[76]
The declaration of war and the war itself reached the Carthaginians by the same messenger. He brought the vote of the Senate, and told them that the fleet had already sailed. They were astounded, and in despair for want of ships and by the recent loss of so many young men. They had neither allies, nor mercenaries, nor supplies for enduring a siege, nor anything else in readiness for this sudden and unheralded war. They knew that they could not prevail against the Romans and Masinissa combined. They sent another embassy to Rome with full powers to settle the difficulty on any terms they could. The Senate was convened and it told them that if, within thirty days, the Carthaginians would give to the consuls, who were still in Sicily, three hundred children of their noblest families as hostages, and would obey their orders in other respects, the freedom and autonomy of Carthage should be preserved and that they should retain their lands in Africa. This was voted in public, and they gave the resolution to the ambassadors to carry to Carthage; but they sent word privately to the consuls that they should carry out their secret instructions.
Appian. The Foreign Wars. Horace White. New York. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
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.