The History of Rome, Book 29

After Scipio had come into Sicily, he marshaled his volunteer soldiers and divided them into centuries. Of these he kept about him three hundred young men, in the flower of their age and notable for their bodily strength, unarmed, and not knowing for what use they were being kept, who were neither formed into centuries nor armed. Then out of the whole number of the younger men of Sicily he chose three hundred horsemen, first in birth and fortune, who were to cross with him into Africa, and named a day on which they should present themselves equipped and furnished with horses and arms. That service seemed a heavy one, far from home, by land and sea to bring many toils and great dangers; and not the men themselves only, but their parents and kindred too, were gnawed by that anxiety. When the appointed day came, they showed their arms and horses. Then Scipio said it had been reported to him that certain of the Sicilian horsemen shrank from that service as heavy and hard: if any were so minded, he would rather they confessed it to him there and then than that they should later, complaining, prove sluggish and useless soldiers to the commonwealth; let them speak out what they felt—he would hear them with good grace. When one of them dared to say that, if the choice were freely his, he would by no means serve, Scipio said to him: "Since then, young man, you have not dissembled what you felt, I will find you a substitute, to whom you may hand over your arms and horse and the rest of your soldier’s gear, and lead him home with you from here at once, and see to his being trained and taught in horse and arms." To the man, who gladly accepted the terms, he handed over one of the three hundred whom he kept unarmed. When the others saw this horseman discharged thus, and with the commander’s good will, each began to excuse himself and to take a substitute. So in place of the three hundred Sicilians were set Roman horsemen, at no public cost. The Sicilians took on the charge of teaching and training them, since the commander’s edict was that whoever did not do so should serve himself. They say that this troop of horse turned out a distinguished one, and aided the commonwealth in many battles. Then, while he was reviewing the legions, he picked out from among them the soldiers of most campaigns, chiefly those who had served under the leadership of Marcellus, whom he believed both formed in the best discipline and, from the long siege of Syracuse, most skilled in the storming of cities; for he was now turning over in his mind nothing small, but nothing less than the destruction of Carthage. Thereupon he distributed the army among the towns; he requisitioned grain of the Sicilian communities, sparing that brought over from Italy; he refitted the old ships and with them sent Gaius Laelius to plunder Africa; the new ones he beached at Panormus, that they might winter on dry land, because they had been built in haste of green timber. With everything made ready for war, he came to Syracuse, which was not yet sufficiently quiet after the great upheavals of the war. The Greeks were claiming back the property granted them by the Senate, which certain men of Italian stock were holding by the same force with which they had seized it in the war. Reckoning it first of all to guard the public faith, he restored their property to the Syracusans, partly by edict, partly by judgments given even against those obstinate in maintaining the wrong. This was welcome not to the Syracusans only, but to all the peoples of Sicily, and they aided the war the more zealously. The same summer there arose in Spain a vast war, stirred up by the Ilergetian Indibilis, for no other cause than that out of admiration for Scipio contempt for the other commanders had sprung up: they thought him the one leader left to the Romans, the rest having been killed by Hannibal; so the Romans had had no other to send into Spain when the Scipios fell, and once a graver war pressed in Italy he had been summoned against Hannibal. Besides that the Romans held only the names of commanders in Spain, the old army too had been led off thence; all was in disorder, and a raw rabble of recruits. Never would there be such an occasion for freeing Spain. To that day they had been in servitude either to the Carthaginians or to the Romans, and not by turns to these or to those, but sometimes to both at once. The Carthaginians had been driven out by the Romans; the Romans could be driven out by the Spaniards, if they made common cause, so that Spain, loosed forever from all foreign rule, might return to its ancestral customs and rites. By saying these things and the like, he roused not the men of his own nation only, but the Ausetani too, a neighboring people, and other peoples bordering on himself and on them. And so within a few days thirty thousand foot and nearly four thousand horse gathered into the Sedetanian territory, where it had been appointed.

The Roman commanders also, Lucius Lentulus and Lucius Manlius Acidinus, lest by neglecting it the war should swell at the outset, themselves too joining their armies and leading their soldiers mercifully through the Ausetanian country as though it were at peace, though it was hostile, came to the enemy’s seat and pitched camp at a distance of three miles from their camp. At first it was tried in vain through envoys that they should lay down their arms; then, when an attack was suddenly made by the Spanish horse upon the Roman foragers, with the cavalry sent up from the Roman post a cavalry engagement was fought, of no memorable issue to either side. As the sun rose the next day, all of them, armed and drawn up, showed their line about a mile from the Roman camp. In the center were the Ausetani; the wings the Ilergetes held on the right, and on the left obscure Spanish peoples; between the wings and the center line they had left intervals open wide enough, through which to send out the cavalry when the time should come. And the Romans, when they had drawn up their army in their own fashion, imitated the enemy only in this, that they too left lanes open between the legions for the horse. But Lentulus, reckoning that the use of cavalry would belong to that side which first sent its horsemen into the enemy’s line as it gaped in the intervals, ordered tribune/">Servius Cornelius, a tribune of the soldiers, to bid the horse drive their mounts through the open lanes in the enemy’s line. He himself, the foot-battle having begun none too well, delayed only long enough to bring the thirteenth legion up from the reserves into the front line as a stay to the twelfth, which, posted on the left wing against the Ilergetes, was giving ground; and after the fight was made even there, he came to Lucius Manlius, who was among the foremost standards heartening the men and leading up reserves to the points the case demanded; he reported that things on the left wing were safe; that Cornelius, already sent off by him, would soon enfold the enemy in a storm of horse. Scarcely had he said this when the Roman horsemen, charging into the midst of the enemy, at one stroke threw the foot-ranks into confusion and closed against the Spanish horse the way for launching their own mounts. And so, the cavalry battle given up, the Spaniards dismounted to fight on foot. When the Roman commanders saw the enemy’s ranks thrown into disorder, the alarm and panic and the wavering of their standards, they exhorted and besought the soldiers to fall upon them while they were shaken and not to suffer the line to be restored. The barbarians would not have withstood so fierce an onset, had not the chieftain Indibilis himself, with the horsemen dismounted to fight on foot, thrown himself in front of the foremost standards of the foot. There for some while the battle stood fierce; at last, when those who fought about the king—half dead, holding out, then pinned to the ground by a javelin—fell overwhelmed by missiles, then flight began on every side. More were slain because the horsemen had had no space to mount, and because the Romans pressed hard upon the panic-stricken; nor did they draw off before they had stripped the enemy even of his camp. Thirteen thousand Spaniards were slain that day, about eighteen hundred taken; of the Romans and the allies a little more than two hundred fell, chiefly on the left wing. The Spaniards driven from their camp, or who had escaped from the battle, scattered first through the fields, then returned each to his own community.

Then, summoned by Mandonius into a council, and there lamenting their disasters and railing at the authors of the war, they resolved that envoys should be sent to surrender their arms and make submission. When these laid the blame on the author of the war, Indibilis, and on the other chiefs, most of whom had fallen in the battle, and were handing over their arms and surrendering themselves, the answer given was that they would be received into surrender on this condition, if they handed over Mandonius and the other inciters of the war alive; if not, the army would be led into the territory of the Ilergetes and the Ausetani and thereafter of the other peoples in turn. This was reported to the envoys and carried back to the council. There Mandonius and the other chiefs were seized and handed over for punishment. Peace was restored to the peoples of Spain; a double year’s tribute and six months’ grain were imposed, and cloaks and togas for the army, and hostages were taken from nearly thirty peoples. So the tumult of rebelling Spain, raised and crushed within a few days with no great upheaval, was over, and all the terror turned upon Africa. Gaius Laelius, having come by night to Hippo Regius, at first light led his soldiers and his naval allies, in support, under standards to plunder the countryside. Since all were going about carelessly, as in peace, great destruction was dealt; and panic-stricken messengers filled Carthage with vast terror, reporting that the Roman fleet and Scipio the commander—and there had been a rumor that he had already crossed into Sicily—had come. Knowing for certain neither how many ships they had seen nor how great a force was wasting their fields, they took in everything magnified, with fear enlarging it. And so first terror and panic, then grief, came over their spirits: that fortune had so changed, that they who but lately had held an army before the walls of Rome as victors, and, after laying low so many armies of the enemy, had received all the peoples of Italy into surrender either by force or by their own will, should now, the war turned against them, behold the ravaging of Africa and the siege of Carthage—and with by no means equal strength to endure these things as the Romans had been. For them the Roman plebs, for them Latium, had furnished a soldiery ever greater and more numerous, springing up to replace so many slaughtered armies; their own commons were unwarlike in the city, unwarlike in the fields; their auxiliaries had to be bought for hire from the Africans, a race shifting and faithless to every breath of hope. As for the kings, Syphax was estranged since his conference with Scipio, and Masinissa, in open revolt, was their bitterest enemy. Nowhere was there any hope, any help. Mago was stirring no tumult out of Gaul, nor joining himself to Hannibal; and Hannibal himself was now waning both in fame and in strength.

Their spirits, sinking into these laments under the fresh tidings, the pressing terror called back again to take counsel by what means they might go to meet the present dangers. A levy, in haste, they resolved to hold in the city and the fields; to send to hire auxiliaries of the Africans; to fortify the city, to carry in grain, to make ready weapons and arms; to fit out ships and send them to Hippo against the Roman fleet. As they were now busied with these things, a messenger came at last that it was Laelius, not Scipio, and that forces only such as sufficed for raids on the fields had been brought over; that the weight and bulk of the war was still in Sicily. So they breathed again, and began to send embassies to Syphax and the other chieftains for the strengthening of the alliance. To Philip also men were sent to promise two hundred talents of silver if he would cross over into Sicily or Italy. And men were sent to their own commanders in Italy, to hold Scipio fast by every kind of alarm; and to Mago not envoys only, but five-and-twenty ships of war, six thousand foot, eight hundred horse, seven elephant-war/">elephants, and besides this a great sum of money for hiring auxiliaries, relying on which he might move his army nearer the city of Rome and join himself to Hannibal. These things they were preparing and setting afoot at Carthage, when to Laelius—who was driving off vast plunder from a country unarmed and bare of garrisons—Masinissa came, roused by the report of the Roman fleet, with a few horsemen. He complained that the thing was being managed sluggishly by Scipio, in that he had not already crossed his army into Africa while the Carthaginians were dismayed and Syphax entangled in wars with his neighbors—whom he held it certain that, if space were given him to settle his own affairs as he wished, would deal in nothing with the Romans in honest faith. Let Laelius urge and goad Scipio not to delay; he himself, though driven from his kingdom, would be at hand with no contemptible forces of foot and horse. Nor ought Laelius himself to linger in Africa; he believed a fleet had set out from Carthage, with which it would not be quite safe to join battle while Scipio was away.

