The History of Rome, Book 28

When by Hasdrubal’s crossing Spain seemed relieved of just as much war as had drained off into Italy, on a sudden a war sprang up there again, the equal of the first. This was how the Romans and the Carthaginians then held Spain. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo had withdrawn far back to the Ocean and Gades; the coast of our sea, and almost all of Spain where it faces eastward, was Scipio’s and under Roman dominion. A new commander, Hanno, having crossed over from Africa with a new army in the room of Hasdrubal the Barcid and joined himself to Mago, had in a short time armed a great number of men in Celtiberia, which lies midway between the two seas; and against him Scipio sent Marcus Silanus with no more than ten thousand foot and five hundred horse. Silanus, by the longest marches he could make—hindered besides both by the roughness of the roads and by the narrow passes shut in by frequent defiles, as most of Spain is—nonetheless outran not only the messengers but even the rumor of his coming, and, with deserters from Celtiberia itself for guides, reached the enemy. From the same informants it was learned, when they were about ten miles from the enemy, that there were two camps astride the road by which they were going: on the left the Celtiberians, a new army, above nine thousand men, held a camp; on the right the Carthaginians held theirs. This last was secure and strong, guarded with pickets, watches, and every proper military safeguard; the other was loose and careless, as of barbarians and raw recruits who feared the less because they were in their own country. Judging that this one should be attacked first, Silanus ordered the standards carried as far to the left as could be, that he might nowhere be seen from the Punic outposts; and he himself, sending scouts ahead, pressed on at a quick march against the enemy.

He was about three miles off, and as yet not one of the enemy had noticed; broken ground and hills mantled with brushwood screened him. There, in a hollow and therefore hidden valley, he ordered the soldiers to sit down and take food; meanwhile the scouts came in, confirming what the deserters had said. Then the Romans, throwing their packs into the middle, took up their arms and went forward into battle in regular line. They were a mile off when they were sighted by the enemy, and a sudden alarm began; and Mago came galloping from the camp at the first shout and uproar. There were in the Celtiberian army four thousand shield-bearing infantry and two hundred horse; this regular legion—and that was about the strength of it—he posted in the front line, the rest, light-armed, he placed in reserve. As he was leading them out of the camp thus drawn up, the Romans flung their javelins upon them before they were fairly clear of the rampart. The Spaniards crouched against the weapons hurled by the enemy, then rose up to throw their own; and when the Romans, packed close as is their wont, had received these on their massed shields, then foot was set to foot and the work began with swords. But the roughness of the ground made the swiftness of the Celtiberians, whose way it is to dart to and fro in battle, useless to them, while it was no disadvantage to the Romans, accustomed to stand and fight—except that the narrows and the brushwood growing between broke their ranks, and they were forced to fight singly or in pairs, as though in single combats. The very thing that hindered the enemy’s flight offered them up, as if bound, to the slaughter; and now, when nearly all the shield-bearing Celtiberians had been killed, the light-armed and the Carthaginians, who had come from the other camp to their aid, were being cut down in their dismay. No more than two thousand foot and the whole of the cavalry escaped with Mago almost before the battle was joined; Hanno, the other commander, was taken alive with those who had come up last, the battle already lost. Almost all the cavalry and what there was of veteran infantry followed Mago in his flight and on the tenth day reached Hasdrubal in the province of Gades; the Celtiberian recruits scattered into the nearest woods and thence dispersed to their homes. By a most timely victory there was crushed a war not yet so much kindled as full of the material for a war to come, had they been allowed, once the Celtiberian nation was roused, to stir up other peoples too to arms. And so Scipio, after praising Silanus warmly, and conceiving a hope of finishing the war if he himself put no delay to it by his own slowness, marched against Hasdrubal, to what remained of the war, into the farthest part of Spain. The Carthaginian, who then chanced to have his camp in Baetica to hold the loyalty of the allies firm, suddenly struck his standards and led off, in the fashion of flight rather than of a march, far away to the Ocean and Gades. But reckoning that, so long as he kept his army together, he would be the mark of the war, before he ferried it across the strait to Gades he distributed the whole army here and there among the cities, that they might guard themselves with walls and the walls with arms.

Scipio, when he perceived the war scattered far and wide, and that to carry his arms round to each several town was a business of length rather than of greatness, turned his march back. Yet, not to leave that region to the enemy, he sent his brother Lucius Scipio with ten thousand foot and a thousand horse to assault the wealthiest city in those parts—the barbarians called it Orongis. It lies within the borders of the Maesesses, a Spanish people; the soil is fruitful, and the inhabitants even dig silver. This had been Hasdrubal’s stronghold for making raids among the peoples of the interior. Scipio, having pitched his camp near the city, before he ringed it with works, sent men to the gates to try the temper of the townsmen by speaking with them close at hand, and to urge them to make trial of the friendship of the Romans rather than of their force. When no peaceable answer was returned, he surrounded the city with a ditch and a double rampart and divided the army into three parts, that one part might always assault while two rested between. When the first part came on to the attack, the battle was fierce indeed and doubtful; it was no easy thing, for the weapons falling on them, to come up or to bring ladders to the walls; even those who had set ladders against the wall were thrust off, some by forks made for that very purpose, while upon others iron grapnels were dropped from above, so that they were in danger of being caught up and hauled onto the wall. When Scipio perceived that the contest was made equal by the too small number of his men, and that the enemy now had the better of it because he fought from a wall, he withdrew the first part and attacked the city with both parts at once. This struck such terror into men already worn with their first fighting that the townsmen abandoned the walls in sudden flight, and the Punic garrison, fearing the city was betrayed, left their posts and gathered into one body. Then fear came over the townsmen that, if the enemy entered the city, they would be cut down at random, Carthaginian and Spaniard without distinction; and so, throwing a gate suddenly open, they rushed out of the town in throngs, holding their shields before them lest weapons be hurled at them from afar, and stretching out their empty right hands to show that they had cast away their swords. Whether this was seen too dimly across the distance, or whether some trick was suspected, was never made out; the charge was made upon the deserters as on a hostile line, and they were cut down; and by that same gate the standards were borne, in hostile array, into the city. In other quarters too the gates were hewn at with axes and mattocks and broken open, and as each horseman entered he galloped to seize the forum—for so it had been ordered. To the cavalry there had been added also a support of the triarii; the legionaries overran the other parts of the city. They refrained from plunder and from killing those they met, save such as defended themselves with arms. All the Carthaginians were given into custody, and of the townsmen too about three hundred who had shut the gates; the rest had the town handed back to them and their property restored. There fell in the assault of that city about two thousand of the enemy, of the Romans no more than ninety.

Joyful both to those who did the deed and to the commander and the rest of the army was the storming of that city; and they made a fine show of their coming, driving before them a vast crowd of prisoners. Scipio, after praising his brother with all the honor of words he could, and matching the taking of Orongis by him to his own taking of Carthage, because winter was now at hand—so that he could neither attempt Gades nor pursue Hasdrubal’s army, scattered everywhere through the province—led all his forces back into Hither Spain; and, dismissing the legions to winter quarters, he sent his brother Lucius Scipio to Rome with Hanno, the enemy’s commander, and the other noble prisoners, and himself withdrew to Tarraco. In that same year the Roman fleet, under the proconsul Marcus Valerius Laevinus, crossing from Sicily into Africa, made wide ravages in the territory of Utica and Carthage. Booty was driven off from the farthest borders of the Carthaginians, about the very walls of Utica. As the fleet made back for Sicily, the Punic fleet met it—there were seventy ships of war—of which seventeen were taken, four sunk in the deep, the rest of the fleet routed and put to flight. Victorious by land and sea, the Roman returned to Lilybaeum with much plunder of every kind. Then, the enemy’s ships driven off and the sea made safe, great convoys of grain were brought up to Rome.

At the beginning of the summer in which these things were done, the proconsul Publius Sulpicius and king Attalus, having wintered at Aegina as was said before, crossed thence with their joined fleet to Lemnos—the Romans had twenty-five quinqueremes, the king’s five-and-thirty. And Philip, that he might be ready for every attempt whether he had to meet the enemy by land or by sea, came down himself to the sea at Demetrias and named a day at Larisa for the army to muster. From every side, at the report of the king’s coming, embassies gathered to Demetrias from his allies. For the Aetolians had taken heart both since the Roman alliance and after Attalus’s coming, and were plundering their neighbors; nor were the Acarnanians only, and the Boeotians, and those who dwell in Euboea, in great fear, but the Achaeans too, whom, over and above the Aetolian war, Machanidas the Lacedaemonian tyrant likewise terrified, having pitched his camp not far from the border of Argos. All these, recounting each from his own cities what perils threatened by land and sea, begged the king for help. Nor was it from his own kingdom alone that quiet news came: it was reported that Scerdilaedus and Pleuratus were stirring, and that the Maedi above all, of the Thracians, would, if any distant war should occupy the king, overrun the parts of Macedonia nearest them. The Boeotians and the peoples of inner Greece reported, too, that the pass of Thermopylae, where its narrow throat pinches the road, was being blocked by the Aetolians with a ditch and a rampart, that they might not give Philip a passage to defend the cities of his allies. Even a sluggish leader might have been roused by so many tumults crowding round him. He dismissed the embassies, promising to bring help to all according as time and circumstance should allow. For the present, where the need most pressed, he sent a garrison to the city of Peparethus, whence word had come that Attalus, crossing with his fleet from Lemnos, had laid waste all the country round the city. Polyphantas he sent with a moderate force into Boeotia, and likewise one Menippus, of the king’s officers, with a thousand targeteers—the pelta is not unlike the caetra—to Chalcis; and five hundred Agrianians were added, that he might be able to guard every part of the island. He himself set out for Scotussa and ordered the Macedonian forces to be brought over thither from Larisa. There it was reported that a council of the Aetolians had been proclaimed at Heraclea, and that king Attalus would come to take counsel on the sum of the war. To break up this gathering by his sudden arrival, he led his army to Heraclea by long marches; but he came when the council was already dismissed. Still, after ravaging the crops, now near to ripeness—chiefly in the bay of the Aenianians—he led his forces back to Scotussa. There he left his whole army, and withdrew with the royal cohort to Demetrias. From there, that he might be able to meet every movement of the enemy, he sent men into Phocis and Euboea and to Peparethus to choose high ground from which beacon-fires set aloft might be seen; and he himself set a watch-tower on Tisaeus—a mountain rising to a vast height of peak—that by fires lit from afar he might in a moment of time receive the signal wherever the enemy were stirring. The Roman commander and king Attalus crossed over from Peparethus to Nicaea, and thence brought their fleet across to Oreus in Euboea, which, for one making from the Demetrian gulf for Chalcis and the Euripus, is set first of the cities of Euboea on the left. And it was so agreed between Attalus and Sulpicius that the Romans should assault from the sea, the king’s men from the land.

On the fourth day after the fleet had put in, they attacked the city. That time was spent in secret conferences with Plator, whom Philip had set in charge of the city. The city has two citadels, one overhanging the sea, the other in the middle of the town. From this last a mined way leads down to the sea, which on the sea side a tower of five stories, a notable bulwark, closed. There at first the fiercest struggle was joined, the tower being furnished with every kind of missile, and engines and artillery for assaulting it being landed from the ships. While this contest had drawn the eyes and minds of all, Plator received the Romans by the gate of the seaward citadel, and in a moment the citadel was seized. The townsmen, driven from there into the middle of the town, made for the other citadel; and there men had been posted to throw the gate’s bars across. So, shut out, they were cut down and taken in the open between. The Macedonian garrison stood gathered in a body under the wall of the citadel, neither breaking into headlong flight nor stubbornly joining battle. These Plator, having got pardon for them from Sulpicius, put aboard ship and set ashore at Demetrium in Phthiotis; he himself withdrew to Attalus. Sulpicius, elated by so easy a success at Oreus, made at once with his victorious fleet for Chalcis, where the issue answered nothing to his hope. From a sea wide on either hand and pinched into narrows, it presents to one who looks at it the show, at first, of twin harbors fronting the two channels; but there is scarcely another anchorage more dangerous to a fleet. For winds, sudden and squally, sweep down from the high mountains on either shore; and the strait of the Euripus itself does not ebb and flow seven times a day at fixed seasons, as the tale runs, but, the sea turned now this way now that at random in the manner of the wind, is swept along like a torrent rolling down a steep mountainside. So neither by night nor by day is there rest given to the ships. Both so dangerous an anchorage received the fleet, and the town besides—shut off on one side by the sea, on the other admirably fortified by land and held by a strong garrison, and above all by the loyalty of its commandants and chief men, which at Oreus had been wavering and hollow—was firm and impregnable. This much the Roman did wisely, in a thing rashly undertaken: having looked round upon the difficulties, that he might not waste time to no purpose, he quickly desisted from the attempt and carried his fleet thence to Cynus in Locris—the trading-port of the Opuntians, whose city lies a mile from the sea.

