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In the present instance, however, Scipio, after inveighing at great length against Mandonius, who stood before him, and Indibilis, who was absent, said "that they had justly forfeited their lives by their wicked conduct, but that they should be preserved by the kindness of himself and the Roman people.
This answer given to the ambassadors, was reported to the assembly, and Mandonius and the other chiefs were there seized and delivered up for punishment. Peace was restored to the states of Spain, which were ordered to pay double taxes that year, and furnish corn for six months, together with cloaks and gowns for the army; and hostages were taken from about thirty of the states.
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.
The same motive induced Indibilis and Mandonius, who were undoubtedly the principal men in all Spain, to desert Hasdrubal and withdraw with the whole body of their countrymen to the eminences which overhung his camp, from which they had a safe retreat along a chain of hills to the Romans.
Meanwhile, there advanced from the midst of the crowd of hostages a woman in years, the wife of Mandonius, who was the brother of Indibilis, the chieftain of the Illergetians; she threw herself weeping at the general's feet, and began to implore him to give particularly strict injunctions to their guardians with respect to the care and treatment of females.
These, laying the blame on Indibilis, the instigator of the war, and the other chiefs, most of whom had fallen in the battle, and offering to deliver up their arms and surrender themselves, received for answer, that their surrender would be accepted on condition that they delivered up alive Mandonius and the rest of the persons who had fomented the war; but if they refused to comply, that armies should be marched into the territories of the Ilergetians and Ausetanians, and afterwards into those of the other states in succession.
Some of the captives he appointed to service in the general fleet and all the hostages he gave back freely to their relatives. For this reason many towns and many princes, among them Indibilis and Mandonius of the Ilergetes, came over to his side. The Celtiberian race, the largest and strongest of those in that region, he gained in the following way.
Yet they followed Mandonius and Indibilis, men of royal rank, who were the leaders of their mad project; you conferred the auspices and command upon the Umbrian, Atrius, and the Calenian, Albius. Deny, soldiers, that you were all concerned in this measure, or that you approved of it when taken. I shall willingly believe, when you disclaim it, that it was the folly and madness of a few.
Indibilis, renouncing his purpose of carrying on war, and considering that his safest reliance in his present distress was on the tried honour and clemency of Scipio, sent his brother Mandonius to him; who, falling prostrate before his knees, ascribed his conduct to the fatal frenzy of those times, when, as it were from the effects of some pestilential contagion, not only the Ilergetians and Lacetanians, but even the Roman camp had been infected with madness.
Your father and uncle were not cut off by the arms of their enemies till they were duped by the treachery of their Celtiberian allies; nor were you yourself exposed to so much danger from Mago and Hasdrubal, the generals of your enemies, as from Indibilis and Mandonius, whom you had received into friendship.
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