History of Rome

​Scipio, having kept Laelius with him while he disposed of the captives, hostages, and booty in accordance with his advice, when everything was sufficiently arranged, ​dispatched a messenger of the victory to Rome, having given him a quinquereme from among the captured vessels and put on board Mago and about fifteen senators who had been captured along with him.

​He himself spent the few days during which he had decided to delay at Carthage in training his naval and land forces.

​On the first day, the legions in arms ran a course of four miles; on the second day, they were ordered to care for and wipe their arms before their tents; on the third day, they clashed with one another with wooden swords in the manner of a real battle and threw javelins tipped with balls; on the fourth day, rest was given;

​on the fifth day, training in arms was run again. This order of labor and rest they maintained as long as they remained at Carthage.

​The rowers and naval soldiers, having put out into the deep in calm weather, tested the agility of their ships in mock naval battles.

​These exercises outside the city by land and sea sharpened both their bodies and minds for war; the city itself was resounding with the preparation of war, with craftsmen of all kinds shut up in the public workshop.

​The general went about everything with equal care: now he was with the fleet and in the shipyard, now he was running with the legions, now he gave time to inspecting the works, and the immense quantity of things that the vast multitude of craftsmen was producing day by day in great competition in the workshops, armory, and shipyards.

​When these things had been thus begun and the parts of the walls that had been shattered were repaired, and garrisons were stationed for the guard of the city, he set out for Tarraco, ​being immediately approached on the way by many embassies, some of which he dismissed on the march after giving them an answer, while others he postponed to Tarraco, where he had proclaimed a convention for all the new and old allies. And almost all the peoples who dwell on this side of the Hiberus, and many from the farther province as well, assembled.

​The generals of the Carthaginians at first intentionally suppressed the rumor of the capture of Carthage; then, as the matter was too famous to be concealed and disguised, they belittled it in words:

​saying that by an unexpected arrival and almost by a theft of a single day, one city of Spain had been intercepted, and that an insolent youth, elated by the prize of so small a matter, had put on the appearance of a great victory with immoderate joy; but when he should hear that three generals, ​three victorious armies of the enemy were approaching, the memory of his family’s deaths would immediately rush upon him.

​These things they bandied about among the common people, though they themselves were by no means ignorant of how much of their strength in all matters had departed from them with the loss of Carthage.