1'If I were leading out into battle line the army which I had with me in Gaul, soldiers, I should have refrained from addressing you; 2for what point would there be in encouraging either those cavalry who had splendidly defeated the enemy's horse at the river Rhône, or those legions with which I pursued this very enemy in flight and held his admission, as he retreated and shirked battle, to be as good as a victory? 3As it is, because that army, enrolled for the province of Spain, is campaigning there under my auspices with my brother Gnaeus Scipio, where the Senate and the Roman people wished it to campaign, I have offered myself of my own accord for this contest, so that you might have a consul as your leader against Hannibal and the Carthaginians; and a new commander must say a few words to new soldiers.
5So that you may not be ignorant of the nature of the war or of the enemy: you have to fight, soldiers, against men whom you defeated by land and sea in the former war, from whom you exacted tribute for twenty years, from whom you hold Sicily and Sardinia, taken as prizes of war. 6In this contest, therefore, you and they will have the spirit that victors and vanquished usually have. 6Nor are they going to fight now because they dare, but because they must; 7unless you believe that those who refused battle when their army was intact have gained more hope now that they have lost two-thirds of their infantry and cavalry in crossing the Alps.
8"But, they say, they are few indeed, but vigorous in mind and body, men whose strength and might scarcely any force could withstand." 9On the contrary, they are likenesses, shadows of men, half dead from hunger, cold, filth and squalor, bruised and crippled among the rocks and cliffs; 9besides this, their limbs are frostbitten, their sinews stiff with snow, their bodies shrivelled by the cold, their weapons battered and broken, their horses lame and feeble: this is the cavalry, this the infantry you are going to fight; 10you have the last remnants of an enemy, not an enemy; 10and I fear nothing more than that, when you have fought, it may seem that it was the Alps that defeated Hannibal.
11But perhaps it was fitting that the gods themselves, without any human help, should begin and all but decide a war against a commander and a people who break treaties, and that we, who after the gods have been most wronged, should finish what has been begun and all but decided.