Next they demanded that they should be paid in money (in pieces of money, and not in leathern coins) for all the corn that was owing to them, and at the highest price that it had fetched during the war; so that they exacted four hundred times as much for a measure of meal as they had given for a sack of wheat.  Such injustice was exasperating; but it was necessary, nevertheless, to submit.

Then the delegates from the soldiers and from the Great Council swore renewed friendship by the Genius of Carthage and the gods of the Barbarians.  They exchanged excuses and caresses with oriental demonstrativeness and verbosity.  Then the soldiers claimed, as a proof of friendship, the punishment of those who had estranged them from the Republic.

Their meaning, it was pretended, was not understood, and they explained themselves more clearly by saying that they must have Hanno’s head.

Several times a day, they left their camp, and walked along the foot of the walls, shouting a demand that the Suffet’s head should be thrown to them, and holding out their robes to receive it.

The Great Council would perhaps have given way but for a last exaction, more outrageous than the rest; they demanded maidens, chosen from illustrious families, in marriage for their chiefs.  It was an idea which had emanated from Spendius, and which many thought most simple and practicable.  But the assumption of their desire to 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.