Philip too the beacons from Oreus had warned, but too late, raised from the watch-tower by Plator’s treachery; and, his sea-strength then being unequal, access to the island was no easy thing for his fleet. So the matter being let slip through hesitation, he stirred himself briskly to the relief of Chalcis when he got the signal. For Chalcis itself, though a city of the same island, is yet cut off by so narrow a strait that it is joined to the mainland by a bridge and has an easier approach by land than by sea. Philip therefore went from Demetrias to Scotussa, and setting out thence at the third watch, after dislodging the garrison and routing the Aetolians who held the pass of Thermopylae, and driving the panic-stricken enemy back to Heraclea, he himself in a single day pressed on more than sixty miles to Elatia in Phocis. On nearly the same day the city of the Opuntians was being taken and plundered by king Attalus—for Sulpicius had yielded that booty to the king, because Oreus a few days before had been plundered by the Roman soldier, the king’s men having no share. While the Roman fleet had withdrawn to Oreus, Attalus, unaware of Philip’s coming, was wasting time in exacting money from the leading men; and so unlooked-for was the thing that, had not certain Cretans, who chanced to have gone out foraging some way from the city, caught sight of the enemy’s column afar, he might have been overwhelmed. Attalus, unarmed and unmarshaled, made for the sea and his ships at full run; and as they were getting the ships off from the land Philip came up, and raised an alarm even from the shore among the sailors. Thence he returned to Opus, blaming gods and men because the fortune of so great an enterprise had been all but snatched from before his eyes and lost. The Opuntians too he upbraided in the same anger, because, when they could have drawn out the siege until his coming, at the mere sight of the enemy they had all but passed over into a voluntary surrender. Having settled matters about Opus, he set out for Thronium. And Attalus at first withdrew to Oreus; then, when the report reached him that Prusias king of Bithynia had crossed into the bounds of his kingdom, abandoning Roman affairs and the Aetolian war, he crossed over into Asia. And Sulpicius withdrew his fleet to Aegina, whence he had set out at the beginning of spring. With no greater struggle than Attalus had spent in taking Opus, Philip took Thronium. That city was inhabited by refugees from Phthiotic Thebes; when their own city was taken by Philip, they had fled for refuge to the protection of the Aetolians, who gave them for a dwelling that city, waste and deserted in an earlier war of this same Philip. Then, having taken Thronium, as was said a little before, he set out and took Tithronion and Drymiae, small and obscure towns of Doris. Thence he came to Elatia, where he had ordered the envoys of Ptolemy and the Rhodians to await him. There, while the matter of ending the Aetolian war was under discussion—for the envoys had lately been present at the council of the Romans and Aetolians at Heraclea—word was brought that Machanidas had resolved to attack the Eleans while they prepared the solemn games of Olympia. Thinking he must forestall this, he dismissed the envoys with a kindly answer—that he had been neither the cause of that war nor would he be a hindrance to peace, if only it might be made on fair and honorable terms—and set out with his column stripped for speed, through Boeotia, down to Megara and thence to Corinth, whence, taking supplies, he made for Phlius and Pheneus. And now, when he had come to Heraea, hearing that Machanidas, terrified by the report of his coming, had fled back to Lacedaemon, he withdrew to Aegium to the council of the Achaeans, thinking at the same time to find there the Punic fleet, which he had summoned that he might be able to do something by sea as well. But a few days before, the Carthaginians had crossed over thence to the Oxeae, and thence had made for the harbors of the Acarnanians, when they heard that Attalus and the Romans had set out from Oreus, fearing that they might be made for and overwhelmed within Rhium—that is the throat of the Corinthian gulf.

Philip indeed grieved and was vexed that, although he himself had hastened to every point, he had nowhere come up with anything in time, and that his swiftness had been baffled by a fortune that swept all things from before his eyes; but in the council, dissembling his chagrin, he spoke with a high spirit, calling gods and men to witness that in no place and at no time had he been wanting, but that wherever the enemy’s arms had clashed thither he had pressed with the utmost speed he could; yet it could scarcely be reckoned whether the war was waged more boldly by himself or more in the fashion of flight by the enemy. So it was that Attalus had slipped from his hands at Opus, Sulpicius at Chalcis, and in these very days Machanidas. But flight was not always lucky, nor was that to be reckoned a hard war in which, if only you came to grips with the enemy, you had conquered. The first thing was this, that he had the enemy’s confession that they were by no means a match for him: in a short while he would have a victory not in doubt, and they would fight him with no better outcome than their hope. Gladly his allies heard the king. Then he gave back to the Achaeans Heraea and Triphylia, and restored Aliphera to the Megalopolitans, since they proved well enough that it had been of their borders. Thence, having received ships from the Achaeans—there were three quadriremes and as many biremes—he crossed to Anticyra. From there, with seven quinqueremes and more than twenty light galleys, which he had sent into the Corinthian gulf to join them to the fleet of the Carthaginians, he set out and made a landing at Erythrae in Aetolia, near Eupalium. He did not escape the Aetolians; for what of their people was in the fields or in the neighboring forts of Potidania and Apollonia fled into the woods and mountains; the cattle, which in the haste could not be driven off, were carried away and herded onto the ships. With these and the rest of the plunder sent to Aegium under Nicias, praetor of the Achaeans, he made for Corinth, and ordered the foot-forces to be led thence by land through Boeotia; he himself, sailing from Cenchreae along the coast of Attica past Sunium, came almost amid the enemy’s fleets to Chalcis. From there, after praising the loyalty and valor of the Oreans, in that neither fear nor hope had bent their minds, and exhorting them to hold fast for the time to come in the same constancy in his alliance, if they preferred their own fortune to that of the Oritani and Opuntians, he sailed from Chalcis to Oreus, and, committing the supreme charge and the keeping of the city to those of the leading men who had chosen to flee when the city was taken rather than surrender themselves to the Romans, he crossed himself from Euboea to Demetrias, whence he had first set out to bear aid to his allies. Then, having laid down at Cassandrea the keels of a hundred ships of war, and gathered a multitude of shipwrights to finish that work, since the departure of Attalus and the help he had timely brought his hard-pressed allies had quieted affairs in Greece, he withdrew back into his kingdom to make war upon the Dardanians.

At the close of that summer in which these things were done in Greece, when Quintus Fabius Maximus the son, lieutenant of the consul Marcus Livius, had reported at Rome to the senate that the consul believed Lucius Porcius with his legions garrison enough for the province of Gaul, and that he might withdraw thence and the consular army be led home, the fathers ordered not only Marcus Livius to return to the city but his colleague Gaius Claudius too. Only this difference there was in the decree, that Marcus Livius’s army was ordered to be brought back, while Nero’s legions were to remain in the province, facing Hannibal. It was agreed between the consuls by letter that, as they had managed the commonwealth with one mind, so, though they came together from different regions, they should approach the city at one time; whoever came first to Praeneste was bidden to await his colleague there. It so chanced that both came to Praeneste on the same day. Thence, an edict being sent ahead that on the third day after a full senate should be present at the temple of Bellona, they drew near the city with the whole multitude pouring out to meet them. And the people not only saluted them all crowding round, but, each man for himself longing to touch the victorious right hands of the consuls, some gave them joy, some gave thanks that by their work the commonwealth was safe. In the senate, when, in the manner of all commanders, they had set forth what they had done and asked that, for the commonwealth bravely and happily administered, honor be paid to the immortal gods and they themselves be allowed to enter the city in triumph, the fathers answered that they decreed what they asked, by the desert first of the gods, then, next to the gods, of the consuls; and, a thanksgiving in the name of both and a triumph being decreed to each, it was agreed between themselves—lest, having waged the war with one mind, they should sunder the triumph—on this wise: since both the action had been in the province of Marcus Livius, and on the day the battle was fought his had chanced to be the auspice, and the Livian army had been led back and was come to Rome, while Nero’s could not be brought from the province, that Marcus Livius should enter the city in a four-horse chariot with the soldiers following, and Gaius Claudius ride on horseback without his soldiers. The triumph thus shared increased the glory of both, but most of all of him who, as far as he went before his colleague in desert, so far yielded to him in honor. That horseman, men said, had run across the length of Italy in the space of six days, and had fought a pitched battle with Hasdrubal in Gaul on the very day on which Hannibal believed him to have his camp set facing himself in Apulia: so one consul, for either part of Italy, had set against two captains, against two armies, on this side his judgment, on that his body. The name of Nero had sufficed to keep Hannibal in his camp; and by what else than by his coming had Hasdrubal been overwhelmed and blotted out? Let the other consul therefore ride aloft in his chariot with teams of many horses, if he would: on one horse the true triumph rode through the city; and Nero, even were he to go on foot, would be memorable, whether for the glory won in that war or for the glory scorned in that triumph. These talkings of the onlookers followed Nero all the way to the Capitol. Into the treasury they brought three million sesterces and eighty thousand asses. To his soldiers Marcus Livius distributed six-and-fifty asses apiece; the like sum Gaius Claudius promised to his soldiers in their absence when he should have returned to the army. It was noted that on that day more verses in soldiers’ jest were thrown at Gaius Claudius than at their own consul; that the horsemen extolled the lieutenants Lucius Veturius and Quintus Caecilius with great praises, and urged the commons to make them consuls for the next year; and that the consuls had added the weight of their own authority to this prerogative of the horsemen, recounting on the following day in the assembly how brave and faithful had been, above all, the service of the two lieutenants.

As the time of the elections drew near, and it had been resolved that they be held by a dictator, the consul Gaius Claudius named his colleague Marcus Livius dictator, and Livius named Quintus Caecilius master of the horse. By Marcus Livius the dictator there were elected as consuls Lucius Veturius and Quintus Caecilius—the very man who was then master of the horse. Then the election of praetors was held; chosen were Gaius Servilius, Marcus Caecilius Metellus, Tiberius Claudius Asellus, and Quintus Mamilius Turrinus, who was then plebeian aedile. The elections finished, the dictator, laying down his office and disbanding his army, set out, by decree of the senate, into the province of Etruria to hold inquiries—as to which of the peoples of the Etruscans or Umbrians had, just before Hasdrubal’s coming, plotted to revolt from the Romans to him, and which had helped him with auxiliaries or supplies or any aid. These things were done that year at home and in the field. The Roman Games were three times wholly repeated by the curule aediles Gnaeus Servilius Caepio and Servius Cornelius Lentulus; likewise the Plebeian Games were once wholly repeated by the plebeian aediles praetor/">Marcus Pomponius Matho and Quintus Mamilius Turrinus. In the thirteenth year of the Punic War, when Lucius Veturius Philo and Quintus Caecilius Metellus were consuls, Bruttium was decreed to both as their province, to wage war with Hannibal. Then the praetors cast lots: Marcus Caecilius Metellus drew the city jurisdiction, Quintus Mamilius the foreign, Gaius Servilius Sicily, Tiberius Claudius Sardinia. The armies were thus divided: to one of the consuls was given the army that Gaius Claudius, consul of the year before, had had, to the other that of Quintus Claudius the propraetor—each was two legions; in Etruria the proconsul Marcus Livius, whose command had been prolonged for the year, was to take over the two legions of volunteer-slaves from the propraetor Gaius Terentius; and it was decreed that Quintus Mamilius, handing over his jurisdiction to his colleague, should hold Gaul with the army that the praetor Lucius Porcius had commanded, and he was ordered to lay waste the fields of those Gauls who had revolted to the Carthaginians at Hasdrubal’s coming. To Gaius Servilius, with the two Cannae legions, as Gaius Mamilius had held it, the keeping of Sicily was given. From Sardinia the old army, which Aulus Hostilius had commanded, was brought home; the new legion which Tiberius Claudius was to take over with him the consuls enrolled. To Quintus Claudius, that he should hold Tarentum, and to Gaius Hostilius Tubulus, that he should hold Capua as his province, the command was prolonged for the year. Marcus Valerius the proconsul, who had been in charge of guarding the seacoast about Sicily, was ordered, after handing over thirty ships to the praetor Gaius Servilius, to return to the city with all the rest of the fleet.

In a state troubled by so great a crisis of war, while men referred the causes of all things prosperous and adverse to the gods, many prodigies were reported: at Tarracina the temple of Jupiter, at Satricum that of Mater Matuta, had been struck from heaven; the people of Satricum were terrified no less by two snakes that glided into the temple of Jupiter through the very doors; from Antium it was reported that bloody ears of corn had appeared to the reapers; at Caere a two-headed pig and a lamb both male and female had been born; and at Alba two suns were said to have been seen, and at Fregellae light to have arisen by night; and an ox in the Roman country was said to have spoken, and the altar of Neptune to have streamed with much sweat in the circus-flaminius/">Circus Flaminius; and the temples of Ceres, of Salus, and of Quirinus had been struck from heaven. These prodigies the consuls were bidden to expiate with full-grown victims and to hold a thanksgiving for one day—this was done by decree of the senate. But more than all the prodigies, whether reported from abroad or seen at home, the fire in the temple of Vesta gone out terrified men’s minds, and the Vestal whose watch had been of that night was scourged by order of Publius Licinius the pontiff. Though this had befallen with the gods portending nothing, but by mere human carelessness, it was nevertheless resolved both that it be expiated with full-grown victims and that a thanksgiving be held at the temple of Vesta. Before the consuls set out for the war, they were admonished by the senate to take care for bringing the commons back onto the land: by the kindness of the gods the war had been pushed away from the city of Rome and from Latium, and men might dwell on the land without fear; it was by no means fitting that more care should be given to the tilling of Sicily than of Italy. But the thing was by no means easy for the people, what with the free cultivators carried off by the war, and the scarcity of slaves, and the cattle plundered and the farmsteads pulled down or burned; yet a great part, compelled by the consuls’ authority, moved back onto the land. What had stirred the raising of this matter was the embassy of the people of Placentia and Cremona, complaining that their territory was raided and laid waste by their Gallic neighbors, that a great part of their colonists had drifted away, and that they had now thinly peopled cities and a country waste and deserted. To the praetor Mamilius was given the charge of protecting the colonies from the enemy; the consuls, by decree of the senate, proclaimed that those who were citizens of Cremona and Placentia should return to the colonies by a fixed day. Then at the beginning of spring they too set out for the war. The consul Quintus Caecilius took over the army from Gaius Nero, Lucius Veturius from Quintus Claudius the propraetor, and filled them up with the new soldiers he had himself enrolled. The consuls led the army into the territory of Consentia, and, ravaging it far and wide, when their column was now heavy with plunder, were thrown into disorder in a narrow defile by the Bruttians and the Numidian javelin-men, so that not the plunder only but the armed men too were in danger. There was, however, more tumult than fighting, and, the plunder sent on ahead, the legions came off safe into cultivated country. Thence they marched into the land of the Lucanians; that whole nation returned without a struggle into the dominion of the Roman people.

