1Wherever I have turned my eyes, I see everything full of spirit and strength: veteran infantry, cavalry of the noblest peoples, with bridles and without, you our most loyal and bravest allies, you Carthaginians who will fight both for your country and from the most righteous anger. 3We are the ones bringing war, coming down into Italy with hostile standards, and we shall fight so much more boldly and bravely than the enemy as the hope and the spirit of the attacker are greater than of the one who wards him off. 3Besides, resentment, injury and indignity kindle and goad our spirits. 4They demanded me, your general, first for punishment, and then all of you who had besieged Saguntum; 4had you been surrendered, they would have inflicted the most extreme tortures on you.
5This most cruel and arrogant nation makes everything its own and subject to its own will. 5It thinks it right that it should lay down with whom we are to have war, with whom peace. 5It confines and shuts us in with boundaries of mountains and rivers that we may not pass, and does not itself observe the boundaries it has set. 6"Do not cross the Ebro; 6have nothing to do with the Saguntines." 6"Do not stir a single step anywhere!" 7Is it not enough that you took away Sicily and Sardinia, my most ancient provinces? 7Are you taking the Spains too? 7And if I withdraw from there, you will cross into Africa.
7Will cross, do I say? 7I say they have crossed; 7they have sent the two consuls of this year, one to Africa, the other to Spain. 7Nothing is left to us anywhere except what we have claimed by arms. 8Those may be timid and cowardly who have something to look back to, whom their own land and their own fields will receive as they flee along safe and peaceful roads: you must be brave men, and, with every alternative between victory and death cut off by sure despair, either conquer or, if fortune wavers, meet death in battle rather than in flight. 9If this is firmly fixed and resolved in all your minds, I will say it again: you have won; no weapon sharper for conquering has been given to man by the immortal gods than contempt of death.'