and the victims sacrificed to those deities to
whom they had been vowed.

Meanwhile, hope and anxiety daily and simultaneously increased; nor
could the minds of men be brought to any fixed conclusion, whether it
was a fit subject for rejoicing that Hannibal had now at length, after
the sixteenth year, departed from Italy and left the Romans in the
unmolested possession of it or whether they had not greater cause to
fear from his having transported his army in safety into Africa. They
said that the scene of action certainly was changed, but not the danger.
That Quintus Fabius, lately deceased, who had foretold how arduous the
contest would be, was used to predict, not without good reason, that
Hannibal would prove a more formidable enemy in his own country than he
had been in a foreign one; and that Scipio would have to encounter, not
Syphax, a king of undisciplined barbarians whose armies Statorius, a man
little better than a soldier's drudge, was used to lead, nor his
father-in-law Hasdrubal, that most fugacious general, nor tumultuary
armies hastily collected out of a crowd of half-armed rustics, but
Hannibal, born in a manner in the pavilion of his father, that bravest
of generals, nurtured and educated in the midst of arms, who served as a
soldier formerly, when a boy, and became a general when he had scarcely
attained the age of manhood; who, having grown old in victory, had
filled Spain, Gaul, and Italy, from the Alps to the strait, with
monuments of his vast achievements; who commanded troops who had served
as long as he had himself; troops hardened by the endurance of every
species of suffering, such as it is scarcely credible that men could
have supported; stained a thousand times with Roman blood, and bearing
with them the spoils not only of soldiers, but of generals. That many
would meet the eyes of Scipio in battle who had with their own hands
slain Roman praetors, generals, and consuls; many decorated with crowns
in reward for having scaled walls and crossed ramparts; many who had
traversed the captured camps and cities of the Romans. That the
magistrates of the Roman people had not then so many fasces as Hannibal
could have carried before him, having taken them from generals whom he
had slain. While their minds were harassed by these apprehensions, their
anxiety and fears were further increased from the circumstance that,
whereas they had been accustomed to carry on war for several years in
different part