29.8
When
Scipio discovered that the citadel had been evacuated and the camp
abandoned, he summoned the Locrians to an assembly and bitterly
reproached them for their defection. The authors of the revolt were executed
and their property assigned to the leaders of the other party as a reward for
their exceptional loyalty to Rome. As regarded the political status of Locri
he said that he would make no change, they were to send representatives to
Rome, and what the senate thought right, that would be their fate. He added
that he was quite sure that although they had behaved so badly to Rome,
they would be better off under the Romans, incensed as they were against
them, than under their friends, the Carthaginians. Leaving the detachment
which had captured the citadel, with Pleminius in command, to protect the
city, he returned with the troops he had brought to Messana. After their
secession from Rome the Locrians had met with such tyrannical and brutal
treatment from the Carthaginians, that they could have submitted to ordinary
ill-usage not only with patience but almost with cheerfulness. But, as a
matter of fact, Pleminius so far surpassed Hamilcar, his soldiers so far
surpassed the Carthaginians in criminality and greed that they seemed to be
rivalling one another in vice, not in courage. Nothing that can make the
power of the strong hateful to the weak and defenceless was left undone by
the general and his men in their conduct towards the townsmen.
Unspeakable outrages were inflicted on their persons, their wives and their
children. Their rapacity did not shrink even from sacrilege; not content with
plundering the other temples it is recorded that they laid hands on the
treasury of Proserpine, which had always been undisturbed, except by
Pyrrhus, and even he restored the plunder and made a costly offering to
expiate his sacrilegious deed. As on that occasion the king's ships, tempest
tossed and shattered, brought to land nothing that was uninjured, except the
sacred money of the goddess, so now by a disaster of a different kind the
same money drove all who were contaminated by the violation of her temple
to such a pitch of frenzy that general was turned against general, and soldier
against soldier in all the madness of mortal strife.
