32^ Imaginary Conversation. PANETIUS. Then it is luxury no longer. SCIPIO. True ; and now tell me, Panetius, or you Polybius, what city was ever so exuberant in riches, as to maintain a great army long together in sheer luxury ? I am not speaking of cities that have been sacked, but of the allied and friendly, whose interests are to be observed, whose affection to be con- ciliated and retained. Hannibal knew this, and minded it. POLYBIUS. You might also have added to the interrogation, if you had thought proper, those cities which have been sacked ; for there plenty is soon wasted, and not soon supplied again. SCIPIO. Let us look closer at the soldier'^s board, and see what is on it in the rich Capua. Is plentiful and wholesome food luxury ? or do soldiers run into the market-place for a phea- sant ? or do those on whom they are quartered pray and press them to eat it ? Suppose they went hunting quails, hares, partridges; would it render them less active.^ There are no wild boars in that neighbourhood, or we might expect from a boar-hunt a visitation of the gout. Suppose the men drew their idea of pleasure from the school or from the practices of Euthymedes. One vice is corrected by another, where a higher principle does not act, and where a man does not exert the proudest of dominion over the most turbulent of states . . his self. Hannibal, we may be sure, never allowed his army to repose in utter inactivity ; no, nor to remain a single day without its exercise . . a battle, a march, a foraging, a convey- ance of wood or water, a survey of the banks of rivers, a fathoming of their depth, a certification of their soundness or their unsoundness at bottom, a measurement of the greater or less extent of their fords, a review, or a castrametation. The plenty of his camp at Capua (for you hardly can ima- gine, Panetius, that the soldiers had in a military sense the freedom of the city, and took what they pleased without pay and without restriction) attached to him the various
