Hannibal

“It is not the subject of inquiry whether Hannibal has besieged Saguntum, by his own private or by public authority, but whether justly or unjustly.

Livy relates that Hieronymus, king of Syracuse, having entered into a convention with Hannibal, sent afterwards to Carthage to have it converted by the state into a league.

Hence the Romans inferred that although the convention made with Asdrubal, by which he was prohibited from passing the Iberus, had been of no service to them, as it had not been ratified by the Carthaginians, yet if the Carthaginians sanctioned the conduct of Hannibal in his attack upon the people of Saguntum with whom the Romans, after the making of that convention, had entered into an alliance, …

If a great matter, a great inheritance is at stake, since by money very many pleasures are produced, your Epicurus, if he wishes to follow his own end of goods, will have to do the same as Scipio, when great glory was set before him if he should draw Hannibal back into Africa.

Or if he were speaking in an assembly — if Hannibal had come to the gates and hurled a javelin over the wall — would he deny that to be captured, to be sold, to be slain, to lose one's country are among evils?

For what man given over to pleasures, what man inflamed by the fires of desires, in attaining those things which he had most keenly desired, do we think is flooded with so great a gladness as either the elder Africanus when Hannibal was conquered, or the younger when Carthage was overthrown?

A single winter quarters undid Hannibal, and the comforts of Campania unstrung that man whom the snows and the Alps could not subdue.

If we were to do what Hannibal did — break off the course of affairs, lay aside the war, and devote our energies to pampering the body — everyone would rightly censure such ill-timed sloth, dangerous even to a victor, much more to one still winning.

And so he gave place to the laws and withdrew to Liternum, intending to charge his own exile to the commonwealth's account as much as he had charged it with Hannibal's.

he conquered anger before he conquered Hannibal.

Did he not, leaving Hannibal and the Punic army and all those who deserved his anger, carry the war over into Africa, so unhurried that he gave malicious men a notion of luxury and indolence?

They say that Hannibal, when he had seen a ditch full of human blood, exclaimed:

why did Hannibal slay Marcellus;

And Hannibal, besides Libya, brought it about that they mastered Italy itself for seventeen years.

And so likewise the Romans might perhaps call Numa their daimon, the Carthaginians Hanno and Hannibal, the Macedonians Alexander or Philip—who made the Macedonians, lowly and weak as they were, and after his father had ceded the rule to the Olynthians, strong and warlike and masters of well-nigh all Europe.

the conqueror of Hannibal, the conqueror of Antiochus, the ornament of his own consulship, the surety for his brother’s, who, but for his own delay, would be set beside Jupiter—him civil seditions will harass as the saviour of his country, and after he had as a young man scorned honours that made him the equal of the gods, in old age the ambition of stubborn exile will please him.

No one as yet at Rome worshipped the true God, when Hannibal at Cannae measured out his slaughter of the Romans by the bushel of their rings.