he generals on each side made a speech to their soldiers before they
engaged.(749) Scipio, after having represented to his forces the glory of
their country, the achievements of their ancestors, observed to them, that
victory was in their hands, since they were to combat only with
Carthaginians, a people who had been so often defeated by them, as well as
forced to be their tributaries for twenty years, and long accustomed to be
almost their slaves: that the advantage they had gained over the flower of
the Carthaginian horse, was a sure omen of their success during the rest
of the war: that Hannibal, in his march over the Alps, had just before
lost the best part of his army; and that those who survived were exhausted
by hunger, cold, and fatigue: that the bare sight of the Romans was
sufficient to put to flight a parcel of soldiers, who had the aspects of
ghosts rather than of men: in a word, that victory was become necessary,
not only to secure Italy, but to save Rome itself, whose fate the present
battle would decide, as that city had no other army wherewith to oppose
the enemy.

Hannibal, that his words might make the stronger impression on the rude
minds of his soldiers, speaks to their eyes, before he addresses their
ears; and does not attempt to persuade them by arguments, till he has
first moved them by the following spectacle. He arms some of the prisoners
whom he had taken in the mountains, and obliges them to fight, two and
two, in sight of his army; promising to reward the conquerors with their
liberty and rich presents. The alacrity wherewith these barbarians engaged
upon these motives, gives Hannibal an occasion of exhibiting to his
soldiers a lively image of their present condition; which, by depriving
them of all means of returning back, puts them under an absolute necessity
either of conquering or dying, in order to avoid the endless evils
prepared for those that should be so base and cowardly as to submit to the
Romans. He displays to them the greatness of their reward, _viz._ the
conquest of all Italy; the plunder of the rich and wealthy city of Rome;
an illustrious victory, and immortal glory. He speaks contemptibly of the
Roman power, the false lustre of which (he observed) ought not to dazzle
such warriors as themselves, who had marched from the pillars of Hercules,
through the fiercest nations, into the very centre of Italy. As for his
own part, he scorns to compare himself with Scipio, a general of b