With Hannibal there was nothing done that year. For neither did he offer himself, in a wound so fresh both to the state and to himself, nor did the Romans provoke him while he kept quiet: such power they reckoned to be in that one leader, even though all else around him were falling in ruin. And I know not whether he was more to be marveled at in adversity than in prosperity, seeing that, when for thirteen years he had waged war in the enemy’s land, so far from home, with varying fortune, with an army not of his own citizens but mixed of the offscourings of all nations—men who had in common no law, no custom, no tongue, but a different bearing, a different dress, different arms, different rites, different worship, all but different gods—he yet so bound them together by some single bond that no mutiny broke out, either among themselves or against their leader, although often both money for pay and supplies in the enemy’s country were lacking, by want of which, in the former Punic war, many unspeakable deeds had been done between leaders and soldiers. But after the army of Hasdrubal with its leader, in whom all the hope of victory had been reposed, was destroyed, and after he had yielded all the rest of Italy by withdrawing into the corner of Bruttium, to whom would it not seem a marvel that no movement was made in his camp? For to the rest there had been added this too, that there was no hope even of feeding the army save from the Bruttian land, which, even if it were all tilled, was yet too small for the feeding of so great an army; and besides, the war had carried off a great part of the youth from the tillage of the fields, and the vice ingrained in the nation’s habit of practicing soldiery by brigandage; nor was anything sent from home, the rulers being anxious about holding Spain, as though all were prosperous in Italy. In Spain affairs stood in one part the same as in Italy, in another far different: the same, in that the Carthaginians, beaten in battle and their general lost, had been driven to the farthest shore of Spain, to the Ocean; different, in that Spain, not only more than Italy but more than any region of the earth, was fitted, by the nature of its places and its men, for renewing war. And so, accordingly, though it was the first of the provinces, at least of those on the mainland, that the Romans entered, it was the last of all to be wholly subdued—only in our own age, under the leadership and auspice of Augustus Caesar. There at that time Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, the greatest and most renowned commander of that war next to the Barcids, having returned from Gades in hope of renewing the war, and helped by Mago son of Hamilcar, after holding levies through Further Spain, armed about fifty thousand foot and four thousand five hundred horse. Of the mounted forces the authorities pretty well agree; of the foot some write that seventy thousand were brought up to the city of Silpia. There the two Punic commanders sat down upon the open plains, with the mind not to refuse battle.

Scipio, when the report of so great an army assembled was brought to him, judging neither that he was a match with his Roman legions alone for so great a multitude—so that the auxiliaries of the barbarians should not at least be set in array to make a show—nor yet that so much strength should be reposed in them that by changing sides they might turn the scale, as that had been the cause of disaster to his father and his uncle, sent Silanus ahead to Culchas, who reigned over eight-and-twenty towns, to receive from him the horse and foot he had promised to enroll during the winter; and he himself, setting out from Tarraco, and gathering moderate auxiliaries from the allies who dwell along the way, came to Castulo. Thither were brought by Silanus the auxiliaries, three thousand foot and five hundred horse. Then he advanced to the city of Baecula with his whole army of citizens and allies, foot and horse, five-and-forty thousand. As they were pitching camp, Mago and Masinissa attacked them with all their cavalry and would have thrown the workers into disorder, had not the horsemen, hidden behind a hill conveniently placed for that purpose by Scipio, charged unexpectedly upon them as they scattered. These routed the readiest of them, those who had ridden up nearest the rampart and against the very workers, almost before the battle was begun; with the rest, who had come on under their standards and in the order of march, the fight was longer and for a while doubtful. But when from the outposts first the light cohorts, then the soldiers drawn off from the work and bidden take up arms, came up in increasing numbers and fresh to relieve the weary, and a great column of armed men was now rushing from the camp into the battle, the Carthaginians and Numidians plainly turned their backs. And at first they retired by squadrons, in no disorder of ranks through panic or haste; then, after the Roman pressed more sharply on their rear and the charge could not be borne, mindful no longer of their ranks, they poured into flight wherever was nearest to each. And although by that battle the spirits of the Romans were somewhat raised and the enemy’s lessened, yet for several days following there was no respite from the raids of the horse and the light-armed.

When their strength had been sufficiently tried by these light contests, Hasdrubal first led his forces out into line, then the Romans too came forward; but each line stood drawn up before its own rampart, and, when battle was begun by neither side, as the day was now sinking toward setting, the forces were led back into camp, first by the Carthaginian, then by the Roman. This same thing was done for several days. Always the Carthaginian was the first to lead his forces out of camp, the first to give the signal of recall to men weary with standing; from neither side was there an advance, or a weapon thrown, or any cry raised. The center on the one side the Romans held, on the other the Carthaginians mingled with Africans; the wings were held by the allies—and on both sides these were Spaniards; before the wings, in front of the Punic line, the elephant-war/">elephants showed from afar like fortresses. Already in both camps the talk was that they would fight drawn up just as they had stood; that the centers, the Roman and the Carthaginian, between whom lay the cause of the war, would clash with equal might of spirit and of arms. When Scipio saw that this was firmly believed, he changed everything of set purpose on the day on which he meant to fight. At evening he gave the watchword through the camp that before light men and horses should be tended and fed, the horseman armed should hold his horse bridled and saddled. When the light was scarcely yet sure, he sent all his cavalry with the light-armed against the Punic outposts; then at once he himself advanced with the heavy column of the legions—against the expectation fixed both of his own men and of the enemy—the wings made firm with Roman soldiers, the allies taken into the center. Hasdrubal, roused by the shout of the horsemen, as he sprang from his tent, when he saw the uproar before the rampart and the alarm of his men and the standards of the legions gleaming afar and the plains full of the enemy, at once sent out all his cavalry against the horse; he himself came out of camp with the column of foot, and changed nothing of the usual order in drawing up his line. The cavalry battle had now long been doubtful, and could not by itself be decided, because for the beaten—and that happened almost by turns—there was a safe retreat into the line of foot; but when the lines were now no more than five hundred paces apart, Scipio, giving the signal of recall and opening his ranks, received all the cavalry and light-armed into the center, and, dividing them into two parts, posted them as reserves behind the wings. Then, when it was now time to begin the battle, he ordered the Spaniards—who made the center—to advance at a slow step; he himself, from the right wing—for there he was in command—sent a message to Silanus and Marcius to extend their wing to the left as they should see him stretching toward the right, and to join battle with the enemy with their nimble foot and horse before the centers could come together. Thus, the wings drawn apart, with three cohorts of foot apiece and three squadrons of horse, and the skirmishers besides, they led at a quick step against the enemy, the others following obliquely; there was a hollow in the middle, where the standards of the Spaniards advanced more sluggishly. And already the wings had clashed when the flower of the enemy’s line, the Punic veterans and the Africans, had not yet come within javelin-cast, nor dared they run apart to the wings to help the fighters there, lest they lay open the center to the enemy coming against them from the front. The wings were hard pressed by a double assault; the horse and the light-armed and the skirmishers, wheeling round the flanks, charged upon their sides; the cohorts pressed them in front, to break the wings away from the rest of the line.

And while in every part the fight was by no means equal, both because the crowd of Balearics and Spanish recruits had been thrown against the Roman and Latin soldier, and because, as the day wore on, the strength of Hasdrubal’s army too had begun to fail, overborne by the morning alarm and forced to go out hastily into line before they had strengthened their bodies with food—and to that end Scipio had purposely drawn out the day, that the battle might be late; for it was not until the seventh hour that the foot-standards charged the wings, and to the centers the fighting came considerably later, so that the heat of the noonday sun and the labor of standing under arms, and at the same time hunger and thirst, wore down their bodies before they came to grips with the enemy. And so they stood leaning on their shields. Now, over and above all else, the elephant-war/">elephants too, terrified by the tumultuous fashion of the fighting of horse and skirmishers and light-armed, had borne in from the wings upon the center of their own line. Worn therefore in body and in spirit, they gave ground, yet keeping their ranks, no otherwise than as a line still whole would retire at the command of its general. But when, the more sharply for that, the conquerors, perceiving the thing inclining, pressed upon them from every side, and the charge could not easily be withstood—though Hasdrubal held back and stood in the way of those giving ground, crying out that there were hills at their backs and a safe retreat if they fell back without haste—yet, fear conquering shame, when each man nearest the enemy gave ground, the backs were all at once turned and they poured themselves into flight. And at first they began to halt their standards at the roots of the hills and to recall the soldiers to their ranks, while the Romans hesitated to bring their line up the rising slope; then, when they saw the standards borne on without slackening, the flight was renewed and they were driven in panic into the camp. Nor was the Roman far from the rampart; and he would have taken the camp by such an onset, had not, out of a fierce sun, such as gleams between clouds heavy with rain, so great a downpour of water been let loose that the conquerors scarcely got themselves back into their own camp, and some were even seized by a religious dread of attempting anything further that day. The Carthaginians, though night and the rain called them, weary with toil and wounds, to needful rest, yet, because fear and danger gave no time for resting, since the enemy would assault the camp at first light, heightened their rampart with stones heaped from the neighboring valleys on every side, meaning to defend themselves by the fortification, since in arms there was too little safeguard; but the desertion of their allies made flight seem safer than delay. The beginning of the going-over was made by Attenes, chieftain of the Turdetani; he deserted with a great band of his countrymen; then two fortified towns with their garrisons were handed over to the Roman by their commandants; and lest the matter should creep further, men’s minds being once inclined to revolt, Hasdrubal in the silence of the next night struck his camp.

Scipio, when at first light those who were on the outposts reported that the enemy had gone, sent the cavalry ahead and ordered the advance; and the column was led at so quick a pace that, had they gone straight on the enemy’s tracks, they would beyond doubt have overtaken them. The guides were believed when they said there was another, shorter road to the river Baetis, that they might attack the enemy as they crossed. Hasdrubal, the river-crossing being closed, bent his march toward the Ocean, and from then on they went off scattered in the manner of fugitives; and so he made some space between himself and the Roman legions. The horse and the light-armed, meeting them now in the rear, now on the flanks, wearied and delayed them; but, when at frequent alarms the standards halted and now cavalry, now infantry battles with the skirmishers and the auxiliary foot were joined, the legions came up. From then on it was no longer a battle but a butchery, as of cattle, until the leader himself, the author of the flight, escaped onto the nearest hills with about six thousand half-armed men; the rest were slain or taken. The Carthaginians threw up in haste a makeshift camp on a very lofty height, and there, after the enemy had vainly tried to climb up by the unfavorable ascent, defended themselves without great difficulty. But a siege in a bare and barren place was scarcely tolerable for a few days; and so there were goings-over to the enemy. At last the leader himself, sending for ships—the sea was not far off—abandoned his army by night and fled to Gades. Scipio, hearing of the flight of the enemy’s leader, left ten thousand foot and a thousand horse with Silanus to blockade the camp; he himself, with the rest of his forces, in seventy days’ marches, returned to Tarraco, to look at once into the causes of the chieftains and the cities, that rewards might be apportioned according to a true estimate of their deserts. After his departure Masinissa, secretly meeting with Silanus, that he might keep his own nation too obedient to a new policy, crossed over into Africa with a few of his countrymen—the cause of so sudden a change being not so plain at the time as it was shown afterward by his most steadfast loyalty to extreme old age, that not even then had he acted without good reason. Mago thereafter, the ships being sent back to him by Hasdrubal, made for Gades; the rest, abandoned by their leaders, scattered, part by going over, part by flight, through the nearest cities, no band notable for number or strength. In this manner above all, by the leadership and auspice of Publius Scipio, the Carthaginians were driven out of Spain, in the fourteenth year after the war began, the fifth after Publius Scipio took over the province and the army. Not long after, Silanus returned to Scipio at Tarraco, reporting the war ended.

Lucius Scipio was sent to Rome with many noble prisoners, the bearer of the news that Spain was recovered. And while the rest were noising abroad that thing with great joy and glory, the one man who had done it, insatiable of valor and of true praise, reckoned the recovery of Spain a small measure of what he had conceived in hope and greatness of soul. Already he looked toward Africa and mighty Carthage, and toward the glory of that war, brought as it were to its consummation, for his own honor and name. And so, thinking he must lay the ground beforehand and win over the minds of kings and nations, he resolved to make trial first of king Syphax. He was king of the Masaesulians. The Masaesulians, a people bordering on the Moors, look toward that part of Spain where New Carthage is situated. There was at that time a treaty between the king and the Carthaginians; and Scipio, thinking it would weigh with him no more heavily and sacredly than treaties commonly do with barbarians, whose faith hangs upon their fortune, sent Gaius Laelius to him as his spokesman with gifts. The barbarian, pleased with them, and because affairs were then everywhere prosperous for the Romans, while for the Carthaginians they were adverse in Italy and in Spain now nothing at all, agreed to accept the friendship of the Romans; but for the confirming of it he would neither give nor receive a pledge save in the presence of the Roman commander himself. So Laelius, receiving from the king only this much surety, that Scipio’s coming should be safe, returned to Scipio. Syphax was of great moment for one aiming at the affairs of Africa, the wealthiest king of that land, already tried in war against the Carthaginians themselves, and with the borders of his kingdom conveniently set toward Spain, from which they are parted by a narrow strait. And so Scipio, judging it a thing worth seeking even at great peril, since it could not be had otherwise, left Lucius Marcius at Tarraco and Marcus Silanus at New Carthage—whither he had gone from Tarraco by long marches on foot—to guard Spain, and himself, with Gaius Laelius, setting out from New Carthage with two quinqueremes, crossed to Africa over a calm sea, mostly by oars, and now and then helped by a gentle breeze. It so chanced that at that very time Hasdrubal, driven out of Spain, had put into the harbor with seven triremes, and, his anchors cast, was bringing his ships to land, when the two quinqueremes were sighted; and, no one doubting they were the enemy’s and could be overwhelmed by the larger number before they entered the harbor, they made nothing but tumult and confusion of soldiers and sailors alike, who got their arms and ships ready to no purpose. For the sails, struck by a wind a little fresher from the deep, carried the quinqueremes into the harbor before the Carthaginians could weigh their anchors; nor did any dare to stir up further tumult in the king’s harbor. So Hasdrubal first, then Scipio and Laelius, having landed, went to the king.

And it seemed a magnificent thing to Syphax—nor was it otherwise—that the leaders of the two wealthiest peoples of that age should have come on one day to seek his peace and friendship. He invited both to be his guests; and, since chance had willed that they should be under one roof and at the same hearth, he tried to bring them into conference to do away their quarrels, Scipio refusing, both that there was no private grudge between himself and the Carthaginian which he should end by conference, and that on a matter of state he could do nothing with an enemy without the senate’s bidding. But when the king pressed hard that one of his guests should not seem shut out from the table, he did not refuse to bring himself to come to the same feast; and they supped together at the king’s house, and on the same couch, because so it pleased the king, Scipio and Hasdrubal reclined. So great moreover was the graciousness in Scipio and the natural readiness of his wit for all things, that he won over by his eloquent address not only Syphax, a barbarian unused to Roman ways, but even his bitterest enemy. Hasdrubal openly declared him more marvelous to him at the meeting face to face than for his deeds in war, and that he did not doubt that Syphax and his kingdom were already in the power of the Romans, such was that man’s art in winning men’s hearts. And so the Carthaginians must inquire not so much how Spain had been lost as take thought how to hold Africa: it was no roving abroad, no wandering for pleasure along delightful shores, that had brought so great a Roman commander, leaving his province newly won and his armies, to cross to Africa with two ships and trust himself to a hostile land, to the king’s power, to an untried faith, but the hope of grasping Africa. This, he said, Scipio had long been turning in his mind, this he openly chafed at, that he did not, as Hannibal did in Italy, so wage war in Africa. Scipio, the treaty struck with Syphax, set out from Africa, and, tossed on the deep by uncertain and for the most part savage winds, on the fourth day made the harbor of New Carthage.

Though the Spains were quiet, as far as the Punic war went, yet it was plain that certain cities, through consciousness of their guilt, were quiet from fear rather than from loyalty; and of these the most notable, both in size and in offense, were Iliturgi and Castulo. Castulo, when prosperity favored, had been an ally, but after the Scipios were cut off with their armies had revolted to the Carthaginians; the people of Iliturgi had added crime even to revolt, by betraying and putting to death those who, escaping from that disaster, had fled to them. Against these peoples, on his first coming when the Spains were doubtful, it would have been deserved rather than expedient to deal harshly; but now, all being quiet, since the time seemed come for exacting punishment, he summoned Lucius Marcius from Tarraco and sent him with a third part of the forces to assault Castulo, while he himself, with the rest of the army, in about five days’ marches came to Iliturgi. The gates were shut and everything set in readiness for warding off an assault; so well had the consciousness of what they knew themselves to have deserved served them in the stead of a declaration of war. From this too Scipio began to hearten his soldiers: that by shutting their gates the Spaniards had themselves declared what they had deserved to fear. And so the war must be waged against them with spirits far more hostile than against the Carthaginians; for with those the struggle was almost without anger, for empire and glory, but from these the penalty of treachery and cruelty and crime was to be exacted. The time had come in which they should avenge both the abominable slaughter of their fellow-soldiers and the fraud prepared against their own selves, had they too been carried thither in flight, and should sanction by a grim example for all time that no man should ever count a Roman citizen and soldier, in any fortune, a fit prey for outrage. Roused by this exhortation of their leader, they distributed scaling-ladders among picked men through the maniples, and, the army divided so that the lieutenant Laelius commanded one part, attacked the city in two places at once with a double terror. Not one leader, nor several chief men of the townsmen, but their own fear, born of consciousness of guilt, urged them to defend the city briskly. They remembered, and reminded the rest, that it was punishment, not victory, that was sought of them: where each man should meet his death, that, they said, was what mattered—whether in the fight and in the line, where Mars, who is common to both, often raises the conquered and casts down the conqueror, or afterward, their city burned and razed, before the eyes of their captured wives and children, amid stripes and chains, dying after all foul and unworthy sufferings. And so not the men of military age only, nor the men alone, but the women and boys too, beyond strength of mind and body, stood by; they handed weapons to the fighters, they carried stones to those strengthening the walls. For it was not liberty only that was at stake, which whets only the breasts of brave men, but the uttermost tortures and a foul death were before the eyes of all. Their spirits were kindled both by the rivalry of toil and danger and by the very sight of one another. And so the contest was begun with such ardor that that army, the tamer of all Spain, was again and again driven back from the walls by the youth of one town, and quailed in a fight by no means seemly. When Scipio saw this, fearing lest, with so many vain attempts of his men, the enemy’s spirit should rise and his soldiers grow slack, he reckoned that he himself must make the attempt and take his share of the danger, and, after rebuking the cowardice of his men, ordered the ladders brought and threatened to mount himself if the rest hung back. He had already, at no slight peril, come up to the walls when a shout was raised on every side by the soldiers, anxious for their commander, and ladders began to be raised at many points at once; and on the other side Laelius pressed in. Then the resistance of the townsmen was overcome, and, the defenders thrown down, the walls were seized. The citadel too, on that side where it seemed impregnable, was taken in the uproar.

African deserters, who were then among the Roman auxiliaries, while the townsmen were turned to defending the quarter from which danger appeared, and the Romans were climbing where they could come at the wall, marked out the highest part of the city, which, because it was shielded by a very high crag, was neither fortified by any work nor manned by defenders. Men of light bodies and made nimble by much exercise, carrying iron spikes with them, climbed where they could by the unevenly jutting points of the rock. Wherever too steep and smooth a stone met them, driving in spikes at moderate intervals, they made as it were steps; and, the foremost drawing up by the hand those that followed, the hindmost heaving up those who went before them, they reached the top. Thence they ran down with a shout into the city, now taken by the Romans. Then indeed it appeared that the city had been assaulted in anger and hatred. No one was mindful of taking men alive, no one of plunder, though all lay open to plundering; they slaughtered the unarmed and the armed alike, women equally with men; the cruel rage went even to the killing of infants. Then they threw fire upon the buildings and tore down what could not be consumed by the burning; such was their longing to wipe out even the traces of the city and to blot out the memory of the enemy’s dwelling. Thence Scipio led his army to Castulo, a city defended not by Spanish refugees only but also by the remnants of the Punic army gathered from their scattered flight everywhere. But the report of the disaster of the people of Iliturgi had come before Scipio’s arrival, and from it terror and despair had crept in; and, their causes being divers, since each wished to take counsel for himself without regard to the other, first an unspoken suspicion, then open discord made a rift between the Carthaginians and the Spaniards. Among these Cerdubelus was openly the author of surrender, Himilco commanded the Punic auxiliaries; and these, with the city, Cerdubelus, having secretly received a pledge, betrayed to the Roman. That victory was the gentler; nor had so great guilt been committed, and the voluntary surrender had somewhat softened the anger.

Marcius was then sent against the barbarians, to bring under law and dominion any who were not yet thoroughly subdued. Scipio returned to New Carthage to pay his vows to the gods and to give the gladiatorial show which he had made ready in honor of the death of his father and uncle. The show of gladiators was not of that kind of men whom it is the lanistae’s custom to match—slaves from the block and free men who put their blood up for sale: the service of all who fought was voluntary and given without pay. For some were sent by the chieftains to display a sample of the valor inbred in their nation; some of their own accord professed that they would fight to please the commander; others rivalry and the spirit of contest drew on, so that they challenged, and being challenged did not refuse; and some, disputes which they had been unable or unwilling to settle by argument, having agreed between themselves that the victor should have the matter, decided by the sword. Nor were they men of obscure birth, but men famous and distinguished, Corbis and Orsua, cousins, contending for the headship of the state which they called Ibes, professed that they would fight it out with the sword. Corbis was the elder; Orsua’s father had been chief next after his elder brother, the headship having come to him after his brother’s death. When Scipio wished to settle the dispute by words and to allay their anger, both said this had been refused them by their common kinsmen, and that they would have no other judge, of gods or men, than Mars. The elder strong in the use of arms, the younger fierce in the flower of his age, each preferring death in the contest to submitting to the other’s rule, when they could not be parted from so great a madness, gave the army a notable spectacle and a proof of how great an evil among mortals is the lust of rule. The elder, by skill in arms and by craft, easily overcame the brute strength of the younger. To this gladiatorial show were added funeral games, as far as the resources of a province and a camp could furnish.

Meanwhile the lieutenants were no less active. Marcius, having crossed the river Baetis, which the inhabitants call Certis, received two wealthy states into surrender without a struggle. There was a city, Astapa, always of the Carthaginian party; and this was less worthy of anger than that, beyond the necessities of war, they bore a peculiar hatred toward the Romans. Nor had they a city safe by site or fortification, to make their spirits fiercer; but the disposition of the inhabitants, delighting in brigandage, had driven them to make raids into the neighboring territory of the allies of the Roman people, and to cut off straggling Roman soldiers, sutlers, and traders. A great company too, because for a few the passage had been too unsafe, crossing their borders, they had surrounded by an ambush set in an unfavorable place and slaughtered. When the army was brought up to assault this city, the townsmen, conscious of their crimes, since neither did surrender seem safe with foes so embittered, nor was there hope of guarding their safety by walls or arms, resolved upon a deed against themselves and their own foul and savage. They marked out a place in the forum, whither they heaped the most precious of their goods. Upon that pile, when they had bidden their wives and children sit down, they built up wood around it and threw on faggots of brushwood. Then they charged fifty armed young men that, so long as the issue of the fight was in doubt, they should keep guard in that place over their fortunes and over those bodies dearer to them than their fortunes; but if they saw the thing going against them, and the city now on the point of being taken, they should know that all whom they saw going into battle would meet their death in the fight itself; and these men they besought by the gods above and below that, mindful of liberty—which that day must be ended either by an honorable death or by an infamous slavery—they should leave nothing on which an angry enemy might vent his cruelty; sword and fire were in their hands; let friendly and faithful hands rather consume what was doomed to perish than that enemies should mock it with proud insolence. To these exhortations was added a dire curse upon any whom hope or softness of spirit should turn from the purpose. Then, their column massed, with the gates flung open they burst out in great tumult; and there was no garrison strong enough set against them, because nothing could less be feared than that they should dare to come forth from their walls. A very few squadrons of horse and the light-armed, sent suddenly from the camp for that very purpose, met them. The fight was keener in onset and spirit than orderly in any array. And so the cavalry, which had first offered itself to the enemy, being driven back, brought terror upon the light-armed; and the battle would have been fought under the very rampart, had not the strength of the legions, in the very short time given for forming, drawn up its line. There too for a little while there was confusion about the standards, while the enemy, blind with fury, rushed upon wounds and the sword with frenzied daring; then the veteran soldier, steadfast against rash assaults, by the slaughter of the foremost held back those who followed. Trying soon after to advance of his own accord, when he saw that no one gave ground and that all stood resolved to die where they stood, he opened out his line—which the multitude of his armed men easily allowed him to do—and, embracing the enemy’s wings, cut them all down to a man as they fought in a ring.

And yet these things were done by enemies enraged and at that very moment fighting, against armed men and men resisting, by the law of war: a fouler butchery was going on within the city, where their own citizens were cutting down the unwarlike, unarmed throng of women and children, and throwing most of them, half-alive, onto the kindled pyre, the streams of blood quenching the rising flame; and at last, worn out themselves by the pitiable slaughter of their own, they flung themselves with their arms into the middle of the fire. The slaughter was already accomplished when the victorious Romans came upon it. And at the first sight of so foul a thing they stood for a while amazed; then, when they wished to snatch out of the fire the gold and silver that gleamed amid the heap of other things, by the greed natural to man, some were caught by the flame, others scorched by the blast of the heat, since for the foremost there was no retreat, the vast throng pressing close behind. So Astapa was consumed by fire and sword without plunder for the soldiers. Marcius, having received the surrender of the rest of that region through fear, led his victorious army back to Scipio at Carthage. In those very days deserters came from Gades, promising that they would betray the city and the Punic garrison that was in it, and the commander of the garrison with his fleet. Mago had halted there after his flight, and, gathering ships in the Ocean, had collected a good number of auxiliaries both from across the strait, from the coast of Africa, and from the nearest parts of Spain, through Hanno his lieutenant. A pledge given and received with the deserters, both Marcius was sent thither with the cohorts stripped for speed, and Laelius with seven triremes and one quinquereme, that by land and sea they might manage the business by common counsel.

Scipio himself, taken with a grave sickness—made graver, however, by report, since each man, by that lust inbred in mortals of feeding rumors, added of set purpose something to what he had heard—threw the whole province, and most of all its distant parts, into disorder; and it appeared what a mighty upheaval a true disaster would have stirred, when an empty rumor had roused such storms. Neither did the allies remain in their loyalty, nor the army in its duty. Mandonius and Indibilis, who, because they had marked out in their minds the kingdom of Spain for themselves once the Carthaginians were driven thence, had got nothing answering to their hope, roused their countrymen—they were Lacetani—and, the youth of the Celtiberians being stirred up, laid waste in hostile fashion the Suessetan and Sedetan territory, allies of the Roman people. Another madness, this time a civil one, arose in the camp at Sucro; there were eight thousand soldiers there, set as a garrison over the peoples who dwell on this side the Ebro. Their minds had been disturbed, not first when the doubtful rumors of the commander’s life were brought, but already before, by the license gathered, as commonly happens, from long idleness; and not a little because, used to live more loosely on plunder in an enemy’s country, they found things straiter in peace. At first only secret talk was sown: if there was war in the province, what were they doing among men at peace? but if the war was now done and the province finished, why were they not carried back to Italy? Pay too had been demanded more insolently than was consistent with soldierly usage and modesty; and the tribunes going their rounds of the watches had been reviled by the sentinels; and some had gone by night to plunder the peaceful country round about; at last by day and openly they left the standards without leave. Everything was managed by the caprice and license of the soldiers, nothing by the rule or discipline of war or by the command of those in charge. Yet the form of a Roman camp held together by this one hope, that, reckoning the tribunes, from the contagion of their madness, would not be free from the mutiny and revolt, they let them give judgment at headquarters and asked them for the watchword and went to their posts and watches in order; and, as they had taken away the substance of authority, so they kept of their own accord the show of obedience by commanding themselves. Then the mutiny broke out, after they perceived that the tribunes blamed and disapproved what was being done, and tried to oppose it, and openly refused to be partners in their madness. And so, the tribunes being driven from headquarters and soon after from the camp, the command was by the consent of all conferred on the leaders of the mutiny, common soldiers, Gaius Albius Calenus and Gaius Atrius the Umbrian; who, by no means content with the tribunes’ insignia, dared even to handle the marks of the supreme command, the rods and axes; nor did it come into their minds that over their own backs, their own necks, hung those rods and axes which they bore before them to terrify others. The false belief in Scipio’s death blinded their wits, under the now-spread rumor of which they doubted not that all Spain would blaze up in war: in that tumult, they thought, both money could be levied from the allies and the neighboring cities plundered; and, all being in confusion, while all men dared all things, what they themselves did would be the less marked.

