ate the favor of the gods, and to inspire the soldiers with
that kind of courage and confidence which the superstitious, however
wicked, feel when they can imagine themselves under the protection of
heaven. These shows and spectacles being over, all things were ready.

In the mean time Hannibal was moving on, as the spring advanced,
toward the banks of the Iberus, that frontier stream, the crossing of
which made him an invader of what was, in some sense, Roman territory.
He boldly passed the stream, and moved forward along the coast of the
Mediterranean, gradually approaching the Pyrenees, which form the
boundary between France and Spain. His soldiers hitherto did not know
what his plans were. It is very little the custom _now_ for military
and naval commanders to communicate to their men much information
about their designs, and it was still less the custom then; and
besides, in those days, the common soldiers had no access to those
means of information by which news of every sort is now so
universally diffused. Thus, though all the officers of the army, and
well-informed citizens, both in Rome and Carthage, anticipated and
understood Hannibal's designs, his own soldiers, ignorant and
degraded, knew nothing except that they were to go on some distant and
dangerous service. They, very likely, had no idea whatever of Italy or
of Rome, or of the magnitude of the possessions, or of the power held
by the vast empire which they were going to invade.

When, however, after traveling day after day they came to the foot of
the Pyrenees, and found that they were really going to pass that
mighty chain of mountains, and for this purpose were actually entering
its wild and gloomy defiles, the courage of some of them failed, and
they began to murmur. The discontent and alarm were, in fact, so
great, that one corps, consisting of about three thousand men, left
the camp in a body, and moved back toward their homes. On inquiry,
Hannibal found that there were ten thousand more who were in a similar
state of feeling. His whole force consisted of over one hundred
thousand. And now what does the reader imagine that Hannibal would do
in such an emergency? Would he return in pursuit of these deserters,
to recapture and destroy them as a terror to the rest? or would he let
them go, and attempt by words of conciliation and encouragement to
confirm and save those that yet remained? He did neither. He called
together the ten thousand discontente