20.136
Some time later, in the tribunate of Gaius Gracchus, B.C.123 uprisings occurred in Rome on account of scarcity, and it was decided to send 6000 colonists into Africa. When they were laying out the land for this purpose in the vicinity of Carthage, all the boundary lines were torn down and obliterated by wolves. Then the Senate put a stop to the settlement. At a still later time it is said that Caesar, who afterwards became dictator for life, when he had pursued Pompey to Egypt, and Pompey’s friends from thence into Africa, and was encamped near the site of Carthage, was troubled by a dream in which he saw a whole army weeping, and that he immediately made a memorandum in writing that Carthage should be colonized. Returning to Rome not long after, and while making a distribution of lands to the poor, he arranged to send some of them to Carthage and some to Corinth. But he was assassinated shortly afterward by his enemies in the Roman Senate, and his son Augustus, finding this memorandum, built the present Carthage, not on the site of the old one, but very near it, in order to avoid the ancient curse. I have ascertained that he sent some 3000 colonists from Rome and that the rest came from the neighboring country. And Y.R. 708 thus the Romans took Africa away from the Carthaginians, B.C.46 destroyed Carthage, and repeopled it again 102 years after its destruction.
Appendix_A.
Appian’s account of the defeat of Regulus by Xanthippus is altogether different from that given by Polybius. I subjoin a translation of the latter: —