While they looked, time and again, for fresh news not only of the death but even of the funeral, and no one came, and the rumor, rashly sprung up, was dying away, the first authors of it began to be sought; and, each withdrawing himself, that he might seem to have believed the thing rashly rather than to have invented it, the leaders, abandoned, now shuddered at their own insignia, and at the true and lawful power that would soon be turned against them in place of the empty image of command which they bore. While the mutiny was thus stunned, when sure authorities brought word that Scipio first lived, then was even in health, seven military tribunes, sent by Scipio himself, came up. At their first arrival the men’s spirits were exasperated; but soon, the tribunes soothing with gentle words those they met, whom they knew, they were softened. For going round the tents at first, then, at headquarters and the general’s quarters, wherever they saw knots of men talking among themselves, they addressed them, asking what was the cause of their anger and of their sudden frenzy rather than charging them with the deed. The common cry was that the pay had not been given on the day; and that, at the very time when the crime of the people of Iliturgi had appeared, after the slaughter of two commanders and two armies, the Roman name had been defended by their valor and the province held, the people of Iliturgi had the punishment their guilt deserved, but there was no one to render thanks for their own good deeds. To such complaints the tribunes answered that they asked what was fair, and that they would lay it before the commander; they were glad that there was nothing more grievous or past healing; and Publius Scipio, by the kindness of the gods, and the commonwealth were able to render thanks. Scipio, used to wars but a novice to the storms of mutiny, was anxious lest either the army should exceed measure in offending or he himself in punishing. For the present it was resolved that things be handled gently, as they had begun, and, collectors of the pay being sent round the tributary cities, to give hope of pay near at hand; and an edict was straightway posted that they should assemble at New Carthage to seek their pay, whether they preferred to come in detachments or all together. The mutiny, quiet of itself and now languishing, was quieted utterly by the sudden cessation of the Spanish revolt; for Mandonius and Indibilis, abandoning their undertaking, had withdrawn into their own borders when word came that Scipio was alive; nor was there now any man, citizen or foreigner, with whom they might share their frenzy. Looking round upon every plan, they had nothing left save the one safest refuge from evil counsels, to commit themselves to the commander’s anger—just, if it must be—or to his clemency, which need not be despaired of: even enemies, with whom he had fought it out by the sword, he had pardoned; their own mutiny had been without a wound, without bloodshed, neither atrocious in itself nor deserving an atrocious punishment—as human wits are all too eloquent in lightening each man’s own fault. The one doubt was whether they should go to seek their pay in separate cohorts or all together. The opinion inclined, as the safer course they judged, that all should go together.

In the same days in which they were thus debating, there was a council at Carthage about them, and it was disputed in opinion whether punishment should be visited only upon the authors of the mutiny—and these were in number no more than five-and-thirty—or whether so foul a precedent, a defection rather than a mutiny, should be avenged by the death of more. The gentler opinion prevailed, that the punishment should rest where the fault had arisen: for the multitude a rebuke was enough. The council dismissed, that the thing might seem the real business, an expedition against Mandonius and Indibilis was proclaimed to the army that was at Carthage, and they were bidden to make ready rations for some days. The seven tribunes who before had gone to Sucro to allay the mutiny were sent to meet the army, and the names of five ringleaders of the mutiny apiece were given to them, that they might, through fit men, invite them with kindly look and word to be their guests, and, having lulled them with wine, bind them. They were now not far from Carthage when they heard from those they met that the whole army would set out next day with Marcus Silanus against the Lacetani; and this not only freed their minds of all the fear that had silently lurked in them, but made them greatly glad, because they reckoned they would rather have the commander to themselves than themselves be in his power. At sunset they entered the city and saw the other army making all ready for the march. They were received with talk deliberately framed—that their coming was welcome and timely to the commander, since they had arrived just at the setting-out of the other army—and they refreshed their bodies. By the tribunes, without any uproar, the authors of the mutiny, brought through fit men into their lodgings, were seized and bound. At the fourth watch the baggage of the army, whose march was feigned, began to set out; toward dawn the standards were moved, but the column was held back at the gate, and guards were sent round all the gates, that no one might leave the city. Then those who had come the day before were summoned to an assembly; and fiercely they ran together into the forum to the commander’s tribunal, meaning of their own accord to terrify him with their shouts. At the same moment the commander mounted the tribunal, and the armed men, brought back from the gates, ranged themselves in the rear of the unarmed assembly. Then all their fierceness fell, and, as they afterward confessed, nothing so terrified them as the strength and color of the commander, beyond their hope—him whom they had thought to see broken—and a countenance such as, they said, they did not remember even in the battle-line. He sat silent a while, until it was reported that the authors of the mutiny had been led down into the forum and that all was made ready.

Then, silence being made by the herald, he began thus: "Never did I believe that words would fail me wherewith to address my army—not that I have ever practiced speech rather than deeds, but because, kept almost from boyhood in the camp, I had grown used to soldiers’ tempers. But how to speak before you, I find neither counsel nor words—you whom I know not even by what name I ought to call. Citizens? you who have revolted from your fatherland. Soldiers? you who have refused the command and the auspices, who have broken the sanctity of your oath. Enemies? Your bodies, your faces, your dress, your bearing I recognize as those of fellow-citizens; your deeds, your words, your plans, your spirits I see to be those of enemies. For what have you wished or hoped, save the same as the Ilergetes and Lacetani? And yet they followed Mandonius and Indibilis, men of royal nobility, as leaders of their madness: you handed over the auspices and the command to Atrius the Umbrian and Albius the Calenian. Deny that you all did this, or wished it done, soldiers; that it was the frenzy and madness of a few I will gladly believe, you denying it; for the things that have been committed are not such as, were they spread upon the whole army, could be expiated without huge atonements. Against my will I touch these things, as it were wounds; but unless they are touched and handled they cannot be healed. For my part, I believed that, the Carthaginians being driven from Spain, there was no place in the whole province, no men, where my life was hateful; so had I borne myself not only toward allies but even toward enemies: in my own camp—lo, how my belief deceived me!—the report of my death was not only received but even longed for. Not that I wish to spread the crime over all—for indeed, did I believe that my whole army had wished my death, here, before your eyes, I would die at once, nor would a life be sweet to me hateful to my fellow-citizens and my soldiers. But every multitude, like the sea by its own nature unmoved, is stirred by winds and breezes; so calm or storm is in you; and the cause and origin of all the frenzy lies with the ringleaders—you went mad by contagion. You who, even today, seem to me not to know to what madness you have proceeded; what you have dared against me, against your fatherland and parents and children, against the gods who witness the oath, against the auspices under which you serve, against the usage of soldiery and the discipline of your forefathers, against the majesty of the supreme command. Of myself I say nothing—you may have believed it rashly rather than greedily; I may, after all, be that man with whom the army might well be wearied of my command: but what had the fatherland deserved of you, that you should betray it by joining counsels with Mandonius and Indibilis? What the Roman people, when you took the command away from tribunes created by the people’s vote and gave it to private men, and, not content with that, handed over the rods of your commander, the Roman army, to men who had never had a slave to command? Albius and Atrius pitched their tent at headquarters; the trumpet sounded before them; the watchword was sought of them; they sat on the tribunal of Publius Scipio; the lictor attended; the way was cleared before them; the rods with the axes were borne in front. That stones should rain and lightnings be hurled from heaven, and beasts bring forth unwonted births—these you count portents: this is the portent that can be expiated by no victims, by no supplications, without the blood of those who have dared so great a crime.

"And I, although no crime has reason in it, yet, as in a wicked matter, would gladly know what was your mind, what your design. Once a legion sent as a garrison to Regium, after slaying by treachery the chief men of the state, held the wealthy city for ten years; for which crime the whole legion, four thousand men, were beheaded in the forum at Rome. But they, first, did not follow Atrius the Umbrian, a half-sutler, a leader of a name even of ill omen, but Decius Vibellius, a military tribune, nor did they join themselves with Pyrrhus, or with the Samnites or Lucanians, enemies of the Roman people: you both shared counsels with Mandonius and Indibilis and would have joined arms with them. They meant to hold Regium for a perpetual seat, as the Campanians held Capua, taken from its old Tuscan dwellers, and the Mamertines Messana in Sicily, with no thought of provoking the Roman people or its allies to war: were you going to make Sucro your dwelling-place? where, if I, your commander, on leaving when the province was finished, had left you behind, you ought to have implored the faith of gods and men because you were not returning to your wives and children. But the memory of these too, as of your fatherland and of me, you may have cast out of your minds: I wish to follow out the course of a design wicked, indeed, but not to the last pitch demented. While I lived and the rest of the army was safe—the army with which in a single day I took Carthage, with which I routed, put to flight, and drove out of Spain four commanders and four armies of the Carthaginians—were you, eight thousand men, all assuredly of less worth than Albius and Atrius, to whom you subjected yourselves, going to wrest the province of Spain from the Roman people? I put away and remove my own name; let me have been wronged by nothing beyond your too-easily-believed report of my death: but what? if I had died, was the commonwealth to die with me, was the empire of the Roman people to fall with me? Jupiter Best and Greatest forbid that the city, founded with the auspices and the gods’ authority to be eternal, should be of one age with this frail and mortal body. Flaminius, Paulus, Gracchus, Postumius Albinus, Marcus Marcellus, Titus Quinctius Crispinus, Gnaeus Fulvius, my own Scipios—so many and so illustrious commanders carried off in one war—the Roman people survives, and will survive though a thousand others perish, now by the sword, now by sickness: was the commonwealth to be borne to burial at my single funeral? You yourselves, here in Spain, when my father and uncle, two commanders, had been killed, chose Septimus Marcius as your leader against the Carthaginians exulting in their fresh victory. And I speak as though Spain would have been without a leader: was Marcus Silanus, sent into the province with the same right and the same command as I, was Lucius Scipio my brother and Gaius Laelius, my lieutenants, wanting as avengers of the majesty of the empire? Could army be matched with army, leaders with leaders, in dignity, in cause? And if you were superior in all these, would you bear arms against your fatherland, against your fellow-citizens? Would you wish Africa to rule over Italy, Carthage over the city of Rome? For what wrong of the fatherland?

"Coriolanus once an unjust condemnation, a wretched and undeserved exile, drove to go and assault his fatherland; yet private piety called him back from public parricide: what grief, what anger spurred you? Was pay reckoned a few days late, while the commander was sick, a cause worthy enough that you should declare war upon your fatherland, that you should revolt to the Ilergetes from the Roman people, that nothing of things divine or human should be inviolate to you? Mad you have surely been, soldiers; nor did a greater violence of disease fall upon my body than upon your minds. My spirit shudders to recount what men have believed, what hoped, what wished: let oblivion blot it all out, if it can; if not, let silence at least cover it. I will not deny that my speech has seemed to you grim and harsh: how much harsher, do you think, are your deeds than my words? And you think it fair that I should bear what you have done: yet you cannot bear with equal mind even to have all said? But not even these very things shall be cast in your teeth further. Would that you might forget them as easily as I shall forget. And so, as concerns you all, if you repent your error, I have punishment and to spare: Albius the Calenian and Atrius the Umbrian and the rest of the authors of the abominable mutiny shall atone with their blood for what they have done. To you the sight of their punishment ought to be not only not bitter but even joyful, if a sound mind has returned; for against no men have they plotted more hostilely or more as enemies than against you." Scarcely had he made an end of speaking when, by prearrangement, terror of every kind at once was spread before their eyes and ears. The army, which had ringed the assembly round, beat upon its shields with its swords; the herald’s voice was heard summoning by name the condemned in council; naked they were dragged into the midst, and at once the whole apparatus of punishment was brought out. They were bound to the stake and scourged and beheaded, those present so numbed with fear that not only no fiercer cry against the savagery of the punishment, but not even a groan, was heard. Then all were dragged out of the midst, and the place being cleansed, the soldiers, called by name before the military tribunes, swore the oath of allegiance to Publius Scipio, and the pay was paid out to each man by name. This was the end and issue of the mutiny of the soldiers begun at Sucro.

About the same time Hanno, lieutenant of Mago, sent from Gades with a small band of Africans, by tempting the Spaniards with pay armed about four thousand of their youth. Then, stripped of his camp by Lucius Marcius—the greater part of the soldiers killed in the confusion of the camp’s capture, some lost also in the flight, while the cavalry pursued the scattered men—he himself escaped with a few. While these things were doing at the river Baetis, Laelius meanwhile, carried through the strait into the Ocean, came with his fleet to Carteia. That city lies on the shore of the Ocean, where the sea first opens out from the narrow jaws of the strait. There had been hope, as was said before, of recovering Gades without a struggle by betrayal, men coming of their own accord into the Roman camp to promise the thing. But the betrayal was uncovered too soon, and Mago, having seized them all, handed them over to praetor/">Adherbal the praetor to be carried to Carthage. Adherbal, having put the conspirators aboard a quinquereme and sent it ahead, because it was slower than a trireme, himself with eight triremes followed at a moderate distance. The quinquereme was now entering the strait when Laelius, himself too in a quinquereme, putting out from the harbor of Carteia with seven triremes following, bore down upon Adherbal and his triremes, confident that the quinquereme, once caught in the rushing strait, could not turn back against the contrary tide. The Carthaginian, in the sudden affair, wavered a while in doubt whether to follow the quinquereme or to turn his beaks against the enemy. That very hesitation took from him the chance of declining the fight; for now they were within javelin-cast and the enemy pressed on every side. The tide too had taken from them the power of managing their ships; nor was it like a sea-fight, where nothing is voluntary, nothing of skill or design. The single nature of the strait and the tide was master of the whole contest, sweeping ships, whether of friend or foe, vainly straining with the oars in the contrary direction; and you might see the fleeing ship, whirled back by an eddy, borne in upon the victors, and the pursuing one, if it fell into a contrary draught of the sea, turning away in the manner of one in flight. And now in the very battle, while one ship made with hostile beak for an enemy’s vessel, it took, itself slewed sideways, the stroke of another’s beak; and while one was set crosswise to the foe, it was suddenly spun round upon its prow. While among the triremes the battle was joined doubtful, fortune ruling it, the Roman quinquereme, whether steadier by its weight or cleaving the eddies the better with its more numerous banks of oars, since it was the more easily steered, sank two triremes, and, carried past one by its rush, swept off the oars of one side; and it would have crippled the rest it caught, had not Adherbal with the five remaining ships crossed to Africa under sail.

