BOOK XXI.

The slaughter was nearly equal on both sides, and the flight and terror of the Numidians gave the victory to the Romans, who were already quite exhausted. The victors lost about one hundred and sixty men—not all Romans, but some of them Gauls—while more than two hundred of the defeated fell. This beginning and omen of the war portended for the Romans a prosperous outcome for the overall conflict, though the victory itself was certainly not without bloodshed or uncertainty. After the event, both commanders returned to their own camps. Scipio could not formulate a plan other than to take his own initiatives based on the councils and actions of the enemy. Hannibal, meanwhile, was uncertain whether to continue his intended march into Italy or to engage the Roman army that had first presented itself. He was turned away from an immediate contest by the arrival of envoys from the Boii and their chieftain, Magalus. They promised to be guides for his journey and partners in his danger, arguing that with the war still fresh and his forces untouched, he should strike at Italy. The rank and file feared the enemy, as the memory of the previous war had not yet faded, but they feared the immense journey and the Alps even more—a prospect truly terrifying to those who had never experienced it.

XXX. Therefore, after Hannibal decided to press on and head for Italy, he called an assembly and tried to sway the spirits of his soldiers with both reprimands and encouragement. He expressed his amazement that such sudden terror had taken hold of hearts that had always been fearless. For so many years, they had campaigned victoriously, and they had not left Spain until all the tribes and lands embraced by two different seas belonged to the Carthaginians. They had then shown indignation when the Roman people demanded, as if for a crime, that all those who had besieged Saguntum be surrendered to them, and they had crossed the Ebro to extinguish the Roman name and liberate the world. At that time, it had not seemed like a long journey to anyone as they marched from the sunset toward the sunrise. Now, when they could see that the greater part of the journey was over, the Pyrenees pass had been surmounted despite the fiercest tribes, and the Rhône—that great river—had been crossed despite the opposition of thousands of Gauls and the force of the current itself, they had the Alps in sight. The other side of those mountains was Italy. To halt here, exhausted, at the very gates of the enemy—what did they believe the Alps to be other than high mountains? Let them imagine them to be higher than the ridges of the Pyrenees. No land, surely, touched the sky or was impassable to the human race. The Alps were indeed inhabited and cultivated; they produced and fed living beings. They were passable to a few, and to armies as well. Those very envoys they saw had not crossed the Alps by flying on wings. Even their ancestors had not been native to Italy but were newcomers who had often crossed these same Alps with huge columns of people, migrating like nomads with their children and wives. For an armed soldier carrying nothing but the tools of war, what could be impassable or insurmountable? What dangers and labors had not been endured over eight months to capture Saguntum? When seeking Rome, the capital of the world, could anything appear so harsh or difficult that it should delay their undertaking? Had the Gauls not once captured that place, a city which a Carthaginian might despair of approaching? Therefore, they should either yield in spirit and virtue to a nation that, during these days, had so often...