ress, their arms, their religious ceremonies and
observances, and I had almost said, their gods; yet he so effectually
united them by some one bond, that no disturbance ever arose either
among the soldiers themselves, or between them and their general,
though he often wanted money to pay them, and provisions, as being
in a hostile country, through want of which, in the former Punic war,
many dreadful transactions had occurred between the generals and their
soldiers. But after the destruction of Hasdrubal and his army, in
which all hopes of victory had been treasured up; and after retiring
from the possession of every other part of Italy by withdrawing into
Bruttium, one corner of it; to whom does it not appear wonderful that
no disturbance arose in the camp? For to other circumstances this also
was added, that he had no nope of subsisting his army, except from the
lands of Bruttium, which, though they were all cultivated, would be
very insufficient for the maintenance of so large an army. Besides,
many of the youth were drawn off from the cultivation of the fields,
and engaged in the war; and a custom also prevailed among the people
of that nation, grafted on a naturally depraved inclination, of
carrying on a predatory kind of warfare. Nor did he receive any
supplies from home, where they were anxious about the retention of
Spain, as if every thing was going on prosperously in Italy. In Spain
the state of affairs was in one respect similar, but in another widely
different; similar in that the Carthaginians, having been defeated
with the loss of their general, had been driven to the remotest coast
of that country, even to the ocean; but different, because Spain, both
from the nature of the country and the genius of its inhabitants, was
better adapted not only than Italy, but than any other part of the
world, for renewing a war. And accordingly, therefore, though this was
the first of the provinces on the continent which the Romans entered,
it was the last which was at length reduced, in the present age, under
the conduct and auspices of Augustus Caesar. Here Hasdrubal, son of
Gisgo, the greatest and most renowned general concerned in the war,
next to the Barcine family, returning from Gades, and encouraged in
his hopes of reviving the war by Mago, son of Hamilcar, by means
of levies made throughout the Farther Spain, armed as many as fifty
thousand foot and four thousand five hundred horse. With regard to
his mounted forc