previous next

Panic at the Envoys' Report

The people had no idea what the announcement was going to be, but suspecting it from
Return of the envoys with the last orders from the Consuls.
the expression of the envoys' countenances, they immediately burst into a storm of cries and lamentations. . . .

Then all the Senators,1 uttering a cry of horror, remained as though paralysed by the shock. But

The popular fury.
the report having quickly spread among the people, the general indignation at once found expression. Some made an attack on the envoys, as the guilty authors of their misfortunes, while others wreaked their wrath upon all Italians caught within the city, and others rushed to the town gates. . . .

The Carthaginians determine to resist, and the consuls, who had not hurried themselves, because they believed that resistance from an unarmed populace was impossible, found, when they approached Carthage, that it was prepared to offer a vigorous resistance. The scene which followed the announcement of the Consul's orders, and the incidents of the siege, are chiefly known to us from Appian, Pun. 91 sq. Livy, Ep. 49. Scipio was serving as military Tribune, B. C. 149-148; consul, B. C. 147.

1 The envoys first report to the Gerusia. Appian, Pun. 91.

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

Robert B. Strassler provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

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.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
147 BC (1)
hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (1):
    • Appian, Punic Wars, 13.91
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: