The History of Rome, Book 30

Gnaeus Servilius and Gaius Servilius were consuls—it was the sixteenth year of the Punic War—and when they had laid before the Senate the matters of state, of the war, and of the provinces, the Fathers resolved that the consuls should arrange between themselves, or settle by lot, which should hold Bruttium against Hannibal and which Etruria and the Ligurians: that he to whom Bruttium fell should take over the army from Publius Sempronius; that Publius Sempronius—for to him too the command was prorogued for a year as proconsul—should succeed Publius Licinius; and that Licinius should return to Rome, a man held good in war as in all else, in which no citizen of that age was reckoned more accomplished, all the goods that nature and fortune can bestow on man being heaped together in him. He was at once noble and rich; he excelled in beauty and bodily strength; he was held most eloquent, whether a cause was to be pleaded or there was occasion in the Senate or before the people to urge or to dissuade; he was most learned in pontifical law; and over and above all this his consulship had made him master of the praise of war as well. What was decreed for the province of Bruttium was decreed likewise for Etruria and the Ligurians: Marcus Cornelius was ordered to hand over his army to the new consul, and himself, his command prorogued, to hold the province of Gaul with the legions which Lucius Scribonius had had the year before. They then drew lots for the provinces: Bruttium fell to Caepio, Etruria to Servilius Geminus. Then the praetors’ provinces were cast into the lot. The city jurisdiction fell to Aelius Paetus, Sardinia to Publius Lentulus, Sicily to Publius Villius; and Quinctilius Varus drew Ariminum with two legions—they had been under Spurius Lucretius. To Lucretius the command was prorogued, that he might rebuild the town of Genua, which Mago the Carthaginian had destroyed. To Publius Scipio the command was prorogued with no limit of time but of the task to be accomplished—until the war in Africa should be finished; and it was decreed that a supplication be held, because he had crossed into the province of Africa, that the thing might be for the welfare of the Roman people and of the commander himself and his army.

For Sicily three thousand soldiers were enrolled, because the strength which that province had possessed had been carried over into Africa; and because it had been resolved to guard the seaboard of Sicily with forty ships, lest any fleet should cross from Africa, Villius took thirteen new ships with him into Sicily, the rest being old ships refitted in Sicily. Over this fleet praetor/">Marcus Pomponius, praetor of the year before, his command prorogued, was set, and he put aboard the new soldiers brought from Italy. An equal number of ships the Fathers decreed to Gnaeus Octavius, praetor likewise of the year before, with an equal right of command, to guard the coast of Sardinia; the praetor Lentulus was ordered to put two thousand soldiers aboard. And the coast of Italy—because it was uncertain where the Carthaginians would send their fleet, and it was thought they would make for whatever was stripped of garrisons—was given to Marcus Marcius, praetor of the year before, to guard with the same number of ships. Three thousand soldiers for that fleet the consuls enrolled by decree of the Fathers, and two city legions against the uncertainties of war. The Spains, with their armies and command, were decreed to the old commanders, Lucius Lentulus and Lucius Manlius Acidinus. With twenty legions in all and one hundred and sixty warships the Roman state carried on its affairs that year. The praetors were ordered to go to their provinces; the consuls were commanded, before they set out from the city, to hold the Great Games which Titus Manlius Torquatus as dictator had vowed for the fifth year following, if the commonwealth should stand in the same estate. And new religious scruples were stirred in men’s minds by prodigies reported from several places. On the Capitol crows were believed not only to have torn with their beaks but even to have eaten the gold; at Antium mice gnawed a golden crown; around Capua a vast host of locusts filled the whole countryside, so that whence they had come was not clear; at Reate a colt was born with five feet; at Anagnia scattered fires first appeared in the sky, then a great torch blazed; at Frusino a rainbow girdled the sun with a thin line, and then a larger orb of the sun enclosed the ring itself from without; at Arpinum the earth in the level country settled into a vast hollow; to one of the consuls, as he sacrificed his first victim, the head of the liver was wanting. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims; the gods to whom sacrifice should be made were named by the college of pontiffs.

These things accomplished, the consuls and praetors set out for their provinces; yet to all of them, as if Africa had been their own allotment, the care of Africa was uppermost, whether because they saw that there the sum of affairs and of the war was turning, or to gratify Scipio, on whom the whole state was then fixed. And so not from Sardinia only, as has been said before, but from Sicily too and Spain, clothing and grain, and even arms from Sicily and every kind of supply, were carried thither. Nor at any time of the winter had Scipio remitted his works of war, of which many at once pressed about him from every side. He was besieging Utica; his camp was in sight of Hasdrubal’s; the Carthaginians had launched their ships; they had a fleet made ready and equipped to intercept his supplies. Amid all this he had not let the care of winning back Syphax slip from his mind, if perchance a surfeit of love for his wife had now come over him out of much enjoyment. From Syphax there came rather terms of peace with the Carthaginians—that the Romans should quit Africa and the Carthaginians Italy—than, if war were waged, any hope that he would desert them. These things, I should rather believe, were done through messengers—and so the greater part of authorities have it—than that Syphax himself, as Valerius Antias reports, came into the Roman camp for a conference. At first the Roman commander would scarcely admit those terms to his ears; afterwards, that there might be a plausible pretext for his men to come and go in the enemy’s camp, he refused those same terms more softly and gave hope that, by men passing oftener back and forth, the matter would come to agreement. The Carthaginians’ winter quarters, built up at random of timber gathered from the fields, were almost wholly of wood. The Numidians especially, their huts for the most part woven of reeds and matting, dwelt scattered with no order; some, like men who had seized their ground without command, lodged even outside the ditch and the rampart. These things, reported to Scipio, had given him hope of burning the enemy’s camp at the first chance.

With the envoys whom he sent to Syphax he sent, in the guise of camp-servants and in slaves’ dress, centurions of the first rank, of tried valor and prudence, who, while the envoys were in conference, should rove through the camp, one by one way and another, and spy out all the approaches and exits, the site and shape both of the whole camp and of its parts—where the Carthaginians, where the Numidians had their quarters—how great the interval between Hasdrubal’s camp and the king’s, and should learn at the same time the custom of the outposts and watches, whether by night or by day they were the fitter for a surprise; and amid the frequent conferences others and yet others were sent on purpose, that the more men might know everything. When the matter, the oftener it was canvassed, made the hope of peace each day surer both to Syphax and to the Carthaginians, the Roman envoys said they were forbidden to return to their commander unless a definite answer were given: accordingly, if the king’s mind were now fixed, let him declare his mind; or if Hasdrubal and the Carthaginians must be consulted, let him consult them; it was time either to compose a peace or to wage war in earnest. While Hasdrubal was being consulted by Syphax, and the Carthaginians by Hasdrubal, both the spies had time to see everything and Scipio to prepare what was needful; and out of the mention and hope of peace there arose, as happens, among the Carthaginians and the Numidian a heedlessness of guarding against any hostile stroke in the meantime. At last the answer was brought back, with certain inequitable conditions added through the opportunity—because the Roman seemed too eager for peace—which most opportunely furnished Scipio, who desired it, a pretext for breaking off the truce; and when he had told the king’s messenger that he would refer the matter to his council, on the next day he answered that to no one else had peace seemed good, himself alone striving for it in vain; let the messenger therefore report that there was no other hope of peace than that Syphax, abandoning the Carthaginians, should be with the Romans. So he broke off the truce, that he might carry out his designs with his faith unpledged; and launching his ships—and it was now the beginning of spring—he put aboard engines and artillery, as though about to attack Utica from the sea, and sent two thousand soldiers to seize the hill above Utica which he had held before, both that he might turn the enemy’s minds from what he was preparing to concern for another matter, and lest, when he himself had set out against Syphax and Hasdrubal, any sally and assault should be made from the city upon his own camp, left with a light garrison.

These preparations made, and his council summoned, and the scouts bidden to tell what they had found out, and Masinissa, to whom all the enemy’s dispositions were known—at last he himself set forth what he was preparing for the coming night; to the tribunes he gave order that, when at the breaking-up of the headquarters the trumpets had sounded together, they should at once lead the legions out of camp. As he had commanded, the standards began to be carried out toward sunset; about the first watch they deployed the column; at midnight—for it was seven miles’ march—they came at a moderate pace to the enemy’s camp. There Scipio assigned part of his forces to Laelius and Masinissa and the Numidians, and bade them attack Syphax’s camp and throw in fire. Then, drawing Laelius and Masinissa aside, each apart, he adjured them that, as much as the night took from foresight, so much they should make good by diligence and care: he himself would attack Hasdrubal and the Punic camp; but he would not begin before he had seen fire in the king’s camp. Nor did that matter long delay him; for as soon as the fire flung upon the first huts caught, it forthwith laid hold of all the nearest and the rest in turn, and spread itself everywhere through the whole camp. And there arose, of course, such an uproar as a fire poured so far abroad by night must cause; but, thinking it a chance fire and not the work of an enemy and of war, they ran out unarmed to quench the blaze and fell among armed foes—the Numidians especially, set by Masinissa, who knew the king’s camp, at the issues of the roads in fitting places. Many the flame consumed half-asleep in their very beds; many, rushing in headlong flight one upon another, were crushed in the narrow gateways.

The Carthaginian watchmen, when they first saw the glow of the flames, and then others, roused by the nightly tumult, fell into the same error and believed the fire too had arisen of itself; and the shout raised amid the slaughter and the wounds, whether it sprang from the panic of the night, robbed them, in their confusion, of any sense of the truth. So each man for himself, unarmed, as men who suspected nothing hostile, ran out by all the gates, by whichever was nearest to each, carrying only such things as would serve to quench the fire, and rushed into the Roman column. When these had all been cut down—not only out of hostile hatred but also that no messenger should escape—Scipio at once burst in by the gates, neglected, as in such an uproar; and fire being flung upon the nearest roofs, the spreading flame first glowed as though scattered in many places, then, creeping on through what was continuous, swept all at once into one conflagration. Men and beasts, scorched, first by their flight, then by their carcasses, blocked the ways through the gates. Those whom the fire had not overwhelmed perished by the sword, and the two camps were destroyed by a single disaster. Yet both leaders escaped, and out of so many thousands of armed men two thousand foot and five hundred horse, half-armed, a great part wounded and seared by the fire. Slain or consumed by the flames were about forty thousand men, taken above five thousand, many Carthaginian nobles, eleven senators; military standards a hundred and seventy-four, Numidian horses above two thousand seven hundred; six elephant-war/">elephants taken, eight destroyed by sword and fire. A great store of arms was taken; all of it the commander, having consecrated it to Vulcan, burned.

Hasdrubal in his flight had made with a few Africans for the nearest city, and thither all the survivors, following their leader’s track, had betaken themselves; then, for fear of being surrendered to Scipio, he left the town. Soon the Romans were admitted there too, the gates standing open, and nothing hostile was done, because the city had passed of its own will into their power. Two cities thereafter were taken and plundered. That booty, and what had been snatched from the fire when the camp was burned, was granted to the soldiery. Syphax took post some eight miles thence in a fortified place; Hasdrubal hastened to Carthage, lest through fear some softer counsel should be taken from the fresh disaster. There so great a terror was at first brought in that they believed Scipio would abandon Utica and at once besiege Carthage itself. The suffetes therefore—for among them this was, as it were, the consular power—summoned the Senate. There a contest was fought out among three opinions: one decreed envoys to Scipio about peace; another recalled Hannibal to defend his country from a war that threatened destruction; the third was of Roman steadfastness in adversity, and held that the army must be made good and Syphax exhorted not to desist from the war. This opinion, because Hasdrubal was present and all the Barcine faction preferred war, prevailed. Thereupon a levy began to be held in the city and the fields, and envoys were sent to Syphax, who was himself with all his might making the war good again, since his wife had prevailed upon him, not now as before by blandishments, potent enough over a lover’s mind, but by prayers and pity, full of tears, beseeching him not to betray her father and her country, nor to suffer Carthage to be consumed by the same flames that had burned the camp. The envoys also brought hope opportunely offered: that four thousand Celtiberians, of excellent youth, hired in Spain by his recruiters around the town called Obba, had met them; and that Hasdrubal would shortly be at hand with a band by no means to be despised. Therefore he not only answered the envoys kindly but even showed them the multitude of country Numidians to whom in those same days he had given arms and horses, and declared that he would call out all the youth from his kingdom: he knew the disaster had been suffered by fire, not in battle; that he was the inferior in war who is conquered by arms. These answers were given to the envoys, and after a few days Hasdrubal and Syphax again joined their forces. That whole army was of about thirty thousand armed men.