Laelius, victorious, sailed back to Carteia. Hearing there what had been done at Gades—that the betrayal was uncovered and the conspirators sent to Carthage, and the hope on which they had come brought to nothing—he sent word to Lucius Marcius that, unless they wished to waste time in vain by sitting before Gades, they must return to the commander; and Marcius agreeing, a few days later both returned to Carthage. At their departure not only did Mago breathe again, hard pressed as he was by a double fear by land and sea, but, on hearing too of the revolt of the Ilergetes, conceiving the hope of recovering Spain, he sent messengers to the senate at Carthage who, exaggerating in words both the civil mutiny in the Roman camp and the defection of the allies, should urge them to send auxiliaries by which the empire of Spain, handed down from their fathers, might be regained. Mandonius and Indibilis, having withdrawn into their own borders, kept quiet for a while in suspense, until they should learn what was determined about the mutiny, not doubting that, if the error of the citizens were pardoned, they too could be pardoned. But after the savagery of the punishment was noised abroad, reckoning that their own guilt would be weighed at a like penalty, they called their countrymen again to arms, and, gathering the auxiliaries they had had before, crossed into the Sedetan territory, where at the beginning of the revolt they had had their standing camp, with twenty thousand foot and two thousand five hundred horse.

Scipio, having easily won back the soldiers’ minds by paying the wage alike to all, guilty and guiltless, and by a face and speech to all appeased, before he moved his camp from Carthage, called an assembly and, inveighing at length against the treachery of the rebel chieftains, declared that he went to avenge that crime in a temper by no means the same as that with which he had lately healed the error of his fellow-citizens. That error he had expiated, as one cutting his own flesh, with groans and tears, by the lives of thirty men, for the imprudence or guilt of eight thousand: now with a glad and erect spirit he went to the slaughter of the Ilergetes. For they were neither born in the same land with the Romans nor joined to them by any alliance: the one bond there had been, of faith and friendship, they themselves had broken by their crime. In his own army, besides that he saw all to be citizens or allies and of the Latin name, he was moved by this too, that there was scarcely a soldier who had not been brought from Italy either by his uncle Gnaeus Scipio, the first of the Roman name to come into that province, or by his father the consul, or by himself. All were used to the name and the auspices of the Scipios; men whom he wished to lead home with him to their deserved triumph, men whose presence he hoped for when he should seek the consulship, as though the honor were the common concern of all. As for the expedition that pressed, whoever called that a war forgot his own deeds. By Hercules, Mago, who had fled with a few ships beyond the bounds of the earth to an island girt by the Ocean, gave him more concern than the Ilergetes; for there were both a Carthaginian commander and some Punic garrison, however small, while here were brigands and brigands’ leaders, who, though they had some force for laying waste their neighbors’ fields and burning their dwellings and driving off their cattle, yet in the line and under joined standards had none; they would fight trusting to swiftness for flight rather than to arms. And so it was not because he saw any danger from them, or the seed of a greater war, that he had judged the Ilergetes must be crushed before he left the province, but, first, that so wicked a revolt might not go unpunished, and next, that no enemy might be said to be left in a province subdued with such valor and such fortune. Therefore, with the gods’ good help, let them follow him, not so much to wage war—for there was no contest with an equal foe—as to exact punishment of wicked men.

Dismissing them from this speech, he bade them make ready for the march on the next day; and setting out, on the tenth day he came to the river Ebro. Crossing the stream, on the fourth day he pitched his camp in sight of the enemy. Before it lay a plain, hemmed about by mountains. Into this valley Scipio, having ordered cattle—most of them driven off from the enemy’s own fields—to be driven forward to provoke the barbarians’ ferocity, sent the light-armed in support, from whom, when the fight had been begun by skirmishing, he ordered Laelius with the cavalry to charge from hiding. A mountain conveniently jutting out screened the cavalry ambush, and there was no delay to the battle. The Spaniards charged at the cattle seen afar, the light-armed at the Spaniards busied with the booty. First they harassed them with missiles; then, the light javelins, which could provoke rather than decide the fight, being thrown away, they drew their swords and the work began foot to foot; and the infantry battle would have been doubtful had not the cavalry come up. Nor only did they, charging from the front, trample down those before them, but some, riding round by the lowest part of the slope, threw themselves across the enemy’s rear to cut off most of them; and the slaughter was greater than light skirmishing battles are wont to produce. The barbarians’ spirits were kindled by the adverse fight rather than cast down. And so, that they might not seem dismayed, at first light next day they came forward into line. The narrow valley, as was said before, could not hold all their forces; about two-thirds of the foot and all the cavalry came down into line; what was left of the foot they posted on a slope across. Scipio, judging that the narrows were on his side—both because the fight in a strait place would be fitter for the Roman soldier than the Spaniard, and because the enemy’s line had been drawn down into a place that would not hold all their multitude—added a new device too in his mind: that he could not surround them with his cavalry on the wings in so narrow a space, and that the cavalry the enemy had led down with their foot would be useless to him. And so he ordered Laelius to lead the horse round over the hills by as hidden a march as he could, and to part the cavalry battle as far as possible from the infantry: he himself turned all the standards of his foot against the enemy; four cohorts he set in front, because he could not deploy his line more widely. He made no delay in fighting, that by the very engagement he might draw their eyes from the horsemen passing over the hills; nor did they perceive the cavalry led round until they caught the tumult of the cavalry fight in their rear. So there were two separate battles; two lines of foot, two of horse, fought along the length of the plain, because the narrows did not allow a battle mixed of either kind. On the Spaniards’ side, since neither did the foot help the horse nor the horse the foot, the foot, rashly committed to the plain in reliance on the horse, was cut down, the horse, surrounded, could endure neither the foot in front—for the foot-forces were now laid low—nor the horse in the rear; and they too, after long defending themselves in a ring with their horses standing, were cut down to the last man, nor did any of the foot or horse who fought in the valley survive. The third part, which had stood on the hill rather to look on safely than to take part in the fight, had both room and time to flee. Among them the chieftains themselves fled, slipping away in the confusion before the whole line was surrounded.

The camp of the Spaniards was taken the same day, with about three thousand men, besides the rest of the plunder. The Romans and allies fell in that battle to the number of about twelve hundred; wounded were more than three thousand. The victory would have been less bloody had the fight been on a more open plain and one easy for taking flight. Indibilis, casting aside his designs of war, thinking nothing safer in his broken fortunes than the tried faith and clemency of Scipio, sent his brother Mandonius to him; who, falling at his knees, accused the fatal madness of that time, when, as by some pestilent contagion, not the Ilergetes only and the Lacetani but the Roman camp too had gone mad. His own state, and his brother’s, and that of the rest of their countrymen, was such that they would either, if so it seemed good, give back to Publius Scipio the life they had received from that same man, or, twice saved, devote forever to him the life owed for it. Before, they had had confidence in their cause, not yet having tried his clemency; now, on the contrary, they had no confidence in their cause, but placed all their hope in the victor’s mercy. It was an old custom of the Romans that, with one with whom friendship was joined neither by treaty nor on equal terms, they did not use their authority over him as over a subdued people until he had surrendered all things divine and human, hostages had been received, arms taken away, and garrisons set in the cities. Scipio, after inveighing in many words against Mandonius present and Indibilis absent, said that they had indeed deserved to perish by their own ill-doing, but that they would live by his and the Roman people’s kindness. For the rest, he would neither take away their arms nor demand hostages—for those were pledges of men fearing rebellion—he would leave them their arms free and their minds unbound; nor would he vent his cruelty, if they revolted, upon innocent hostages, but upon themselves, nor exact penalties of an unarmed but of an armed enemy. He left it to men who had tried either fortune to choose whether they would rather have the Romans propitious or angry. So Mandonius was dismissed, only a sum of money being demanded from which pay might be furnished to the soldiers. He himself, sending Marcius ahead into Further Spain and sending Silanus back to Tarraco, after waiting a few days until the Ilergetes paid out the money demanded, overtook with troops stripped for speed Marcius, now drawing near the Ocean.

The matter of Masinissa, already begun before, had been put off for one cause or another, because the Numidian wished by all means to meet with Scipio himself and to seal his faith with that man’s right hand; this was then the cause to Scipio of a journey so long and so far out of the way. Masinissa, while he was at Gades, being informed by Marcius that Scipio was drawing near, pretending that the horses shut up in the island were spoiling and bringing want of all things on the rest and feeling it themselves, and that besides the cavalry was rotting in idleness, prevailed on Mago to let him cross to the mainland to ravage the nearest fields of Spain. Having crossed, he sent ahead three chiefs of the Numidians to fix the time and place for the conference. Two of them Scipio ordered to be kept as hostages; the third being sent back to bring Masinissa where he was bidden, they came with a few men to the conference. Already before this the Numidian had been seized with admiration of the man from the report of his deeds, and had set in his mind too a great and noble shape of his body; but a greater reverence took him at the sight of him present, and, besides that there was much majesty in his nature of itself, his flowing hair set him off, and a habit of body not trimmed with niceties but truly manly and soldierly, and his age was in the full strength of its vigor, which the fresh bloom of youth, as it were renewed after sickness, made fuller and brighter. Almost thunderstruck by the meeting itself, the Numidian gave thanks for his brother’s son sent back. From that time forth, he declared, he had sought the occasion which now at last, offered by the kindness of the immortal gods, he had not let slip. He longed to render service to him and to the Roman people, so that no one single foreigner should help the Roman cause more zealously. This, even if he had long wished it, he had been less able to perform in Spain, a land foreign and strange to him; but in the land where he had been born and bred in the hope of his father’s kingdom, he would easily perform it. If indeed the Romans sent the same Scipio as commander into Africa, he had good hope that Carthage had a very short time to live. Scipio saw and heard him with joy, knowing that he had been the head of all the enemy’s cavalry, and that the young man himself bore the marks of a high spirit. A pledge given and received, he set out back to Tarraco. Masinissa, by the Romans’ leave—that he might not seem to have crossed to the mainland without cause—having ravaged the nearest fields, returned to Gades.

To Mago, who had despaired of affairs in Spain—affairs into the hope of which first the soldiers’ mutiny, then the revolt of Indibilis, had lifted his spirits—and was preparing to cross into Africa, word was brought from Carthage that the senate bade him carry the fleet he had at Gades over into Italy; there, hiring as great a force as he could of the youth of the Gauls and Ligurians, he was to join himself to Hannibal and not suffer the war, begun with the greatest energy and a greater fortune, to grow old. For this purpose both money was brought to Mago from Carthage, and he himself exacted as much as he could from the Gaditani, plundering not their treasury only but their temples as well, and forcing all men to bring in privately their gold and silver to the public store. As he sailed along the coast of Spain, having landed soldiers not far from New Carthage, he laid waste the nearest fields; then he brought his fleet to the city. There, having kept his soldiers aboard by day, he led them ashore by night to that part of the wall where Carthage had been taken by the Romans, thinking both that the city was held by no strong enough garrison, and that some of the townsmen, in hope of a change, would stir something. But messengers from the fields, alarmed, had brought word at once of the ravaging and the flight of the country-folk and the enemy’s coming; and the fleet had been seen by day, nor was it plain without cause that it had chosen its station before the city; and so, drawn up and armed, they were held within the gate that faces toward the lagoon and the sea. When the enemy, pouring out in disorder, a naval rabble mixed among the soldiers, came up to the walls with more tumult than force, the gate was suddenly thrown open and the Romans burst out with a shout, and, the enemy thrown into confusion and at the first charge and volley of weapons turned about, pursued them with great slaughter all the way to the shore; nor, had not the ships drawn up to the beach received the panic-stricken, would any have survived for flight or for fight. On the ships too there was confusion, while they drew up the ladders lest the enemy break in along with their own men, and cut the cables and anchors that there might be no delay in getting away; and many, swimming to the ships, in the darkness uncertain what they should make for or shun, perished miserably. The next day, when the fleet had fled back thence to the Ocean whence it had come, about eight hundred men were found slain between the wall and the shore, and about two thousand stand of arms.

Mago, having made again for Gades, was shut out from it; and, his fleet brought to land at Cimbii—a place not far from Gades—by sending envoys and complaining that the gates had been closed against him, an ally and friend, when they cleared themselves that it had been done by a gathering of the multitude, enraged at some plunder done by the soldiers as they embarked, he enticed their suffetes—that is the supreme magistracy among the Carthaginians—with the quaestor to a conference, and, having had them torn with stripes, ordered them fixed to the cross. Then with his ships he crossed to the island of Pityusa, about a hundred miles from the mainland—the Carthaginians then dwelt there. And so the fleet was received with good will and peace, and not only were supplies generously furnished but, to recruit the fleet, young men and arms were given; trusting in which the Carthaginian crossed to the Balearic islands, fifty miles thence. There are two Balearic islands, the one larger and richer in arms and men; it has too a harbor, where he thought he might winter conveniently—and it was now the close of autumn. But he was met no less in hostile fashion than if Romans inhabited the island. They use the sling now most of all, and then it was their only weapon; nor is any one man of another nation so skilled in that art as the Balearics are above all others. And so such a shower of stones, thick as densest hail, was poured upon the fleet as it now neared the land, that, not daring to enter the harbor, they turned their ships out to sea. Thence they crossed to the smaller of the Balearic islands, fruitful of soil, but not so strong in men and arms. And so, landing, they pitched their camp on a strong position above the harbor; and, mastering city and country without a struggle, having there enrolled two thousand auxiliaries and sent them to Carthage, they beached their ships for the winter. After Mago’s departure from the coast of the Ocean, the Gaditani surrendered to the Romans.

