previous next

Mathos Harasses Hamilcar

Meanwhile Mathōs himself was continuing the siege of Hippo Zarytus, and he now counselled Autaritus, the leader of the Gauls, and Spendius to stick close to the skirts of the enemy, avoiding the plains, because the enemy were strong in cavalry and elephants, but marching parallel with them on the slopes of the mountains, and attacking them whenever they saw them in any difficulty.
Mathōs harasses Hamilcar's march.
While suggesting these tactics, he at the same time sent messengers to the Numidians and Libyans, entreating them to come to their aid, and not to let slip the opportunity of securing their own freedom. Accordingly, Spendius took with him a force of six thousand men, selected from each of the several nationalities at Tunes, and started, keeping along a line of hills parallel to the Carthaginians. Besides these six thousand he had two thousand Gauls under Autaritus, who were all that were left of the original number, the rest having deserted to the Romans during the period of the occupation of Eryx. Now it happened that, just when Hamilcar had taken up a position in a certain plain which was surrounded on all sides by mountains, the reinforcements of Numidians and Libyans joined Spendius. The Carthaginians, therefore, suddenly found a Libyan encampment right on their front, another of Numidians on their rear, and that of Spendius on their flank; and it seemed impossible to escape from the danger which thus menaced them on every side.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Theodorus Büttner-Wobst after L. Dindorf, 1893)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Hippo Zarytus (Tunisia) (1)
Eryx (Italy) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (2 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: