from these the further fruits of their
important victory. Such of the Carthaginians as had crossed the river
were driven back, and the line of the Ebro was held in the meanwhile,
till Rome gained time to send a new army and a new general.
Fortunately the turn of the war in Italy, where Capua had just fallen,
allowed this to be done. A strong legion--12,000 men--arriving under
the propraetor Gaius Claudius Nero, restored the balance of arms.
An expedition to Andalusia in the following year (544) was most
successful; Hasdrubal Barcas was beset and surrounded, and escaped a
capitulation only by ignoble stratagem and open perfidy. But Nero was
not the right general for the Spanish war. He was an able officer,
but a harsh, irritable, unpopular man, who had little skill in the
art of renewing old connections or of forming new ones, or in taking
advantage of the injustice and arrogance with which the Carthaginians
after the death of the Scipios had treated friend and foe in Further
Spain, and had exasperated all against them.

Publius Scipio

The senate, which formed a correct judgment as to the importance
and the peculiar character of the Spanish war, and had learned from
the Uticenses brought in as prisoners by the Roman fleet the great
exertions which were making in Carthage to send Hasdrubal and
Massinissa with a numerous army over the Pyrenees, resolved to
despatch to Spain new reinforcements and an extraordinary general of
higher rank, the nomination of whom they deemed it expedient to leave
to the people. For long--so runs the story--nobody announced himself
as ready to take in hand the complicated and perilous business; but
at last a young officer of twenty-seven, Publius Scipio (son of the
general of the same name that had fallen in Spain), who had held the
offices of military tribune and aedile, came forward to solicit it.
It is incredible that the Roman senate should have left to accident
an election of such importance in this meeting of the Comitia which
it had itself suggested, and equally incredible that ambition and
patriotism should have so died out in Rome that no tried officer
presented himself for the important post. If on the other hand the
eyes of the senate turned to the young, talented, and experienced
officer, who had brilliantly distinguished himself in the hotly-
contested days on the Ticinus and at Cannae, but who still had not the
rank requisite for his coming forward as the successor of me