When Scipio discovered that the citadel had been evacuated and the camp abandoned, he summoned the Locrians to an assembly and bitterly reproached them for their defection. [2] The authors of the revolt were executed and their property assigned to the leaders of the other party as a reward for their exceptional loyalty to Rome. [3] As regarded the political status of Locri he said that he would make no change, they were to send representatives to Rome, and what the senate thought right, that would be their fate. [4] He added that he was quite sure that although they had behaved so badly to Rome, they would be better off under the Romans, incensed as they were against them, than under their friends, the Carthaginians. [5] Leaving the detachment which had captured the citadel, with Pleminius in command, to protect the city, he returned with the troops he had brought to Messana. [6] After their secession from Rome the Locrians had met with such tyrannical and brutal treatment from the Carthaginians, that they could have submitted to ordinary ill-usage not only with patience but almost with cheerfulness. [7] But, as a matter of fact, Pleminius so far surpassed Hamilcar, his soldiers so far surpassed the Carthaginians in criminality and greed that they seemed to be rivalling one another in vice, not in courage. [8] Nothing that can make the power of the strong hateful to the weak and defenceless was left undone by the general and his men in their conduct towards the townsmen. Unspeakable outrages were inflicted on their persons, their wives and their children. [9] Their rapacity did not shrink even from sacrilege; not content with plundering the other temples it is recorded that they laid hands on the treasury of Proserpine, which had always been undisturbed, except by Pyrrhus, and even he restored the plunder and made a costly offering to expiate his sacrilegious deed. [10] As on that occasion the king's ships, tempest tossed and shattered, brought to land nothing that was uninjured, except the sacred money of the goddess, so now by a disaster [11??] of a different kind the same money drove all who were contaminated by the violation of her temple to such a pitch of frenzy that general was turned against general, and soldier against soldier in all the madness of mortal strife.
Livy. History of Rome. English Translation by. Rev. Canon Roberts. New York, New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 1. Livy. History of Rome. English Translation. Rev. Canon Roberts. New York, New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 2.
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