Ab Urbe Condita 21.16

1At about the same time the envoys who had returned from Carthage reported at Rome that everything was hostile, and the destruction of Saguntum was announced; 2and at once such grief seized the senators, and pity for allies so undeservedly destroyed, and shame at not having brought help, and anger against the Carthaginians, and fear for the safety of the state, as if the enemy were already at the gates, that, troubled by so many emotions at one time, they panicked rather than deliberated: for never, they felt, had a fiercer or more warlike enemy engaged with them, nor had the Roman state ever been so sluggish and unwarlike. 3The Sardinians and Corsicans, the Histrians and Illyrians had harassed rather than exercised Roman arms, and with the Gauls there had been skirmishing rather than real war; 5the Carthaginian, a veteran enemy hardened by twenty-three years of the harshest service among the Spanish peoples, always victorious, accustomed to a most vigorous leader, fresh from the destruction of a very wealthy city, was crossing the Ebro, dragging with him so many peoples of Spain that he had roused, and was about to stir up the Gallic nations, always eager for war: they would have to wage war with the whole world, in Italy and before the walls of Rome.