Scipio, intent—as though the war, so far as Syphax and the Carthaginians were concerned, were now finished—upon the storming of Utica, and already bringing up his engines to the walls, was turned aside by the report of the war renewed; and leaving moderate garrisons by land and sea to keep up the mere show of a siege, he himself set out with the strength of his army to go against the enemy. At first he encamped on a hill about four miles distant from the king’s camp; on the next day, going down with his cavalry into the Great Plains—so they call them—that lie below that hill, he spent the day in riding up to the enemy’s outposts and provoking them with light skirmishes. And through the two following days they did nothing on either side worth the telling, in tumultuous sallies hither and thither in turn: on the fourth day both sides came down into line of battle. The Roman set his principes behind the first standards of the hastati, and the triarii in reserve; the Italian cavalry he posted on the right wing, on the left the Numidians and Masinissa. Syphax and Hasdrubal, placing the Numidians against the Italian cavalry and the Carthaginians against Masinissa, took the Celtiberians into the center of the line against the standards of the legions. Thus drawn up they joined battle. At the first onset both wings together, the Numidians and the Carthaginians, were driven back; for neither could the Numidians, the greatest part of them rustics, withstand the Roman cavalry, nor the Carthaginians, themselves raw soldiers too, withstand Masinissa, terrible above all else from his fresh victory. The Celtiberian line stood, stripped of its wings on either hand, because in flight no safety showed itself in country unknown, nor was there hope of pardon from Scipio, against whom—well-deserving of himself and his nation—they had come into Africa to make war with mercenary arms. And so, the enemy pouring round them on every side, they died stubbornly, falling one upon another; and while all were turned against them, Syphax and Hasdrubal gained some space for flight. Night came down upon the victors, wearier with slaughter than with the fight.

On the next day Scipio sent Laelius and Masinissa with all the Roman and Numidian cavalry and the light-armed soldiers to pursue Syphax and Hasdrubal; he himself with the strength of his army subdued the cities round about, which were all under the dominion of the Carthaginians, partly by hope, partly by fear, partly by force. At Carthage there was indeed vast terror, and they believed that Scipio, carrying his arms about and swiftly subduing all the neighborhood, would suddenly attack Carthage itself. And so the walls were repaired and armed with bulwarks, and each man for himself carried in from the fields what is needed for enduring a long siege. Rare is the mention of peace, more frequent that of sending envoys to summon Hannibal; the greatest part bid the fleet that had been made ready to receive the supplies be sent to fall upon the station of the ships at Utica, that was carelessly kept—perhaps they might also surprise the naval camp, left with a light garrison. To this counsel they chiefly incline; envoys, however, they vote must be sent to Hannibal: for, though the fleet’s affair should fall out most happily, the siege of Utica would be lightened in some part only; to guard Carthage itself there was left neither any other commander than Hannibal nor any other army than Hannibal’s. So the ships were launched on the next day, and at the same time the envoys set out for Italy; and all things were done in haste, fortune goading them, and each man thought that wherein he himself had been slack the safety of all was being betrayed by him. Scipio, dragging along an army now heavy with the spoils of many cities, sent the captives and the rest of the booty to the old camp at Utica, and, now bent upon Carthage, seized Tunes, abandoned in the flight of its guards—it is about fifteen miles from Carthage—a place secure both by its works and by its own nature, and one that can both be seen from Carthage and afford a prospect of the city and of the sea encircling it.

While the Romans were here at their busiest casting up a rampart, the enemy’s fleet was sighted, making from Carthage for Utica. So, the work abandoned, the order to march was given and the standards began to be borne off in haste, lest the ships, turned toward the land and the siege and least of all fit for a naval battle, should be surprised; for how should they have withstood a fleet nimble and apt with its naval gear and armed, when their own ships carried artillery and engines and were either turned to the use of transports or so beached against the walls as to serve for a mound and gangways? And so Scipio, when he had come thither, contrary to what is the custom in a naval fight, drew the beaked ships, which could be a protection to the others, into the rearmost line near the land, and set a fourfold line of transports for a wall against the enemy; and these very ships, lest in the confusion of battle the ranks could be thrown into disorder, he made fast by masts and yards passed from ship to ship, and bound together with strong ropes as by a single chain, and laid planks over them so that there was a passage along the whole row of ships, and beneath the very gangways he left intervals through which the scout-vessels could run out against the enemy and be safely received. With these things hastily made ready as the time allowed, about a thousand chosen defenders were put aboard the transports; a vast store of missile weapons especially was heaped up, that they might suffice for a fight however long. So prepared and intent they awaited the enemy’s coming. The Carthaginians, who, had they made haste, would at the first onset have overwhelmed everything amid the confusion of a panic-stricken throng, dismayed by their defeats on land, and thence not even at sea, where they themselves were the stronger, sufficiently confident, having wasted the day in sluggish sailing, toward sunset brought their fleet to harbor—the Africans call it Rusucmon. On the next day, about sunrise, they drew up their ships out at sea as for a regular naval battle, and as though the Romans would come out against them. When they had stood a long while, after they saw that nothing was stirred by the enemy, then at last they attacked the transports. The thing was least of all like a naval battle, nearest to the look of ships assaulting walls. The transports somewhat overtopped them in height; from the beaked ships the Carthaginians sent up, for the most part vainly, their weapons aimed upward into the higher place; the stroke from above out of the transports was the heavier and the truer by its very weight. The scout-vessels and the other light craft, which ran out through the intervals beneath the planked gangways, were at first overwhelmed merely by the onset and the bulk of the beaked ships; then they were a hindrance even to the defenders, because, mingled with the enemy’s ships, they often compelled them to hold their weapons for fear of striking their own by an uncertain cast. At last poles tipped with iron hooks—the soldiers call them harpagones—began to be flung from the Punic ships upon the Roman. When they could cut neither these nor the chains by which they were hung as they were flung, then, as each beaked ship, backing water, dragged off a transport caught by the hook, you might see the bonds by which it was bound to the others torn apart, and a whole string of several ships dragged off together. In this way chiefly all the gangways were torn to pieces, and scarcely was room given the defenders to leap across into the second row of ships. About sixty transports were dragged off by their sterns to Carthage. The joy was greater than the matter warranted, but the more welcome because, amid unbroken disasters and tears, one gladness, however small, had shone out beyond hope—with this withal, that it was plain the Roman fleet had been not far from destruction, had not their own ships’ captains been slack and had not Scipio come up in time.

About those same days it chanced that Laelius and Masinissa, having reached Numidia on about the fifteenth day, the Maesulians, Masinissa’s hereditary kingdom, gladly went over to their king, long desired. Syphax, his prefects and garrisons driven out from there, kept within his old kingdom, by no means likely to be quiet; his wife and his father-in-law goaded him, sick with love, and he so abounded in men and horses that the strength of a kingdom flourishing through many years, set before his eyes, might breed spirit even in a mind less barbarous and ungoverned. And so, gathering into one all who were fit for war, he distributed horses, arms, and weapons; he arranged the horse in squadrons and the foot in cohorts, as he had once learned from Roman centurions. With an army no smaller than that which he had had before, but almost all new and untrained, he went on to meet the enemy. With his camp pitched near, at first a few horsemen, spying from safety, advanced from the outposts, then, driven off by javelins, ran back to their fellows; thence sallies were made on either side in turn, and as indignation kindled those who were driven back, more came up to the support—which is the spur of cavalry engagements, when either hope draws the winners on or anger the beaten. So then, the fight kindled by a few, the eagerness of the contest poured out at last all the cavalry on both sides. And while it was a pure cavalry battle, the multitude of the Maesulians, Syphax sending out vast columns, could scarcely be withstood; then, when the Roman foot, by a sudden interposition through the lanes that their own horse opened for them, made the line firm and frightened off the enemy as he charged in disorder, at first the barbarians let their horses on more slowly, then halted and were near thrown into confusion by the new kind of fighting, and at last not only gave way to the foot but could not even sustain the cavalry, grown bold under the foot’s protection. Now the standards of the legions too were drawing near. Then indeed the Maesulians bore not only the first onset but not even the sight of the standards and the arms; so much did either the memory of former disasters or present terror avail.

There Syphax, while he rode up to the enemy’s squadrons, to see whether by shame or by his own peril he could stay their flight, was thrown when his horse was grievously struck, was overpowered, and taken alive; and—to furnish before all others to Masinissa a welcome spectacle—was haled to Laelius. The slaughter in that battle was less than the victory, because it had been fought only as a cavalry engagement: not more than five thousand were slain, less than half that number of men was taken in the assault made upon the camp, into which the multitude, dismayed at the loss of their king, had betaken themselves. Cirta was the capital of Syphax’s kingdom; and thither out of the flight a vast throng of men had betaken themselves. Masinissa said that for himself indeed nothing in the present was fairer than to revisit as victor, after so long an interval, his ancestral kingdom; but that no more in prosperity than in adversity was there space given for tarrying: if Laelius would let him go ahead to Cirta with the cavalry and the captive Syphax, he would overwhelm everything while all was in panic; Laelius could follow with the foot by easy marches. Laelius agreeing, he went ahead to Cirta and bade the chief men of the Cirtans be called to a conference. But with men ignorant of the king’s fate he prevailed neither by setting forth what had been done, nor by threats, nor by persuasion, before the king, in chains, was set before their eyes. Then at the sight, so foul, lamentation arose, and partly in terror the walls were deserted, partly by a sudden consent of men seeking favor with the victor the gates were thrown open. And Masinissa, having sent a garrison about the gates and the points of vantage on the walls, that the way of flight might be open to none, rode at a gallop to seize the palace. As he entered the porch, on the very threshold Sophoniba, wife of Syphax, daughter of Hasdrubal the Carthaginian, met him; and when she had marked Masinissa, conspicuous amid the throng of armed men both by his arms and by all his bearing, thinking him to be the king, which he was, she threw herself at his knees and said: "The gods indeed, and your own valor and good fortune, have given you all power over us; but if a captive may send up a suppliant’s voice to the lord of her life and death—if I may touch your knees and your victorious right hand—I pray and beseech you, by the majesty of kingship in which a little while ago we too stood, by the name of the Numidian race which was common to you with Syphax, by the gods of this palace, who may receive you with better omens than those with which they sent Syphax hence: grant this grace to a suppliant, that you yourself decide whatever your mind bears concerning your captive, and suffer me not to come into the proud and cruel arbitration of any Roman. Had I been nothing else than the wife of Syphax, yet I would rather make trial of the faith of a Numidian, born in the same Africa with me, than of an alien and a stranger: what a Carthaginian woman, what the daughter of Hasdrubal, has to fear from a Roman, you see. If by no other means you can, I pray and beseech you, deliver me by death from the arbitration of the Romans." She was of conspicuous beauty and in the very flower of her age. And so, when, now clasping his knees, now his right hand, she begged his pledge that she should be given over to no Roman, and her speech was now nearer to coaxing than to entreaty, the victor’s mind not only fell into pity, but—as the Numidian race is headlong toward love—the victor was taken captive by his captive’s love. Giving his right hand to the pledging of his faith in what was asked, he withdrew into the palace. Then he set himself to consider how he might make good the pledge of his promise. And since he could not find a way out, he borrowed from love a rash and shameless counsel: he ordered the marriage to be prepared suddenly for that very day, that he might leave nothing entire either to Laelius or to Scipio himself to determine concerning her, as a captive, who would now be Masinissa’s wedded wife. When the marriage had been made, Laelius came up, and so far was he from concealing that he disapproved the deed that at first he even tried to take her, along with Syphax and the other captives, down from the marriage-bed and send her to Scipio. Then, overcome by the prayers of Masinissa, who begged that the decision which of the two kings Sophoniba should fall to as the prize of fortune be referred to Scipio, he sent off Syphax and the captives, and with Masinissa’s help recovered the rest of the cities of Numidia that were held by royal garrisons.

