s recognised some of their former
companions.

The Suffet had proposed to all the captives that they should serve in
his troops. Several had fearlessly refused; and quite resolved neither
to support them nor to abandon them to the Great Council, he had sent
them away with injunctions to fight no more against Carthage. As to
those who had been rendered docile by the fear of tortures, they had
been furnished with the weapons taken from the enemy; and they were now
presenting themselves to the vanquished, not so much in order to seduce
them as out of an impulse of pride and curiosity.

At first they told of the good treatment which they had received from
the Suffet; the Barbarians listened to them with jealousy although they
despised them. Then at the first words of reproach the cowards fell
into a passion; they showed them from a distance their own swords
and cuirasses and invited them with abuse to come and take them. The
Barbarians picked up flints; all took to flight; and nothing more could
be seen on the summit of the mountain except the lance-points projecting
above the edge of the palisades.

Then the Barbarians were overwhelmed with a grief that was heavier than
the humiliation of the defeat. They thought of the emptiness of their
courage, and they stood with their eyes fixed and grinding their teeth.

The same thought came to them all. They rushed tumultuously upon the
Carthaginian prisoners. It chanced that the Suffet's soldiers had been
unable to discover them, and as he had withdrawn from the field of
battle they were still in the deep pit.

They were ranged on the ground on a flattened spot. Sentries formed a
circle round them, and the women were allowed to enter thirty or forty
at a time. Wishing to profit by the short time that was allowed to them,
they ran from one to the other, uncertain and panting; then bending over
the poor bodies they struck them with all their might like washerwomen
beating linen; shrieking their husband's names they tore them with their
nails and put out their eyes with the bodkins of their hair. The men
came next and tortured them from their feet, which they cut off at the
ankles, to their foreheads, from which they took crowns of skin to put
upon their own heads. The Eaters of Uncleanness were atrocious in their
devices. They envenomed the wounds by pouring into them dust, vinegar,
and fragments of pottery; others waited behind; blood flowed, and they
rejoiced like vintagers r