Masinissa dismissed from this conference, Laelius the next day set sail from Hippo with his ships laden with plunder, and, carried back to Sicily, laid Masinissa’s charge before Scipio. In nearly those same days the ships that had been sent from Carthage to Mago made land between the Ligurian Albingauni and Genua. In those parts Mago then chanced to be holding his fleet; and when he had heard the words of the envoys bidding him gather the largest armies he could, he straightway held a council of the Gauls and Ligurians—for a vast multitude of either nation was there. He said that he had been sent to set them free, and that, as they themselves could see, reinforcements were being sent him from home; but with how great a strength, with how great an army that war should be waged, lay in their own power. There were two Roman armies, one in Gaul, the other in Etruria; he knew well that Spurius Lucretius would join himself with Marcus Livius; many thousands must be armed, that they might withstand two Roman commanders and two Roman armies. The Gauls said their good will to it was complete; but since they had one Roman camp within their borders and another in the neighboring land of Etruria, almost in sight, if it should become plain that the Carthaginian had been helped with auxiliaries by them, at once hostile armies would burst in upon their country from both sides. Let him ask of the Gauls what could be furnished secretly; the Ligurians, since the Roman camps were far from their fields and cities, had a free hand in their counsels; it was fair that those should arm their youth and take up their share of the war. The Ligurians did not refuse: they asked only a space of two months to hold their levies. Meanwhile Mago, his Gallic soldiers dismissed, went on secretly hiring men through their fields for pay; and supplies of every kind were sent him in secret by the Gallic peoples. Marcus Livius led his army of volunteer-slaves over from Etruria into Gaul, and, joined with Lucretius, made ready, if Mago should move from the Ligurians nearer the city, to go to meet him; if the Carthaginian kept quiet under the angle of the Alps, he too would be at the same station about Ariminum to guard Italy.

After Gaius Laelius’s return from Africa, and when Scipio had been spurred by Masinissa’s exhortations, and the soldiers, seeing the plunder carried off out of the enemy’s land by the whole fleet, were kindled to cross over as soon as might be, a smaller design broke in upon a greater—that of recovering the city of Locri, which at the time of Italy’s defection had itself too gone over to the Carthaginians. And the hope of attempting that thing shone out from a very small matter. Affairs in Bruttium were being carried on by brigandage rather than by lawful war, the beginning made by the Numidians, and the Bruttians falling in with that manner no more by their Punic alliance than by their own bent; and at last the Roman soldiers too, now by a kind of contagion delighting in plunder, made raids into the enemy’s fields so far as their leaders allowed. By these, certain Locrians who had gone out of the city were surrounded and dragged off to Rhegium. In that number of captives were certain craftsmen, who chanced to have been accustomed to work for hire among the Carthaginians in the citadel of Locri. These were recognized by the leading men of the Locrians who, driven out by the opposing faction—that which had betrayed Locri to Hannibal—had betaken themselves to Rhegium; and when, to those who questioned them on this and that, as is the way with men long absent, they had told what was being done at home, they gave hope that, if they were ransomed and sent back, they would deliver the citadel to them; there they dwelt, and they were trusted in all things among the Carthaginians. And so, as men who were at once gnawed by longing for their country and aflame with desire of avenging themselves on their enemies, they at once ransomed and sent them back; and when they had arranged the order of the business and the signals that they should watch for, given from afar, they themselves set out to Scipio at Syracuse—with whom were some of the exiles—and, reporting there the captives’ promises, when they had given the consul a hope not far from fulfillment, the tribunes of the soldiers tribune/">Marcus Sergius and Publius Matienus were sent with them and ordered to lead three thousand soldiers from Rhegium to Locri; and it was written to the propraetor Quintus Pleminius that he should be at hand for the carrying-out of the business. Setting out from Rhegium, carrying ladders fashioned to the lofty height of the citadel, about the middle of the night they gave the signal from the appointed place to the betrayers of the citadel; who, ready and intent, having let down ladders made for that very purpose, and received the men as they climbed at several points at once, made an attack—before any outcry could arise—upon the Punic watchmen, lulled in sleep as men under no such fear. Of these the groaning was first heard as they died; then there was sudden consternation, men startled from sleep, and uproar, the cause being unknown; at last the matter grew clearer, as one roused another. And now each was calling to arms for himself: the enemy were in the citadel and the watch was being cut down; and the Romans, by no means equal in number, would have been overwhelmed, had not the shout raised by those who were outside the citadel—though it was uncertain whence it came—made everything seem doubled, the nightly tumult magnifying empty things. And so the Carthaginians, terrified as though the citadel were already full of the enemy, gave up the contest and fled into the other citadel—there are two, not far apart from each other. The townsmen held the city, set as a prize in the midst for the victors; from the two citadels there was fighting every day in slight engagements. Quintus Pleminius commanded the Roman garrison, Hamilcar the Punic. They increased their forces by summoning reinforcements from places near; at last Hannibal himself was coming, nor would the Romans have held out, had not the multitude of the Locrians, exasperated by the arrogance and greed of the Carthaginians, inclined to the Romans.

When it was reported to Scipio that the matter at Locri was turning to a graver crisis, and that Hannibal himself was approaching, lest the garrison too should be endangered—the retreat from there being no easy thing—he too, leaving his brother Lucius Scipio in garrison at Messana, when first the tide turned the strait, sent his ships down with a favoring sea. And Hannibal, from the river Bulotus—it is not far from the city of Locri—sending word ahead that his men should at first light join battle with the Romans and Locrians with all their might, while he himself, all eyes being turned to that tumult, should from the rear attack the city off its guard—when he found the fight begun at dawn, he was not willing to shut himself up in the citadel, where he would block a narrow space with his crowd, nor had he brought ladders by which to scale the walls. Having thrown his baggage into a heap, he showed his line not far from the walls to terrify the enemy, and rode round the city with the Numidian horse while ladders and whatever else was needed for the assault were being prepared, to see at what part it could best be attacked. As he advanced to the wall, the man who chanced to be standing next to him was struck by a scorpion; alarmed then by so perilous a chance, when he had ordered the recall sounded, he fortified a camp out of range of weapons. The Roman fleet from Messana reached Locri in some few hours, much of the day still remaining; all were set ashore from the ships and before sunset entered the city. The next day the fight was begun from the citadel by the Carthaginians, and Hannibal, with ladders now and all else made ready for the assault, was coming up to the walls, when suddenly, against him as he feared nothing less than any such thing, a gate was thrown open and the Romans burst out. They killed about two hundred, having fallen on them unawares; the rest Hannibal, when he perceived the consul was at hand, drew back into camp, and, sending word to those who were in the citadel that they should look to themselves, he moved his camp in the night and went away. And those who were in the citadel, throwing fire upon the roofs they held, so that this tumult might delay the enemy, overtook their own column before nightfall, in a march like flight.

Scipio, when he saw both that the citadel had been left by the enemy and that their camp was empty, summoning the Locrians to an assembly, gravely upbraided them for their defection; of the authors he exacted punishment, and granted their goods to the leaders of the other faction for their notable loyalty toward the Romans. As for the community, he said he would neither give nor take away anything from the Locrians; let them send envoys to Rome; what the Senate should judge fair, that fortune they would have. This much he knew well, that, though they had deserved ill of the Roman people, they would be in a better state under angry Romans than they had been under friendly Carthaginians. He himself, leaving the legate Pleminius and the garrison that had taken the citadel to guard the city, crossed with the forces he had brought to Messana. So arrogantly and cruelly had the Locrians been treated by the Carthaginians after their defection from the Romans, that they could endure moderate wrongs not only with even but almost with willing minds; but in very truth Pleminius so far outdid Hamilcar the commandant of the garrison, the Roman garrison-soldiers so far outdid the Carthaginians in wickedness and greed, that it seemed a contest waged not in arms but in vices. None of all the things that make the wealth of the more powerful hateful to the poor was left undone against the townsmen by leader or by soldiers; upon their very persons, upon their children, upon their wives, unspeakable outrages were committed. And now their greed did not refrain even from the spoliation of holy things; nor were the other temples only violated, but even the treasures of Proserpina, untouched through every age, except that they were said to have been despoiled by Pyrrhus, who brought back his plunder with a great expiation of his sacrilege. As therefore before the royal ships, shattered by shipwreck, had brought ashore nothing whole save the sacred money of the goddess which they were carrying off, so then too that same money, by another kind of disaster, cast madness upon all who were tainted by that violation of the temple, and turned them in hostile frenzy against each other, leader against leader, soldier against soldier.

Pleminius was in supreme command; part of the soldiers was under him, those whom he had himself brought from Rhegium, part under the tribunes. A soldier of Pleminius’s, having snatched a silver cup from a townsman’s house and fleeing those whose it was as they pursued, chanced to meet the tribunes of the soldiers Sergius and Matienus; and when the cup had been taken from him by the tribunes’ order, there arose from that a quarrel and an outcry, and at last a fight broke out between Pleminius’s soldiers and the tribunes’, the throng and the tumult growing as each came up opportunely to his own side. Pleminius’s soldiers, beaten, when they had run together to Pleminius, showing their blood and wounds, not without loud crying and indignation, reporting the reproaches that had been flung at himself in the brawls, he, kindled with rage, rushed out of his house, and summoning the tribunes, ordered them stripped and the rods made ready. While time was spent in stripping them—for they resisted and implored the soldiers’ protection—suddenly the soldiers, fierce in their fresh victory, ran together from every quarter, as though the call to arms had been raised against an enemy; and when they had seen the tribunes’ bodies already violated with the rods, then indeed, kindled to a far more ungovernable frenzy on the instant, with no respect not of majesty only but even of humanity, they made an attack upon the legate, having first beaten his lictors in shameful fashion. Then they cut him off from his men, hemmed him in, savaged him like enemies, and left him all but lifeless, his nose and ears mutilated. When these things were reported at Messana, Scipio, a few days after, sailed to Locri in a galley of six banks; and when he had heard the cause of Pleminius and the tribunes, having freed Pleminius of blame and left him in garrison of that same place, and having judged the tribunes guilty and cast them into chains to be sent to Rome to the Senate, he returned to Messana and thence to Syracuse. Pleminius, ungoverned in his wrath, reckoning his own injury slighted by Scipio and judged too lightly, and that no other could weigh that suit but one who by suffering had felt the atrocity of it, ordered the tribunes dragged to him, and, after mangling them with every torment a body can bear, killed them; nor sated with the punishment of the living, he flung them out unburied. With like cruelty he dealt also with the chief men of the Locrians, whom he heard had set out to Publius Scipio to complain of their wrongs; and the foul examples he had earlier made of the allies through lust and greed, he now, out of anger, made many times over, bringing infamy and odium not on himself only but on the commander too.

