History of Rome

​Scipio, immediately after the battle, having stormed and plundered the enemy’s camp with huge booty, returned to the sea ​and the ships, upon the receipt of the news that P. Lentulus had arrived at Utica with fifty rostrate ships, a hundred transports, and every kind of provisions.

​Thinking, therefore, that terror should be brought from all sides upon the stricken Carthage, after sending Laelius to Rome with the news of the victory, he ordered Cn. Octavius to lead the legions to Carthage by a land route; he himself, having joined Lentulus’s new fleet to his own old one, set out from Utica and made for the harbour of Carthage.

​He was not far off when a Carthaginian ship met him, adorned with sacred wool-fillets and olive branches. There were ten ambassadors, leading men of the state, sent at the instigation of Hannibal to sue for peace.

​When these had approached the stern of the flagship, holding out the tokens of suppliants, praying and imploring the protection and mercy of Scipio, ​no other answer was given to them than that they should come to Tunes; that he would move his camp thither. He himself, having advanced to reconnoitre the situation of Carthage, not so much for the sake of obtaining information at present as of terrifying the enemy, returned to Utica, having also recalled Octavius to the same place.

​As they were proceeding from there to Tunes, a message was brought that Vermina, the son of Syphax, was coming to the aid of the Carthaginians with more cavalry than infantry.

​A part of the army, with all the cavalry, having attacked the column of the Numidians on the first day of the Saturnalia, routed them in a slight engagement. Their escape also being cut off, and the Numidians being surrounded on all sides by the cavalry, fifteen thousand men were slain, twelve hundred taken alive, along with fifteen hundred Numidian horses and seventy-two military standards. The young prince himself escaped in the confusion with a few followers.

​Then the camp was pitched at Tunes in the same place as before, and thirty ambassadors came from Carthage to Scipio. Indeed, they pleaded much more miserably than before, as fortune pressed them harder; but they were heard with considerably less mercy, because of the recent memory of their treachery.

​In the council, although a just anger stimulated everyone to destroy Carthage, yet when they considered both how great an undertaking it was and how long a time the siege of so fortified and strong a city would require, ​and since the expectation of a successor who would come to reap the glory of the war finished by another’s labour and danger also troubled Scipio himself, the minds of all were turned towards peace.