having them for tribunes, you, a Roman army, conferred the fasces of your general upon men who never had a slave under their command?  Albius and Atrius had their tents in your general’s pavilion.  With them the trumpet sounded, from them the word was taken, they sat upon the tribunal of Scipio, upon whom the lictor attended, for them the crowd was cleared away as they moved along, before them the fasces with the axes were carried.  When showers of stones descend, lightnings are darted from the heavens, and animals give birth to monsters, you consider these things as prodigies.  This is a prodigy which can be expiated by no victims, by no supplications, without the blood of those men who have dared to commit so great a crime.

28.  “Now, though villany is never guided by reason, yet so far as it could exist in so nefarious a transaction, I would fain know what was your design.  Formerly, a legion which was sent to garrison Rhegium, wickedly put to the sword the principal inhabitants and kept possession of that opulent city through a space of ten years; on account of which enormity the entire legion, consisting of four thousand men, were beheaded in the forum at Rome.  But they, in the first place, did not put themselves under the direction of Atrius the Umbrian, scarcely superior to a scullion, whose name even was ominous, but of Decius Jubellius, a military tribune; nor did they unite themselves with Pyrrhus, or with the Samnites or Lucanians, the enemies of the Roman people.  But you made common cause with Mandonius and Indibilis, and intended also to have united your arms with them.  They intended to have held Rhegium as a lasting settlement, as the Campanians held Capua, which they took from its ancient Tuscan inhabitants; and as the Mamertines held Messana in Sicily, without any design of commencing without provocation a war upon the Roman people or their allies.  Was it your purpose to hold Sucro as a place of abode? where, had I, your general, left you on my departure after the reduction of the province, you would have been justified in imploring the interference of gods and men, because you could not return to your wives and children.  But suppose that you banished from your minds all recollection of these, as you did of your country and myself; I would wish to track the course of a wicked design, but not of one utterly insane.  While I was alive, and the rest of the army safe, with which in one day I took Carthage, with which I routed, put to flight, and expelled from Spain four generals and four armies of the Carthaginians; did you, I say, who were only eight thousand men, all of course of less worth than Albius and Atrius, to whom you subjected yourselves, hope to wrest the province of Spain out of the hands of the Roman people?  I lay no stress upon my own name, I put it out of the question.  Let it be supposed that I have not been injured by you in any respect beyond the ready credence of my death.  What! if I were dead, was