Kitap 28
42
"Do you put your trust in Syphax and his Numidians? Be satisfied with having trusted them once. Rashness does not always succeed and duplicity prepares the way for confidence through trifles, so that when the occasion calls for it, it may succeed in securing some great advantage. Your father and your uncle were not defeated until the treachery of their Celtiberian auxiliaries left them victims to the enemy. You yourself were not exposed to anything like the danger from the Carthaginian commanders, Mago and Hasdrubal, that you were from Indibilis and Mandonius after you had accepted their alliance. Can you trust the Numidians after the experience you have had of the disloyalty of your own troops? Syphax and Masinissa would both prefer that they rather than the Carthaginians should be the leading powers in Africa, but failing that, they would rather have the Carthaginians than any one else. At this moment mutual rivalry and numberless grounds of complaint are embittering them against one another, because external dangers are far distant; but once let them see the arms of Rome and a foreign army, and they will hasten side by side to extinguish, as it were, a conflagration which threatens them both. Those Carthaginians defended Spain in a very different way from that in which they would defend their country's walls, the temples of their gods, their hearths and homes, when their trembling wives will follow them and their little children cling to them as they march out to battle. What, moreover, if, feeling quite assured of the united support of Africa, the fidelity of their royal allies and the strength of their walls, and seeing that you and your army are no longer here to protect Italy, the Carthaginians should send over a fresh army from Africa, or order Mago, who, we understand, has left the Balearic Isles and is sailing along the Ligurian coast, to form a junction with Hannibal? Surely we should be in the same state of alarm as we were at the appearance in Italy of Hasdrubal, after you had allowed him to slip through your hands-you, who are going to blockade not Carthage only but the whole of Africa with your army! You will say that you defeated him. Then I regret all the more, both on your account and on behalf of the republic, that you allowed him after his defeat to invade Italy.