The time of the elections was now drawing near, when from the consul Publius Licinius a letter was brought to Rome: that he and his army were afflicted with a grave sickness, and that they could not have held out had not the same violence of the malady, or a worse, fallen upon the enemy; and so, since he himself could not come to the elections, if it seemed good to the Fathers, he would name Quintus Caecilius Metellus dictator for the holding of the elections. It was for the good of the state that Quintus Caecilius’s army should be disbanded; for there was no use of it for the present, since Hannibal had now drawn his men into winter quarters, and so great a force of sickness had come upon that camp that, unless they were disbanded in good time, it seemed that none of all of them would survive. Leave was given the consul to do in this what he judged for the good of the state and his own honor. At that time a sudden religious scruple seized the city, upon a prophecy being found in the Sibylline Books—consulted because that year there had been more frequent showers of stones from heaven—that whenever a foreign enemy should have brought war upon the land of Italy, he could be driven out of Italy and conquered if the Idaean Mother were brought from Pessinus to Rome. This prophecy, found by the decemvirs, moved the Fathers the more because the envoys who had carried the gift to Delphi reported both that all had been favorable when they themselves sacrificed to Pythian Apollo, and that an oracle had been given that a far greater victory was at hand for the Roman people than that from whose spoils they were bringing the gifts. To the sum of that same hope they referred Publius Scipio’s spirit, prophetic as it were of the end of the war, in that he had demanded Africa for his province. And so, that they might the sooner become possessed of the victory which fate, omens, and oracles portended, they began to think and turn over by what means the goddess might be brought to Rome.

The Roman people had as yet no allied states in Asia; nevertheless, remembering that Aesculapius too had once been summoned out of Greece for the people’s health, though Greece was then bound by no treaty, and that friendship with king Attalus had now been begun on account of the common war against Philip—he would do, they thought, what he could for the Roman people’s sake—they decreed envoys to him: Marcus Valerius Laevinus, who had twice been consul and had conducted affairs in Greece; Marcus Caecilius Metellus, of praetorian rank; Servius Sulpicius Galba, of aedilician; and two of quaestorian rank, Gnaeus Tremelius Flaccus and Marcus Valerius Falto. To them they assigned five quinquereme ships, that they might approach in keeping with the dignity of the Roman people those lands among which the majesty of the Roman name had to be conciliated. The envoys, making for Asia, went up at once to Delphi and approached the oracle, consulting it about the business on which they had been sent from home, and what hope it portended of accomplishing it for them and for the Roman people. The answer, they say, was that they would attain what they sought through king Attalus; and when they had brought the goddess to Rome, then let them see to it that the best man at Rome should receive her with hospitality. They came to the king at Pergamum. He, having kindly received the envoys, led them to Pessinus in Phrygia, and handed over to them the sacred stone which the inhabitants called the Mother of the Gods, and bade them carry it to Rome. Marcus Valerius Falto, sent ahead by the envoys, announced that the goddess was being brought; that the best man in the state must be sought, who should receive her with due rite. Quintus Caecilius Metellus was named dictator by the consul in Bruttium for the holding of the elections, and his army disbanded; his master of horse was Lucius Veturius Philo. The elections were held by the dictator. The consuls made were Marcus Cornelius Cethegus and Publius Sempronius Tuditanus, the latter in his absence, since he held the province of Greece. Then the praetors were chosen: Tiberius Claudius Nero, Marcus Marcius Ralla, Lucius Scribonius Libo, praetor/">Marcus Pomponius Matho. The elections over, the dictator abdicated his office. The Roman games were repeated three times, the plebeian seven times. The curule aediles were Gnaeus and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus. Lucius held the province of Spain; chosen in his absence, he held that office in his absence. Tiberius Claudius Asellus and Marcus Junius Pennus were plebeian aediles. The temple of Virtus at the Porta Capena was dedicated that year by Marcus Marcellus, in the seventeenth year after it had been vowed by his father in his first consulship in Gaul at Clastidium. And the flamen of Mars died that year, Marcus Aemilius Regillus.

In those two years affairs in Greece had been neglected. And so Philip brought the Aetolians—deserted by the Romans, in whose help alone they had trusted—to seek and bargain for peace on what terms he willed. Had he not hastened to accomplish this with all his might, Publius Sempronius the proconsul, sent as successor to the command in place of Sulpicius with ten thousand foot and a thousand horse and thirty-five beaked ships—no small weight to bear aid to the allies—would have caught him as he warred with the Aetolians. Scarcely was the peace made when word came to the king that the Romans had come to Dyrrachium, that the Parthini and other neighboring peoples had been stirred to the hope of a fresh rising, and that Dimallum was being besieged. Thither the Romans had turned aside from the help of the Aetolians, to whom they had been sent, angered because without their sanction they had made peace with the king against the treaty. When Philip heard this, lest some greater movement should arise among the neighboring peoples and nations, he made by long marches for Apollonia, to which Sempronius had withdrawn, having sent the legate Laetorius with part of his forces and fifteen ships into Aetolia to see how things stood and to disturb the peace if he could. Philip laid waste the fields of the Apolloniates, and bringing his forces up to the city offered the Roman the chance of battle; but when he saw him keep quiet and only guard the walls, not trusting his strength enough to assault the city, and desiring with the Romans too, as with the Aetolians, to make peace if he could, or if not a truce, he withdrew into his kingdom, his hatred provoked no further by a new contest. At the same time, weary of the long war, the Epirotes, having first sounded the will of the Romans, sent envoys about a general peace to Philip, affirming that they were confident it would be agreed upon if he came to a conference with Publius Sempronius the Roman commander. It was easily obtained—for not even the king’s own mind shrank from it—that he should cross over into Epirus. Phoenice is a city of Epirus; there the king first conferred with Aeropus and Derdas and Philip, praetors of the Epirotes, and afterward met with Publius Sempronius. There were present at the conference Amynander king of the Athamanes, and the other magistrates of the Epirotes and the Acarnanians. The praetor Philip spoke first, and asked both of the king and of the Roman commander that they should make an end of war and grant that boon to the Epirotes. Publius Sempronius stated the terms of peace: that the Parthini and Dimallum and Bargullum and Eugenium should belong to the Romans; Atintania, if by sending envoys to Rome it should obtain it from the Senate, to be added to Macedonia. When peace was being agreed on these terms, there were inscribed to the treaty on the king’s side Prusias king of Bithynia, the Achaeans, Boeotians, Thessalians, Acarnanians, Epirotes; on the Roman side the Ilienses, king Attalus, Pleuratus, Nabis tyrant of the Lacedaemonians, the Eleans, Messenians, Athenians. These things were written down and sealed, and a truce of two months was made until envoys could be sent to Rome that the people might order peace on these terms; and all the tribes ordered it, because, the war being turned toward Africa, they wished for the present to be relieved of all other wars. Publius Sempronius, the peace made, departed to Rome to his consulship.

In the consulship of Marcus Cornelius and Publius Sempronius—it was the fifteenth year of the Punic war—the provinces decreed were, to Cornelius Etruria with the old army, to Sempronius Bruttium, that he should enroll new legions; to the praetors fell, to Marcus Marcius the city, to Lucius Scribonius Libo the foreign jurisdiction and likewise Gaul, to praetor/">Marcus Pomponius Matho Sicily, to Tiberius Claudius Nero Sardinia. To Publius Scipio command was prolonged for a year, with the army and the fleet he had; likewise to Publius Licinius, that he should hold Bruttium with two legions so long as it should seem to the consul for the good of the state that he tarry in the province with the command. And to Marcus Livius and Spurius Lucretius command was prolonged, with the two legions apiece with which they had guarded Gaul against Mago; and to Gnaeus Octavius, that, when he had handed over Sardinia and the legion to Tiberius Claudius, he should himself with forty ships of war guard the coast within such bounds as the Senate should appoint. To the praetor Marcus Pomponius in Sicily the two legions of the army of Cannae were decreed. Titus Quinctius was to hold Tarentum, Gaius Hostilius Tubulus Capua, as propraetors, just as in the year before, each with the old garrison. As to the command in Spain, it was put to the people which two should be sent as proconsuls into that province. All the tribes ordered that the same Lucius Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Manlius Acidinus, as proconsuls, should hold those provinces, just as they had held them the year before. The consuls set about holding a levy, both to enroll new legions for Bruttium and to fill up the other armies—for so they had been ordered by the Senate.

Although Africa had not yet been openly decreed a province—the Fathers concealing it, I suppose, lest the Carthaginians should learn it beforehand—yet the city had been raised to this hope, that in Africa there would be war that year and that the end of the Punic war was at hand. This had filled men’s minds with superstition, and they were prone both to report prodigies and to believe them; so the more were noised abroad: that two suns had been seen, and that there had been a flash of light by night, and that at Setia a meteor had been seen stretching from the east to the west; that at Tarracina a gate, and at Anagnia both a gate and the wall in many places, had been struck from heaven; that in the temple of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium a noise had been made with a dreadful crash. For the averting of these a supplication was held one day, and a nine-day rite was performed because there had been a shower of stones from heaven. Added to this was the deliberation about receiving the Idaean Mother, of whose coming, besides that Marcus Valerius, one of the envoys, going ahead, had announced that she would soon be in Italy, a fresh message had now come that she was already at Tarracina. A matter of no small moment held the Senate: who was the best man in the state? A true victory in that thing each would rather have for himself than any commands or honors conferred by the vote of Fathers or of plebs. They judged Publius Scipio, son of that Gnaeus who had fallen in Spain, a young man not yet of quaestorian age, to be the best of the good men in the whole state. By what virtues moved they so judged, I would gladly hand down to posterity, as it has been handed down by the writers nearest to the memory of those times; but I will not interpose my own opinions, guessing at a thing buried in antiquity. Publius Cornelius was ordered to go with all the matrons to Ostia to meet the goddess; he was to receive her from the ship, and, when she was brought to land, hand her over to be carried by the matrons. When the ship reached the mouth of the river Tiber, he, as he had been ordered, going out in a boat upon the open sea, received the goddess from the priests and brought her to land. The foremost matrons of the state received her, among whom the name of one, Claudia Quinta, is conspicuous; whose reputation, having been doubtful before, as tradition has it, by so religious a service made her chastity the more illustrious to posterity. They, passing her from hand to hand, one set relieving another, while the whole city poured out to meet her, censers set before the doors where she was borne past, and the incense kindled, praying that she would enter the city of Rome willing and propitious, carried the goddess into the temple of Victory which is on the Palatine, on the day before the Ides of April; and that day was a festival. The people thronging brought gifts to the goddess on the Palatine, and there was a feast of the gods and games, called the Megalesia.

