o, after the ambassadors were introduced into the senate, having
made a motion on the state of public affairs, it was resolved that
envoys should be sent into Spain to inspect the circumstances of the
allies; and if they saw good reason, both to warn Hannibal that he
should refrain from the Saguntines, the allies of the Roman people,
and to pass over into Africa to Carthage, and report the complaints of
the allies of the Roman people. This embassy having been decreed but
not yet despatched, the news arrived, more quickly than any one
expected, that Saguntum was besieged. The business was then referred
anew to the senate. And some, decreeing Spain and Africa as provinces
for the consuls, thought the war should be maintained both by sea and
land, while others wished to direct the whole hostilities against
Spain and Hannibal. There were others again who thought that an affair
of such importance should not be entered on rashly; and that the
return of the ambassadors from Spain ought to be awaited. This
opinion, which seemed the safest, prevailed; and Publius Valerius
Flaccus, and Quintus Baebius Tamphilus, were, on that account, the
more quickly despatched as ambassadors to Hannibal at Saguntum, and
from thence to Carthage, if he did not desist from the war, to demand
the general himself in atonement for the violation of the treaty.

7. While the Romans thus prepare and deliberate, Saguntum was already
besieged with the utmost vigour. That city, situated about a mile from
the sea, was by far the most opulent beyond the Iberus. Its
inhabitants are said to have been sprung from the island Zacynthus,
and some of the Rutulian race from Ardea to have been also mixed with
them; but they had risen in a short time to great wealth, either by
their gains from the sea or the land, or by the increase of their
numbers, or the integrity of their principles, by which they
maintained their faith with their allies, even to their own
destruction. Hannibal having entered their territory with a hostile
army, and laid waste the country in every direction, attacks the city
in three different quarters. There was an angle of the wall sloping
down into a more level and open valley than the other space around;
against this he resolved to move the vineae, by means of which the
battering-ram might be brought up to the wall. But though the ground
at a distance from the wall was sufficiently level for working the
vineae, yet their undertakings by no mea