inexperienced.

30. Hannibal, therefore, when his own resolution was fixed to proceed
in his course and advance on Italy, having summoned an assembly, works
upon the minds of the soldiers in various ways, by reproof and
exhortation. He said, that "he wondered what sudden fear had seized
breasts ever before undismayed: that through so many years they had
made their campaigns with conquest; nor had departed from Spain before
all the nations and countries which two opposite seas embrace, were
subjected to the Carthaginians. That then, indignant that the Romans
demanded those, whosoever had besieged Saguntum, to be delivered up to
them, as on account of a crime, they had passed the Iberus to blot out
the name of the Romans, and to emancipate the world. That then the way
seemed long to no one, though they were pursuing it from the setting
to the rising of the sun. That now, when they saw by far the greater
part of their journey accomplished, the passes of the Pyrenees
surmounted, amid the most ferocious nations, the Rhone, that mighty
river, crossed, in spite of the opposition of so many thousand Gauls,
the fury of the river itself having been overcome, when they had the
Alps in sight, the other side of which was Italy, should they halt
through weariness at the very gates of the enemy, imagining the Alps
to be--what else than lofty mountains? That supposing them to be
higher than the summits of the Pyrenees, assuredly no part of the
earth reached the sky, nor was insurmountable by mankind. The Alps in
fact were inhabited and cultivated;--produced and supported living
beings. Were they passable by a few men and impassable to armies? That
those very ambassadors whom they saw before them had not crossed the
Alps borne aloft through the air on wings; neither were their
ancestors indeed natives of the soil, but settling in Italy from
foreign countries, had often as emigrants safely crossed these very
Alps in immense bodies, with their wives and children. To the armed
soldier, carrying nothing with him but the instruments of war, what in
reality was impervious or insurmountable? That Saguntum might be
taken, what dangers, what toils were for eight months undergone! Now,
when their aim was Rome, the capital of the world, could any thing
appear so dangerous or difficult as to delay their undertaking? That
the Gauls had formerly gained possession of that very country which
the Carthaginian despairs of being able to approach. That th