When the matter of the reinforcement of the legions that were in the provinces was being dealt with, it was suggested by certain senators that the time had come, now that the kindness of the gods had at last removed the fear, no longer to endure what had been borne after a fashion in doubtful circumstances. The Fathers being raised to expectation, they put forward the twelve Latin colonies which, in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Quintus Fulvius, had refused to give soldiers, and had now for nearly six years held exemption from military service, as though by way of honor and favor, while in the meantime the good and obedient allies, for their loyalty and submission to the Roman people, had been drained dry by levies in all the unbroken years. At this word there was renewed in the Fathers not so much the memory of a thing now almost blotted out as their anger was provoked. And so, suffering the consuls to bring nothing before them sooner, they decreed that the consuls should summon to Rome the magistrates and ten of the leading men of each from Nepete, Sutrium, Ardea, Cales, Alba, Carseoli, Sora, Suessa, Setia, Circeii, Narnia, Interamna—for these were the colonies in that case—and command them that whatever number of soldiers each of those colonies had at most given to the Roman people since the enemy had been in Italy, they should give double that number of foot and a hundred and twenty horse apiece; if any could not make up that number of horse, it should be allowed to give three foot for one horseman; the foot and horse should be chosen from the wealthiest, and sent wherever outside Italy reinforcement was needed. If any of them refused, it was resolved that the magistrates and envoys of that colony be detained, and that no audience of the Senate be granted them, should they ask it, before they had done what was commanded. Besides this, a tribute was to be imposed on these colonies and exacted yearly, of one as on every thousand of bronze; and a census was to be taken in those colonies on a form given by the Roman censors; and the form to be given was the same as for the Roman people; and the returns were to be brought to Rome by the colonies’ censors, sworn, before they left office. From this decree of the Senate, the magistrates and chief men of those colonies being summoned to Rome, when the consuls demanded of them the soldiers and the tribute, they began, one more than another, to refuse and cry out: that so many soldiers could not be raised; that they would scarcely strain to it if a single levy were demanded by the form; they begged and besought that they might be allowed to approach the Senate and plead for mercy; that they had done nothing for which they ought deservedly to perish; but if perish they must, neither their own offense nor the anger of the Roman people could make them give more soldiers than they had. The consuls, unmoved, ordered the envoys to remain at Rome, the magistrates to go home to hold the levies: that unless the full number of soldiers commanded were brought to Rome, no one would grant them audience of the Senate. So, the hope of approaching the Senate and pleading for mercy being cut off, the levy in those twelve colonies—the number of their young men increased through the long exemption—was carried out without difficulty.

Another matter, also neglected almost as long in silence, was brought up by Marcus Valerius Laevinus, who said that it was at last fair that the moneys contributed by private persons in his and Marcus Claudius’s consulship should be repaid; nor ought anyone to wonder that the public faith pledged was his especial care; for besides that it pertained in a particular way to the consul of the year in which the moneys had been contributed, he had himself also been the author of so contributing them, the treasury being empty and the plebs not sufficing for the war-tax. Welcome to the Fathers was this reminder; and bidding the consuls bring it forward, they decreed that the money should be paid in three installments: the first, in cash, those who were then consuls should pay; the second and third, the consuls of the third and fifth years. Then one care above all others took hold of them, after the disaster of the Locrians, which had been unknown to that day, was made public by the arrival of the envoys; nor did Pleminius’s wickedness so much provoke men’s anger as Scipio’s ambition or negligence in the matter. Ten envoys of the Locrians, foul with squalor and filth, while the consuls sat in the comitium, holding out before the tribunal the wreaths of suppliants, the boughs of olive, as is the custom of the Greeks, with tearful crying threw themselves on the ground. When the consuls asked, they said they were Locrians, and had suffered from the legate Quintus Pleminius and the Roman soldiers such things as the Roman people would not wish even the Carthaginians to suffer; they prayed that the Fathers would grant them leave to approach and bewail their miseries.

Audience of the Senate being granted, the eldest of them spoke: "I know, Conscript Fathers, that of how much our complaints are esteemed by you the chief weight lies in this, that you should rightly know both how Locri was betrayed to Hannibal, and how, after Hannibal’s garrison was driven out, it was restored to your dominion; for if the guilt of the defection be far from the public counsel, and the return into your dominion appear to have come not by our will only but by our help and valor too, the more you would be indignant that to good and faithful allies such unworthy, such atrocious wrongs are done by your legate and soldiers. But I think the cause of our two defections must be deferred to another time, for two reasons: one, that it may be pleaded before Publius Scipio, who recovered Locri and is witness to all that we have done rightly or wrongly; the other, because, whatever we are, yet these things we have suffered we ought not to have suffered. We cannot dissemble, Conscript Fathers, that, while we had the Punic garrison in our citadel, we suffered many foul and unworthy things both from Hamilcar the commandant of the garrison and from the Numidians and Africans; but what are those, set beside what we suffer today? With your good leave, I pray, hear, Conscript Fathers, that which I speak against my will. The whole human race is now in the balance, whether it shall see you or the Carthaginians lords of the world. If the Roman and the Punic empire are to be weighed by the things which we Locrians have suffered either from them or now most of all suffer from your garrison, there is no one who would not choose them rather than you for his masters. And yet see how the Locrians are minded toward you. When we received from the Carthaginians wrongs so much less, we fled to your commander; when from your garrison we suffer more than enemies would inflict, nowhere else than to you have we carried our complaints. Either you will look upon our ruined fortunes, Conscript Fathers, or there is left nothing that we might pray even of the immortal gods. The legate Quintus Pleminius was sent with a garrison to recover Locri from the Carthaginians, and was left there with that same garrison. In this legate of yours—for utmost misery gives courage to speak freely—there is nothing, Conscript Fathers, of a man save the figure and the shape, nothing of a Roman citizen save the bearing and the dress and the sound of the Latin tongue; a plague and a monstrous beast, such as the tales tell once beset the strait by which we are parted from Sicily, to the destruction of seafarers. And if he were content to wreak his wickedness and lust and greed upon your allies alone, we would fill up that one pit, deep though it be, by our endurance; but as it is, he has made all your centurions and soldiers Pleminii—so utterly has he willed license and wickedness to be shared in common; all rob, despoil, beat, wound, kill; they ravish matrons, maidens, free-born boys torn from their parents’ embrace. Daily our city is taken, daily it is plundered; day and night all places ring everywhere with the wailings of women and children who are seized and carried off. One who knew it might wonder how either we suffice to endure, or those who do these things have not yet had their fill of such great wrongs. I cannot recount, nor is it worth your while to hear, the several things we have suffered; I will embrace all together. I say there is no house in Locri, I say there is no man, free of injury; I say there is left no kind of crime, of lust, of greed, that has not been wrought upon every one of us who could endure it. Scarcely can it be reckoned which fate is the more abominable for a city, when enemies have taken it in war, or when a deadly tyrant has crushed it by force of arms. All that captured cities suffer we have suffered and most of all do now suffer, Conscript Fathers; all the crimes that the cruelest and most violent tyrants commit upon their oppressed citizens Pleminius has committed upon us and our children and wives.

"There is one thing about which a scruple fixed in our minds compels us to complain by name, and which we would have you hear and free your commonwealth from the religious bond, if so it seem to you, Conscript Fathers; for we have seen with how great ceremony you not only worship your own gods but even receive foreign ones. There is among us a shrine of Proserpina, of the sanctity of which temple I believe some report has reached you in the war with Pyrrhus, who, when on his return from Sicily he sailed with his fleet past Locri, among the other foul deeds he did against our city for its loyalty toward you, despoiled also the treasures of Proserpina, untouched to that day; and so, the money loaded into his ships, he himself set out by land. What then came to pass, Conscript Fathers? The next day the fleet was shattered by a most foul tempest, and all the ships that held the sacred money were cast upon our shores; taught at last by so great a disaster that gods there are, that most arrogant king ordered all the money hunted out and carried back into the treasury of Proserpina. Nor did anything prosper with him ever after; driven from Italy, he met an ignoble and dishonorable death, entering Argos rashly by night. When your legate and the tribunes of the soldiers had heard these things, and a thousand others, which were told us and our forefathers not to magnify religion but often proved by the present power of the goddess, they nonetheless dared to lay sacrilegious hands on those untouched treasures, and with the unspeakable plunder to defile themselves and their houses and your soldiers. By you and by your faith, Conscript Fathers, before you have done aught in Italy or in Africa, expiate their crime, lest they pay for the sin they have committed not with their own blood only but with a public disaster. Yet even now, Conscript Fathers, the anger of the goddess does not cease, whether in your leaders or in your soldiers. Several times already they have clashed with one another, standards joined; the leader of one party was Pleminius, of the other the two tribunes of the soldiers. They fought with the sword among themselves no less fiercely than with the Carthaginians, and by their madness would have given Hannibal the chance to recover Locri, had not Scipio, summoned by us, intervened. But, you will say, frenzy drives the soldiers tainted by sacrilege; in the punishing of the leaders themselves no power of the goddess appeared. Nay, there above all she was present. The tribunes were beaten with rods by the legate; then the legate, caught by the tribunes’ ambush, besides that he was mangled all over his body, his nose too and his ears cut off, was left bloodless; recovered then from his wounds, he cast the tribunes of the soldiers into chains, and then, having scourged them and tortured them with every servile punishment, killed them; and the dead he forbade to be buried. These are the penalties the goddess exacts from the despoilers of her temple, nor will she cease to drive them with all the Furies until the sacred money has been put back in the treasury. Once long ago our forefathers, in a grievous war with the people of Croton, since the temple is outside the city, wished to remove that money into the city; a voice was heard by night from the shrine: let them keep their hands off, the goddess would defend her own. Because a religious dread had been struck into them at moving the treasures thence, they wished to surround the temple with a wall; the walls had been raised to some height when suddenly they fell in ruin. But both now and then and often on other occasions the goddess has either protected her own seat and her own temple, or exacted grievous expiations from those who violated it: our wrongs neither can nor could any avenge but you, Conscript Fathers. To you and to your faith we flee as suppliants. It matters nothing to us whether you suffer us to be Locri under that legate, under that garrison, or hand us over to angry Hannibal and the Carthaginians for punishment. We do not demand that you believe us at once, against an absent man, the cause unheard: let him come, hear in person, in person clear himself. If he has left undone any crime that man can commit against men, we do not refuse that we should suffer all the same things over again, if we can bear them, and that he be freed of every crime, divine and human."