These were the things done in Spain under the leadership and auspice of Publius Scipio. He himself, the province handed over to the propraetors Lucius Lentulus and praetor-b23/">Lucius Manlius Acidinus, returned to Rome with ten ships, and, the senate being granted him outside the city in the temple of Bellona, set forth what he had done in Spain: how often he had fought in pitched battle, how many towns he had taken by force from the enemy, what nations he had reduced under the dominion of the Roman people; that he had gone into Spain against four commanders, four victorious armies, and had left not one Carthaginian in those lands. For these achievements the hope of a triumph was sounded out rather than firmly pressed, because it was well known that to that day no one had triumphed who had managed affairs without holding a magistracy. The senate dismissed, he entered the city, and carried before him into the treasury fourteen thousand three hundred and forty-two pounds of silver and a great quantity of coined silver. Then Lucius Veturius Philo held the assembly for choosing consuls, and all the centuries, with great favor, named Publius Cornelius Scipio consul; his colleague added was Publius Licinius Crassus the pontifex-maximus/">pontifex maximus. It is recorded that the assembly was thronged with a greater crowd than any held during that war. They had gathered from every side not only to vote but also to look upon Publius Scipio; and they ran in throngs both to his house and to the Capitol, as he sacrificed, offering up the hundred oxen he had vowed in Spain to Jupiter; and they pledged themselves in their minds that, as Gaius Lutatius had ended the former Punic war, so Publius Cornelius would end this one that pressed; and that, as he had driven the Carthaginians from all Spain, so he would drive them from Italy; and they marked out Africa for him as his province, as though the war in Italy were already finished. Then the election of praetors was held. Chosen were two who were then plebeian aediles, Spurius Lucretius and Gnaeus Octavius, and from among private men Gnaeus Servilius Caepio and Lucius Aemilius Papus. In the fourteenth year of the Punic war, when Publius Cornelius Scipio and Publius Licinius Crassus entered upon the consulship, the provinces were named to the consuls: Sicily to Scipio without lot, his colleague yielding because the charge of the rites kept the pontifex maximus in Italy; Bruttium to Crassus. Then the praetorian provinces were cast into the lot. The city jurisdiction fell to Gnaeus Servilius; Ariminum—so they called Gaul—to Spurius Lucretius; Sicily to Lucius Aemilius, Sardinia to Gnaeus Octavius. The senate was held on the Capitol. There, on the motion of Publius Scipio, a decree of the senate was passed that he should hold the games he had vowed amid the soldiers’ mutiny in Spain, out of the money he had himself brought into the treasury.

Then he brought into the senate the envoys of the Saguntines. The eldest of them said: "Though there is nothing of evils, conscript fathers, beyond what we have suffered, that we might keep faith with you to the last, yet such have been the deserts of you and your commanders toward us that we do not repent of our calamities. For our sake you took up the war; the war once taken up, you wage it now into its fourteenth year so stubbornly that you have yourselves often come to the last hazard, and have brought the Carthaginian people to it too. When you had in Italy so dreadful a war and Hannibal for your enemy, you sent a consul with an army into Spain, as it were to gather up the remnants of our shipwreck. From the time Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius came into the province they never ceased to do whatever was prosperous to us and adverse to our enemies. First of all they restored to us our town; through all Spain they sent men to search out our fellow-citizens, sold into slavery, and restored them from bondage to liberty. When we were now almost at the point of having, out of a most wretched fortune, a desirable one, your commanders Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius perished, to our grief almost more than to yours. Then indeed we seemed to have been brought back from far-scattered places to our ancient seat only that we might perish a second time and see another destruction of our fatherland—nor, for our ruin, was there need of a Carthaginian commander or army: by the Turduli, our oldest enemies, who had been the cause of our former destruction too, we could be wiped out—when on a sudden, beyond hope, you sent us this Publius Scipio, whom we, of all Saguntines the most fortunate, seem to ourselves to be, because we see him declared consul and shall report to our fellow-citizens that we have seen him, our hope, our help, our salvation; who, when he had taken very many cities of your enemies in Spain, everywhere singled out the Saguntines from the number of captives and sent them home to their fatherland; and last, Turdetania, so hostile to us that, with that nation safe, Saguntum could not stand, he so crushed in war that not to us only but—be the word free of ill omen—not even to our posterity need it be feared. We behold the city of those destroyed for whose sake Hannibal destroyed Saguntum; we take tribute from their fields, which is no more pleasant to us for its fruit than for its vengeance. For these things—than which we could neither hope nor pray greater from the immortal gods—the senate and people of Saguntum have sent us ten envoys to render you thanks; and at the same time to give you joy that you have so managed affairs these years in Spain and Italy that you hold Spain subdued by arms not as far as the river Ebro but as far as the Ocean bounds the uttermost lands, and have left the Carthaginian nothing in Italy save what the rampart of his camp encloses. To Jupiter Best and Greatest, guardian of the Capitoline citadel, we were bidden not only to render thanks for these things but also, if you allow, to bear this gift, a golden crown, into the Capitol in token of victory. This we beg you to permit; and, if it seem good to you, to make the benefits your commanders have bestowed on us firm and lasting by your authority."

The senate answered the Saguntine envoys that Saguntum, destroyed and restored, would be to all nations a proof of faith kept by allies on both sides; that their commanders had done rightly and in order and according to the will of the senate in restoring Saguntum and freeing the Saguntine citizens from slavery; and whatever other kindnesses they had done them, the senate had so willed it to be done; it permitted them to set the gift in the Capitol. Then lodging and entertainment were ordered to be furnished to the envoys, and, by way of gift, to each not less than ten thousand asses. Then the other embassies were brought into the senate and heard; and at the petition of the Saguntines that, so far as they safely could, they might go to see Italy, guides were given them and letters sent through the towns that the Spaniards should be courteously received. Then the matter of the commonwealth, of enrolling armies, of the provinces, was laid before them. And when men were giving out as common talk that Africa, as a new province, was being destined for Publius Scipio without lot, and Scipio himself, now content with no moderate glory, kept saying that he had been declared consul not merely to wage the war but to end it, and that this could not be done otherwise than if he himself carried an army over into Africa, and gave it openly to be understood that he would carry it through the people if the senate opposed him—this design, by no means pleasing to the chief men of the fathers, while the rest through fear or self-interest murmured under their breath, Quintus Fabius Maximus, being asked his opinion, said: "I know that to many of you, conscript fathers, it seems that a matter already settled is being debated this day, and that he will speak to no purpose who delivers his opinion on Africa as a province as if it were still an open question. But I, first, do not see how Africa is already a sure province for the consul, a brave and energetic man, when neither has the senate voted it the province for this year nor the people ordered it. And then, if it is, I think the consul does wrong who, by feigning to consult the senate on a matter already settled, makes a mockery of it, not the senator who in his own place delivers his opinion on what he is consulted. And I am sure that, in dissenting from this haste to cross over into Africa, I must incur the suspicion of two things: of one, that slowness inbred in my nature, which young men may well call fear and sloth, provided it do not repent us that to this day the counsels of others, more attractive at first sight, have always proved in the using better in mine; of the other, of disparagement and envy against the daily growing glory of a most valiant consul. From which suspicion, if neither my past life and my character, nor a dictatorship with five consulships, and so much glory of war and peace won, that I am nearer to a surfeit of it than to a longing, free me, let at least my age free me. For what rivalry can I have with one who is not even the equal in years of my son? No one heard me, when I was dictator and still strong in vigor and in the very course of the greatest affairs, refuse, either in the senate or before the people, that the master of the horse, harassing me, should have his command made equal with mine—a thing never before heard in story; I chose to achieve by deeds rather than by words that one whom in some men’s judgment had been put on a level with me should soon, by his own confession, prefer me to himself; far less, having done with the honors I have held, would I set before myself contests and rivalry with a young man in his fullest flower. Doubtless, that to me, now wearied not by affairs only but by living, Africa might be decreed as a province if it were denied to him! With the glory I have won I must live and die. I prevented Hannibal from conquering, that by you, whose strength is now in its vigor, he might even be conquered.

"It will be fair, Publius Cornelius, that you grant me this: since I have never in my own case reckoned the report of men more than the commonwealth, that I should not set even your glory above the public good. And yet, if there were either no war in Italy, or an enemy from whose conquering no glory could be sought, the man who kept you in Italy, though he did it for the public good, might seem, along with the war, to be wresting away the material of your glory. But when Hannibal, an enemy with his army unbroken, in his fourteenth year is besieging Italy, will you repent, Publius Cornelius, of your glory, if you as consul drive out of Italy that enemy who has been the cause to us of so many funerals, so many disasters, and, as the title of finishing the former Punic war rested with Gaius Lutatius, so that of this one rest with you? Unless either Hamilcar is to be preferred to Hannibal as a leader, or that war to this, or that victory greater and more renowned than this would be—provided it fall to us to conquer while you are consul. Would you rather have drawn Hamilcar away from Drepana or Eryx than driven the Carthaginians and Hannibal out of Italy? Not even you, though you embrace glory won rather than hoped for, would boast more of Spain delivered from war than of Italy. Hannibal is not yet of such a sort that he who has chosen another war may not seem to have feared him rather than scorned him. Why then do you not gird yourself to this, and aim your war straight where Hannibal is, rather than by those roundabout ways, hoping that, when you have crossed to Africa, Hannibal will follow you thither? Is it some surpassing palm of finishing the Punic war that you seek? It is both more natural that, when you have defended your own, you should go to attack another’s; let there be peace in Italy before there is war in Africa, and let fear depart from us before it is carried to others. If both can be done under your leadership and auspice, then, Hannibal conquered here, storm Carthage there: if one or the other victory must be left to the new consuls, the former, as the greater and more renowned, will also be the cause of the later. For now, besides that the treasury cannot maintain two separate armies in Italy and in Africa, besides that there is nothing left from which to guard fleets and furnish supplies—what danger, pray, would be incurred, who does not see? Publius Licinius will wage war in Italy, Publius Scipio in Africa. What if—which may all the gods avert, and my mind shudders even to say it, but the things that have happened can happen—the victorious Hannibal should make his way to the city? Shall we then at last summon you, the consul, from Africa, as we summoned Quintus Fulvius from Capua? What of the fact that in Africa too the chances of war will be common? Let your own house, your father and uncle slain with their armies within thirty days, in places where they had by the management of mighty affairs by land and sea raised among foreign nations the highest renown of the Roman people and of your family—let these be a warning to you. The day would fail me, if I should wish to recount the kings and commanders who, by rashly crossing into the enemy’s land, have brought the greatest disasters upon themselves and their armies. The Athenians, a most prudent state, leaving a war at home, on the prompting of an equally energetic and noble young man, carried a great fleet over into Sicily, and by one naval battle shattered forever their flourishing commonwealth.

"I recall things foreign and too ancient. Let that same Africa, and Marcus Atilius, a notable example of either fortune, be a warning to us. Indeed, Publius Cornelius, when you have looked upon Africa from the deep, your Spains will seem to have been mere sport and pastime. For what is there alike? Sailing along the coast of Italy and Gaul over a peaceful sea, you brought your fleet to Emporiae, a city of allies; the soldiers landed, you led through everything most safe to Tarraco, to allies and friends of the Roman people; from Tarraco then your march lay through Roman garrisons; about the Ebro the armies of your father and uncle, made fiercer by the very calamity after the loss of their commanders, and a leader, makeshift indeed, that Lucius Marcius chosen for the time by the soldiers’ suffrage, but, if nobility and lawful honors set him off, a match in every art of war for the most famous commanders; New Carthage stormed in entire ease, with none of the three Punic armies defending its allies; the rest—and I do not belittle them—in no way to be compared with the war of Africa, where no harbor is open to our fleet, no land at peace, no city allied, no king friendly, no place anywhere to halt or to advance; wherever you look round, all is hostile and threatening. Or do you trust to Syphax and the Numidians? Let it be enough to have trusted once; rashness is not always lucky, and fraud builds up credit for itself in small things, that, when it is worth its while, it may deceive at a great price. It was not an enemy that ringed your father and uncle round in arms, before allies, the Celtiberians, did it by treachery; nor was there to yourself so much danger from Mago and Hasdrubal, the enemy’s commanders, as from Indibilis and Mandonius, whom you had received into your faith. Can you trust Numidians, you who have tried the mutiny of your own soldiers? Both Syphax and Masinissa would rather that they themselves than the Carthaginians be most powerful in Africa, but the Carthaginians rather than any other. Now rivalry among themselves and all the causes of strife whet them, because foreign fear is far off: show them Roman arms and a foreign army, and they will run together as if to put out a common fire. Those very same Carthaginians defended Spain in one fashion; they will defend the walls of their fatherland, the temples of their gods, their altars and hearths, in another, when, as they go into battle, a trembling wife shall attend them and their little children run to meet them. What further, if the Carthaginians, confident enough in the agreement of Africa, in the faith of their allied kings, in their own walls, when they see Italy stripped of you and your army’s protection, should themselves of their own accord send a new army into Italy out of Africa, or bid Mago—who, we know, has crossed by fleet from the Balearic islands and is already coasting along the shore of the Ligurian Alps—join himself to Hannibal? Surely we shall be in the same terror in which we lately were when Hasdrubal crossed into Italy—Hasdrubal whom you, who are to shut in not Carthage only but all Africa with your army, let slip out of your hands into Italy. You will say he was beaten by you; the more, for that very reason, I could wish—and that for your sake, not the commonwealth’s only—that no road into Italy had been given to one beaten. Suffer us to ascribe to your counsel all that has fallen out prosperously for you and for the empire of the Roman people, and to lay the adverse to the uncertain chances of war and of fortune: the better and braver you are, the more does your fatherland and all Italy wish to keep so great a guardian for itself. You cannot even yourself dissemble that, where Hannibal is, there is the head and citadel of this war, since you give out that your reason for crossing into Africa is to draw Hannibal thither. Whether therefore here or there, with Hannibal you will have to do. Will you, then, be the stronger in Africa alone, or here with your own and your colleague’s army joined? Are not even Claudius and Livius the consuls, by an example so recent, a proof of how much that matters? What of this—will the farthest corner of the Bruttian land, while Hannibal vainly asks aid from home this long while, or neighboring Carthage and all Africa his ally, make him the more powerful in arms and men? What counsel is this, to choose to fight where your own forces are by half the smaller, the enemy’s much the greater, rather than where with two armies you would fight against one wearied with so many battles and so long and grievous a service? Reflect how like your design is to your father’s. He, having set out as consul into Spain, returned from his province into Italy to meet Hannibal coming down from the Alps: you, when Hannibal is in Italy, prepare to leave Italy—not because it is useful to the commonwealth, but because you reckon it splendid and glorious to yourself—just as when, leaving your province and army, with no law, no decree of the senate, you trusted to two ships the fortune of the state and the majesty of the empire, which then were imperiled in your person. I, conscript fathers, hold that Publius Cornelius was made consul for the commonwealth and for us, not for himself privately, and that the armies were enrolled for the guarding of the city and of Italy, not for consuls to carry over, after the fashion of kings, in their pride, whithersoever of the lands they please."