When it was announced that Syphax was being brought into the camp, the whole multitude poured out as to the spectacle of a triumph. He himself went before in chains; there followed a band of Numidian nobles. Then each man, as far as he most could, added to the greatness of Syphax and the fame of his nation, magnifying his own victory: that this was the king to whose majesty so great a thing two most powerful peoples in the world, the Roman and the Carthaginian, had granted, that Scipio his own commander, to seek his friendship, had left the province of Spain and his army and sailed to Africa with two quinqueremes, and Hasdrubal the Carthaginian commander had not only come himself to him in his kingdom but had even given him his daughter in marriage. He had had at one time in his power two commanders, the Carthaginian and the Roman. As from the immortal gods, so from him both sides alike had sought peace by sacrificing victims, friendship had been sought from either part alike. Already he had had such resources that he had driven Masinissa from his kingdom and reduced him to this, that he lived hidden by the report of his death and in the lairs of wild beasts, like a beast, living by plunder in the woods. With such talk of those who stood about, the king was escorted to Scipio’s headquarters. And Scipio too was moved, both by the man’s former fortune compared with his present, and by the recollection of the friendship and the right hand given and of the alliance joined both publicly and privately. These same things gave Syphax spirit too in addressing the victor. For when Scipio asked what he had meant, who had not only refused the Roman alliance but had even of his own accord made war, then Syphax confessed that he had indeed done wrong and been mad, but not first then when he had taken up arms against the Roman people; that this had been the end of his madness, not the beginning; that then he had gone mad, then had cast out of his heart all private ties of friendship and public treaties, when he received the Carthaginian matron into his house. By those marriage-torches his palace had been set ablaze; that fury and that bane, by all her allurements, had turned his mind and estranged it, nor had she rested until with her own hands she had armed him in wicked arms against his host and friend. Yet to him, ruined and stricken as he was, this was a comfort in his miseries, that he saw that same bane and fury had passed into the house and household gods of the man most hateful to him of all men. Masinissa was no more prudent and no more steadfast than Syphax, and, by reason of his youth, more incautious; certainly he had taken her more foolishly and intemperately than Syphax had.

When he had said these things, seeing her loved by his rival not only out of an enemy’s hatred but with the very goads of love, he struck Scipio’s mind with no slight concern; and credit was given to the charges by the marriage, all but contracted amid arms, with neither Laelius consulted nor awaited, and by the headlong haste, so that on the same day on which he had seen her taken as an enemy he should receive her joined to him in wedlock and complete the marriage rite at the household gods of his enemy. And these things seemed the fouler to Scipio because in Spain he himself, a young man, had been moved by the beauty of no captive. As he turned these things over with himself, Laelius and Masinissa came up. When he had received both alike with kindly looks and had honored them with signal praises before the crowded headquarters, drawing Masinissa aside into privacy he thus addressed him: "I suppose, Masinissa, that it was because you saw some good in me that both at the first in Spain you came to join friendship with me, and afterwards in Africa committed your very self and all your hopes to my faith. Yet of all the virtues for which I seemed to you worth seeking out, there is none on which I have so prided myself as on temperance and the mastery of my desires. This too, Masinissa, I could wish you had added to your other excellent virtues. There is not—believe me—there is not for our age so much peril from armed enemies as from the pleasures that flow round us on every side. He who has bridled and tamed them by his self-command has won for himself a far greater honor and a greater victory than we have in the conquest of Syphax. The things you did strenuously and bravely in my absence I have gladly both recorded and remembered: the rest I would rather you turn over with yourself than blush while I speak it. Syphax has been conquered and taken under the auspices of the Roman people. Therefore his very self, his wife, his kingdom, his land, his towns, the men who dwell in them—whatever, in short, was Syphax’s—are the booty of the Roman people; and the king and his wife, even were she not a Carthaginian citizen, even were we not to see her father a commander of the enemy, ought to be sent to Rome, and the judgment and decision concerning her belong to the Senate and people of Rome—her who is said to have estranged from us a king who was our ally and driven him headlong into arms. Conquer your heart; beware lest you deform many good things by a single fault, and spoil the gratitude due for so many services by a fault greater than the cause of the fault."

As Masinissa heard these words, not only did the blush mount over him, but tears too came forth; and when he had said that he would indeed be in the commander’s power, and had begged him to make what allowance he could for his faith rashly pledged—for he had promised that he would deliver her into no one’s power—he withdrew, in confusion, from the headquarters to his own tent. There, the witnesses removed, when with frequent sighing and groaning, which could easily be heard by those who stood about the tent, he had spent some space of time, at last, with a mighty groan uttered, he called one of his trusty slaves, under whose keeping was kept, after the royal fashion, against the chances of fortune, poison, and bade him carry it mixed in a cup to Sophoniba, and at the same time to announce that Masinissa would gladly have kept toward her the first faith which a husband owes a wife: since those who have the power take that from him, he made good the second faith—that she should not come alive into the power of the Romans. Mindful of her father the commander and of her country and of the two kings to whom she had been wedded, let her take counsel for herself. When this messenger, bearing at once the message and the poison, had come to Sophoniba, "I accept," she said, "the wedding-gift, nor is it unwelcome, if a husband could render his wife nothing greater. Yet tell him this, that I should have died the better had I not married at my own funeral." No more fiercely did she speak than, taking the cup, she drank it off undismayed, with no sign of dread shown. When this was announced to Scipio, lest the fierce young man, sick at heart, should take some graver counsel, he summoned him at once and now consoled him, now gently chid him for having atoned for one rashness by another and made the matter sadder than it need have been. On the next day, to turn his mind from his present agitation, he mounted the tribunal and ordered an assembly to be called. There he first hailed Masinissa by the name of king, adorned him with signal praises, and presented him with a golden crown, a golden bowl, a curule chair, an ivory scepter, an embroidered toga, and a palm-figured tunic. He added honor in words: that among the Romans there was nothing more magnificent than a triumph, and that for those who triumph there was no fairer adornment than that with which the Roman people deemed Masinissa, alone of all foreigners, worthy. Then Laelius too, himself likewise praised, he presented with a golden crown; and the other soldiers were rewarded, each according to the service he had done. By these honors the king’s mind was softened and raised to the near hope, Syphax removed, of possessing all Numidia.

Scipio, having sent Gaius Laelius with Syphax and the other captives to Rome—with whom Masinissa’s envoys too set out—himself moved his camp back again to Tunes and finished off the fortifications he had begun. The Carthaginians, drenched in a not only brief but almost empty joy by the fairly prosperous attack of their fleet for the present, after the report of Syphax’s capture—in whom they had laid up nearly more hope than in Hasdrubal and their own army—were stricken, and now, no further author of war being heard, they sent envoys to seek peace, thirty of the elder chiefs; that was among them the more august council, and of the greatest force toward governing the Senate itself. When these had come into the Roman camp and to the headquarters, after the manner of flatterers—a rite received, I suppose, from that region from which they were sprung—they prostrated themselves. A speech in keeping with such humble flattery followed, not clearing their guilt but transferring the beginning of the guilt to Hannibal and the supporters of his power. They asked pardon for a state twice overthrown by the rashness of its citizens, and destined to be safe again by the kindness of its enemies; the Roman people sought dominion over conquered enemies, not their destruction; let it command, and they would obediently serve and do whatever it willed. Scipio said that he had both come into Africa with that hope, and that his hope had been increased by the prosperous outcome of the war, that he would carry home victory, not peace; nevertheless, though he held victory all but in his hands, he did not refuse peace, that all nations might know that the Roman people both undertook wars justly and ended them justly. The terms of peace he declared to be these: that they restore the prisoners and deserters and runaways; that they withdraw their armies from Italy and Gaul; that they keep their hands off Spain; that they depart from all the islands that lie between Italy and Africa; that they hand over all their warships except twenty, and three hundred thousand measures of wheat, two hundred thousand of barley. As to the sum of money he imposed, there is too little agreement: in one place I find five thousand talents imposed, in another five thousand pounds of silver, in another a double pay for the soldiers. "On these terms," he said, "whether peace please you will be given three days to deliberate. If it please you, make a truce with me, send envoys to Rome to the Senate." So the Carthaginians were dismissed; and since they had judged that no terms of peace should be refused—seeking, of course, a delay of time until Hannibal should cross into Africa—they sent some envoys to Scipio to make a truce, others to Rome to seek peace, taking a few captives and deserters and runaways for show, that the peace might be the more easily obtained.

Many days before, Laelius with Syphax and the chief Numidian captives had come to Rome, and set forth to the Fathers in order all that had been done in Africa, amid the great present joy of men and hope for the future. The Fathers, then consulted, resolved that the king should be sent into custody at Alba, and that Laelius should be kept until the Carthaginian envoys came. A supplication of four days was decreed. Publius Aelius the praetor, the Senate dismissed and an assembly thereupon summoned, went up to the rostra with Gaius Laelius. There indeed, hearing that the armies of the Carthaginians had been routed, that a king of mighty name had been utterly defeated and taken, that all Numidia had been overrun in a signal victory, they could not contain their joy in silence but signified their unbounded gladness with shouts and with whatever else a multitude is wont to use. And so the praetor at once proclaimed that the temple-keepers should open all the sacred shrines throughout the whole city, and that power be given the people, the whole day through, to go about and salute the gods and render thanks. On the next day he brought Masinissa’s envoys into the Senate. First they congratulated the Senate that Publius Scipio had prospered in Africa; then they gave thanks that Masinissa he had not only called king but had made one by restoring him to his ancestral kingdom, in which, Syphax removed, if it so seemed good to the Fathers, he would reign without fear and without strife; then that, having praised him before the assembly, he had honored him with the amplest gifts, of which that he might not be unworthy Masinissa both had taken pains and would take pains further. They asked that the Senate by its decree confirm the royal name and Scipio’s other benefits and gifts; and, if it were not troublesome, this also Masinissa asked, that they send back the Numidian captives who were in custody at Rome; that this would be a great thing for him among his countrymen. To this the answer given to the envoys was that in the prosperous conduct of affairs in Africa the congratulation was shared by them with the king; that Scipio seemed to have done rightly and in order in hailing him king, and that whatever else he had done that was to Masinissa’s liking the Fathers approved and praised. The gifts also that the envoys should carry to the king they decreed: two purple cloaks with one golden brooch each and tunics with the broad stripe, two caparisoned horses, two sets of equestrian arms with cuirasses, and tents and military furniture such as it was the custom to furnish to a consul. These the praetor was ordered to send to the king; and to the envoys gifts of not less than five thousand asses apiece, to their attendants of a thousand asses each, and two suits of clothing to the envoys, one apiece to the attendants and to the Numidians who, released from custody, should be given back to the king; and besides, free lodgings and entertainment were decreed to the envoys.

In the same summer in which these things were decreed at Rome and done in Africa, Publius Quinctilius Varus the praetor and Marcus Cornelius the proconsul fought a pitched battle with Mago the Carthaginian in the territory of the Insubrian Gauls. The praetor’s legions were in the front line; Cornelius held his own in reserve, himself riding up to the front standards; and on the two wings the praetor and the proconsul exhorted the soldiers with all their might to carry the standards against the enemy. When they could move them nothing, then Quinctilius said to Cornelius: "The fight, as you see, grows slower, and the enemy’s fear is hardened beyond expectation by their resistance, and there is danger lest it turn to boldness. We must raise a storm of cavalry, if we mean to throw them into confusion and shift them from their footing. So either do you sustain the battle at the front standards while I lead the horse into the fight; or I will manage the matter here in the front line, and do you launch the cavalry of four legions upon the enemy." When the proconsul took whichever part of the task the praetor would, Quinctilius the praetor with his son—whose praenomen was Marcus, an active youth—went to the cavalry, and bidding them mount their horses suddenly launched them upon the enemy. The cavalry tumult was swelled by the shout the legions added, nor would the enemy’s line have stood, had not Mago at the first stir of the cavalry brought up at once the elephant-war/">elephants he had ready into the battle. At their screaming and their smell and the sight of them the horses, terrified, made the cavalry’s aid of no avail. And as, in the mellay, where the Roman horseman could use the lance and at close quarters the sword, he was of greater strength, so, when borne away by his frightened horse, the Numidian threw his javelins the better from a distance. At the same time too the twelfth legion of foot, in great part cut to pieces, held its ground more by shame than by strength; nor would it have held longer, had not from the reserves the thirteenth legion, brought up into the front line, taken over the doubtful fight. Mago too, from the reserves, set the Gauls against the fresh legion. When these had been routed with no great struggle, the hastati of the eleventh legion massed themselves and attacked the elephants, which were now throwing even the line of foot into disorder; and when they had hurled their javelins upon them in close array, hardly any cast in vain, they turned them all back into the line of their own men; four, weighed down with wounds, fell. Then for the first time was the enemy’s line shaken, while at the same time all the cavalry, when they saw the elephants turned, poured out to increase the panic and the tumult. But so long as Mago stood before the standards, retiring their step little by little, they kept their ranks and the tenor of the fight: after they saw him fall, his thigh pierced, and being borne off the field nearly drained of blood, at once all turned to flight. About five thousand of the enemy were slain that day, and twenty-two military standards taken. Nor was the victory bloodless for the Romans: two thousand three hundred of the praetor’s army, by much the greatest part from the twelfth legion, were lost; and of these too the military tribunes Marcus Cosconius and Marcus Maevius; of the thirteenth legion as well, which had come up in the last of the fight, the military tribune Gaius Helvius fell as he was restoring the battle; and about twenty-two distinguished cavalrymen, trampled by the elephants, perished with some centurions. And the contest would have been longer had not the victory been yielded by the leader’s wound.

Mago, setting out in the silence of the next night, by forced marches—as far as he could endure the road for his wound—came to the sea, to the Ligurian Ingauni. There envoys from Carthage, their ships put in a few days before into the Gallic gulf, came to him, bidding him cross into Africa at the first opportunity; that his brother Hannibal too—for envoys had gone to him also with the same bidding—would do the like; the affairs of the Carthaginians did not stand so that they could hold Gaul and Italy by arms. Mago, moved not only by the command of the Senate and the peril of his country but fearing also lest the victorious enemy press on him as he lingered, and lest the Ligurians themselves, seeing Italy abandoned by the Carthaginians, go over to those in whose power they would soon be, and hoping at the same time that the tossing would be gentler for his wound on the voyage than on the road and that all things would be more convenient for its tending, put his forces aboard the ships and set out; but, Sardinia scarcely passed, he died of his wound. Some Carthaginian ships too, scattered on the deep, were taken by the Roman fleet that lay about Sardinia. These things were done by land and sea in the part of Italy that lies toward the Alps. The consul Gaius Servilius, no memorable thing done in his province of Etruria and Gaul—for thither too he had advanced—his father Gaius Servilius and Gaius Lutatius having been recovered from servitude after the sixteenth year (they had been taken by the Boii at the village of Tannetum), with his father on one side and Catulus on the other set about him, returned to Rome marked by a distinction private rather than public. A measure was carried to the people that it should not be a reproach to Gaius Servilius that, while his father, who had sat in the curule chair, was living—of which he was ignorant—he had been a plebs/">tribune of the plebs and a plebeian aedile contrary to what was sanctioned by the laws. This bill carried, he returned to his province. To the consul Gnaeus Servilius, who was in Bruttium, Consentia, Aufugum, Bergae, Baesidiae, Ocriculum, Lymphaeum, Argentanum, Clampetia, and many other unknown peoples, seeing the Punic war growing old, came over. The same consul fought a pitched battle with Hannibal in the territory of Croton. The fame of that fight is obscure. Valerius Antias says five thousand of the enemy were slain—a matter so great that it must either have been impudently invented or carelessly passed over. Certainly nothing further was done in Italy by Hannibal. For to him too envoys from Carthage recalling him to Africa came, in those very days in which they came to Mago.

Gnashing and groaning and scarcely refraining from tears, he is said to have heard the envoys’ words. After the orders had been delivered, "Now," he said, "not in riddling fashion but openly they recall me, who long since were drawing me back by forbidding that reinforcements and money be sent. So it was not the Roman people, so often cut to pieces and put to flight, that conquered Hannibal, but the Carthaginian Senate, by detraction and envy; nor will Publius Scipio so exult and lift himself up at this disgrace of my return as Hanno, who, when he could in no other way, has crushed my house by the ruin of Carthage." Already, divining this very thing in his mind, he had made his ships ready beforehand. And so, dismissing the useless throng of soldiers, under the show of garrisons, into the towns of the Bruttian land, the few that were held more by fear than by loyalty, he carried over into Africa what strength there was in his army; and many men of Italian stock, because they refused to follow him into Africa and had withdrawn into the temple of Juno Lacinia, inviolate to that day, were foully slaughtered in the very temple. Rarely, they say, has any man leaving his country for exile departed so sorrowful as Hannibal in quitting the enemy’s land; that he looked back often at the shores of Italy, accusing gods and men and calling down a curse upon his own head also, that he had not led his soldiers, bloody from the victory of Cannae, to Rome; that Scipio had dared to go to Carthage who as consul had not seen a Carthaginian enemy in Italy; while he himself, after a hundred thousand armed men slain at Trasimene and at Cannae, had grown old about Casilinum and Cumae and Nola. Thus accusing and complaining, he was drawn off from his long possession of Italy.

To Rome in those same days word was brought that both Mago and Hannibal had set out. The gladness of this double congratulation was lessened both because the commanders seemed to have had too little spirit or strength in keeping them back, though that had been charged on them by the Senate, and because men were anxious as to where the matter would issue, now that the whole weight of the war was tilted upon one army and one leader. In those same days envoys of the Saguntines came, bringing with them, arrested with their money, some Carthaginians who had crossed into Spain to hire auxiliaries. Two hundred and fifty pounds of gold, eight hundred of silver, they laid down in the vestibule of the Senate-house. The men were taken and shut up in prison, the gold and silver given back, and thanks rendered to the envoys, and over and above gifts given, and ships in which they might return to Spain. Then mention was made by the elder men that men feel good things more sluggishly than ill; let them remember how much terror and panic there was at Hannibal’s passage into Italy; what disasters, what mournings had befallen thereafter. The enemy’s camp had been seen from the walls of the city; what vows there had been, of individuals and of all together! How often in the assemblies had voices been heard, of men stretching their hands to heaven: would that day ever come on which they should see Italy, empty of the enemy, flowering in good peace? The gods had given that at last, in the sixteenth year indeed, and there was no one to move that thanks be rendered to the gods; so little do men kindly receive even a grace as it comes, far from being mindful enough of one gone by. Then a shout was raised from every part of the Senate-house that Publius Aelius the praetor should put the question; and it was decreed that for five days about all the couches of the gods supplication be made, and that a hundred and twenty full-grown victims be sacrificed. Laelius and Masinissa’s envoys being now dismissed, when word came that the Carthaginian envoys, coming about the peace to the Senate, had been seen at Puteoli and would come thence by land, it was resolved that Gaius Laelius be recalled, that the matter of peace might be dealt with in his presence. Quintus Fulvius Gillo, Scipio’s lieutenant, brought the Carthaginians to Rome; and they being forbidden to enter the city, lodging was given them in the public villa, and audience of the Senate at the temple of Bellona.

They delivered nearly the same speech as they had before Scipio, turning all the blame of the war from the public counsel upon Hannibal: that he, without the Senate’s order, had crossed not only the Alps but the Ebro too, and had made war of his own private counsel not on the Romans only but, before that, even on the Saguntines; that to the Senate and people of Carthage, if any judged truly, the treaty was to that day unbroken with the Romans; and so they had no other charge than to ask that they be allowed to abide in that peace which had last been made with Gaius Lutatius. When, by the custom handed down from the Fathers, the praetor had given the envoys power of being questioned, if any wished anything, and the elder men who had been present at the treaties asked one this, another that, and the envoys said they did not remember, by reason of their age—for they were nearly all young men—a shout was raised from every part of the Senate-house that by Punic guile men had been chosen to ask back the old peace which they themselves did not remember.

The envoys then removed from the Senate-house, the opinions began to be asked. Marcus Livius held that Gaius Servilius the consul, who was nearer, should be summoned, that the matter of peace might be dealt with in his presence; since no deliberation greater than this could arise, it did not seem to him consonant with the dignity of the Roman people that, with one of the consuls or both absent, the matter be transacted. Quintus Metellus, who three years before had been consul and dictator, held that, since Publius Scipio, by cutting the armies to pieces and laying waste the fields, had driven the enemy to such straits that as suppliants they sought peace, and no one of all men could judge more truly in what mind that peace was sought than he who waged war before the gates of Carthage, the peace must be accepted or refused on no one’s counsel but Scipio’s. Marcus Valerius Laevinus, who had twice been consul, argued that spies, not envoys, had come, and that they must be ordered to quit Italy and guards be sent with them all the way to their ships, and that it be written to Scipio not to slacken the war. Laelius and Fulvius added that Scipio too had placed his hope of peace on this, that Hannibal and Mago should not be recalled from Italy; but that the Carthaginians would feign everything, awaiting those leaders and their armies; then, forgetful of treaties however fresh and of all the gods, they would wage war. By this the more was the assembly brought over to Laevinus’s opinion. The envoys, the peace unmade, were dismissed almost without an answer.

In those days the consul Gnaeus Servilius, not doubting that the glory of Italy pacified lay with himself, as though pursuing Hannibal driven off by him, crossed into Sicily, meaning thence to cross into Africa. When this was made public at Rome, at first the Fathers had resolved that the praetor should write to the consul that the Senate thought it right he return to Italy; then, when the praetor said he would scorn his letter, dictator/">Publius Sulpicius, created dictator for that very purpose, by the right of his higher command recalled the consul to Italy. The rest of the year he spent with Marcus Servilius, his master of horse, going about the cities of Italy that had been estranged in the war and inquiring into the case of each. During the time of the truce, from Sardinia, from the praetor Publius Lentulus, a hundred transport ships with supplies, under the escort of twenty beaked ships, crossed to Africa, the sea safe both from the enemy and from storms. To Gnaeus Octavius, crossing from Sicily with two hundred transports and thirty warships, the same fortune did not fall. Borne in a prosperous course nearly within sight of Africa, he was first failed by the wind, then, when it turned to the southwest, was thrown into confusion, and his ships scattered everywhere. He himself with the beaked ships, struggling through the adverse waves by the huge toil of the rowers, made the Promontory of Apollo: the transports for the most part were carried to the island of Aegimurus—it closes from the deep the gulf on which Carthage is set, about thirty miles from the city—others over against the city itself to the Hot Waters. All was in sight of Carthage. And so from the whole city there was a rush to the forum; the magistrates summoned the Senate; the people in the vestibule of the Senate-house clamored that so great a booty should not be let slip from their eyes and hands. When some opposed the faith of the peace they had sought, others of the truce—for its days had not yet run out—with the council of Senate and people nearly mingled, it was agreed that Hasdrubal should cross with a fleet of fifty ships to Aegimurus and gather thence the Roman ships scattered along the shores and harbors. Deserted by the flight of their sailors, the transports were dragged off by their sterns to Carthage, first from Aegimurus, then from the Waters.

The envoys had not yet returned from Rome, nor was it known what the opinion of the Roman Senate concerning war or peace was, nor had the days of the truce yet run out; and so Scipio, thinking the wrong the more unworthy, that by those who had sought peace and a truce both the hope of peace and the faith of the truce had been violated, at once sent envoys to Carthage—Lucius Baebius, Lucius Sergius, Lucius Fabius. When these had been all but assaulted by a rush of the multitude, and saw that their return would be no safer, they asked of the magistrates, by whose help the violence had been kept off, that they send ships to escort them. Two triremes were given, which, when they had come to the river Bagradas, whence the Roman camp was in view, returned to Carthage. The Punic fleet lay at station off Utica. From it three quadriremes, whether by a messenger secretly sent from Carthage that this should be done, or by Hasdrubal, who commanded the fleet, daring the deed without public treachery, suddenly attacked from the deep the Roman quinquereme as it doubled the promontory. But they could neither strike with the beak the ship that slipped past beneath their stroke for its speed, nor leap aboard, the armed men from the lower vessels into the higher; and it was defended excellently while the weapons held out. When these now failed, nothing else could have saved it but the nearness of the land and the multitude poured out from the camp onto the shore. For, driving it shoreward with the oars at the greatest force they could, they ran it aground, and, the ship only being lost, they themselves escaped unhurt. So, when by one crime piled on another the truce had been beyond doubt broken, Laelius and Fulvius came up from Rome with the Carthaginian envoys. To them Scipio, though by the Carthaginians not only the faith of the truce but the law of nations also in the persons of envoys had been violated, nevertheless said that he would do nothing toward them unworthy either of the institutions of the Roman people or of his own character; and, the envoys dismissed, he made ready for war. As Hannibal now drew near the land, when one of the sailors had been bidden to climb the mast to spy out what region they were holding, and had said that a ruined tomb the prow was facing, abominating the omen and bidding the steersman sail past, he brought his fleet to Leptis and there landed his forces.

These things were done in Africa in that year; what follows passes over into the year in which Marcus Servilius Geminus, who was then master of the horse, and Tiberius Claudius Nero were made consuls. But at the close of the former year, when envoys of the allied cities from Greece had complained that their fields had been laid waste by the king’s garrisons, and that their envoys who had gone to Macedonia to seek redress had not been admitted to king Philip, and had at the same time reported that four thousand soldiers under the leader Sopater were said to have been carried over into Africa to be a help to the Carthaginians, and a sum of money sent along with them, the Senate resolved that envoys be sent to the king to declare that these things seemed to the Fathers done against the treaty. There were sent Gaius Terentius Varro, Gaius Mamilius, Marcus Aurelius; to them three quinqueremes were given. The year was marked by a great fire, in which the Publician Slope was burned to the ground, and by floods of water, but it was a year of cheap grain, both because peace had laid all Italy open, and because a great store of grain sent from Spain Marcus Valerius Falto and Marcus Fabius Buteo, the curule aediles, doled out to the people street by street at four asses the measure. In the same year Quintus Fabius Maximus died, of full age, if indeed it is true that he was augur for sixty-two years, which some authorities state. He was certainly a man worthy of so great a surname, even if it had begun new with him. He surpassed his father’s honors, equaled his grandfather’s. With more victories and greater battles his grandfather Rullus was distinguished; but all of them one enemy, Hannibal, can outweigh. Yet he was held cautious rather than prompt; and, as you might doubt whether he was a delayer by temperament or because that suited precisely the war then being waged, so nothing is more certain than that one man by delaying restored our state, as Ennius says. Augur in his place was inaugurated his son Quintus Fabius Maximus; in the same man’s place as pontiff—for he had held two priesthoods—Servius Sulpicius Galba. The Roman games were repeated for one day, the plebeian thrice entire, by the aediles Marcus Sextius Sabinus and Gnaeus Tremelius Flaccus. Both these were made praetors, and with them Gaius Livius Salinator and Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Whether Gaius Servilius the consul held that year’s elections, or, because affairs in Etruria detained him while he held inquiries by decree of the Senate into the conspiracies of leading men, a dictator named by him, Publius Sulpicius, held them, the discordant authorities leave uncertain.

At the beginning of the following year Marcus Servilius and Tiberius Claudius, the Senate summoned to the Capitol, laid before it the matter of the provinces. They wished Italy and Africa to be cast into the lot, both desiring Africa; but, with Quintus Metellus chiefly striving against it, Africa was neither denied nor given. The consuls were ordered to deal with the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs that, if it seemed good to them, they ask the people whom they would have wage war in Africa. All the tribes ordered Publius Scipio. Nonetheless the consuls cast the province of Africa—for so the Senate had decreed—into the lot. To Tiberius Claudius Africa fell, that he should cross into Africa with a fleet of fifty ships, all quinqueremes, and be commander with equal authority to Publius Scipio: Marcus Servilius drew Etruria. In the same province the command was prorogued to Gaius Servilius too, if it should seem good to the Senate that the consul remain at the city. Of the praetors, Marcus Sextius drew Gaul, that Publius Quinctilius Varus should hand over to him two legions and the province; Gaius Livius drew Bruttium, with the two legions over which tribune/">Publius Sempronius the proconsul had been the year before; Gnaeus Tremelius drew Sicily, that he should receive the province and the two legions from Publius Villius Tappulus, praetor of the year before; Villius as propraetor with twenty warships and a thousand soldiers should guard the coast of Sicily; Marcus Pomponius with the remaining twenty ships should bring fifteen hundred soldiers to Rome. To Gaius Aurelius Cotta fell the city jurisdiction. To the rest the commands were prorogued, each as he held his province and army. With sixteen legions, no more, the empire was defended that year. And, that they might begin and do all things with the gods appeased, the games which Titus Manlius the dictator had vowed in the consulship of Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Titus Quinctius, and the full-grown victims he had vowed, if for five years the commonwealth should stand in the same estate—those games the consuls were to hold before they set out for the war. The games were held in the circus for four days, and the victims to the gods to whom they had been vowed were slain.

Meanwhile both hope and care grew day by day, nor could it be sufficiently settled in men’s minds whether it were the worthier of joy that Hannibal, departing from Italy after the sixteenth year, had left its possession free to the Roman people, or the more to be feared that he had crossed into Africa with his army unbroken: the place, forsooth, was changed, not the peril; and Quintus Fabius, who had lately died, the prophet of so great a struggle, had not in vain been wont to foretell that Hannibal would be a graver enemy in his own land than he had been in another’s. Nor would Scipio’s matter be with Syphax, a king of unschooled barbarism, whose armies a half-camp-follower, Statorius, had been used to lead, nor with his father-in-law Hasdrubal, a most runaway leader, nor with hasty armies suddenly gathered from a half-armed crowd of rustics, but with Hannibal—born well-nigh in the headquarters of his most valiant father, reared and brought up amid arms, a soldier once when a boy, a commander when scarcely a youth, who, grown old in conquering, had filled the Spains, the Gauls, Italy from the Alps to the strait with the monuments of his vast deeds. He led an army of the same standing as his own campaigns, hardened to the endurance of all things which one could scarcely believe men had borne, drenched a thousand times in Roman blood, carrying the spoils not of soldiers only but even of commanders. Many would meet Scipio in the line who with their own hand had killed Roman praetors, generals, consuls—marked with mural and rampart crowns, who had ranged over captured Roman camps, captured Roman cities. There were not today so many fasces for the magistrates of the Roman people as Hannibal could carry before him, taken from the slaughter of commanders. By turning over these terrors in their minds they themselves increased their own cares and fears, the more because, whereas for some years they had grown used to wage a war before their eyes in one and another part of Italy, with a sluggish hope toward no near end of finishing it, now Scipio and Hannibal, leaders matched as if for a last contest, had lifted up all men’s minds. Even those who had great confidence in Scipio and hope of victory, the nearer they pressed it upon their minds the more intent were their cares. Not unlike was the temper of the Carthaginians: now, looking upon Hannibal and the greatness of his deeds, they repented of having sought peace; now, when they looked back—twice beaten in the field, Syphax taken, driven from Spain, driven from Italy, and all this done by the valor and counsel of one man, Scipio—they shuddered at him as a leader fated, born for their destruction.

Hannibal had now reached Hadrumetum; whence, after a few days taken to refresh his soldiers from the tossing of the sea, roused by panic-stricken messengers reporting that all about Carthage was held by arms, he pressed on by great marches to Zama. Zama is five days’ journey from Carthage. From there scouts sent ahead, when, intercepted by the Roman pickets, they had been brought to Scipio, he handed over to a tribune of the soldiers, and bidding them, all fear laid aside, look at everything, asked whether they had explored everything to their satisfaction; and, giving them men to escort them, sent them back to Hannibal. Hannibal heard with no glad mind anything of what was reported—for they brought word that Masinissa too had come up that very day, as it chanced, with six thousand foot and four thousand horse—but most of all he was struck by the enemy’s confidence, which surely had not been conceived for nothing. And so, although he himself was both the cause of the war and by his coming had disturbed the truce agreed and the hope of treaties, yet reckoning that fairer terms could be obtained if he sought peace whole than if beaten, he sent a messenger to Scipio to ask leave to confer with him. Whether he did this of his own accord or by public counsel, I have warrant to affirm neither. Valerius Antias relates that he was conquered by Scipio in a first battle, in which twelve thousand armed men were slain in the line, seventeen hundred taken, and that he came as an envoy with ten other envoys into the camp to Scipio. For the rest, Scipio not having refused the conference, both leaders by agreement advanced their camps, that they might be able to meet from near at hand. Scipio took post not far from the town of Naraggara, in a place opportune for other things and because the water was within a javelin’s cast. Hannibal seized a hill four miles thence, safe and convenient otherwise except that the watering was distant. There in the midst a place open on every side was chosen, that there might be no ambush.

