mix with Punic blood
made the people indignant; and they were bluntly told that they were to
receive no more. Then they exclaimed that they had been deceived,
and that if their pay did not arrive within three days, they would
themselves go and take it in Carthage.

The bad faith of the Mercenaries was not so complete as their enemies
thought. Hamilcar had made them extravagant promises, vague, it is true,
but at the same time solemn and reiterated. They might have believed
that when they disembarked at Carthage the town would be abandoned to
them, and that they should have treasures divided among them; and
when they saw that scarcely their wages would be paid, the disillusion
touched their pride no less than their greed.

Had not Dionysius, Pyrrhus, Agathocles, and the generals of Alexander
furnished examples of marvellous good fortune? Hercules, whom the
Chanaanites confounded with the sun, was the ideal which shone on the
horizon of armies. They knew that simple soldiers had worn diadems, and
the echoes of crumbling empires would furnish dreams to the Gaul in
his oak forest, to the Ethiopian amid his sands. But there was a nation
always ready to turn courage to account; and the robber driven from
his tribe, the patricide wandering on the roads, the perpetrator of
sacrilege pursued by the gods, all who were starving or in despair
strove to reach the port where the Carthaginian broker was recruiting
soldiers. Usually the Republic kept its promises. This time, however,
the eagerness of its avarice had brought it into perilous disgrace.
Numidians, Libyans, the whole of Africa was about to fall upon Carthage.
Only the sea was open to it, and there it met with the Romans; so that,
like a man assailed by murderers, it felt death all around it.

It was quite necessary to have recourse to Gisco, and the Barbarians
accepted his intervention. One morning they saw the chains of the
harbour lowered, and three flat-bottomed boats passing through the canal
of Taenia entered the lake.

Gisco was visible on the first at the prow. Behind him rose an enormous
chest, higher than a catafalque, and furnished with rings like hanging
crowns. Then appeared the legion of interpreters, with their hair
dressed like sphinxes, and with parrots tattooed on their breasts.
Friends and slaves followed, all without arms, and in such numbers that
they shouldered one another. The three long, dangerously-loaded barges
advanced amid the shouts of the