28.32
By his
punctual payment of arrears to all alike, the guilty as well as the innocent,
and by his affable tone and bearing towards every one, Scipio soon regained
the affection of his soldiers. Before he broke up his quarters at New
Carthage, he called his troops together and after denouncing at some length
the treachery of the two chiefs in recommencing war went on to say that the
temper in which he was going to avenge that crime was very different from
the spirit in which he had recently healed the fault of his misled
fellow-citizens. Then he felt as if he were tearing his own vitals, when with
groans and tears he expiated either the thoughtlessness or the guilt of 8000
men at the cost of thirty lives. Now it was in a cheerful and confident spirit
that he was marching to the destruction of the Ilergetes. They were not
natives of the same soil with him, nor was there any treaty bond between
them; the only bond was that of honour and friendship, and that they had
themselves broken by their crime. When he looked at his own army he saw
that they were all either Roman citizens or Latin allies, but what affected him
most was the fact that there was hardly a single soldier amongst them who
had not been brought from Italy, either by his uncle Cnaeus Scipio, who was
the first Roman general to come into that province, or by his father or else
by himself. They were all of them accustomed to the name and auspices of
the Scipios, and he wanted to take them back with him to their country to
enjoy a well-earned triumph. Should he become a candidate for the
consulship he hoped that they would support him, as the honour conferred
on him would belong to them all. As to the expedition in front of them the
man who regarded it as a war must have forgotten all that he had hitherto
done. Mago, who had fled with a few ships to an island surrounded by an
ocean; beyond the limits of the world of men, was, he assured them, more of
a concern to him than the Ilergetes were, for a Carthaginian general and a
Carthaginian garrison, however small, were still there, but here there were
only brigands and brigand chiefs. They may be strong enough to plunder
their neighbours' fields and burn their houses and carry off their flocks and
herds but they have no courage for a pitched battle and an open field; when
they have to fight they will trust more to their swiftness for flight than to
their weapons. It was not, therefore, because he saw that there was any
danger from them, or any prospect of serious war that he was marching to
crush the Ilergetes before his departure from the province, but because such
a criminal revolt must not go unpunished, and also because it must not be
said that a single enemy has been left behind in a province which by such
courage and good fortune has been reduced to submission. "Follow me
then," he said, in conclusion, "with the kind help of heaven, not to make war
-for you have to do with an enemy who is no match for you -but to inflict
punishment upon men steeped in crime."
