Identify and explain the significance of one feature important to the history of the Roman Republic of Claudius, following the Greek history of Acilius,reports that Publius Africanus was a member of that embassy and that at Ephesus he conferred with Hannibal, and he even relates one conversation. When Africanus asked who, in Hannibal's opinion, was the greatest general, Hannibal named Alexander, the king of the Macedonians, because with a small force he had routed armies innumerable and because he had traversed the most distant regions, even to see which transcended human hopes. To the next request, as to whom he would rank second, Hannibal selected Pyrrhus;saying that he had been the first to teach the art of castrametation; besides, no one had chosen his ground or placed his troops more discriminatingly; he possessed also the art of winning men over to him, so that the Italian peoples preferred the lordship of a foreign king to that of the Roman people, so long the master in that land. When he continued, asking whom Hannibal considered third, he named himself without hesitation. Then Scipio broke into a laugh and said, "What would you say if you had defeated me?"