31.
While these things were happening in1 Italy, Gnaeus Servilius Geminus the consul, with a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships, sailed round Sardinia and Corsica, and after taking hostages from both, bore away for Africa.
[2]
Before descending on the mainland, he plundered the island of Menix; and after accepting ten talents of silver, which the people of Cercina gave him,2 to induce him not to burn and pillage their territory also, he sailed in to the coast of Africa and disembarked his troops.3
[3]
Soldiers and naval allies went off to pillage the country-side and dispersed as freely as if they were plundering desert islands.
[4]
And so they quickly fell into an ambush, and losing contact with each other, and knowing nothing of the country, were set upon by large bands of their enemies, who knew it well, and driven back to their ships in a bloody and disgraceful rout.
[5]
Fully a thousand men were lost, including the quaestor, Tiberius Sempronius Blaesus. Moorings were cast off in a hurry, and the fleet, leaving the shore behind it lined with enemies, stood away for Sicily.
[6]
At Lilybaeum it was handed over to the praetor Titus Otacilius, to be conducted by his lieutenant, Publius Cincius, back to Rome.
[7]
The consul himself proceeded overland through Sicily to the straits, where he crossed into Italy, in obedience to a dispatch from Quintus Fabius. The dictator had sent for Servilius, and for Marcus Atilius his colleague, to take over his armies, for his six months' tenure of authority was drawing to a close.
[8]
[p. 307]Nearly all the annalists state that Fabius was4 dictator in his campaign against Hannibal; Coelius even writes that he was the first to be created dictator by the people.
[9]
But Coelius and the rest forget that only the consul Gnaeus Servilius, who was then far away in his province of Gaul,5 had the right of naming a dictator.
[10]
It was because the nation, appalled by their great disaster, could not put up with so long a delay that resort was had to the popular election of an acting dictator.
[11]
Thereafter the general's successes and his great renown, and the additions which his descendants made to the inscription which accompanies his portrait,6 led easily to the belief that one who had in fact been made acting dictator had been dictator.
1 B.C. 217
2 Menix (or Meninx) and Cercina were in the Lesser Syrtis. The former was supposed to have been the land of the lotus-eaters. (The modern names are Djerba and Kerkenna.)
3 Polybius (II. xcvi. 13) mentions the ransom of Cercina, and speaks of the capture not of Menix but of Cossyrus (a little island to the E. of Carthage). He says nothing of the landing in Africa.
4 B.C. 217
5 i.e. in Northern Italy, in the neighbourhood of Ariminum.
6 In this inscription the expression II dictator (as in the Fasti) or bis dictator (as in the Elogium of Fabius, C. I. L. I. 228) very likely occurred, conveying the erroneous impression that Fabius was in 217 formally elected dictator, whereas he was in fact invested with the powersof a dictator but not with the actual title. Note that at chap. viii. § 6 Livy accepted, without citing his authority, the tradition which he now rejects and ascribes to Coelius. This is a striking instance of the ancient custom of citing sources only in cases where the writer's suspicions are aroused.
Livy. Boooks XXI-XXII With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1929: no copyright notice.
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