He continued to travel from place to place, and had spent the contents of nearly all his statues, except a small one, so that his means had literally come down to the lowest figure. In this dilemma he found himself at Bithynia, where Prusias gave him house-room for a short time; taking advantage of the visit, to render his guest useful in a war that was being carried on against Eumenes, king of Pergamus. Hannibal, however, could not persuade the parsimonious Prusias to go to the expense of conducting hostilities in an effective style; and, indeed, there being no money to carry on the war, it was impossible to do so with credit; for nobody would make any advance on the security of a bad sovereign. The Romans regarding Hannibal as a dangerous agitator, which he had indeed proved himself to be, required that he should be given up; but Prusias, declining to be at the expense of carriage, intimated that whoever wanted Hannibal had better come for him. The Carthaginian general, foreseeing his fate, endeavoured to make his escape by one of seven secret passages leading from his house; but his enemies had found them out, and were therefore certain of finding him at home; for they had taken care to bar his egress. [Illustration: Hannibal makes the usual neat and appropriate Speech previous to killing himself.] Though possessing all the courage of a soldier, he was miserably destitute of a superior kind of fortitude, and he always carried a bottle of poison about with him. Finding escape impossible, he drew the fatal phial from his pocket, and, as he shook it up, he indulged in one of those speeches which are usually attributed by classical historians to men on the point of suicide. "I will," he said--or is said to have said, for nobody could have heard him, as he was quite alone, and nobody could have been listening, or the bottle would have been snatched out of his hand; "I will deliver the Romans from the dread which has so long tormented them, since they think it too long to wait for the decease of a worn-out old man." Here he may be supposed to have paused; and, after giving the bottle another final shake, to have continued as follows: "Flaminius's victory over a foe, unarmed and betrayed, will not redound much to his honour;" and, with a mental once, twice, thrice, and away, the wretched Hannibal may be imagined to have raised the nauseous draught to his lips, and to have tossed it off with desperate energy.