When these things had been said by the envoys, and Quintus Fabius had asked of them whether they had laid these complaints before Publius Scipio, they answered that envoys had been sent, but that he was busied with the preparation of war, and had either already crossed into Africa or would within a few days cross over; and that they had learned how great was the legate’s favor with the commander, since, the cause between him and the tribunes being heard, he had cast the tribunes into chains and left the legate, equally guilty or even more so, in that same office. The envoys being bidden to withdraw from the temple, not Pleminius only but Scipio too was mangled by the speeches of the leading men. Above all Quintus Fabius charged him with being born to the corrupting of military discipline: thus in Spain too almost more had been lost through the mutiny of the soldiers than in the war; in a foreign and royal fashion he both indulged the soldiers’ license and raged against them. He added to his speech a sentence equally savage: that it was his pleasure that the legate Pleminius should be carried in chains to Rome, and from his chains plead his cause, and, if what the Locrians complained of were true, be put to death in prison and his goods confiscated; that Publius Scipio, because he had left his province without the Senate’s order, be recalled, and that the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs be approached to bring before the people the abrogation of his command; that the Senate should answer the Locrians to their face that the wrongs they complained had been done them neither the Senate nor the Roman people wished done; that they be called good men and allies and friends; that their children, wives, and whatever else had been taken from them be restored; that the money, as much as had been taken from the treasury of Proserpina, be hunted out and double the money put back into the treasury; and that an expiatory rite be performed, after first referring to the college of pontiffs, since the sacred treasury had been moved, opened, violated, what expiations, to what gods, with what victims, it pleased should be made; that the soldiers who were at Locri be all carried over into Sicily; that four cohorts of the allies of the Latin name be brought to Locri as a garrison. The votes could not be taken through that day, men’s passions being kindled for Scipio and against Scipio. Besides Pleminius’s crime and the Locrians’ disaster, even the commander’s own dress, not Roman, nay not even soldierly, was bandied about: that he walked in the gymnasium in a cloak and Greek slippers; that he gave his attention to little books and the wrestling-ground; that his whole staff just as idly enjoyed the pleasantness of Syracuse; that Carthage and Hannibal had slipped from his memory; that his whole army was corrupted by license, as it had been at Sucro in Spain, as it now was at Locri, more to be feared by the allies than by the enemy.

Although these charges were bandied about, partly true, partly mingled with falsehood and therefore like the truth, yet the opinion of Quintus Metellus prevailed, who, agreeing with Maximus on the rest, dissented on Scipio’s case: for how did it suit that a man whom the state had but lately, while still very young, chosen as its one leader for the recovery of Spain, whom, when Spain was recovered from the enemy, it had made consul to put an end to the Punic war, on whom it had fixed its hope of dragging Hannibal out of Italy and subduing Africa, should suddenly, like a Quintus Pleminius, almost condemned, his cause unheard, be recalled from his province, when the very things the Locrians complained had been wickedly done against them they did not say had been done even in Scipio’s presence, and nothing could be charged against him but his forbearance, or the modesty by which he had spared his legate? His pleasure was that the praetor Marcus Pomponius, to whom Sicily had fallen as his province by lot, should within the next three days set out for the province; that the consuls should choose from the Senate ten envoys, such as seemed good to them, to send with the praetor, and two plebs/">tribunes of the plebs and an aedile; that with this council the praetor should hold the inquiry; if the things the Locrians complained had been done had been done by the order or with the consent of Publius Scipio, they should order him to depart from the province; if Publius Scipio had already crossed into Africa, the tribunes of the plebs and the aedile, with two of the envoys whom the praetor should judge most fit, should set out for Africa—the tribunes and the aedile to bring Scipio back from there, the envoys to take charge of the army until a new commander should come to that army; but if Marcus Pomponius and the ten envoys found that those things had been done neither by the order nor with the consent of Publius Scipio, Scipio should remain with the army and wage the war as he had purposed. This decree of the Senate being passed, it was arranged with the tribunes of the plebs that they should agree among themselves, or choose by lot, which two should go with the praetor and the envoys; it was referred to the college of pontiffs about expiating the things at Locri which had been touched and violated in the temple of Proserpina and carried off thence. The tribunes of the plebs who set out with the praetor and the ten envoys were Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Marcus Cincius Alimentus; an aedile of the plebs was assigned them, whom, if Scipio either in Sicily did not obey the praetor’s word or had already crossed into Africa, the tribunes might order to arrest him, and by the right of their sacrosanct power bring him back. Their plan was to go to Locri before Messana.

But there is a double report as touching Pleminius. Some hand it down that, when he heard what had been done at Rome, going into exile to Naples, he chanced to fall in with Quintus Metellus, one of the envoys, and was by him dragged back by force to Rhegium; others, that a legate was sent by Scipio himself with thirty of the noblest of the horse, to cast Quintus Pleminius into chains and with him the leaders of the mutiny. These all, whether by Scipio’s earlier order or now by the praetor’s, were given into custody at Rhegium. The praetor and the envoys, setting out for Locri, made their first care, as had been charged them, that of religion; for they hunted out all the sacred money, both that which was with Pleminius and that which was with the soldiers, and, together with what they had themselves brought with them, put it back into the treasury, and performed an expiatory rite. Then the praetor, having summoned the soldiers to an assembly, ordered them to carry the standards out of the city, and pitched camp in the plain, with a stern edict that, if any soldier had either remained in the city or carried off with him what was not his own—; he granted the Locrians leave to seize whatever each recognized as his, and to reclaim whatever was not found; above all it was his pleasure that the free persons should without delay be restored to the Locrians; he who did not restore them would be discharged with no light penalty. Then he held an assembly of the Locrians and told them that the Roman people and the Senate restored to them their liberty and their own laws; if any wished to accuse Pleminius or any other, let him follow him to Rhegium; if they wished to complain publicly of Publius Scipio that the things wickedly done at Locri against gods and men had been done by the order or with the consent of Publius Scipio, let them send envoys to Messana; there he would hold the inquiry with his council. The Locrians gave thanks to the praetor and the envoys, to the Senate and the Roman people; they said they would go to accuse Pleminius; as for Scipio, though he had grieved too little at the wrongs of their city, he was such a man as they would rather have for a friend than an enemy; they held it for certain that neither by the order nor by the consent of Publius Scipio had so many and so wicked deeds been committed, but that either Pleminius had been trusted too much or themselves too little, or that it is inborn in certain men rather to wish wrong not to be done than to have spirit enough to avenge it once done. Both from the praetor and from his council no light burden was lifted, that of inquiring into Scipio. Pleminius and up to two-and-thirty men with him they condemned, and sent in chains to Rome. They themselves set out to Scipio, that they might also carry back to Rome, proved by their own eyes, the things that were noised abroad in talk about the commander’s dress and idleness and the loosened discipline of his army.

As they came to Syracuse, Scipio made ready for his clearing not words but facts. He ordered the whole army to assemble there and the fleet to be made ready, as though there must be battle that day by land and sea with the Carthaginians. On the day they came he received them hospitably and kindly; the next day he showed them the land and sea forces, not only drawn up but the one performing maneuvers, the fleet in the harbor giving the very semblance and show of a sea-fight; then the praetor and the envoys were led round to view the arsenals and the granaries and the rest of the apparatus of war. And so great an admiration of the several things and of all together was struck into them, that they believed it sufficiently sure that either by that leader and that army the Carthaginian people would be conquered, or by no other; and they bade him, with the gods’ good favor, cross over, and make the Roman people, at the earliest moment, possessed of the hope they had conceived on the day when all the centuries had named him the foremost consul; and they set out thence with spirits so glad that they seemed about to announce to Rome not the magnificent apparatus of war but a victory. Pleminius and those who were in the same case, after coming to Rome, were straightway shut in prison. And at first, when they were brought before the people by the tribunes, before minds already preoccupied by the disaster of the Locrians, they found no place for pity; afterward, when they were brought out more often, the resentment now ebbing, men’s anger was softened; and Pleminius’s very disfigurement, and the memory of the absent Scipio, won favor with the crowd. Yet he died in chains before the people’s judgment upon him was completed. This Pleminius—so Clodius Licinus relates in the third book of his Roman History—at the votive games which Africanus, consul a second time, was holding at Rome, attempted through certain men whom he had bribed to set fire to the city in several places, that he might have the chance of breaking out of prison and fleeing; then, the crime being detected, he was consigned to the Tullianum by decree of the Senate. Of Scipio nothing was done save in the Senate, where all the envoys and the tribunes, extolling the fleet, the army, and the commander in words, brought it about that the Senate decreed that the crossing into Africa should be made at the earliest moment, and that Scipio be permitted to choose, out of the armies that were in Sicily, which he should take with him into Africa, which leave to guard the province.

While these things were doing among the Romans, the Carthaginians too, after passing an anxious winter with lookouts set on every headland, questioning and trembling at every messenger, added no small reinforcement of their own to the guarding of Africa—the alliance of king Syphax, in reliance on whom chiefly they had believed the Roman would cross into Africa. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo had with the king not only ties of hospitality—of which it was told before, when Scipio and Hasdrubal chanced to come together at the same time out of Spain—but also a connection by marriage now broached, that the king should wed Hasdrubal’s daughter. To complete that affair and fix a day for the nuptials—for the maiden was now of marriageable age—Hasdrubal set out, and when he perceived the king inflamed with desire—and the Numidians are, before all barbarians, given over to love—he fetched the maiden from Carthage and hastened the wedding; and, that to the private bond a public one too might be joined, an alliance between the Carthaginian people and the king was sworn, by oaths given on either side that they would hold the same friends and the same enemies. But Hasdrubal, mindful both of the alliance entered into by the king with Scipio, and how empty and shifting are the tempers of barbarians, fearing lest, if Scipio crossed into Africa, that marriage should prove a slender bond, while he had the Numidian inflamed with his fresh love, prevailed on him, plying the girl’s coaxings too, to send envoys into Sicily to Scipio, by whom he should warn him not, trusting to his former promises, to cross into Africa; that he, bound both by the marriage of a Carthaginian citizen, the daughter of that Hasdrubal whom he had seen at his own house in hospitality, and by a public treaty too with the Carthaginian people, desired first that, as they had done hitherto, the Romans should wage their war with the Carthaginians far from Africa, lest he be forced to take part in their contests, and, refusing arms now to these, now to those, to follow the one alliance or the other; but if Scipio did not keep away from Africa and moved an army up to Carthage, it would be necessary for him to fight both for the land of Africa, in which he himself too was born, and for the fatherland of his wife, and for her father and her household gods.

