out any design of commencing without provocation a war upon the Roman people or their allies. Was it your purpose to hold Sucro as a place of abode? here had I, your general, left you on my departure after the reduction of the province, you would have been justified in imploring the interference of gods and men, because you could not return to your wives and children.
But suppose that you banished from your minds all recollection of these, as you did of your country and myself; I would wish to track the course of a wicked design, but not of one utterly insane. While I was alive, and the rest of the army safe, with which in one day I took Carthage, with which I routed, put to flight, and expelled from Spain four generals and four armies of the Carthaginians; did you, I say, who were only eight thousand men,[1] all of course of less worth than Albius and Atrius, to whom you subjected yourselves, hope to wrest the province of Spain out of the hands of the Roman people? I lay no stress upon my own name; I put it out of the question. Let it be supposed that I have not been injured by you in any respect beyond the ready credence of my death. What! if I were dead, was the state to expire with me? Was the empire of the Roman people to fall with me? Jupiter, most good and great, would not have permitted that the existence of the city,
- ↑ This force had been placed on the Iberus (now the Ebro) to guard the settlements on its eastern shore against the Carthaginians.
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