History of Rome

​Pleminius was in overall command; part of the soldiers was under him, whom he himself had brought from Regium, and part was under the military tribunes.

​A soldier of Pleminius, having stolen a silver cup from a townsperson’s house, was fleeing while those to whom it belonged were pursuing him, when by chance he met the military tribunes Sergius and Matienus; when the cup had been taken away from him by the order of the tribunes, ​a quarrel and clamor arose therefrom, and finally a fight broke out between the soldiers of Pleminius and those of the tribunes, as each arrived opportunely to help his own, while the crowd and the tumult increased at the same time.

​When the defeated soldiers of Pleminius had run to Pleminius, showing their blood and wounds, not without shouting and indignation, reporting the insults cast against him himself in the quarrel, he, inflamed with anger, rushed out of his house and ordered the summoned tribunes to be stripped and the rods to be made ready.

​While time was being wasted in stripping them—for they were resisting and imploring the protection of the soldiers—suddenly the soldiers, fierce from their recent victory, ran together from all places, as if a call to arms had been sounded against an enemy;

​and when they had seen the bodies of the tribunes already outraged by the rods, then indeed, suddenly inflamed into a much more uncontrollable rage, without regard not only for dignity but even for humanity, they made an attack on the lieutenant, having first beaten the lictors in an unworthy manner; then, having intercepted him himself from his own men, ​and shut him off, they mangled him in a hostile manner and left him almost lifeless, with his nose and ears mutilated.

​When these things were reported to Messana, Scipio, having sailed to Locri in a hexere after a few days, when he had heard the case of Pleminius and the tribunes, freed Pleminius from guilt and left him in command of the same place, and having judged the tribunes guilty and cast them into chains to be sent to the senate in Rome, returned to Messana and thence to Syracuse.

​Pleminius, unable to control his anger, thinking that his injury had been neglected and too lightly borne by Scipio, ​and that no one else could estimate that dispute except one who had felt its atrocity by suffering it, ordered the tribunes to be dragged to him, and killed them, mangled with all the tortures that any body can suffer, and not satisfied with the punishment of the living, threw them out unburied.

​He used similar cruelty also against the leading men of the Locrians, whom he heard had set out to P. Scipio to complain of the injuries;

​and the foul examples which he had previously displayed against the allies through lust and avarice, he then displayed multiplied through anger, and they were a source of infamy and hatred not only to himself but also to the general.