History of Rome

​At the close of the same summer, when Marcus Marcellus came to the city from the province of Sicily, an audience of the senate was granted to him by Gaius Calpurnius, the praetor, at the temple of Bellona.

​Having there discoursed upon the things achieved by him, complaining gently not so much of his own condition as of that of his soldiers, because, the province having been thoroughly pacified, it had not been permitted to bring back the army, he requested that he might be allowed to enter the city in triumph.

​This he did not obtain. When it had been discussed with many words, which of the two would be less fitting: to deny a triumph to him present, in whose name, though absent, a thanksgiving had been decreed and honor paid to the immortal gods on account of the things successfully achieved under his leadership, ​or that he, whom they had ordered to hand over the army to a successor—which would not be decreed unless a war still remained in the province—should triumph as if the war were finished, while the army, the witness of a deserved or undeserved triumph, was absent; at length a middle course was seen as best, that he should enter the city in ovation.

​The tribunes of the plebs, by the authority of the senate, proposed to the people that Marcus Marcellus should have military command on the day he entered the city in ovation.

​On the day before he entered the city, he triumphed on the Alban Mount; from there, in ovation, he brought a great amount of booty before him into the city.

​Together with a model of captured Syracuse, catapults, ballistas, and all other engines of war were carried, as well as the ornaments of a long peace and of royal opulence, ​a great quantity of wrought silver and bronze, other furniture, costly vestments, and many noble statues with which Syracuse, among the chief cities of Greece, had been adorned.

​Eight elephants led in the procession were also a symbol of victory over the Carthaginians. And it was no small spectacle when Sosis of Syracuse and Moericus the Spaniard preceded with golden crowns, ​under the guidance of the former of whom entry had been made into Syracuse by night, while the latter had betrayed Nasus and the garrison that was there.

​To both of these citizenship was given and five hundred iugera of land apiece: to Sosis in the territory of Syracuse, which had belonged either to the king or to the enemies of the Roman people, and a house in Syracuse of any of those against whom measures had been taken by the law of war;

​to Moericus and the Spaniards who had gone over with him, a city and land in Sicily from among those who had revolted from the Roman people were ordered to be given.

​This was mandated to Marcus Cornelius, that he should assign the city and land to them wherever it seemed good to him. In the same land, four hundred iugera of land were decreed to Belligenes, by whom Moericus had been enticed to defect.

​After the departure of Marcellus from Sicily, the Carthaginian fleet landed eight thousand infantry and three thousand Numidian cavalry. To them the cities of Murgentia and Ergetium revolted. Following their defection, Hybla and Macella, and certain other less famous ones, did the same.

​Also the Numidians, under their leader Muttines, wandering through all Sicily, were burning the fields of the allies of the Roman people.

​Besides these things, the Roman army, being angry, partly because they had not been brought back from the province with their commander, and partly because they had been forbidden to winter in the towns, performed their military service sluggishly, and they lacked a leader for mutiny rather than the will.

​Amidst these difficulties, Marcus Cornelius the praetor, now by consoling and now by chastising, quieted the minds of the soldiers, and reduced all the states which had revolted into subjection, and from among these he assigned Murgentia to the Spaniards, to whom a city and land were due by the decree of the senate.