[3] About the beginning of the Sicilian war, the Romans sent 350 ships to Africa, captured a number of towns, and left in command of the army Atilius Regulus, who took some 200 more towns, which gave themselves up to him on account of their hatred of the Carthaginians; and continually advancing he ravaged the territory. Thereupon the Carthaginians, considering that their misfortunes were due to bad generalship, asked the Lacedaemonians to send them a commander. The Lacedaemonians sent them Xanthippus.

Regulus, being encamped in the hot season alongside a lake, marched around it to engage the enemy, his soldiers suffering greatly from the weight of their arms, from dust, thirst, and fatigue, and exposed to missiles from the neighboring heights. Toward evening he came to a river which separated the two armies. This he crossed at once, thinking in this way to terrify Xanthippus, but the latter, anticipating an easy victory over an enemy thus harassed and exhausted and having night in his favor, drew up his forces and made a sudden sally from his camp. The expectations of Xanthippus were not disappointed. Of the 30,000 men led by Regulus, only a few escaped with difficulty to the city of Aspis. All the rest were either killed or taken prisoners, and among the latter was the consul Regulus himself.

[4] Not long afterward the Carthaginians, weary of fighting 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 Lacedaemonians, pretended to honor him with splendid gifts, sent galleys to convey him back to Lacedaemon, but enjoined upon the captains of the ships to throw him and his Lacedaemonian comrades overboard. In this way he paid the penalty for his successes. Such were the results, good and bad, of the first war of the Romans in Africa, until the Carthaginians surrendered Sicily to them. How this came about has been shown in my Sicilian History.

[5] After this there was peace between the Romans and the Carthaginians, but the Africans, who were subject to the latter and had served them as auxiliaries in the Sicilian war, and certain Celtic mercenaries who complained that their pay had been withheld and that the promises made to them had not been kept, made war against the Carthaginians in a very formidable manner. The latter appealed to the Romans for aid on the score of friendship, and the Romans allowed them for this war only to hire mercenaries in Italy, for even that had been forbidden in the treaty. Nevertheless they sent men to act as mediators between them.

The Africans refused the mediation, but offered to become subjects of the Romans if they would take them. The latter would not accept them. Then the Carthaginians blockaded the towns with a great fleet, and cut off their supplies from the sea, and as the land was untilled in consequence of the war they overcame the Africans by the famine, but were driven to supply their own wants by piracy, even taking some Roman ships, killing the crews, and throwing them overboard to conceal the crime. This escaped notice for a long time. When the facts became known and the Carthaginians were called to account, they put off the day of reckoning until the Romans voted to make war against them, when they surrendered Sardinia by way of compensation. And this clause was added to the former treaty of peace.