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[4] Not long afterward the Carthaginians, weary of fighting
B.C. 250
sent him, in company with their own ambassadors, to Rome to obtain peace or to return if it were not granted. Yet Regulus in private strongly urged the chief magistrates of Rome to continue the war, and then went back to certain torture, for the Carthaginians shut him up in a cage stuck full of spikes and thus put him to death. This success was the beginning of sorrows to Xanthippus, for the Carthaginians, in order that the credit might not seem to be due to the Lacedemonians, pretended to honor him with splendid gifts, sent galleys to convey him back to Lacedemon, but enjoined upon the captains of the ships to throw him and his Lacedemonian comrades overboard.1 In this way he paid the penalty for his successes. Such
Y.R. 513
were the results, good and bad, of the first war of the
B.C. 241
Romans in Africa, until the Carthaginians surrendered Sicily to them. How this came about has been shown in my Sicilian history.


1 Polybius (i. 36) says that Xanthippus returned home in safety. He seems to have been aware of the report of foul play against Xanthippus, but discredited it.

Appian. The Foreign Wars. Horace White. New York. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899.

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