Their armed men withdrawn an equal space, they met, each with a single interpreter, the greatest leaders not of their own age only but of all the memory of all nations before them, the peers of any king or commander whatsoever. For a little while, in the sight of each other, well-nigh thunderstruck with mutual admiration, they held their peace; then Hannibal spoke first: "If it was so given by fate that I, who first made war on the Roman people, and who so often had victory all but in my hands, should come of my own accord to sue for peace, I am glad that it is you, before all others, whom the lot has given me to sue. For you too, among many honors, this will be not the least of your praises, that Hannibal, to whom the gods had given the victory over so many Roman commanders, yielded to you, and that you set an end to this war, marked first by your defeats and then by ours. This too the mockery of chance will have brought to pass: that, having taken up arms in your father’s consulship, and with that same man as the first Roman commander against whom I joined battle, I come unarmed to his son to sue for peace. It had been best of all that the gods had given our fathers such a mind, that you should be content with the empire of Italy, and we of Africa; for not even to you are Sicily and Sardinia worthy prices for so many fleets, so many armies, so many excellent leaders lost. But things past can be censured rather than corrected. We so coveted what was another’s that we had to fight for our own, and had war not in Italy only for ourselves and in Africa for you; but both you have seen the standards and arms of enemies almost within your gates and on your walls, and we from Carthage hear the murmur of a Roman camp. That, therefore, which we should most abominate, and you would before all things desire—of peace it is treated in your better fortune. We treat of it who have the greatest interest that there be peace, and whose acts, whatever we shall have done, our states will hold ratified: we need only a temper not shrinking from quiet counsels. As for me, my age now, returning an old man to the fatherland whence I set out a boy, my fortunes both prosperous and adverse, have so schooled me that I had rather follow reason than fortune: of your youth and unbroken good fortune, both too high-spirited for quiet counsels, I am afraid. Not lightly does he reckon the uncertainty of chance whom fortune has never deceived. What I was at Trasimene, at Cannae, that you are today. Scarce yet of soldier’s age, having taken command, you have begun all things most boldly, and nowhere has fortune failed you. Avenging the death of your father and uncle, out of the calamity of your house you won a signal glory of valor and of rare piety; you recovered the lost Spains, four Punic armies driven thence; made consul, when others had too little heart to defend Italy, you crossed into Africa, and here, two armies cut to pieces, two camps taken and burned in the same hour, Syphax a most powerful king taken, so many cities of his kingdom, so many of our empire torn away, you have dragged me down, clinging now the sixteenth year to the possession of Italy. The mind may prefer victory to peace. I know spirits more lofty than profitable; and on me too once such a fortune shone. But if in prosperity the gods gave also a good mind, we should reckon not only what has happened but also what could happen. Though you forget all others, I am proof enough for every chance—I whom you saw a little while ago, my camp pitched between the Anio and your city, bearing my standards on and now all but scaling the walls of Rome; here you may behold me, bereft of two brothers, most valiant men, most illustrious commanders, before the walls of my well-nigh besieged country, pleading away from it the very terrors with which I affrighted yours. The greatest fortune is the least to be trusted. In your prosperity, our doubtful state, peace, if you give it, is splendid and ample to you; to us who beg it, more necessary than honorable. Better and safer is a peace assured than a victory hoped for: the one is in your own hand, the other in the gods’. Stake not the good fortune of so many years on the hazard of a single hour. Set before your mind both your own strength and the power of fortune and the common chance of war: on both sides will be the sword, on both sides human bodies; nowhere less than in war do outcomes answer to expectation. You will not add so much glory by victory in the field to what you can already have by granting peace, as you will lose if any adversity befall. The decorations both won and hoped for the fortune of a single hour can overturn. All things are in your power if you settle peace, Publius Cornelius; otherwise you must take such fortune as the gods shall give. Among the few examples of good fortune and good sense, Marcus Atilius would once have stood, in this same land, had he as victor granted peace to our fathers who sought it; but by setting no measure to his prosperity and not curbing the fortune that bore him up, the higher he had been raised, the more foully he fell. It is indeed his who grants, not his who begs, to dictate the terms of peace; but perhaps we are not unworthy to lay the fine upon ourselves. We do not refuse that all those things for which the war was begun be yours—Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, whatever islands are contained in all the sea between Africa and Italy; let us Carthaginians, shut within the shores of Africa, see you, since so it has pleased the gods, ruling even a foreign realm by sea and land. I will not deny that, because of a peace lately sought or awaited none too sincerely, Punic faith is suspect to you: much, for the keeping of peace in good faith, depends on those by whom it is sought, Scipio. Your Fathers too, as I hear, refused the peace partly for this, that there was too little dignity in the embassy. It is I, Hannibal, who sue for peace—I who would not sue unless I believed it profitable, and who for that same profit’s sake will guard the peace for whose sake I sought it. And as, because the war was begun by me, I saw to it that none repented of it until the gods themselves grew jealous, so I will strive that none repent of the peace gotten through me."

Against this the Roman commander answered to about this purport: "It did not escape me, Hannibal, that it was in hope of your coming that the Carthaginians disturbed both the present faith of the truce and the hope of peace; nor indeed do you dissemble it, who subtract from the former terms of peace everything except what has long been in our power. But as it is your care that your citizens feel how great a burden is lifted from them through you, so I must labor that the rewards which they then bargained for, withdrawn today from the terms of peace, they hold not as the wages of perfidy. You are unworthy that the same terms lie open to you, and you ask that your fraud should even profit you. Neither did our fathers begin the war over Sicily first, nor we over Spain; in the one case the peril of our allies the Mamertines, and in this the destruction of Saguntum, put just and righteous arms into our hands. That you were the aggressors you yourself confess, and the gods are witnesses, who both gave the issue of that former war according to right and divine law, and give and will give the issue of this. As for me, I both remember the weakness of man and reckon the power of fortune and know that all we do is subject to a thousand chances; but as I should confess that I acted proudly and violently if, before I had crossed into Africa, I were to spurn you, withdrawing of your own will from Italy and embarking your army and coming yourself to sue for peace, so now, when I have all but with hand laid on dragged you, resisting and shuffling, into Africa, I am bound to you by no respect. Therefore, if to those terms on which it seemed peace would then be agreed something is added—as a fine for the ships with their cargo seized during the truce and for the envoys outraged—there is matter for me to refer to the council; but if those things too seem heavy, prepare for war, since peace you could not endure." So, peace unmade, when they had withdrawn from the conference to their own people, they reported that words had been tried in vain: the issue must be decided by arms, and such fortune accepted as the gods should give.

When they had come into camp, both proclaimed that the soldiers should make ready their arms and their spirits for the last contest, victors—if good fortune were with them—not for a single day but forever. Whether Rome or Carthage should give laws to the nations they would know before the morrow’s night; for not Africa nor Italy, but the whole world, would be the prize of victory; the peril equal to the prize for those whom the fortune of the fight had gone against. For neither did any way of escape lie open to the Romans in a land alien and unknown, and for Carthage, her last help poured out, present destruction seemed at hand. To this decision they went forth on the next day, the two by far most illustrious leaders of the two wealthiest peoples, the two most valiant armies, either to crown that day the many decorations won before or to overthrow them. Therefore wavering hope and fear mingled their minds; and as they gazed now on their own line, now on the enemy’s, weighing their strength by their eyes rather than by reason, at once glad and grim thoughts rose before them. What did not occur to themselves of their own accord, that the leaders by reminding and exhorting supplied. The Carthaginian rehearsed the deeds done in the land of Italy in sixteen years, so many Roman leaders, so many armies slain to a man, and each man’s own decorations, when he came to a soldier marked by the memory of some notable fight: Scipio told of the Spains and the late battles in Africa and the enemy’s own confession, in that they had been able neither not to seek peace for fear, nor to abide in it for the perfidy bred in their souls. Besides, he turns Hannibal’s conference, held in secret and so free to be fashioned as he would, whichever way he pleases. He takes it for an omen that, with the same auspices under which their fathers had once fought at the Aegates islands, the gods had given a sign to these men as they went out into the line. The end of war and toil was at hand; in their hands was the plunder of Carthage, the return home to their country, to parents, children, wives, and the household gods. Erect in body and with countenance so glad that you would have thought he had already conquered, he spoke these things. He then drew up first the hastati, behind them the principes; with the triarii he closed the rearmost line.

He drew up the cohorts not in close array each before its own standards, but the maniples somewhat apart from one another, that there might be room through which the enemy’s elephant-war/">elephants, when driven on, should throw the ranks into no disorder. Laelius, whose service he had used before as a lieutenant, and that year, by decree of the Senate, as quaestor out of the usual course, he set with the Italian cavalry on the left wing, Masinissa and the Numidians on the right. The open lanes between the maniples of the antesignani he filled with velites—that was then the light-armed soldiery—with the order given that at the elephants’ charge they should either retreat behind the drawn-up ranks, or, dispersing to the right and left and attaching themselves to the antesignani, give the beasts a passage by which to rush in upon weapons on either hand. Hannibal, to inspire terror, drew up the elephants in front—there were eighty of them, more than he had ever before had in a line—then the auxiliaries of Ligurians and Gauls, with Balearics and Moors mixed in: in the second line the Carthaginians and Africans and a legion of Macedonians: then, a moderate interval left, he drew up a reserve line of Italian soldiers—they were mostly Bruttians, who had followed him out of Italy as he withdrew more by force and necessity than of their own will. The cavalry too he set about the wings; the right the Carthaginians held, the left the Numidians. Various was the exhortation in an army among so many men whose tongue, custom, law, arms, dress and bearing, and cause of soldiering were not the same. To the auxiliaries was held out pay both present and multiplied out of the booty: the Gauls were kindled by their own peculiar and inbred hatred of the Romans: to the Ligurians the rich plains of Italy, they being drawn down from their most rugged mountains, were displayed in hope of victory: the Moors and Numidians he frightened with Masinissa’s domination to come, that would brook no curb: to others other hopes and fears were thrown out. To the Carthaginians were displayed the walls of their country, the household gods, the tombs of their ancestors, their children with their parents, and their wives in terror, and either destruction and slavery or the empire of the world—nothing midway, either for fear or for hope. While the commander was at his busiest with these things among the Carthaginians, and the leaders of their nations among their countrymen—much of it through interpreters, among men mingled with aliens—the trumpets and horns sounded from the Romans, and so great a clamor arose that the elephants turned upon their own, chiefly upon the left wing, the Moors and Numidians. Masinissa easily added terror to the panic-stricken, and stripped the line on that side of its cavalry support. A few of the beasts, however, undismayed, driven against the enemy, dealt huge slaughter among the ranks of the velites, though with many wounds of their own. For the velites, springing back to the maniples, when they had made way for the elephants that they might not be trampled, hurled their javelins at the beasts now exposed to the stroke on both sides; nor did the pila of the antesignani cease, until, driven out of the Roman line by the weapons falling on them from every quarter, these too turned to flight the very Carthaginian cavalry on their own right wing. Laelius, when he saw the enemy in confusion, added terror to the panic-stricken.

The Punic line was stripped of its cavalry on both wings when the foot joined, no longer matched either in hope or in strength. To this add things small to tell but the same of great moment in the very doing: a harmonious shout from the Romans, and thereby the greater and the more terrible; from the others discordant cries, as of many nations with jarring tongues; the Roman fighting steady, bearing down on the enemy with the weight both of his own body and of his arms; on the other side more of running to and fro and of speed than of strength. And so at the first onset the Romans at once shifted the enemy’s line from its place. Then, thrusting with the elbow and the boss, and pressing forward into those they dislodged, they advanced a good space, as though none resisted, the rearmost too urging on the foremost when once they felt the line stirred—which itself added great force to driving back the enemy. Among the enemy the auxiliaries giving way, the second line, the Africans and Carthaginians, were so far from sustaining them that, on the contrary, lest the enemy, by cutting down the foremost as they stubbornly resisted, should reach themselves, they too gave back a step. Therefore the auxiliaries suddenly turned their backs and, wheeling upon their own men, partly fled into the second line, partly, not being received, fell to cutting them down, as men not aided a little before and now shut out; and there were now well-nigh two battles mingled, since the Carthaginians were forced to grapple at once with the enemy and with their own. Yet they did not, even so, take into their line men panic-stricken and enraged, but, closing their ranks, thrust them out onto the wings and the empty plain around, beyond the battle, lest with soldiers terror-struck by flight and wounds they should disorder their line, sound and entire. But so great a heap of men and arms had filled the place where a little before the auxiliaries had stood that the passage was well-nigh harder than it had been through the close-packed enemy. And so the foremost, the hastati, following the enemy as best each could over the mounds of bodies and arms and through the welter of blood, threw both standards and ranks into confusion. The standards of the principes too had begun to waver, seeing the line before them straying. When Scipio saw this, he ordered the recall to be sounded in haste for the hastati, and, the wounded withdrawn into the rearmost line, brought the principes and triarii onto the wings, that the line of the hastati in the center might be the safer and the firmer. So a new battle, all afresh, arose; for they had come now to the true enemy, matched both in kind of arms and in soldierly experience and in fame of deeds done and in the greatness of hope or of peril; but the Roman was both superior in number and in spirit, because he had already routed the cavalry, already the elephant-war/">elephants, already, the first line driven back, was fighting against the second.

