Besides, many of the youth were drawn off from the cultivation of the fields, and engaged in the war; and a custom also prevailed among the people of that nation, grafted on a naturally depraved inclination, of carrying on a predatory kind of warfare.

Nor did he receive any supplies from home, where they were anxious about the retention of Spain, as if every thing was going on prosperously in Italy.

In Spain the state of affairs was in one respect similar, but in another widely different; similar in that the Carthaginians, having been defeated with the loss of their general, had been driven to the remotest coast of that country, even to the ocean; but different, because Spain, both from the nature of the country and the genius of its inhabitants, was better adapted not only than Italy, but than any other part of the world, for renewing a war.

And accordingly, therefore, though this was the first of the provinces on the continent which the Romans entered, it was the last which was at length reduced, in the present age, under the conduct and auspices of Augustus Caesar.

Here Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, the greatest and most renowned general concerned in the war, next to the Barcine family, returning from Gades, and encouraged in his hopes of reviving the war by Mago, son of Hamilcar, by means of levies made throughout the Farther Spain, armed as many as fifty thousand foot and four thousand five hundred horse.