Aspar. For Aspar himself, being an adherent of the Arian
faith, and having no intention of changing it for another, was unable to
enter upon the imperial office, but he was easily strong enough to
establish another in it, and it already seemed likely that he would plot
against the Emperor Leon, who had given him offence. So they say that
since Aspar was then fearful lest, if the Vandals were defeated, Leon
should establish his power most securely, he repeatedly urged upon
Basiliscus that he should spare the Vandals and Gizeric.

[467 A.D.] Now before this time Leon had already appointed and sent
Anthemius, as Emperor of the West, a man of the senate of great wealth
and high birth, in order that he might assist him in the Vandalic war.
And yet Gizeric kept asking and earnestly entreating that the imperial
power be given to Olybrius, who was married to Placidia, the daughter of
Valentinian, and on account of his relationship[29] well-disposed toward
him, and when he failed in this he was still more angry and kept
plundering the whole land of the emperor. Now there was in Dalmatia a
certain Marcellianus, one of the acquaintances of Aetius and a man of
repute, who, after Aetius had died in the manner told above,[30] no
longer deigned to yield obedience to the emperor, but beginning a
revolution and detaching all the others from allegiance, held the power
of Dalmatia himself, since no one dared encounter him. But the Emperor
Leon at that time won over this Marcellianus by very careful wheedling,
and bade him go to the island of Sardinia, which was then subject to the
Vandals. And he drove out the Vandals and gained possession of it with
no great difficulty. And Heracleius was sent from Byzantium to Tripolis
in Libya, and after conquering the Vandals of that district in battle,
he easily captured the cities, and leaving his ships there, led his army
on foot toward Carthage. Such, then, was the sequence of events which
formed the prelude of the war.

But Basiliscus with his whole fleet put in at a town distant from
Carthage no less than two hundred and eighty stades (now it so happened
that a temple of Hermes had been there from of old, from which fact the
place was named Mercurium; for the Romans call Hermes "Mercurius"), and
if he had not purposely played the coward and hesitated, but had
undertaken to go straight for Carthage, he would have captured it at the
first onset, and he would have reduced the Vandals to subjection