And in Ternate, one of the Molucca Islands, which suffered such untold miseries after the Europeans had discovered its spices and its heathenism, not only was war never begun without being first declared, but it was also customary to inform the enemy of the number of men and the amount and kind of weapons with which it was intended to conduct hostilities.[176] But the case of the Romans is by far the most remarkable. Polybius, Livy, and Ælian all agree in their testimony that for a long period of their history the Romans refrained from all kinds of stratagem as from a sort of military meanness; and their evidence is corroborated by Valerius Maximus, who says that the Romans, having no word in their language to express a military ruse, were forced to borrow the Greek word, from which our own word stratagem is derived.[177] Polybius, who lived and wrote as late as the second century before Christ, after complaining that artifice was then so prevalent among the Romans that their chief study was to deceive one another in war and in politics, adds that, in spite of this degeneracy, they still declared war solemnly beforehand, seldom formed ambuscades, and preferred to fight man to man in close engagement. So late as the year 172 B.C. the elder senators regretted the lost virtue of their ancestors, who refrained from such stratagems as night attacks, counterfeit flights, and sudden returns, and who sometimes even appointed the day of battle and fixed the field of combat, looking for victory not from fraud, but only from superiority in personal bravery.[178] Ælian, too, declares that the Romans never resorted to stratagems till about the end of the Second Punic War; and truly the great Roman general, Scipio, who took the name of Africanus, displayed a thorough African skill in the use he made of spies and surprises to bring that war to a successful issue.