28.  Meanwhile, hope and anxiety daily and simultaneously increased; nor could the minds of men be brought to any fixed conclusion, whether it was a fit subject for rejoicing, that Hannibal had now at length, after the sixteenth year, departed from Italy, and left the Romans in the unmolested possession of it, or whether they had not greater cause to fear, from his having transported his army in safety into Africa.  They said that the scene of action certainly was changed, but not the danger.  That Quintus Fabius, lately deceased, who had foretold how arduous the contest would be, was used to predict, not without good reason, that Hannibal would prove a more formidable enemy in his own country than he had been in a foreign one; and that Scipio would have to encounter not Syphax, a king of undisciplined barbarians, whose armies Statorius, a man little better than a soldier’s drudge, was used to lead; nor his father-in-law, Hasdrubal, that most fugacious general; nor tumultuary armies hastily collected out of a crowd of half-armed rustics, but Hannibal, born in a manner in the pavilion of his father, that bravest of generals, nurtured and educated in the midst of arms, who served as a soldier formerly, when a boy, and became a general when he had scarcely attained the age of manhood; who, having grown old in victory, had filled Spain, Gaul, and Italy, from the Alps to the strait, with monuments of his vast achievements; who commanded troops who had served as long as he had himself; troops hardened by the endurance of every species of suffering, such as it is scarcely credible that men could have supported; stained a thousand times with Roman blood, and bearing with them the spoils not only of soldiers but of generals.  That many would meet the eyes of Scipio in battle who had with their own hands slain Roman praetors, generals, and consuls; many decorated with crowns, in reward for having scaled walls and crossed ramparts; many who had traversed the captured camps and cities of the Romans.  That the magistrates of the Roman people had not then so many fasces as Hannibal could have carried before him, having taken them from generals whom he had slain.  While their minds were harassed by these apprehensions, their anxiety and fears were further increased from the circumstance, that, whereas they had been accustomed to carry on war for several years, in different parts of Italy, and within their view, with languid hopes, and without the prospect of bringing it to a speedy termination, Scipio and Hannibal had stimulated the minds of all, as generals prepared for a final contest.  Even those persons whose confidence in Scipio and hopes of victory were great, were affected with anxiety, increasing in proportion as they saw their completion approaching.  The state of feeling among the Carthaginians was much the same; for, when they turned their eyes on Hannibal, and the greatness of his achievements, they repented having solicited peace; but when again they reflected that they had been twice defeated in a pitched battle, that Syphax had been made prisoner, that they had been driven out of Spain and Italy, and that all this had been effected by the valour and conduct of Scipio alone, they regarded him with horror, as a general marked out by destiny, and born, for their destruction.