With these instructions the king’s envoys, sent to Scipio, met him at Syracuse. Scipio, though robbed of a great means and a great hope of his enterprise in Africa, sent the envoys back in haste, before the matter should be noised abroad, and gave them a letter to the king, in which again and again he warned him not to play false with the rights of hospitality between them, nor with the alliance entered into with the Roman people, nor with right, faith, the clasped hands, the gods called to witness and judge of the covenants. But since the coming of the Numidians could not be hidden—for they had wandered in the city and shown themselves about the headquarters—and, if it were kept silent on what errand they had come, there was danger lest the truth, by that very concealment, should the more of itself leak out, and fear creep into the army that they would have to war at once with the king and the Carthaginians, he forestalled men’s minds with falsehoods, turning them from the truth; and summoning the soldiers to an assembly, he said there must be no more delaying; the allied kings were pressing that he cross into Africa as soon as might be. Masinissa, he said, had earlier come in person to Gaius Laelius, complaining that time was being wasted by delay; now Syphax was sending envoys, wondering at the same thing—what was the cause of so long a delay—and demanding that either at last the army be crossed into Africa, or, if their plans were changed, that he be informed, so that he too might be able to take counsel for himself and his kingdom. And so, since all was now equipped and made ready, and the matter admitted no further delay, it was his mind to bring the fleet over to Lilybaeum, and there to gather all his forces of foot and horse, and on the first day that gave a course to his ships, with the gods’ good help, to cross into Africa. He sent a letter to Marcus Pomponius, that, if it seemed good to him, he should come to Lilybaeum, that they might take counsel together which legions above all, and how great a number of soldiers, he should carry into Africa. Likewise he sent round the whole sea-coast, that all the transport ships seized should be gathered to Lilybaeum. When whatever of soldiers and ships there was in Sicily had assembled at Lilybaeum, and neither the city could hold the multitude of men nor the harbor the ships, so great was the ardor in all of crossing into Africa, that they seemed to be led not to war but to the sure rewards of victory. Especially those soldiers who survived of the army of Cannae believed that under that leader and no other, by good service to the commonwealth, they could end their inglorious soldiering. And Scipio least of all disdained that kind of soldier, as one who knew that the disaster at Cannae had not been incurred through their cowardice, and that there were no soldiers in the Roman army equally seasoned, and proved not in various battles only but in the storming of cities too. The fifth and sixth were the legions of Cannae. When he had said he would carry them over into Africa, he inspected the soldiers one by one, and, leaving behind those he thought unfit, put in their place those he had brought with him from Italy; and so he filled up those legions that each had six thousand two hundred foot and three hundred horse. Of the allies of the Latin name likewise he chose foot and horse from the army of Cannae.

How many soldiers were carried over into Africa is no small disagreement among the authorities. In one place I find ten thousand foot and two thousand two hundred horse, in another sixteen thousand foot and one thousand six hundred horse, in another the matter swollen by more than half—five and thirty thousand foot and horse put aboard the ships. Some have not added the number, among whom, in a doubtful matter, I would rather set myself. Coelius, though he refrains from a number, yet swells the show of the multitude to a vast size: he says that birds dropped to the ground at the soldiers’ shout, and that so great a multitude went aboard the ships that no mortal seemed to be left behind either in Italy or in Sicily. The care that the soldiers should embark in order and without tumult Scipio took upon himself; the sailors Gaius Laelius, who was prefect of the fleet, forced aboard the ships first and kept there; the charge of loading the supplies was given to the praetor Marcus Pomponius. Provisions for five-and-forty days, of which fifteen days’ was cooked, were put aboard. When all were now in the ships, he sent boats round, that from all the ships the steersmen and ships’ masters and two soldiers from each should gather in the forum to receive their orders. When they had assembled, he first asked of them whether they had put aboard water for the men and beasts for as many days as the grain. When they answered that there was water for five-and-forty days in the ships, then he gave order to the soldiers that, keeping silence, they should yield to the sailors quietly and without strife, well obedient to the performing of their tasks. He himself with twenty beaked ships, and Lucius Scipio, would guard the right wing; on the left as many beaked ships, and Gaius Laelius the prefect of the fleet with Marcus Porcius Cato—he was then quaestor—would guard the transports. The beaked ships should each carry a single light, the transports two; on the flagship the sign by night would be three lights. He gave order to the steersmen to make for Emporia. That region is a most fertile land, and therefore abounding in all manner of plenty; and the barbarians—as commonly happens in a rich soil—are unwarlike, and seemed likely to be overwhelmed before help could come from Carthage. These orders given, they were bidden return to the ships, and the next day, at the signal given, with the gods’ good help, to loose the ships.

Many Roman fleets had set out from Sicily and from that very harbor; yet not in this war only—and that is no wonder, for most of the fleets had gone only to plunder—but not even in any earlier one had any departure been of so great a spectacle; although, if you reckoned by the size of the fleet, two consuls with two armies had crossed before, and there had been in those fleets almost as many beaked ships as transports with which Scipio now crossed; for besides forty ships of war he carried his army over in nearly four hundred transports. But the war that followed seemed to the Romans more terrible than the former, both because it was being waged in Italy, and because the huge slaughters of so many armies, with their leaders slain together, had made it so; and Scipio the leader, celebrated partly by brave deeds, partly by a certain vast fortune of his own, had drawn men’s minds to him; and at the same time the very thought of crossing, attempted by no leader before in that war, since he had spread the word that he was crossing to drag Hannibal away out of Italy and transfer the war and end it in Africa, had turned all eyes. There had run together to the spectacle in the harbor the whole crowd not of those who dwelt at Lilybaeum only, but of all the embassies from Sicily, which had both gathered to escort Scipio out of courtesy and had followed Marcus Pomponius the praetor of the province; besides this, the legions that were being left in Sicily had come forward to escort their comrades; nor was the fleet only a spectacle to those who looked out from the land, but the land too, all around, thronged with the crowd, was a spectacle to those who sailed.

When day broke, Scipio, silence being made by the herald from the flagship, said: "Gods and goddesses, who dwell in the seas and the lands, I pray and beseech you that whatsoever under my command has been done, is doing, and shall hereafter be done, may turn out well for me, for the Roman people and commons, for the allies and the Latin name who by land, sea, and rivers follow the Roman people and follow my lead, command, and auspices; that you would aid all these things well and increase them with good increase; that you would set them safe and unhurt, the foe conquered, as victors decked with spoils, laden with booty, and triumphing, brought home again with me; that you would grant us the means of avenging ourselves on our adversaries and our enemies; and that what the Carthaginian people has striven to do against our state, you would grant me and the Roman people the power of making an example of, against the state of the Carthaginians." After these prayers he cast into the sea the raw entrails of the slain victim, as is the custom, and with the trumpet gave the signal for setting forth. Carried by a wind fair and strong enough, they were swiftly borne out of sight of land; and from noon a fog came on, so that they scarcely avoided the ships’ running foul of one another; the wind became gentler on the open sea. The following night the same haze held; it was scattered at sunrise, and force was added to the wind. Now they could descry the land. Not very long after, the steersman said to Scipio that Africa was no more than five miles off; he said he descried the promontory of Mercury; if he bade steer thither, the whole fleet would soon be in harbor. Scipio, when the land was in sight, having prayed the gods that to the good of the commonwealth and of himself he might have seen Africa, ordered the sails set and another landing-place sought lower down for the ships. They were borne on by the same wind; but a fog, rising at about the same hour as the day before, took away the sight of land, and the wind fell as the fog pressed it down. Then night made all things more uncertain; and so they cast anchor, lest the ships either run foul of one another or be driven on the land. When day broke, the same wind, rising, and the fog scattered, opened all the shores of Africa. Scipio, having asked what the nearest promontory was, when he heard it was called the Promontory of the Fair One, said: "The omen pleases me; steer the ships hither." Thither the fleet ran down, and all the forces were landed. That the voyage was prosperous, without alarm or tumult, I have believed on the authority of very many Greek and Latin writers. Coelius alone, except that he does not sink the ships in the waves, sets forth all the other terrors of sky and sea, and at last the fleet swept by a tempest away from Africa to the island of Aegimurus, and thence with difficulty its course recovered, and the ships almost sunk, and the soldiers, without the commander’s order, escaping to land in boats, unarmed, with vast tumult, just like shipwrecked men.

The forces landed, the Romans pitched camp on the nearest hills. Now not into the seaside fields only had panic and terror come—first at the sight of the fleet, then at the tumult of those landing—but into the very cities; for not only had a throng of men, with bands of women and children mingled, filled all the ways everywhere, but the country folk too were driving their cattle before them, so that you would say Africa was being suddenly abandoned. And into the cities themselves they brought a greater terror than they had brought with them; at Carthage above all there was a tumult almost as of a captured city. For since Marcus Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius were consuls, nearly fifty years before, they had seen no Roman army save plundering fleets, by which descents had been made on the seaside fields, and, after snatching whatever chance threw in the way, retreat had always been made to the ships before a shout could rouse the country folk. The greater therefore was then the flight and panic in the city. And, by Hercules, there was neither a strong army at home nor a leader to set against the foe. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo was by birth, by fame, by riches, by his kingly connection now too, by far the first man of the state; but they remembered that he had been routed and driven by Scipio himself in several battles in Spain, and that as a leader he was no more a match for that leader than their own hastily-gathered army for the Roman army. And so, as though Scipio were about to assault the city at once, the call to arms was raised, the gates hastily shut, armed men set on the walls, and watches and outposts posted, and through the following night they kept guard. The next day five hundred horsemen, sent to the sea to scout and to harass those disembarking, fell in with the Roman outposts. For Scipio, having now sent his fleet to Utica, had himself, advancing not very far from the sea, seized the nearest hills, and had both posted horsemen at suitable places on guard and sent some through the fields to plunder.

These, when they had engaged with the Carthaginian cavalry, killed a few in the very fight, but most as they fled, pursuing them—among whom the commander too, Hanno, a noble youth. Scipio not only laid waste the fields round about but also took the nearest city of the Africans, a wealthy enough one; where, besides the rest—which was at once put aboard the transports and sent to Sicily—eight thousand free and slave persons were taken. But the gladdest thing to the Romans at the beginning of their operations was the coming of Masinissa; whom some relate to have come with no more than two hundred horse, most with a body of two thousand horse. But since he was by far the greatest of all the kings of his age, and aided the Roman cause most of all, it seems worth while to digress a little to relate with how varied a fortune he had borne the losing and recovering of his father’s kingdom. While he was warring for the Carthaginians in Spain, his father died; Gala was his name. The kingdom passed to the king’s brother Oezalces, far advanced in years—such is the custom among the Numidians. Not long after, Oezalces too being dead, the elder of his two sons, Capussa, the other being but a boy, received his father’s rule. But since he held the kingdom rather by the law of the nation than by authority among his people or by strength, there arose a certain man, Mazaetullus by name, not a stranger in blood to the kings, of a family always hostile to them, and contending with those who at the time held power, with varying fortune, for the rule. He, having stirred up the people, among whom hatred of the kings carried great weight, by pitching his camp openly forced the king to come down into the field and fight for his kingdom. In that battle Capussa fell with many of the chiefs. The whole nation of the Maesulians passed under the dominion and rule of Mazaetullus; yet he abstained from the title of king, and, content with the modest title of guardian, named as king the boy Lacumazes, who survived of the royal stock. A Carthaginian woman of noble birth, the daughter of Hannibal’s sister, who had lately been married to king Oezalces, he joined to himself in marriage, in hope of an alliance with the Carthaginians, and renewed by sending envoys his old ties of hospitality with Syphax, preparing all these helps against Masinissa.

And Masinissa, having heard of his uncle’s death, then of the murder of his cousin, crossed from Spain into Mauretania—Baga was at that season king of the Moors. From him, a suppliant with the lowliest prayers, he obtained, since he could not aid by war, four thousand Moors to aid his journey. With these, having sent word ahead to his father’s and his own friends, when he had reached the borders of the kingdom, about five hundred Numidians gathered to him. Therefore, the Moors being sent back, as had been agreed, to the king, although the multitude that gathered fell somewhat short of his hope, and was not such as he might venture to attempt so great a thing with, yet reckoning that by acting and stirring he would gather strength too for acting, he met the young prince Lacumazes at Thapsus as he was setting out to Syphax. The column having fled in alarm into the city, Masinissa took the city at the first assault, and of the royal party received some who surrendered, killed others who made resistance; the greater part with the boy himself reached Syphax, whither they had first directed their march, amid the tumult. The report of this small success at the outset of an enterprise prosperously begun turned the Numidians to Masinissa, and from every quarter, out of the fields and villages, the old soldiers of Gala flowed to him and urged the young man to recover his father’s kingdom. In number of soldiers Mazaetullus was considerably superior; for he had both that army with which he had conquered Capussa, and some of those received after the king’s slaying, and the boy Lacumazes had brought vast auxiliaries from Syphax. Fifteen thousand foot and ten thousand horse Mazaetullus had, with whom Masinissa, having by no means so many foot or horse, joined battle in the line. The valor of the veteran soldiers, however, and the foresight of a leader practiced amid Roman and Punic arms, prevailed; the young prince with his guardian and a slender band of Maesulians fled into Carthaginian territory. So Masinissa, having recovered his father’s kingdom, since he saw that against Syphax a contest by no means slighter still remained, reckoned it best to be reconciled with his cousin, and sent men both to give the boy hope that, if he committed himself to the protection of Masinissa, he would be in the same honor in which Oezalces once had been with Gala, and to pledge to Mazaetullus, besides impunity, the faithful restoration of all his property; and both of them, preferring a modest fortune at home to exile—the Carthaginians purposely doing everything to prevent it—he won over to himself.

Hasdrubal chanced at the time these things were doing to be with Syphax; who, to the Numidian, who believed it mattered not much to himself whether the kingdom of the Maesulians lay with Lacumazes or with Masinissa, said he was greatly mistaken if he believed Masinissa would be content with the same bounds as his father Gala or his uncle Oezalces: far greater was the bent of spirit and genius in him than had ever been in any of that nation; often in Spain he had shown to allies and enemies alike a specimen of valor rare among men; and both Syphax and the Carthaginians, unless they smothered that rising fire, would soon be ablaze in a vast conflagration, when they could no longer bring any help; as yet his strength was tender and frail, while he still cherished a kingdom scarcely knitting together. By urging and goading he won him to move his army to the borders of the Maesulians and to pitch camp, as though by undoubted right his own, in the land about which it had often not only been disputed in words with Gala but fought out in arms. If any should bar him—that which above all was wanted—he would fight it out in the line; but if through fear the land were yielded, he must march into the heart of the kingdom: either the Maesulians would pass into his dominion without a contest, or would be by no means a match in arms. Roused by these words, Syphax made war on Masinissa; and in the first encounter he routed and put to flight the Maesulians; Masinissa with a few horsemen fled from the field to a mountain—the inhabitants call it Bellus. Several families with their huts and their flocks—that is their wealth—followed the king: the rest of the multitude of the Maesulians passed under the dominion of Syphax. The mountain which the exiles had seized is grassy and well-watered; and because it was good for feeding cattle, it sufficed abundantly with food for men too, who live on flesh and milk. Thence, first by nightly and stealthy raids, then by open brigandage, all the country round was made unsafe; above all the Carthaginian land was harried, both because there was more plunder than among the Numidians, and because the brigandage was safer. And now they grew so wantonly bold that they carried their plunder down to the sea and sold it to merchants who put in their ships for that very purpose, and more Carthaginians often fell and were taken than in a regular war. The Carthaginians bewailed these things before Syphax and stirred him, already incensed of himself, to pursue the remnants of the war; but it seemed scarcely kingly to chase a wandering brigand over the mountains.

Bucar, one of the king’s officers, a man keen and unwearied, was chosen for the task. To him were given four thousand foot and two thousand horse, and he was loaded with the hope of vast rewards if he brought back Masinissa’s head, or—that indeed would be an unspeakable joy—took him alive. Falling unexpectedly on the scattered and careless men, he cut off from their armed guard a vast multitude of cattle and men, and drove Masinissa himself with a few up to the top of the mountain. Thence, the war as good as ended, having sent to the king not only the plunder of cattle and the captured men, but also part of his forces—too large indeed for what remained of the war—he pursued Masinissa, who had come down from the heights with no more than five hundred foot and two hundred horse, and shut him in a narrow valley, the jaws blocked on both sides. There a great slaughter of the Maesulians was made: Masinissa, with no more than fifty horsemen, escaped through the unknown windings of the mountain, his pursuers following. Yet Bucar held his track, and, having overtaken him in the open plains near the city of Clupea, so hemmed him in that he slew all to a man save four horsemen. With these he let Masinissa himself too, wounded, slip almost out of his hands amid the tumult. The fugitives were in sight; the troop of horse, scattered over the broad plain, was pursuing five enemies, some striking across by oblique paths to meet them. A great river received the fleeing men—for they had driven their horses in without hesitation, as men urged by a greater fear—and, swept off by the current, they were carried aslant. Two being swallowed in sight of the enemy in the headlong current, Masinissa himself was believed to have perished; but he with the two remaining horsemen emerged among the thickets of the farther bank. That was the end of Bucar’s pursuit, since he dared not enter the river, and believed he had now no one left to pursue. So he returned to the king, an idle reporter that Masinissa was destroyed, and men were sent to carry the great joy to Carthage; and all Africa, filled with the report of Masinissa’s death, was variously affected. Masinissa, in a hidden cave, while he treated his wound with herbs, lived some days on the brigandage of his two horsemen. As soon as the wound was closed over and he seemed able to bear the jolting, with vast daring he set forth to seek his kingdom again; and on the very journey, having gathered no more than forty horsemen, when he had come among the Maesulians, now openly declaring who he was, he made so great a stir, both by his old favor and by the unlooked-for joy that they saw alive the man they had believed dead, that within a few days six thousand armed foot and four thousand horse flowed together to him; and now he was not only in possession of his father’s kingdom, but was even laying waste the peoples allied to the Carthaginians and the borders of the Masaesulians—that was the kingdom of Syphax. Then, having provoked Syphax to war, he took post in the ridges of mountains conveniently placed for every purpose, between Cirta and Hippo.

Syphax, therefore, reckoning the matter now too great to be handled through his officers, sent part of the army with his young son—Vermina was his name—and ordered him, leading his column round, to attack from the rear the enemy intent on himself. Vermina set out by night, to fall on from concealment; Syphax, however, moved camp by day, by an open march, as one who would fight it out, standards joined, in the line. When the time seemed to have come at which those sent round could be thought to have arrived, he too, by a gentle slope leading up to the enemy, led his line up the face of the mountain, trusting both in his numbers and in the ambush made ready at the rear. Masinissa, trusting above all to the ground, on which he would fight at far greater advantage, drew up his men too. The battle was fierce and long doubtful, the ground and the valor of his soldiers helping Masinissa, the numbers, which were excessively greater, helping Syphax. That multitude, divided so that one part pressed in front and another had poured itself round to the rear, gave Syphax an undoubted victory, nor was there even any way of escape for men shut in here in front, there at the rear. And so the rest of the foot and horse were slain or taken: about two hundred horsemen Masinissa ordered to gather close about him, and, dividing them by squadrons into three parts, to break out, naming a place to which they should rally from their scattered flight. He himself, by the way he had aimed at, got clear amid the midst of the enemy’s weapons; two of the squadrons stuck fast; the one through fear surrendered to the enemy, the other, more stubborn in resistance, was overwhelmed and pierced through with missiles. Vermina, pressing almost on his very tracks, he eluded by bending now into this path, now into that, until at last, weary with vexation and despair, he forced him to leave off the pursuit; he himself with sixty horsemen reached the Lesser Syrtis. There, in the consciousness of having so often, with honor, sought to recover his father’s kingdom, between the Punic Emporia and the nation of the Garamantes, he spent all the time until the coming of Gaius Laelius and the Roman fleet into Africa. These things incline my mind to believe that it was rather with a modest than with a great escort of horse that Masinissa afterward also came to Scipio; since the former multitude befits one reigning, this scantiness the fortune of an exile.

The Carthaginians, having lost their troop of horse with its commander, having got together by a new levy another body of cavalry, set Hanno, son of Hamilcar, over it. Hasdrubal and Syphax they summoned again and again by letters and messengers, and at last even by envoys; Hasdrubal they bade bring aid to a fatherland all but beleaguered; Syphax they besought to come to the help of Carthage, of all Africa. Scipio then had his camp at Utica, about a mile from the city, shifted from the sea, where for a few days he had had a standing camp joined to the fleet. Hanno, having received cavalry by no means strong enough not only to provoke the enemy but even to guard the fields from ravaging, set about this first of all, to increase the number of his horse by a levy; and not disdaining other nations, yet chiefly hired Numidians—that is by far the foremost kind of cavalry in Africa. He had now about four thousand horse, when he seized a city by name Salaeca, nearly fifteen miles from the Roman camp. When this was reported to Scipio, "Cavalry," he said, "in summer quarters under roofs! Let there be more of them yet, so long as they have such a leader." Reckoning that he ought to be the less idle in proportion as they managed the matter more sluggishly, he sent Masinissa ahead with the cavalry to ride up to the gates and lure the enemy to battle; when the whole multitude had poured out and the contest was now too heavy to be easily withstood, he should give ground little by little; he himself would come up in the nick of the fight. Having delayed only so long as seemed time enough for the man sent ahead to draw out the enemy, he followed with the Roman cavalry, hidden by the screening hills which most opportunely had been set about the bends of the road. Masinissa, as agreed, now in the guise of one threatening, now of one afraid, either rode up to the very gates, or by giving ground—since his feigning of fear bred boldness in the enemy—lured them on to follow rashly. Not all had yet come out, and the commander was harassed in various ways, forcing some, heavy with wine and sleep, to take arms and bridle their horses, hindering others lest, scattered and disordered, without rank or standards, they should rush out by all the gates. At first Masinissa met them as they charged unwarily; soon more, crowded together, poured out of the gate and made the contest even; at last, when now the whole cavalry was in the fight, they could be withstood no longer; yet Masinissa did not flee in rout, but by giving ground gradually received their onsets, until he had drawn them to the hills that screened the Roman cavalry. Thence the horsemen sprang up, both with fresh strength and on fresh horses, and poured themselves round Hanno and the Africans, wearied with fighting and pursuing; and Masinissa, wheeling his horse suddenly, returned to the fight. About a thousand who had been in the van, to whom retreat was not easy, were cut off with the leader Hanno himself and slain; the rest, panic-stricken above all by the slaughter of their leader, fleeing in disorder, the victors pursued for thirty miles, and either took or killed besides up to two thousand horse. It was sufficiently agreed that among them were not fewer than two hundred Carthaginian horse, some of them illustrious in riches and in birth.

On the same day, as it chanced, on which these things were done, the ships that had carried the plunder to Sicily returned with supplies, as though they had divined that they were coming back for a second plunder. That two Carthaginian leaders of the same name were killed in two cavalry battles, not all the authorities relate, fearing, I suppose, lest the same thing twice told should deceive them: Coelius indeed and Valerius hand down that Hanno was even taken. Scipio rewarded the prefects and the horsemen, according as each had served, and before all Masinissa, with notable gifts; and, a strong garrison set in Salaeca, he himself with the rest of the army set out, and, not only laying waste the fields wherever he went, but storming certain cities and villages too, and spreading the terror of war far and wide, on the seventh day after he had set out returned to camp dragging a great quantity of men and cattle and plunder of every kind, and again sent off the ships laden with the enemy’s spoils. Then, leaving aside small expeditions and forays, he turned the whole force of the war to the assaulting of Utica, intending, if he should take it, to have it as a seat for carrying out the rest. At once both from the fleet the naval allies, on the side where the city is washed by the sea, and the land army from a hill almost overhanging the very walls, were brought up. Engines and machines he had both brought with him, and they had been sent from Sicily with the supplies; and new ones were being made in the arsenal, where many craftsmen of such works had been on purpose shut up. The people of Utica, beset by so great a mass on every side, had all their hope in the Carthaginian people, the Carthaginians in Hasdrubal, if only he could move Syphax; but through the very longing of those who needed aid, everything moved too slowly. Hasdrubal, by a most diligent levy, when he had made up about thirty thousand foot and three thousand horse, yet dared not move his camp nearer the enemy before the coming of Syphax. Syphax came with fifty thousand foot and ten thousand horse, and at once, the camp being moved from Carthage, took post not far from Utica and the Roman works. Their coming, however, had this much of effect, that Scipio, when for nearly forty days he had besieged Utica, trying everything in vain, withdrew from there, his enterprise unaccomplished. And—for now winter was at hand—he fortified a winter camp on a promontory which, joined to the mainland by a narrow ridge, stretches out into some space of sea. With one rampart he embraced both the ships’ station and the camp; on the middle of the ridge he placed the camp of the legions; the side turned to the north the beached ships and the naval allies held, the southern valley, sloping to the other shore, the cavalry. These were the things done in Africa up to the end of autumn.

Besides the grain carried in from every side out of the wasted fields round about, and the supplies brought over from Sicily and Italy, Gnaeus Octavius the propraetor brought a vast quantity of grain from Sardinia, from Tiberius Claudius the praetor whose province that was; and not only were the granaries that had already been built filled, but new ones were built. Clothing was lacking to the army; this charge was laid on Octavius, that he should treat with the praetor whether anything could be procured and sent from that province. This matter too was not sluggishly attended to; twelve hundred togas and twelve thousand tunics were sent in a short space. In that summer in which these things were done in Africa, the consul Publius Sempronius, whose province was Bruttium, fought with Hannibal in the very line of march, in a scrambling battle, in the territory of Croton. It was fought in columns rather than in a regular line. The Romans were beaten, and in a tumult truer than a battle about twelve hundred of the consul’s army were slain; there was a panic-stricken return to the camp, yet the enemy did not dare to assault it. But, setting out thence in the silence of the next night, the consul, having sent word ahead to the proconsul Publius Licinius to bring up his legions, joined their forces. So two leaders and two armies returned against Hannibal; nor was there any delay in fighting, since the consul’s strength was doubled, and his recent victory gave the Carthaginian spirit. Sempronius led his own legions into the front line; the legions of Publius Licinius were posted in reserve. At the beginning of the fight the consul vowed a temple to Fortuna Primigenia if on that day he routed the enemy; and he obtained his vow. The Carthaginians were routed and put to flight; above four thousand armed men were slain, a little less than three hundred taken alive, and forty horses and eleven military standards. Shaken by the unsuccessful battle, Hannibal led his army back to Croton. At the same time Marcus Cornelius the consul, in the other part of Italy, held Etruria in check not so much by arms as by the terror of trials—Etruria almost wholly turned to Mago and, through him, to the hope of a fresh rising. These inquiries he held, by decree of the Senate, with no partiality; and many noble Etruscans who had either gone themselves or sent to Mago about the defection of their peoples were at first, while present, condemned; afterward, conscious of guilt, dooming themselves to exile, when they had been condemned in their absence, they withdrew their persons, and only their goods, which could be confiscated, they offered as a pledge to pay the penalty.

While the consuls were thus engaged in different regions, the censors at Rome meanwhile, Marcus Livius and Gaius Claudius, read out the roll of the Senate. As leader of the Senate Quintus Fabius Maximus was chosen, a second time; seven were noted, none, however, who had sat in a curule chair. The upkeep of the public buildings they exacted keenly and with the utmost good faith. They contracted for the making of a road from the cattle-market to the temple of Venus, past the public stalls, and to the temple of the Great Mother on the Palatine. They established also a new revenue from the duty on salt. Salt had been at a sixth of an as both at Rome and throughout all Italy; at Rome they let it out to be supplied at the same price, but dearer in the market-towns and assembly-places, and at one price here, another there. That this revenue was devised by one of the two censors, men believed well enough, because he was angry with the people for having once been condemned by an unjust judgment, and that in the price of salt the tribes by whose doing he had been condemned were burdened above all; hence to Livius was given the surname Salinator. The lustrum was closed later, because the censors sent through the provinces to have reported the number of Roman citizens that there was anywhere in the armies. With these there were registered two hundred and fourteen thousand persons. Gaius Claudius Nero closed the lustrum. Then they received the census of twelve colonies—a thing never done before—the censors of those colonies themselves making the returns, that there might stand in the public records monuments of how strong they were in number of soldiers, how strong in money. Then the census of the knights began to be taken; and both the censors chanced to have a public horse. When they came to the tribe Pollia, in which was Marcus Livius’s name, and the herald hesitated to summon the censor himself, "Summon," said Nero, "Marcus Livius"; and—whether from the remnant of their old feud or puffed up by an untimely display of severity—he ordered Marcus Livius, because he had been condemned by the people’s judgment, to sell his horse. Likewise Marcus Livius, when they came to the tribe Arniensis and to his colleague’s name, ordered Gaius Claudius to sell his horse, for two reasons: one, that he had borne false witness against him; the other, that he had not been reconciled with him in honest faith. As foul a contest of befouling each other’s repute, to the damage of his own, was made at the end of their censorship. When Gaius Claudius had sworn to the laws and gone up into the treasury, among the names of those whom he was leaving as aerarii he gave his colleague’s name. Then Marcus Livius came to the treasury; and, except the Maecian tribe, which had neither condemned him nor, when condemned, made him consul or censor, he left the whole Roman people, four and thirty tribes, aerarii, because they had both condemned him innocent and, condemned, made him consul and censor, and could not deny that they had sinned once in the judgment and twice in the elections: among the four and thirty tribes Gaius Claudius too would be an aerarius; and if he had a precedent for leaving the same man twice an aerarius, he would have left Gaius Claudius by name among the aerarii. A perverse contest of marks between the censors; a censorial chastisement of the people’s inconstancy, worthy of the gravity of those times. Since the censors were in ill repute, Gnaeus Baebius, plebs/">tribune of the plebs, reckoning there was an occasion for his own advancement out of it, named a day for both before the people. That matter was quashed by the agreement of the Fathers, lest thereafter the censorship should be subject to the breath of popular favor.

In the same summer, in Bruttium, Clampetia was taken by storm by the consul; Consentia and Pandosia and other obscure communities came over of their own will into his dominion. And since the time of the elections now drew near, it was resolved that Cornelius rather should be summoned to Rome out of Etruria, where there was no war. He created as consuls Gnaeus Servilius Caepio and Gaius Servilius Geminus. Then the praetorian elections were held. There were chosen Publius Cornelius Lentulus, Publius Quinctilius Varus, Publius Aelius Paetus, Publius Villius Tappulus; these two, being aediles of the plebs, were made praetors. The consul, the elections finished, returned to his army in Etruria. The priests who died that year and those chosen in their place were: Tiberius Veturius Philo, made and inaugurated flamen of Mars in place of Marcus Aemilius Regillus, who had died the year before; in the place of praetor/">Marcus Pomponius Matho, augur and decemvir, were chosen as decemvir Marcus Aurelius Cotta, as augur Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, quite a young man—a thing then very rare in the conferring of priesthoods. A four-horse chariot of gold was set up that year on the Capitol by the curule aediles Gaius Livius and Marcus Servilius Geminus, and the Roman games were repeated for two days; likewise for two days the plebeian games by the aediles Publius Aelius and Publius Villius; and there was a feast of Jupiter for the games’ sake.