerors, may make head against our victorious enemies. There are no more Alps for them to pass, which might give us leisure to raise new forces. No, soldiers; here you must take you stand, as if you were just now before the walls of Rome. Let every one reflect, that he is now to defend, not his own person only, but his wife, his children, his helpless infants. Yet, let not private considerations alone possess our minds: let us remember that the eyes of the senate and people of Rome are upon us and that, as our force and courage shall now prove, such will be the fortune of that city and of the Roman empire

18. ADHERBAL AGAINST THE VIOLENCE OF JUGURTHA.

Fathers, It is known to you that king Micipsa, my father, on his death-bed, left in charge to Jugurtha, his adopted son, conjunctly with my unfortunate brother Hiempsal, and myself, the children of his own body, the administration of the kingdom of Numidia; directing us to consider the senate and people of Rome, as proprietors of it. He charged us to use our best endeavors to be serviceable to the Roman commonwealth, in peace and war; assuring us, that your protection would prove, to us, a defense against all enemies, and would be instead of

armies, fortifications and treasures. While my brother and I were thinking of nothing but how to regulate ourselves according to the directions of our deceased father;-Jugurtha,-the most infamous of mankind!—breaking through all ties of gratitude, and of common humanity, and trampling on the authority of the Roman commonwealth, procured the murder of my unfortunate brother, and has driven me from my throne, and native country, though he knows I inherit, from my grandfather Masinissa, and my father Micipsa, the friendship and alliance of the Romans. For a prince to be reduced, by villany, to my distressful circumstances, is calamity enough; but my misfortunes are heightened by the consideration, that I find myself obliged to solicit your assistance, fathers, for the services done you by my ancestors; not for any I have been able to render you in my own person. Jugurtha has put it out of my power to deserve any thing at your hands, and has forced me to be burdensome before I could be useful to you. And yet, if I had no plea but my undeserved misery, who, from a powerful prince, the descendant of a race of illustrious monarchs, find myself, without any fault of my own, destitute of every support, and reduced to the necessity of begging foreign assistance, against an enemy who has seized my throne and kingdom; if my unequaled distresses were all I had to plead, it would become the greatness of the Roman commonwealth, the arbitress of the world, to protect the injured, and to check the triumph of daring wickedness over helpless innocence. But to provoke your vengeance to the utmost, Jugurtha has driven me from the very dominions which the senate and people of Rome gave to my ancestors, and from whence my grandfather, and my father, under your umbrage, expelled Syphax and the Carthaginians. Thus, fathers, your kindness to our family is defeated, and Jugurtha in injuring me throws contempt on you.

Oh wretched prince! Oh cruel reverse of fortune! Oh father Micipsa! Is this the consequence of your generosity; that he whom your goodness raised to an equality with your own children, should be the murderer of your children! Must, then, the royal house of Numidia always be a scene of havoc and blood? While Carthage remained, we suffered, as was to be expected, all sorts of hardships from their hostile attacks; our enemy near; our only powerful ally, the Roman commonwealth, at a distance; while we were so circumstanced, we were always in arms and in action. When that scourge of Africa was no more, we congratulated ourselves on the prospect of established peace. But instead of peace, behold the kingdom of Numidia drenched with royal blood, and the only surviving son of its late king