In the nick of time Laelius and Masinissa, having pursued the routed cavalry over a good space, returning, charged the enemy’s line in the rear. That charge of cavalry at last broke the enemy. Many, surrounded, were cut down in the line; many, scattered in flight over the open plain around, perished here and there, the cavalry holding all the ground. Of the Carthaginians and their allies above twenty thousand were slain that day; about an equal number was taken, with a hundred and thirty-two military standards, eleven elephant-war/">elephants: of the victors about fifteen hundred fell. Hannibal, slipping away amid the tumult with a few horsemen, fled to Hadrumetum, having tried everything both before the battle and in the fight before he withdrew, and having won, by the confession even of Scipio and of all skilled in war, the praise of having that day drawn up his line with singular art: the elephants in the very front, that their random charge and intolerable force might keep the Romans from following the standards and keeping their ranks, in which they placed their chief hope; then the auxiliaries before the Carthaginian line, that men mixed from the dregs of all nations, held not by loyalty but by hire, might have no free retreat for flight, and at the same time, receiving the first ardor and onset of the enemy, might tire them and, if nothing else, blunt the enemy’s steel with their own wounds; then, where all the hope lay, the Carthaginian soldiers and the Africans, that, equal in all else, they might prove the superior in this, that fresh men fought against the weary and the wounded; the Italians removed into the rearmost line, and parted off too by an interval, since it was uncertain whether they were allies or enemies. This was the last work, as it were, of Hannibal’s valor; and when he had fled to Hadrumetum, and being summoned thence to Carthage had returned thither in the six-and-thirtieth year after he had set out from it a boy, he confessed in the Senate-house that he had been beaten not in the battle only but in the war, and that there was no hope of safety anywhere but in obtaining peace.

Scipio, straightway after the battle, having stormed and plundered the enemy’s camp, returned with vast booty to the sea and to his ships, word being brought that Publius Lentulus had put in at Utica with fifty beaked ships and a hundred transports with every kind of supply. Thinking, therefore, that terror must be brought from every quarter upon stricken Carthage, he sent Laelius to Rome with news of the victory, and ordered Gnaeus Octavius to lead the legions by land to Carthage: he himself, his old fleet joined to Lentulus’s new one, set out from Utica and made for the harbor of Carthage. He was not far off when a Carthaginian ship met him, veiled with fillets and branches of olive. There were ten envoys, leading men of the state, sent at Hannibal’s instance to sue for peace. When they had come up to the stern of the flagship, holding out the emblems of suppliants, beseeching and imploring the faith and mercy of Scipio, no other answer was given them than that they should come to Tunes: thither he would move his camp. He himself, having advanced into the harbor to view the site of Carthage—not so much to learn it for the present as to dishearten the enemy—returned to Utica, Octavius too recalled thither. As they advanced toward Tunes, word was brought that Vermina, son of Syphax, was coming with more horse than foot to the help of the Carthaginians. Part of the army with all the cavalry, sent out, attacked the column on the first day of the Saturnalia and routed the Numidians in a slight engagement. The way of flight too being cut off, the cavalry surrounding them on every side, fifteen thousand men were slain, twelve hundred taken alive, and fifteen hundred Numidian horses, seventy-two military standards; the princeling himself amid the tumult escaped with a few. Then at Tunes the camp was pitched in the same place as before, and thirty envoys came from Carthage to Scipio. And these indeed pleaded far more piteously than before, the more as fortune pressed them; but they were heard with somewhat less compassion, for the fresh memory of their perfidy. In the council, though just anger goaded all to the destruction of Carthage, yet when they reckoned both how great the matter was, and how long a siege of so well-fortified and so strong a city would be, and Scipio himself was troubled by the expectation of a successor coming to the ready fruit of victory and to the fame of a war ended by another’s toil and peril, all men’s minds were turned to peace.

On the next day the envoys were recalled, and after much chiding of their perfidy, and a warning that, taught at last by so many disasters, they should believe that there were gods and an oath, the terms of peace were declared: that they should live free under their own laws; that whatever cities and lands and within whatever bounds they had held before the war they should hold, and that the Roman should that day make an end of ravaging; that they should give back to the Romans all deserters and runaways and captives, and hand over their beaked ships except ten triremes, and such elephant-war/">elephants as they had tamed, and tame no others; that they should wage war neither in Africa nor outside Africa without the order of the Roman people; that they should make restitution to Masinissa and make a treaty with him; that they should furnish grain and pay to the auxiliaries until the envoys should return from Rome; that they should pay ten thousand talents of silver, apportioned in equal installments over fifty years; that they should give a hundred hostages at Scipio’s choice, none younger than fourteen years nor older than thirty. A truce he would grant on this condition, that the transports taken during the former truce, and whatever had been in those ships, be restored; otherwise there would be neither truce nor any hope of peace. When the envoys, ordered to carry these terms home, set them forth in the assembly, and Gisgo came forward to dissuade the peace, and was being heard by the restless and unwarlike multitude, Hannibal, indignant that such things should be said and heard at such a time, seized Gisgo with his own hand and dragged him down from the high place. When this sight, unwonted in a free state, had stirred a murmur of the people, the soldierly man, disturbed by the city’s freedom, said: "At nine years old I set out from you; after the six-and-thirtieth year I have returned. The arts of war, which fortune, now private now public, has taught me from boyhood, I seem to know well enough: the rights, the laws, the customs of the city and the forum, it is for you to teach me." Having excused his lack of usage, he discoursed at length on the peace, how it was neither unjust nor avoidable. The hardest of all was that of the ships taken during the truce nothing appeared except the ships themselves, nor was the inquiry easy, since those who would be accused were opposed to the peace. It was resolved that the ships be given back and the men in any case be inquired after: as for the rest that were missing, it was left to Scipio to assess them, and so the Carthaginians should pay the value in money. There are those who relate that Hannibal went straight from the battle to the sea, and thence in a ship made ready beforehand set off at once to king Antiochus; and that, when Scipio demanded before all things that Hannibal be handed over to him, the answer was given that Hannibal was not in Africa.

After the envoys returned to Scipio, the quaestors were ordered to set down from the public accounts what public property had been in the ships, and the owners to declare what was private; for that sum of money twenty-five thousand pounds of silver were exacted on the spot; and a truce was granted the Carthaginians for three months. It was added that during the time of the truce they should send envoys nowhere but to Rome, and that whatever envoys came to Carthage they should not let go before they had informed the Roman commander who they were and what they came to seek. With the Carthaginian envoys there were sent to Rome Lucius Veturius Philo and Marcus Marcius Ralla and Lucius Scipio, the commander’s brother. In those days supplies from Sicily and Sardinia made grain so cheap that the merchant left the grain to the sailors for the freight. At Rome, on the first news of the Carthaginians’ renewal of war, there had been alarm, and Tiberius Claudius had been ordered to lead his fleet betimes into Sicily and thence cross to Africa, and the other consul Marcus Servilius to tarry at the city until it should be known in what state things were in Africa. Sluggishly had everything been done by Tiberius Claudius the consul in the making ready and launching of the fleet, because the Fathers had judged that the arbitrament should rather be Scipio’s than the consul’s on what terms peace should be given. Prodigies too, reported just at the rumor of the renewed war, had brought terror: at Cumae the orb of the sun seemed to be lessened, and it rained a shower of stones; and in the Veliternine country the earth settled in vast caverns and trees were swallowed into the deep; at Aricia the forum and the shops about it, at Frusino the wall in several places and a gate were struck from heaven; and on the Palatine it rained stones. That prodigy was expiated, after the ancestral custom, with a nine-day rite, the rest with full-grown victims. Among these, the unwonted greatness of the waters too was turned to religious dread; for the Tiber so overflowed that the Apolline games, the circus being flooded, were made ready outside the Colline gate at the temple of Erycine Venus. But on the very day of the games, a sudden clearness arising, the procession that had begun to be led to the Colline gate was recalled and led down into the circus, when word came that the water had withdrawn thence; and the restoration of its own seat to the solemn spectacle added gladness to the people and concourse to the games.

The consul Claudius, having set out at last from the city, between the harbors of Cosa and Loreta, a fierce force of storm coming on, brought him into vast fear. When he had thence reached Populonia and had stood there until the rest of the storm raged itself out, he crossed to the island of Ilva, and from Ilva to Corsica, from Corsica to Sardinia. There, as he was passing the Insane Mountains, a storm far fiercer and on more dangerous ground fell on him and scattered the fleet. Many ships were shattered and stripped of their tackle, some broken; the fleet, so battered and torn, made Caralis. There, while the ships were drawn up and refitting, winter came on, and the season of the year turned round, and, no one prolonging his command, Tiberius Claudius as a private man led the fleet back to Rome. Marcus Servilius, lest he be recalled to the city for the sake of the elections, having named Gaius Servilius Geminus dictator, set out for his province; the dictator named Publius Aelius Paetus master of the horse. Often, when the elections had been proclaimed, storms hindered their being completed; and so, when on the day before the Ides of March the old magistrates had gone out, and the new had not been chosen in their place, the commonwealth was without curule magistrates. Titus Manlius Torquatus, the pontiff, died that year; in his place was chosen Gaius Sulpicius Galba. By Lucius Licinius Lucullus and aedile/">Quintus Fulvius, curule aediles, the Roman games were thrice repeated entire. The scribes and runners of the aediles were convicted, on an informer’s evidence, of having secretly carried off money from the treasury, not without infamy to the aedile Lucullus. Publius Aelius Tubero and Lucius Laetorius, aediles of the plebs, faultily created, abdicated their magistracy, after they had held games and, for the games’ sake, a feast to Jupiter, and had set up three statues, made from fine-money silver, on the Capitol. The Cerialia the dictator and the master of the horse held by decree of the Senate.

When the Roman and the Carthaginian envoys had come together to Rome from Africa, the Senate was held at the temple of Bellona. There, when Lucius Veturius Philo had set forth that battle had been joined with Hannibal in a final fight for the Carthaginians, and that an end had at last been put to the mournful war, amid the vast joy of the Fathers, he added that Vermina too, son of Syphax—a small accession to the success—had been utterly beaten. He was then ordered to go forth into the assembly and impart that joy to the people. Then, after the thanksgiving, all the temples in the city were thrown open and supplications decreed for three days. To the envoys of the Carthaginians and of king Philip—for these too had come—asking that the Senate be granted them, the answer was given, by order of the Fathers and through the dictator, that the new consuls would grant them the Senate. Then the elections were held. The consuls created were Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Aelius Paetus; the praetors Marcus Junius Pennus, to whom the city lot fell, Marcus plebs/">tribune/">Valerius Falto, who drew Bruttium, Marcus Fabius Buteo, who drew Sardinia, Publius Aelius Tubero, who drew Sicily. Concerning the consuls’ provinces it pleased the Senate that nothing be done before the envoys of king Philip and of the Carthaginians had been heard; they foresaw in their minds the end of the one war, the beginning of the other. The consul Gnaeus Lentulus burned with desire for the province of Africa, whether, if there were war, an easy victory, or, if it were now ending, the glory of so great a war finished in his consulship, that he sought. He declared therefore that he would suffer nothing to be done before the province of Africa was decreed to him, his colleague giving way, a moderate and prudent man, who saw that the contest for that glory with Scipio, besides being unfair, would also be unequal. Quintus Minucius Thermus and Manius Acilius Glabrio, tribunes of the plebs, said that Gnaeus Cornelius was attempting what had been attempted the year before in vain by Tiberius Claudius the consul: that by the authority of the Fathers it had been put to the people whose command should be in Africa; that all the five-and-thirty tribes had decreed that command to Publius Scipio. After many contentions both in the Senate and before the people, the matter was at last brought to this, that they left it to the Senate. The Fathers therefore, on oath—for so it had been agreed—resolved that the consuls should arrange between themselves, or settle by lot, which should have Italy, which a fleet of fifty ships; that he to whom the fleet fell should sail to Sicily; if peace could not be composed with the Carthaginians, he should cross to Africa; the consul should manage the war by sea, Scipio by land with the same right of command as hitherto; if the terms of peace were agreed, the tribunes of the plebs should ask the people whether they bade the consul or Publius Scipio grant the peace, and which, if the victorious army were to be brought back from Africa, should bring it back. If they ordered the peace to be granted through Publius Scipio and the army brought back by the same, the consul should not cross from Sicily into Africa. The other consul, to whom Italy fell, should receive two legions from Marcus Sextius the praetor.

