Kitap 28
39
The senate held a session in the Capitol. A resolution was passed on the motion of P. Scipio that he should celebrate the Games which he had vowed during the mutiny and defray the cost out of the money which he had brought into the treasury. Then he introduced a deputation from Saguntum, the senior member of which addressed the House in the following terms: "Although there is no form of suffering, senators, which we have not endured in order to keep our faith with you to the last, still the kindness which you and your generals have shown to us has made us forget our misery. For us you have undertaken war and for fourteen years have carried it on with such determination that often you have brought yourselves and often reduced the Carthaginians to the last extremities. Though you had in the heart of Italy such a terrible war and such an enemy as Hannibal, you nevertheless sent a consul with his army to Spain to collect, as it were, the remains of our wreckage. From the day that the two Scipios, Publius and C. Cornelius, came into the province they never at any moment failed to do good to us and injury to our enemies. First of all, they restored our city to us, and sent men all over Spain to find out those of us who had been sold into slavery and set them free. When our fortunes, from being utterly miserable, had become almost enviable, your two generals Publius and C. Cornelius met with their deaths, a loss which we felt even more bitterly than you. It seemed at the time as though we had been brought back from distant exile to our old home only to see for the second time our own ruin and our country's destruction. It did not require a Carthaginian general or army to effect our annihilation, the Turduli, our inveterate enemies who had been the cause of our former collapse, would have been quite able to extinguish us. And just when we had lost all hope, you suddenly sent P. Scipio, whom we are more fortunate than all our fellow-citizens in seeing here today. We shall carry back to our people the news that we have seen, as your consul-elect, the one man in whom we placed all our hopes of safety. City after city has been taken by him from your enemies throughout Spain, and in every instance he picked out the Saguntines from the mass of prisoners and sent them home. And lastly the Turdetani, such deadly enemies to us that had their strength remained unimpaired Saguntum must have fallen, even they have been brought so low by his arms that they are no longer to be feared by us, nor, if I may dare to say so, by our posterity. The tribe in whose favour Hannibal destroyed Saguntum have had their own city destroyed before our eyes. We take tribute from their land, but it is not the profit, but the revenge that we enjoy most.
