42. "But I am adducing foreign and too remote examples. That same Africa, and Marcus Atilius, who was a signal example of both extremes of fortune, may form a warning to us. Without doubt, Publius Cornelius, when you shall have a view of Africa from the sea, the reduction of your province of Spain will appear to you to have been a mere matter of sport and pastime. For what similarity is there between them? After sailing along the coast of Italy and Gaul to Emporiae without any enemy to oppose you, you brought your fleet to land at a city of our allies. There landing your soldiers, you marched them through countries entirely secure from danger to Tarraco, to join the allies and friends of the Roman people. After that, from Tarraco you marched through places garrisoned by Roman troops. On the banks of the Iberus were the armies of your father and your uncle, rendered still more furious after the loss of their generals, even by the very calamity they had suffered. The general, indeed, Lucius Marcius, had been irregularly constituted and chosen for the time by the suffrages of the soldiers; but had he been adorned with noble birth and the regular gradation of preferment, he would have been equal to the most distinguished generals, from his skill in every art of war. You then laid siege to Carthage, quite at your leisure, not one of the three Punic armies coming to the defence of their allies. The rest of your achievements, nor do I wish to disparage them, are by no means to be compared with what you will have to do in a war in Africa, where there is not a single harbour open to receive our fleet, no part of the country at peace with us, no state in alliance, no king in friendship with us, no room in any part either to take up a position or to advance. Whichever way you turn your eyes, all is hostility and danger. Do you trust in the Numidians and Syphax? Let it suffice to have trusted in them once. Temerity is not always successful, and the fraudulent usually pave the way to confidence in small matters, that when an advantageous opportunity occurs, they may deceive with great gain. Your father and uncle were not cut off by the arms of their enemies till they were duped by the treachery of their Celtiberian allies; nor were you yourself exposed to so much danger from Mago and Hasdrubal, the generals of your enemies, as from Indibilis and Mandonius, whom you had received into friendship. Can you place any confidence in Numidians after having experienced a defection in your own soldiers? Syphax and Masinissa would rather that they themselves should have the rule in Africa than the Carthaginians, but that the Carthaginians should rather than any other state. At present emulation and the various causes of dispute existing between them incite them against each other, because the fear of any foreign enemy is remote. But show them the Roman arms and a body of troops, natives of another country, and they will run together as if to extinguish a common