Intelligence
In this conflict intelligence played an important role on both sides. Hannibal mastered an intelligence service that enabled him to achieve outstanding victories. Likewise Scipio Africanus major's victories were dependant on information. In 217 BC a Carthaginian resident spy in Rome, who was probably a Roman citizen, was caught and had his hands cut off as a punishment.
Read more about this topic: Second Punic War
Famous quotes containing the word intelligence:
“Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (10643 B.C.)
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (17131768)