When Fabius had moved a great part of the senate, and the elder men especially, both by a speech fitted to the occasion and by the weight of his authority and the fame of his long-tried prudence, and more praised the old man’s counsel than the young man’s spirit, fierce with youth, Scipio is reported to have spoken thus: "Quintus Fabius himself, conscript fathers, at the beginning of his speech, noted that in his opinion disparagement might be suspected; of which charge, though I would not myself dare to accuse so great a man, yet that suspicion, whether by the fault of his speech or of the matter, has assuredly not been cleared away. For he so exalted his own honors and the fame of his deeds, in words, to do away the charge of envy, as though I were in danger from the lowest of men, that he might not vie with me, and not from one who, because he excels the rest—to which I too do not dissemble that I strive—is unwilling to be made equal to me. He set himself up as an old man and one who had done with his course, and me below the age of even his own son, as though the lust of glory extended no further than the span of human life, and the greatest part of it did not reach out into memory and posterity. I am sure that it happens to every greatest spirit to compare itself not only with the men of its own day but with the illustrious of every age. For my part I do not dissemble that I wish not only to attain to your praises, Quintus Fabius, but—with your good leave be it said—even, if I can, to surpass them. Let neither you toward me nor I toward those younger than myself be of such a mind as to be unwilling that any citizen come forth our like; for that is a loss not only to those we should envy but to the commonwealth and well-nigh to all mankind. He recounted how much danger I should incur if I crossed into Africa, so as to seem anxious for me too, not only for the commonwealth and the army. Whence has this care for me sprung up so suddenly? When my father and uncle were slain, when their two armies were almost cut to pieces, when the Spains were lost, when four armies of the Carthaginians and four commanders held all by fear and arms, when, a commander being sought for that war, no one offered himself save me, no one dared give in his name, when the Roman people had conferred the command on me, a youth of four-and-twenty—why then did no one make mention of my age, the force of the enemy, the difficulty of the war, my father’s and uncle’s recent disaster? Has some greater calamity now been suffered in Africa than was then in Spain? Are there now greater armies in Africa, and more and better commanders, than then in Spain? Was my age then riper for waging war than it now is? Is it fitter to wage war against the Carthaginian enemy in Spain than in Africa? It is easy, after four Punic armies routed and put to flight, after so many cities taken by force or subdued by fear into our power, after all things subdued as far as the Ocean, so many petty kings, so many savage nations, after all Spain recovered so that no trace of war is left, to make light of my achievements—as easily, by Hercules, as, when I shall have returned victorious from Africa, to make light of those very things which, to keep me here, are now exalted in words that they may seem terrible. He says there is no access to Africa, that no harbors lie open. He recalls Marcus Atilius taken in Africa, as though Marcus Atilius had come to grief at his first approach to Africa, and does not remember that to that same so unlucky commander the harbors of Africa nevertheless lay open, that he did things excellently in the first year, and, as far as the Carthaginian commanders went, remained unconquered to the last. You will not, then, frighten me with that example. If in this war, not the former, if of late and not forty years ago that disaster had been suffered, why should I cross less into Africa with Regulus captive than into Spain with the Scipios slain? Nor would I suffer that Xanthippus the Lacedaemonian had been born more luckily for Carthage than I for my fatherland, and my confidence would grow from this very thing, that in the valor of one man there can be so much weight. But we must also listen to the Athenians, who rashly crossed into Sicily, leaving the war at home. Why then, since you have leisure to tell Greek tales, do you not rather cite Agathocles the Syracusan king, who, when Sicily had long been ablaze with the Punic war, crossing into this same Africa, turned the war back whence it had come?

"But what carrying the war over to the enemy of one’s own accord, and bringing another into peril once the danger is removed from oneself, is like—is there need to remind by old and foreign examples? Can there be any greater or more present example than Hannibal? It is one thing to lay waste another’s borders, another to see your own burned and harried; there is more spirit in him who brings the danger than in him who wards it off. Besides, the terror of things unknown is greater: when you have entered his borders you behold close at hand the good and ill of the enemy. Hannibal had not hoped that so many peoples in Italy would revolt to him: they revolted after the disaster of Cannae: how much less is there anything firm or stable in Africa for the Carthaginians, faithless allies, harsh and proud masters? Besides, we, even deserted by our allies, stood by our own strength, the Roman soldier: the Carthaginian has no citizen strength; they have soldiers bought for pay, Africans and Numidians, the lightest of natures for changing their faith. Let there be only no delay here, and at one moment you shall hear that I have crossed, that Africa is ablaze with war, that Hannibal is moving from here, and that Carthage is besieged. Look for more joyful and more frequent messages from Africa than you were wont to receive from Spain. These hopes the fortune of the Roman people suggests to me, the gods who witness the treaty broken by the enemy, Syphax and Masinissa, kings on whose faith I will so lean that I shall be well guarded against treachery. Many things which now, from the distance, do not appear, the war will lay open: that is the part of a man and a commander, not to be wanting to fortune when she offers herself, and to bend what chance throws in his way to his own design. I shall have, Quintus Fabius, the match you give me, Hannibal; but I will rather draw him after me than he hold me back. I will compel him to fight in his own land, and Carthage, rather than the half-ruined forts of the Bruttians, shall be the prize of victory. As for the fear that the commonwealth take any harm in the meanwhile, while I cross, while I land the army in Africa, while I move my camp up to Carthage—what you, Quintus Fabius, could guarantee when Hannibal ranged victorious over all Italy, see that it be not insulting to deny that Publius Licinius the consul, a most valiant man, can guarantee against Hannibal now shaken and well-nigh broken, who, that he might not be absent from the sacred rites, as pontifex-maximus/">pontifex maximus did not come into the lot of so distant a province. If, by Hercules, the war were finished no sooner this way which I advise, yet it would belong to the dignity of the Roman people and to its fame among foreign kings and nations to show that we have spirit not only to defend Italy but to carry arms into Africa too; and not to let it be believed and noised abroad that what Hannibal dared no Roman commander dares; and that in the former Punic war, when the contest was over Sicily, Africa was so often assailed by our armies and fleets, while now, when the contest is over Italy, Africa is at peace. Let Italy, so long harried, rest at last awhile: let Africa in its turn be burned and laid waste. Let the Roman camp rather threaten the gates of Carthage than we again behold from our walls the enemy’s rampart. Let Africa be the seat of the rest of the war; thither let terror and flight, the wasting of fields, the defection of allies, all the calamities of war that for fourteen years have crashed down upon us, be turned. What concerns the commonwealth and the war that presses and the provinces in question, it is enough to have said: that long speech, and not concerning you, would it be, if, as Quintus Fabius belittled my deeds in Spain, I in turn should choose to mock his glory and exalt my own in words. I will do neither, conscript fathers; and if in nothing else, at least in modesty and in restraining my tongue I, a young man, will outdo an old one. So have I lived and so managed affairs that I am easily content to keep silence in that estimate which you have of your own accord conceived in your minds."

Scipio was heard with less goodwill, because it had got abroad that, if he did not prevail with the senate that Africa be decreed his province, he would at once carry it to the people. And so Quintus Fulvius, who had been four times consul and censor, demanded of the consul that he say openly in the senate whether he allowed the fathers to decree about the provinces and would abide by what they decreed, or would carry it to the people. When Scipio answered that he would do what was for the good of the commonwealth, then Fulvius said: "I asked, not ignorant of what you would answer or do, since you give it openly to be understood that you are sounding rather than consulting the senate, and unless we at once decree you the province you wish, you have a bill ready. And so, plebs/">tribunes of the plebs," he said, "I ask of you that you support me when I refuse to deliver my opinion on this ground, that, even if it be carried to my opinion, the consul will not hold it ratified." Thence a wrangle arose, the consul denying it was fair that the tribunes interpose to prevent each man, asked in his own place, from delivering his opinion. The tribunes decreed thus: "If the consul permits the senate to decide about the provinces, we resolve that men abide by what the senate has decreed, nor will we suffer the matter to be carried to the people; if he does not permit, we will support whoever refuses to deliver his opinion on the matter." The consul asked a day for conferring with his colleague; on the next day the decision was left to the senate. The provinces were thus decreed: to one consul Sicily and the thirty beaked ships which Gaius Servilius had had the year before; and he was permitted, if he judged it for the good of the commonwealth, to cross into Africa; to the other Bruttium and the war with Hannibal, with the army that Lucius Veturius and tribune/">Quintus Caecilius should either draw lots for or arrange between themselves, which of the two should manage affairs in Bruttium with the two legions the consul should leave; and the command should be prolonged for the year to him to whom that province fell. And to the others besides the consuls and praetors who were to be in charge of armies and provinces the commands were prolonged. By the lot it fell to Quintus Caecilius to wage war along with the consul in Bruttium against Hannibal. Then the games of Scipio were celebrated with a great throng and favor of the onlookers. As envoys to Delphi to carry a gift from the spoils of Hasdrubal were sent praetor/">Marcus Pomponius Matho and Quintus Catius. They bore a golden crown of two hundred pounds and images of the spoils made of a thousand pounds of silver. Scipio, though he neither obtained leave to hold a levy nor greatly strove for it, gained that he might be allowed to lead volunteer soldiers, and—since he had said the fleet would be no charge to the commonwealth—that he might receive what the allies gave toward building new ships. The peoples of Etruria first promised to aid the consul, each according to its means: the Caerites grain for the crews and supplies of every kind, the Populonienses iron, the Tarquinienses linen for sails, the Volaterrani timbers for ships and grain, the Arretini three thousand shields, as many helmets, javelins, Gallic darts, and long spears, fifty thousand in all, an equal number of each kind, and axes, spades, sickles, baskets, and hand-mills, as many as were needed for forty ships of war, and a hundred and twenty thousand pecks of wheat, and a contribution toward the journey-money of the petty officers and the rowers; the Perusini, Clusini, and Rusellani fir for building ships and a great quantity of grain; and fir was used from the public forests as well. The peoples of Umbria, and besides these the Nursini and Reatini and Amiternini and all the Sabine country, promised soldiers. Many of the Marsi, Paeligni, and Marrucini gave in their names as volunteers for the fleet. The Camertes, though they were on an equal treaty with the Romans, sent an armed cohort of six hundred men. The keels of thirty ships—twenty quinqueremes, ten quadriremes—being laid, Scipio himself so pressed the work that on the forty-fifth day from the time the timber was hauled from the forests the ships, fitted out and armed, were launched into the water.

He set out for Sicily with thirty ships of war, about seven thousand volunteers put aboard. And Publius Licinius came into Bruttium to the two consular armies. Of these he chose for himself the one Lucius Veturius the consul had had; Metellus, that he might command the legions he had been over, thinking he would manage affairs more easily with men used to his command, he allowed to keep them. The praetors too set out, each to his province. And because money for the war was lacking, the quaestors were ordered to sell the region of the Campanian land bounded by the Greek dike toward the sea, leave being given too for an informer to disclose what land had belonged to a Campanian citizen, that it might become public property of the Roman people; and a reward for the informer was fixed, a tenth part of the money at which the land disclosed was valued. And to Gnaeus Servilius the city praetor the business was given that the Campanian citizens should dwell where each was allowed by decree of the senate, and that he should punish those who dwelt elsewhere. In the same summer Mago son of Hamilcar, from the lesser of the Balearic islands, where he had wintered, having put picked youth aboard his fleet, crossed into Italy with about thirty beaked ships and many transports, twelve thousand foot and about two thousand horse, and by a sudden arrival took Genua, no garrisons guarding the seacoast. Thence he brought his fleet to the coast of the Ligurian Alps, to see if he could stir any movement there. The Ingauni—that is a Ligurian people—were at that time waging war with the Epanterian mountaineers. And so the Carthaginian, having deposited his booty at Savo, an Alpine town, and left ten ships of war on station to guard it, the rest being sent to Carthage to defend the seacoast, because there was a rumor that Scipio would cross over, himself, having made alliance with the Ingauni, whose favor he preferred, set about assaulting the mountaineers. And his army grew daily, the Gauls flocking to him from every side at the fame of his name. This, made known by a letter of Spurius Lucretius, stirred great concern in the fathers, lest they should have rejoiced in vain at the destruction of Hasdrubal and his army two years before, if another war as great were to spring from that quarter, only the leader being changed. And so they ordered both Marcus Livius the proconsul to bring up the volunteer-slave army from Etruria to Ariminum, and to Gnaeus Servilius the praetor the business was given that, if he judged it for the good of the commonwealth, he should order the two city legions to be led out of the city under whatever commander he saw fit. Marcus Valerius Laevinus led these legions to Arretium. In the same days about eighty Carthaginian transports were taken off Sardinia by Gnaeus Octavius, who was in charge of the province; Coelius records that they were laden with grain and supplies sent to Hannibal, Valerius that they were carrying the Etruscan plunder and the captives of the Ligurians and mountaineers to Carthage. In Bruttium almost nothing memorable was done that year. A pestilence had come on with equal havoc upon the Romans and the Carthaginians, save that the Punic army was afflicted, over and above the disease, by famine too. By the temple of Juno Lacinia Hannibal spent the summer, and there he founded and dedicated an altar, with a great inscription of his deeds graven upon it in Punic and Greek letters.