Chapter 87

Meanwhile those horsemen of Scipio’s who had escaped from the battle were proceeding in the direction of Utica when they came to the town of Parada. Being refused admittance by the inhabitants—for the tidings of Caesar’s victory had preceded them—they gained possession of the town by force; then, making a pile of faggots in the middle of the market-place and heaping on top all the inhabitants’ possessions, they set fire to it and then flung into the flames, alive and bound, the inhabitants of the town themselves, irrespective of rank or age, thereby meting out to them the most cruel of all punishments. Whereupon they came straight to Utica. Now earlier on M. Cato had come to the conclusion that on account of the benefit they had received from the Julian law the men of Utica were but lukewarm supporters of his cause and so he had expelled the unarmed mob from the town, built a concentration camp in front of the military gate, protected by quite a shallowish trench, and forced them to live there cordoned off by sentries. As for the town’s senate, he kept it under restraint. This concentration camp of theirs Scipio’s horsemen now attacked and began to storm, for the very reason that they knew that its occupants had been adherents of Caesar’s side: and if they massacred them their destruction might serve to avenge their own sense of disappointment. But the people of Utica, emboldened as a result of Caesar’s victory, drove back the horsemen with stones and clubs. And so, finding it impossible to gain possession of the camp, the horsemen hurled themselves upon the town of Utica, where they massacred many of the inhabitants and stormed and looted their houses. As Cato could not persuade them by any means to join him in defending the town or cease from their butchery and pillaging, and as he was aware of their intentions, he distributed a hundred sesterces to each of them by way of appeasing their wanton attitude. Faustus Sulla followed suit and bribed them out of his own pocket; he then left Utica with them and proceeded on his way to Juba’s kingdom.