Hitherto Malchus had thought only of a war with Rome made up of sea fights and of descents upon Sicily and Sardinia. The very idea of invading Italy and striking at Rome herself had never even entered his mind, for the words of his father had been forgotten in the events which followed so quickly upon them. The prospect which the words opened seemed immense. First Northern Spain was to be conquered, Gaul to be crossed, the terrible mountains of which he had heard from travellers were next to be surmounted, and finally a fight for life and death to be fought out on the plains of Italy. The struggle would indeed be a tremendous one, and Malchus felt his heart beat fast at the thought that he was to be an actor in it. Surely the history of the world told of no greater enterprise than this. Even the first step which was to be taken, a mere preliminary to this grand expedition, was a most formidable one.

Saguntum stood as an outpost of Rome. While Carthage had been advancing from the south Rome had been pressing forward from the east along the shores of the Mediterranean, and had planted herself firmly at Marseilles, a port which gave her a foothold in Gaul, and formed a base whence she could act in Spain. In order to check the rising power of the Carthaginians there she had entered into a firm alliance with the Saguntines, whose country occupied what is now the district of Valencia. By the terms of the last treaty between the two republics each was forbidden to make war upon tribes in alliance with their rivals, and Saguntum being thus under the jurisdiction of Rome, an attack upon it would be almost equivalent to a declaration of war.