"If your fellow-townsman, Alco, had shown the same courage in bringing back to you the terms on which Hannibal will grant peace that he showed in going to Hannibal to beg for peace, this journey of mine would have been unnecessary. 1 have not come to you either as an advocate for Hannibal qr as a deserter. But as he has remained with the enemy either through your fault or his own-his own if his fears were only feigned, yours if those who report what is. true have to answer for their lives-I have come to you out of regardi-to the old ties of hospitality which have so long subsisted between us, that you may not be left in ignorance of the fact that there do exist terms on which you can secure peace and the safety of your lives. Now, that it is for your sake alone and not on behalf of anyone else that I say what I am saying before you is proved by the fact that as long as you had the stjength to maintain a successful resistance, and as long as you had any hopes of help from Rome, I never breathed a word about king peace. But now that you have no longer anything to hope for from Rome, now that neither your arms nor your walls suffice to protect you, I bring you a peace forced upon you by necessity rather than recommended by the fairness of its conditions. But the hopes, faint as they are, of peace rest upon your accepting as con- ,quered men the terms which Hannibal as conqueror imposes and not looking upon what is taken from you as a positive loss, since everything is at the victor's mercy, but regarding what is left to you as a free gift from him. The city, most of which he has laid in ruins, the whole of which he has all but captured, he takes from you; your fields and lands he lea ves you; and he will assign you a site where you can build a new town. He orders all the gold and silver, both that belonging to the State and that owned by private individuals, to be brought to him; your persons and those of your wives and children he preserves inviolate on condition that you consent to leave Saguntum with only two garments apiece and without arms. These are the demands of your victorious enemy, and heavy and bitter as they are, your miserable plight urges you to accept them. I am not without hope that when everything has passed into his power he will relax some of these c01;J.ditions, but I consider that even as they are you ought to submit to them rather than permit yourselves to be butchered and your wives and children seized and carried off before your eyes."