State of minds in Rome and Carthage
However, hopes and anxieties grew more lively day by day:it was unclear whether to rejoice that Hannibal, evacuating Italy after sixteen years, had left possession of it in peace to the Roman people, or rather to alarm that he had crossed into Africa without having lost a single man. "The theater of war alone was changed; the peril was the same.
Quintus Fabius, the oracle of that horrible struggle, who had just died, had not been wrong in predicting that Hannibal would be a more formidable enemy in his homeland than he had been on foreign soil; Scipio would no longer have to fight against Syphax, a barbarous and coarse king, who placed at the head of his troops a Statorius, an army valet; or Syphax's father-in-law, Hasdrubal, the cowardest of generals; or, finally, improvised and hastily formed armies from a collection of ill-armed peasants; but Hannibal, born, so to speak, in the tent of Hamilcar, that renowned captain; Hannibal nurtured, brought up in the midst of arms, a soldier from infancy, a general almost from his youth, aged in the bosom of victory; Hannibal, who had filled Spain, Gaul, Italy, from the Alps to the strait, with monuments of his exploits.
He had under his orders an army which included as many campaigns as his general, which had been hardened by the habit of sufferings of all kinds, the story of which would seem fabulous; who had covered herself a thousand times with Roman blood, and who bore the spoils of soldiers like those of generals. Scipio would find before him, on the field of battle, a great number of enemies who had killed with their own hands Roman praetors, generals, consuls; who had merited mural and vallar crowns; who had traveled through Roman camps, through Roman towns forced by their arms. Roman magistrates did not have as many fasces today as Hannibal had conquered from generals killed in battle and could bring before him."
Their minds agitated by these alarms, they still felt their uneasiness and their fears increase, because, accustomed for several years to making war in Italy, on one point or another, to see it dragging length without hoping that the end would be approached, their interest was powerfully excited by the spectacle of these two rivals, Hannibal and Scipio, one and the other casting off as for a last and decisive battle. Even those who placed no bounds in their confidence in Scipio and who counted on victory experienced, as they saw the moment coming, a growing anxiety.
The same preoccupations manifested themselves among the Carthaginians:sometimes they repented of having asked for peace, thinking of their Hannibal, of the glory of his great deeds; then, when, looking back, they remembered that they had been twice defeated in pitched battle, that Syphax was a prisoner, that they had been driven from Spain, driven from Italy, and that all these disasters were the work of a single man, the brave and wise Scipio, Hannibal was no longer for them but a general predestined to destroy them, and they cursed him.