"Take care of yourself, Hannibal!" said an old Celtiberian planting himself before his horse. "Your enemies in Carthage, Hanno's faction, will unite with Rome to work your ruin."
"The people love me," said the chieftain, arrogantly. "Before the Carthaginian Senate hears the Romans, Saguntum will be ours, and the Carthaginians will acclaim our triumph."
With saddened heart Actæon beheld the desolation of the fields which used to be so joyous and so fertile. There were no other ships in the port but men-of-war from New Carthage. The seamen slept in the fane of Aphrodite after having rifled the temple of its valuables. The warehouses had been pillaged and destroyed; the wharves covered with filth; in the fields not a vestige of the ancient villas remained. The ferocity of the barbarian tribes from the interior, their hatred for the Greeks of the coast, had incited them to even tear up the multicolor pavements and to scatter the fragments. The whole valley was an immense, desolated plain. Not a tree was standing. To combat the cold of winter they had felled the groves of fig trees, the broad plantations of olives, the stocks of the grapevines of the vineyards, destroying even the houses to warm themselves with the rafters from the roofs. Nothing remained standing but ruined walls and low shrubbery. A fungoid vegetation which grew rapidly, fertilized by bodies of men and animals, extended over the valley, obliterating the ancient roads, creeping up the ruins, and choking the beds of the streams which, their irrigating ditches broken, scattered their waters until the low fields were converted into ponds.
It was the devastating work of a continually swelling army composed of a hundred and eighty thousand men and of many thousands of horses. In a short time they had devoured the Saguntine domain. The soldiers after destroying all that was not of immediate use, extended their rapacity to surrounding zones, constantly broadening their radius of destruction as the siege was prolonged.
Supplies now came from a distance of many days' journey; sent by remote tribes in the hope of a reward of booty which Hannibal knew how to instill into their minds, telling them of the riches of Saguntum. The elephants had been sent to New Carthage some months before, as they were useless in the siege and difficult to maintain in this devastated region.