the second city of Italy, which concluded an alliance with him.
Mago embarked at one of the ports of Bruttium to carry the news of
Hannibal's success to Carthage, and to demand reinforcements.

Neither Rome nor Carthage had the complete mastery of the sea, and as
the disaster which had befallen Rome by land would greatly lessen
her power to maintain a large fleet, Carthage could now have poured
reinforcements in by the ports of Bruttium without difficulty. But
unfortunately Hannibal's bitterest enemies were to be found not in Italy
but in the senate of Carthage, where, in spite of the appeals of Mago
and the efforts of the patriotic party, the intrigues of Hanno and
his faction and the demands made by the war in Spain, prevented the
reinforcements from being forwarded which would have enabled him to
terminate the struggle by the conquest of Rome.

Hannibal, after receiving the submission of several other towns and
capturing Casilinum, went into winter quarters at Capua. During the
winter Rome made gigantic efforts to place her army upon a war footing,
and with such success that, excluding the army of Scipio in Spain,
she had, when the spring began, twelve legions or a hundred and twenty
thousand men again under arms; and as no reinforcements, save some
elephants and a small body of cavalry, ever reached Hannibal from
Carthage, he was, during the remaining thirteen years of the war,
reduced to stand wholly on the defensive, protecting his allies,
harassing his enemy, and feeding his own army at their expense; and yet
so great was the dread which his genius had excited that, in spite of
their superior numbers, the Romans after Cannae never ventured again to
engage him in a pitched battle.

Soon after the winter set in Hannibal ordered Malchus to take a number
of officers and a hundred picked men, and to cross from Capua to
Sardinia, where the inhabitants had revolted against Rome, and were
harassing the praetor, Quintus Mucius, who commanded the legion which
formed the garrison of the island. Malchus and the officers under him
were charged with the duty of organizing the wild peasantry of the
island, and of drilling them in regular tactics; for unless acting
as bodies of regular troops, however much they might harass the Roman
legion, they could not hope to expel them from their country. Nessus of
course accompanied Malchus.

The party embarked in two of the Capuan galleys. They had not been many
hours at sea when the