1And so Hannibal, after he had himself resolved to press on and make for Italy, called an assembly of the soldiers and worked on their minds by rebuke and encouragement: he wondered, he said, what sudden terror had seized hearts that had always been fearless. 2For so many years they had served and been victorious, and had not left Spain before all the nations and lands embraced by the two opposite seas belonged to the Carthaginians. 3Then, indignant that the Roman people demanded that whoever had besieged Saguntum should be handed over to them as if for a crime, they had crossed the Ebro to blot out the name of the Romans and set the world free.
4Then no one had thought the journey long, although they were directing their march from the setting of the sun to its rising; 5now, when they saw that much the greater part of the journey had been covered, the pass of the Pyrenees crossed among the fiercest nations, the Rhône, so great a river, crossed in spite of so many thousands of Gauls trying to prevent them, and the force of the river itself subdued, and when they had the Alps in sight, the other side of which was Italy, they were halting, worn out, at the very gates of the enemy — believing the Alps to be what else but high mountains?
7Suppose them higher than the ridges of the Pyrenees: surely no lands touched the sky or were impassable to the human race. 7The Alps indeed were inhabited and cultivated, and bred and nourished living things: their passes could be travelled by armies. 8Those very envoys whom they saw had not crossed the Alps borne aloft on wings. 8Not even their ancestors had been natives, but settlers, newcomers to Italy, who had often crossed these very Alps safely in huge columns with their children and wives in the manner of migrants. 9For an armed soldier, carrying nothing with him but the tools of war, what indeed was pathless or insurmountable? 9To take Saguntum, what danger, what toil had been endured for eight months!
10To men making for Rome, the capital of the world, could anything seem so rough and steep as to hold up their undertaking? 11The Gauls had once captured places which the Carthaginian despaired of being able even to approach. 11So let them either yield in spirit and courage to a nation they had so often defeated in these days, or hope that the end of their journey was the plain lying between the Tiber and the walls of Rome.