[After Hannibal's attack on the city of Saguntum, an ally of Rome, Rome sent Fabius to the Carthaginians to demand whether this was done with their government's approval. They refused to reply, and told him to say what was really on Rome's mind.]
Fabius, in answer, laid his hand on the fold of his toga, where he had gathered it at his breast, and, "Here," he said, "we bring you peace and war. Take which you will." Scarcely had he spoken, when the answer no less proudly rang out: "Whichever you please-- we do not care." Fabius let the gathered folds fall, and cried: "We give you war." The Carthaginian senators replied, as one man: "We accept it; and in the same spirit we will fight it to the end."
[Hannibal's troops are nervous about crossing the Alps, so he gives the following speech.]
"What sudden panic is this which has entered those breasts where fear has never been? Year after year you have fought with me, and won; and you never left Spain until all the lands and peoples between the two seas were subject to our power. When the Roman people demanded the surrender of the 'criminal'-- whoever it may have been-- who laid siege to Saguntum, you were justly angry and crossed the Ebro bent upon obliterating the very name of Rome and setting the world free. Then, at least, none of you thought of the journey long, though it stretched from the setting to the rising sun; but now, when you can see that much the greater part of the distance is already behind you-- when you have made your way through the wild tribes and over the passes of the Pyrenees, when you have tamed the violence of the mighty Rhone and crossed it in the face of those countless Gallic warriors who would fain have stopped you; when, finally, you have the Alps in sight, and know that the other side of them is Italian soil: now, I repeat, at the very gateway of the enemy's country, you come to a halt-- exhausted!
"What do you think the Alps are? Are they anything worse than high mountains? Say, if you will, that they are higher than the Pyrenees, but what of it? No part of the earth reaches the sky; no height is insuperable to men. Moreover, the Alps are not desert. Men live there, they till the ground. There are animals there, living creatures. If a small party can cross them, surely armies can? The envoys you see with us did not, in order to get over, soar into the air on wings. Moreover, their own forebears were immigrants. They were countryfolk from Italy, who often crossed these same mountains safely enough-- hordes of them, with their women and children, whole peoples on the move. Surely, then, for an army of soldiers, with nothing to carry but their military gear, no waste should be too wild to cross, no hills too high to climb.
"Remember Saguntum, and those eight long months of toil and peril endured to the end. It is not Saguntum now, but Rome, the mightiest city of the world, you aim to conquer. How can you feel that anything, however hard, however dangerous, can make you hesitate? Why, even the Gauls once captured Rome-- and you despair of being able even to get near it. Either confess, then, that you have less spirit and courage than a people you have again and again defeated during these latter days, or steel your hearts to march forward, to halt only on Mars' Field between the Tiber and the walls of Rome."
[They reach the Alps.]
The nature of the mountains was not, of course, unknown to his men by rumor and report-- and rumor commonly exaggerates the truth. Yet in this case all tales were eclipsed by the reality.
The dreadful vision was now before their eyes: the towering peaks, the snow-clad pinnacles soaring to the sky; the rude huts clinging to the rocks; beasts and cattle shriveled and parched with cold; the people with their wild and ragged hair; all nature, animate and inanimate, stiff with frost. All this, and other sights the horror of which words cannot express, gave a fresh edge to their apprehension. As the column moved forward up the first slopes, there appeared, right above their heads, ensconced upon their eminences, the local tribesmen, wild men of the mountains, who, if they had chosen to lurk in clefts of the hills, might well have sprung out from ambush upon the marching column and inflicted untold losses and disaster.
