after my victory at Cannae, became master of the greatest part of your country, and deliberated with myself what fate I should decree to Italy and Rome. And now, see the change! Here, in Africa, I am come to treat with a Roman, for my own preservation, and my country's. Such are the sports of fortune. Is she then to be trusted because she smiles? An advantageous peace is preferable to the hope of victory. The one is in your own power, the other at the pleasure of the gods. Should you prove victorious, it would add little to your own glory, or the glory of your country; if vanquished, you lose in one hour all the honor and reputation you have been so many years acquiring. But what is my aim in all this?—that you should content yourself with our cession of Spain, Sicily, Sardinia and all the islands between Italy and Africa. A peace on these conditions will, in my opinion, not only secure the future tranquillity of Carthage, but be sufficiently glorious to you, and for the Roman name. And do not tell me that some of our citizens dealt fraudulently with you in the late treaty—it is I, Hannibal, that now ask a peace: I ask it, because I think it expedient for my country; and, thinking it expedient, I will inviolably maintain it.
Scipio's Answer.
I knew very well, Hannibal, that it was the hope of your return which embolded the Carthaginians to break the truce with us, and to lay aside all thoughts of a peace, when it was just upon the point of being concluded; and your present proposal is a proof of it. You retrench from their concessions every thing but what we are, and have
been long possessed of. But as it is your care that your fellow citizens should have the obligations to you of being eased from a great part of their burden, so it ought to be mine that they draw no advantage from their perfidiousness. Nobody is more sensible than I am of the weakness of man and the power of fortune, and that whatever we
enterprise is subject to a thousand chances. If, before the Romans passed into Africa, you had of your own accord quitted Italy, and made the offers you now make, I believe they would not have been rejected. But as you have been forced out of Italy, and we are masters here of the open country, the situation of things is much altered. And
