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You admired the training of my Numidians more than my beauty when, of an afternoon, outside the walls they astounded your old warriors by hurling darts while kneeling on their horses, which ran so fast that they raised the dust with their bellies. We went out to fight with the Olcades, the Vaccæi, all those Iberian tribes which yesterday you fought and which to-day follow you.

Those who escaped from Hermandica joining themselves to the exiles of the Olcades, a nation subdued the preceding summer, excite the Carpetani to arms; and having attacked Hannibal near the river Tagus, on his return from the Vaccaei, they threw into disorder his army encumbered with spoil.

As there could be no doubt that by attacking them the Romans would be excited to arms, he first led his army into the territory of the Olcades, a people beyond the Iberus, rather within the boundaries than under the dominion of the Carthaginians, so that he might not seem to have had the Saguntines for his object, but to have been drawn on to the war by the course of events; after the adjoining nations had been subdued, and by the progressive annexation of conquered territory.

He drew up the line of his infantry on the bank with forty elephants in front. The Carpetani, with the addition of the Olcades and Vaccaei amounted to a hundred thousand, an invincible army, were the fight to take place in the open plain.

Great numbers of the Vacaei had sought refuge among the Olcades, who had been subdued the previous autumn, and together they had included the whole of the fierce tribes known as the Carpatans, who inhabited the country on the right bank of the upper Tagus, to make common cause with them against the invaders.

From its walls one could take in the immensity of the fertile domain, the territories belonging to the Republic, reaching out of sight to the south along the shore toward the boundary of the lands occupied by the Olcades; the innumerable villages and estates, grouped on the banks of the Bætis-Perkes, and the city opening like a great white fan down the slope of the mount, enclosed by walls over which the close-packed houses seemed to spring and scatter through the orchards.