History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita)

...with the assent of his listeners. He protested before the gods, the arbiters and witnesses of treaties, that the Senate should not incite a war with the Saguntines. He claimed he had warned and predicted that they should not send the offspring of Hamilcar to the army. He said that neither the spirit nor the lineage of that man could rest, and that as long as any of the Barcine blood and name survived, Roman treaties would never be quiet. "You have sent to the army a young man burning with the desire for sovereignty, who sees only one way to achieve it: by sowing wars from wars and living surrounded by arms and legions, as if providing fuel to a fire. You have therefore nurtured this fire, in which you are now burning. Your armies are surrounding Saguntum, from which they are barred by treaty. Soon, Roman legions will surround Carthage, led by the same gods through whom they avenged broken treaties in the previous war. Are you ignorant of the enemy, or of yourselves, or of the fortune of both peoples? Your noble general did not admit the envoys coming from and for your allies into his camp; he violated the law of nations. Yet these men, from whom not even the envoys of enemies are kept away, came to you after being repulsed. They are demanding reparations according to the treaty; may public guilt be absent, let them demand the author of the fault and the guilty party for the crime. The more gently they act and the more slowly they begin, the more I fear they will rage persistently once they have begun. Place before your eyes the Aegates Islands and Eryx, what you have suffered for twenty-four years by land and sea. And this was not a boy commander, but Hamilcar himself, another Mars, as they wish to call him. But we had not refrained from Tarentum, that is, Italy, according to the treaty, just as we do not refrain from Saguntum now. Therefore, gods and men have prevailed; and that which was debated in words—which people had broken the treaty—the outcome of the war, like a just judge, gave victory to the side where right stood. Hannibal is now moving siege sheds and towers toward Carthage; he is shaking the walls of Carthage with a ram. The ruins of Saguntum—may I be a false prophet—will fall upon our own heads, and the war begun with the Saguntines must be waged with the Romans. Shall we surrender Hannibal, then? someone will say. I know my authority is slight in this matter because of ancestral enmities, but I rejoiced that Hamilcar perished for this reason, that if he were alive, we would already be at war with the Romans. And this young man, like a fury and a torch of this war, I hate and detest. He should not only be surrendered as an atonement for the broken treaty but, if no one demands it, he should be taken to the farthest shores of the sea and land, exiled to a place where neither his name nor his fame can reach us, and where he cannot disturb the state of our peaceful city. I propose that envoys be sent to Rome immediately to satisfy the Senate, others to tell Hannibal to lead his army away from Saguntum and to surrender Hannibal himself to the Romans according to the treaty; I decree a third embassy to provide reparations to the Saguntines." XI. When Hanno had finished speaking, it was not necessary for anyone to contend with him in speech, as the entire Senate was so nearly on Hannibal’s side; they argued that Hanno had spoken more hostilely than Flaccus Valerius, the Roman envoy. The Roman envoys were then answered that the war had arisen from the Saguntines, not from Hannibal, and that the Roman people were acting unjustly if they placed the Saguntines before their most ancient alliance with the Carthaginians.

While the Romans were wasting time sending embassies, Hannibal, because...