To Publius Scipio the command was prorogued with the armies he had in the province of Africa. To the praetors: to Marcus plebs/">tribune/">Valerius Falto the two legions in Bruttium over which Gaius Livius had been the year before were decreed; Publius Aelius should receive two legions in Sicily from Gnaeus Tremelius; one legion was decreed to Marcus Fabius for Sardinia, which Publius Lentulus as propraetor had held. To Marcus Servilius, consul of the year before, with his two legions likewise, the command was prorogued in Etruria. As regards the Spains, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus and praetor-b23/">Lucius Manlius Acidinus had now been there several years; the consuls were to deal with the tribunes that, if it seemed good to them, they ask the plebs whom they would have command in Spain; he should enroll from the two armies into one legion the Roman soldiers and into fifteen cohorts the allies of the Latin name, with which he should hold the province; the veteran soldiers Lucius Cornelius and Lucius Manlius should bring home to Italy. To the consul a fleet of fifty ships out of two fleets—Gnaeus Octavius’s, which was in Africa, and Publius Villius’s, which guarded the coast of Sicily—was decreed, that he might choose what ships he would. Publius Scipio should keep the forty warships he had had; and if he wished Gnaeus Octavius to command them, as he had commanded, Octavius should have proconsular command for that year; if he should set Laelius over them, Octavius should withdraw to Rome and bring back the ships of which the consul had no use. And to Marcus Fabius ten warships were decreed for Sardinia. The consuls were ordered to enroll two city legions, so that with fourteen legions and a hundred warships the commonwealth was administered that year.

Then the matter of the envoys of Philip and of the Carthaginians was taken up. It was resolved that the Macedonians be brought in first; their speech was various. Partly they cleared the charges of which the envoys sent to the king from Rome had complained, the ravaging of the allies; partly they themselves brought charges, indeed against the allies of the Roman people, but far more bitterly against Marcus Aurelius, who, of the three envoys sent to them, had stayed behind after holding a levy, and had provoked the king to war against the treaty, and had often fought pitched battles with his prefects; partly they demanded that the Macedonians and their leader Sopater, who had served Hannibal for hire and were then captives in chains, be restored to them. Against these things Marcus Furius, sent for that very purpose by Aurelius from Macedonia, argued that Aurelius had been left behind lest the allies of the Roman people, worn out by ravagings, should through force and wrong go over to the king; that he had not gone beyond the bounds of the allies; that he had taken pains that the ravagers should not pass with impunity into their fields. Sopater was one of the king’s courtiers and kinsmen; he had lately been sent with four thousand Macedonians and money into Africa as a help to Hannibal and the Carthaginians. Being questioned on these matters, the Macedonians answered evasively, and themselves carried away no mild answer: the king was seeking war, and if he went on he would soon find it; in two ways the treaty had been broken by him—both that he had done wrong to the allies of the Roman people and provoked them with war and arms, and that he had aided their enemies with auxiliaries and money. And Publius Scipio seemed to have done, and to be doing, rightly and in order, in holding in chains, as among enemies, those who had been taken bearing arms against the Roman people; and Marcus Aurelius was acting for the good of the state, and his doing so was welcome to the Senate, in that he guarded the allies of the Roman people with arms, since by the law of treaty he could not. With this so grim an answer the Macedonians dismissed, the Carthaginian envoys were called. When their ages and dignities had been marked—for they were by far the first men of the state—then each said to himself that the matter of peace was now in truth being dealt with. Conspicuous, however, above the rest was Hasdrubal—whom his countrymen called by the surname Haedus—always an author of peace and opposed to the Barcine faction. The more on that account had he then the more authority in shifting the blame of the war from the state upon the greed of a few. He used a varied speech, now clearing the charges, now confessing some things, lest pardon should be the harder for men who impudently denied what was certain, now even warning the conscript Fathers to use prosperity modestly and with moderation: had the Carthaginians listened to himself and to Hanno, and been willing to use the occasion, they would have given the terms of peace which they were now begging; rarely were good fortune and a good mind given to men at once; the Roman people was therefore unconquered, because in prosperity it remembered to be wise and to take counsel; and, by Hercules, it would have been a marvel if it did otherwise; out of unwontedness those to whom good fortune is new run mad with an uncontrolled joy; to the Roman people the joys of victory were customary and now well-nigh worn out, and it had enlarged its empire well-nigh more by sparing the conquered than by conquering. The speech of the rest was more piteous, recalling from how great wealth to what the Carthaginian state had fallen: nothing was left to those who but lately had held well-nigh the whole world by arms save the walls of Carthage; shut within these, they saw nothing of their own either by land or by sea; even the city itself and their household gods they would keep only if the Roman people willed not to rage against these too, beyond which there was nothing further. When it appeared that the Fathers were being bent by compassion, one of the senators, hostile to the perfidy of the Carthaginians, cried out, they relate, asking by what gods they would strike a treaty, since those by whom the former had been struck they had deceived. "By the same," said Hasdrubal, "since they are so hostile to the breakers of treaties."

When all minds inclined to peace, the consul Gnaeus Lentulus, whose province was the fleet, interposed against the decree of the Senate. Then Manius Acilius and Quintus Minucius, plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, put it to the people whether they willed and ordered that the Senate decree that peace be made with the Carthaginians; and whom they bade grant that peace, and whom bring the army back from Africa. Concerning the peace all the tribes ordered "as you ask"; that Publius Scipio grant the peace, and the same bring back the army. On this enactment the Senate decreed that Publius Scipio, by the advice of the ten commissioners, should make peace with the Carthaginian people on what terms he saw fit. Then the Carthaginians gave thanks to the Fathers, and asked that they be allowed to enter the city and speak with their fellow-citizens who were held in the public custody as captives: some of these were their kinsmen and friends, noble men, some men to whom they bore messages from their kindred. When these had been met, and they again asked that power be given them to ransom whom they would of them, they were ordered to name names; and when they named about two hundred, a decree of the Senate was made that the Roman envoys should carry over to Publius Cornelius in Africa two hundred of the captives whom the Carthaginians chose, and announce to him that, if peace were agreed, he should give them back to the Carthaginians without ransom. When the fetials were ordered to go to Africa to strike the treaty, at their own request a decree of the Senate was made in these words: that they should carry with them each his own flint stones and each his own fetial-herb/">sacred herbs, so that, when the Roman praetor bade them strike the treaty, they should demand of the praetor the holy plants—it is a kind of herb, taken from the citadel, that is wont to be given to the fetials. So the Carthaginians, dismissed from Rome, when they had come into Africa to Scipio, made the peace on the terms before stated. They handed over their warships, their elephant-war/">elephants, the deserters, the runaways, and four thousand captives, among whom was the senator Quintus Terentius Culleo. The ships, drawn out into the deep, he ordered to be burned; some relate that they were five hundred of every kind that are driven by oars; the sudden sight of their burning was as mournful to the Carthaginians as if Carthage itself were ablaze. Concerning the deserters harder counsel was taken than concerning the runaways: those who were of the Latin name were beheaded, the Romans crucified.

Forty years before, peace with the Carthaginians had last been made, in the consulship of Quintus Lutatius and Aulus Manlius. The war was begun twenty-three years after, in the consulship of Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius, and was finished in the seventeenth year, in the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius and Publius Aelius. Often afterward, they say, Scipio said that first the greed of Tiberius Claudius, then that of Gnaeus Cornelius, had been in the way of his finishing that war with the destruction of Carthage. When at Carthage the first contribution of money seemed hard, drained as they were by the long war, and there was sorrow and weeping in the Senate-house, Hannibal, they say, was seen laughing. When Hasdrubal Haedus rebuked his laughter amid the public weeping, since he himself was the cause of the tears, "If," he said, "as the cast of a face is discerned by the eyes, so the mind within could be discerned, it would easily be plain to you that this laughter which you rebuke is the laughter not of a glad heart but of one well-nigh mad with its woes; yet it is by no means so unseasonable as those absurd and ill-sorted tears of yours. Then was the time to weep, when our arms were taken from us, our ships burned, foreign wars forbidden us; for by that wound we fell. Nor is there cause for you to believe that the Romans have taken thought for your repose. No great state can long be quiet; if it has no enemy abroad, it finds one at home, as over-strong bodies seem safe from outward causes but are burdened by their own strength. Just so much, forsooth, do we feel of public ills as touches our private fortunes, and in these nothing stings more sharply than the loss of money. So, when the spoils were being stripped from conquered Carthage, when you saw her left unarmed and naked among so many armed nations of Africa, no man groaned: now, because the tribute is to be contributed from private means, you wail as at a public funeral. How I fear lest you soon feel that you have wept today over the lightest of your ills." These things Hannibal said among the Carthaginians. Scipio, an assembly summoned, presented Masinissa, besides his ancestral kingdom, with the town of Cirta and the other cities and lands that had passed from the kingdom of Syphax into the power of the Roman people. He ordered Gnaeus Octavius to hand over the fleet that had been led to Sicily to Gnaeus Cornelius the consul, and the envoys of the Carthaginians to set out for Rome, that what had been done by him on the advice of the ten commissioners might be confirmed by the authority of the Fathers and the order of the people.

Peace gotten by land and sea, his army put aboard the ships, he crossed to Lilybaeum in Sicily. Thence, a great part of his soldiers sent on by ship, he himself came through an Italy glad with peace no less than with victory—not the cities only pouring out to do him honor, but throngs of country folk too besetting the roads—to Rome, and was borne into the city in the most illustrious of all triumphs. He brought into the treasury a hundred and twenty-three thousand pounds of silver. To the soldiers he distributed from the booty four hundred asses apiece. By death Syphax was withdrawn from the spectacle of men, rather than from the glory of the triumphing general—dead at Tibur not so very long before, whither he had been brought from Alba. His death, however, was conspicuous, because he was given a public funeral. That this king was led in the triumph Polybius, an authority by no means to be despised, relates. Following Scipio in his triumph was Quintus Terentius Culleo, the cap of liberty set on his head, and ever after, throughout his life, as was fitting, he honored the author of his freedom. The surname Africanus—whether the favor of the soldiery or the breath of popularity first made it current, or whether, as in our fathers’ memory the surnames Felix for Sulla and Magnus for Pompey, it was begun by the flattery of his household—I have too little ascertained; certainly he was the first commander ennobled by the name of a nation he had conquered; afterward, following his example, men in no way matched in victory made for themselves splendid titles of their images and illustrious surnames of their families.