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Updated: June 14, 2025
Hannibal recovers. The falarica. Arrival of the Roman embassadors. Hannibal's policy. Hannibal sends embassadors to Carthage. The Roman embassadors. Parties in the Carthaginian senate. Speech of Hanno. Hanno proposes to give up Hannibal. Defense of Hannibal's friends. Hannibal triumphant. Saguntum falls. The name of Hannibal's father was Hamilcar. He was one of the leading Carthaginian generals.
"You could not deny yourself?" he muttered hurriedly. "And a priest with me?" she answered; and she shook her head. There was no time for more, and even as Mademoiselle spoke Count Hannibal's knuckles tapped the door. She cast a last look at her lover. He had turned his back on the window; the light no longer fell on his face.
The soldiers were disheartened by cold and fatigue. The scene around them was desolate and dreary. New perils awaited their onward course. But no such feeling entered Hannibal's courageous soul. Fired by hope and ambition, he sought to plant new courage in the hearts of his men.
Perhaps they were advance guards of the camp watching that part of the mountain, or marauders who followed the army, and had established themselves there out of Hannibal's sight. Actæon watched the plain and picked his way cautiously, crouching along by a stony ridge, stopping often to listen, holding his breath. He thought he was being shadowed, that someone was skulking behind him.
Knowing how few the enemy were in numbers, and their great want of money and supplies, he advised the Romans not to offer battle to a man who had at his disposal an army trained by many previous encounters to a rare pitch of perfection, but rather to send reinforcements to their allies, keep a tight hand over their subject cities, and allow Hannibal's brilliant little force to die away like a lamp which flares up brightly with but little oil to sustain it.
In fact, as one of the speakers in the senate was rising to animadvert upon and oppose Hannibal's views, he undertook to pull him down and silence him by force. This proceeding awakened immediately such expressions of dissatisfaction and displeasure in the assembly as to show him very clearly that the time for such domineering was gone.
It had formed no part of Hannibal's original plan to excite a war on the island; but partly through accident, chiefly through the boyish vanity of the imprudent Hieronymus, a land war had broken out there, which doubtless because Hannibal had not planned it the Carthaginian council look up with especial zeal.
His pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by Count Hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead. And dead he would have been within thirty seconds had Tavannes played his part. But his thoughts were elsewhere.
In this again he was doomed to disappointment, for the rich Campanian towns, notably Capua, richest of all, held aloof till they knew for certain who would be conqueror. In all Hannibal's campaigns nothing is more surprising than the way he managed to elude his enemies, who were always close to him and always on the look-out for him; yet he went wherever he wished.
He wished to confer with his friends and avoid the useless sacrifice of the city, explaining to them the mood of Rome so that they should not persist in a useless defense. For seven months Saguntum had held out in strenuous resistance. Autumn had not yet commenced when Hannibal's army had appeared before the city, and it was now near the end of winter.
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