The Beginning of the Outbreak
When the whole army had mustered at Sicca, and Hanno,
The beginning of the outbreak, B. C. 241. |
now appointed general in
Libya, far from satisfying
these hopes and the promises they had received,
talked on the contrary of the burden of the taxes
and the embarrassment of the public finances; and actually
endeavoured to obtain from them an abatement even from the
amount of pay acknowledged to be due to them; excited and
mutinous feelings at once began to manifest themselves. There
were constant conferences hastily got together, sometimes in
separate nationalities, sometimes of the whole army; and there
being no unity of race or language among them, the whole camp
became a babel of confusion, a scene of inarticulate tumult, and
a veritable revel of misrule. For the Carthaginians being
always accustomed to employ mercenary troops of miscellaneous
nationalities, in securing that an army should consist of several
different races, act wisely as far as the prevention of any rapid
combinations for mutiny, or difficulty on the part of the commanders in overawing insubordination, are concerned: but the
policy utterly breaks down when an outburst of anger, or
popular delusion, or internal dissension, has actually occurred;
for it makes it impossible for the commander to soothe excited
feelings, to remove misapprehensions, or to show the ignorant
their error. Armies in such a state are not usually content
with mere human wickedness; they end by assuming the
ferocity of wild beasts and the vindictiveness of insanity.
This is just what happened in this case. There were in the
army Iberians and Celts, men from
Liguria and the Balearic
Islands, and a considerable number of half-bred Greeks,
mostly deserters and slaves; while the main body consisted of
Libyans. Consequently it was impossible to collect and address
them en masse, or to approach them with this view by any
means whatever. There was no help for it: the general could
not possibly know their several languages; and to make a
speech four or five times on the same subject, by the mouths
of several interpreters, was almost more impossible, if I may say
so, than that. The only alternative was for him to address his
entreaties and exhortations to the soldiers through their officers.
And this Hanno continually endeavoured to do. But there
was the same difficulty with them. Sometimes they failed to
understand what he said: at others they received his words
with expressions of approval to his face, and yet from error or
malice reported them in a contrary sense to the common soldiers. The result was a general scene of uncertainty, mistrust,
and misunderstanding. And to crown all, they took it into
their heads that the Carthaginian government had a design in
thus sending Hanno to them: that they purposely did not
send the generals who were acquainted with the services they
had rendered in
Sicily, and who had been the authors of the
promises made to them; but had sent the one man who had
not been present at any of these transactions. Whether that
were so or not, they finally broke off all negotiations with
Hanno; conceived a violent mistrust of their several commanders; and in a furious outburst of anger with the Carthaginians started towards the city, and pitched their camp about
a hundred and twenty stades from
Carthage, at the town of
Tunes, to the number of over twenty thousand.