n the territory of the Insubres (about Milan)
been defeated by the far superior double army of the Romans. The
Roman cavalry had been brought to give way, and the infantry had been
thrown into confusion; victory seemed on the point of declaring for
the Carthaginians, when a bold attack by a Roman troop on the enemy's
elephants, and above all a serious wound received by their beloved and
able commander, turned the fortune of the battle. The Phoenician army
was obliged to retreat to the Ligurian coast, where it received and
obeyed the order to embark; but Mago died of his wound on the voyage.

Hannibal Recalled to Africa

Hannibal would probably have anticipated the order, had not the
last negotiations with Philip presented to him a renewed prospect of
rendering better service to his country in Italy than in Libya; when
he received it at Croton, where he latterly had his head-quarters, he
lost no time in complying with it. He caused his horses to be put
to death as well as the Italian soldiers who refused to follow him
over the sea, and embarked in the transports that had been long in
readiness in the roadstead of Croton. The Roman citizens breathed
freely, when the mighty Libyan lion, whose departure no one even now
ventured to compel, thus voluntarily turned his back on Italian
ground. On this occasion the decoration of a grass wreath was
bestowed by the senate and burgesses on the only survivor of the Roman
generals who had traversed that troubled time with honour, the veteran
of nearly ninety years, Quintus Fabius. To receive this wreath--which
by the custom of the Romans the army that a general had saved
presented to its deliverer--at the hands of the whole community was
the highest distinction which had ever been bestowed upon a Roman
citizen, and the last honorary decoration accorded to the old general,
who died in the course of that same year (551). Hannibal, doubtless
not under the protection of the armistice, but solely through his
rapidity of movement and good fortune, arrived at Leptis without
hindrance, and the last of the "lion's brood" of Hamilcar trode once
more, after an absence of thirty-six years, his native soil. He had
left it, when still almost a boy, to enter on that noble and yet so
thoroughly fruitless career of heroism, in which he had set out
towards the west to return homewards from the east, having described
a wide circle of victory around the Carthaginian sea. Now, when what
he had