Punic Wars

About the beginning of the Sicilian war the Romans [*](B.C.256) sent 350 ships to Africa, captured a number of towns, and left in command of the army Atilius Regulus, who took some 200 more towns, which gave themselves up to him on account of their hatred of the Carthaginians; and continually advancing he ravaged the territory. Thereupon the Carthaginians, considering that their misfortunes were due to bad generalship, asked the Lacedemonians to send them a commander. The Lacedemonians sent them Xanthippus. Regulus, being encamped in the hot season alongside a lake, marched around it to engage the enemy, his soldiers suffering greatly from the weight of their arms, from dust, thirst, and fatigue, and exposed to missiles from the neigh-boring heights. Toward evening he came to a river which separated the two armies. This he crossed at once, thinking in this way to terrify Xanthippus, but the latter, anticipating an easy victory over an enemy thus harassed and exhausted and having night in his favor, drew up his forces [*](Y.R. 499) and made a sudden sally from his camp. The expectations [*](B.C.255) of Xanthippus were not disappointed. Of the 30,000 men led by Regulus, only a few escaped with difficulty to the city of Aspis. All the rest were either killed or taken prisoners, and among the latter was the consul Regulus himself.[*](See Appendix to this Book.) [*](Y.R. 504)

Not long afterward the Carthaginians, weary of fighting [*](B.C.250) sent him, in company with their own ambassadors, to Rome to obtain peace or to return if it were not granted. Yet Regulus in private strongly urged the chief magistrates of Rome to continue the war, and then went back to certain torture, for the Carthaginians shut him up in a cage stuck full of spikes and thus put him to death. This success was the beginning of sorrows to Xanthippus, for the Carthaginians, in order that the credit might not seem to be due to the Lacedemonians, pretended to honor him with splendid gifts, sent galleys to convey him back to Lacedemon, but enjoined upon the captains of the ships to throw him and his Lacedemonian comrades overboard.[*](Polybius (i. 36) says that Xanthippus returned home in safety. He seems to have been aware of the report of foul play against Xanthippus, but discredited it.) In this way he paid the penalty for his successes. Such [*](Y.R. 513) were the results, good and bad, of the first war of the [*](B.C.241) Romans in Africa, until the Carthaginians surrendered Sicily to them. How this came about has been shown in my Sicilian history.