Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 28
Frank Gardener Moore, Professor Emeritus in Columbia University, Ed.

32. Scipio by his conscientiousness in paying all his men, guilty and innocent alike, and more by his countenance and speech showing no resentment against any one, easily won the hearts of his soldiers. [2] Before moving his camp away from (New) Carthage he summoned an assembly. [3] There after inveighing at great length against the treachery of the chiefs in rebellion, he declared that in order to punish their crime he was setting out in a very different spirit [p. 131]from that in which he recently cured a misunderstanding¹ on the part of citizens. [4] At that time, he said, with sighing and tears, just as though he were cutting into his own vital organs, he had atoned by the lives of thirty men for the folly, or it might be the guilt, of eight thousand. [5] But now with joy and exaltation of spirit he was advancing to the slaughter of the Ilergetes. For they had not been born in the same land, nor were they linked by any alliance with himself. [6] The only bond which once existed, that of loyalty and friendship, they had themselves broken by their crime. As for his own army, he was stirred on seeing all the men in it citizens or allies and Latins, and also because there was hardly a soldier who had not been brought from Italy either by his uncle Gnaeus Scipio, who was the first of the Romans to come into that province, or by his father as consul, or by himself. [7] They were all of them accustomed to the name and auspices of the Scipios, being men whom he would like to bring home to their country for a well-earned triumph, men who he hoped would support his canvass for the consulship, just as if an honour shared by all alike were at stake.

[8] So far as concerned the enterprise now impending, he said, any man who considered it a war was forgetting their own achievements. Mago surely, who fled with a few ships beyond the known world to an island surrounded by the Ocean,² was a greater concern to him than the Ilergetes. [9] For there it was a Carthaginian general and also a Punic force however small; here there were brigands and brigand chiefs, who might, to be sure, have considerable strength for ravaging the lands of neighbouring tribes and for burning houses and stealing cattle, but none [p. 133]at all in battle-line and when standards faced standards.³ In battle they would rely more upon swiftness in flight than upon arms. [10] Accordingly it was not because he saw any danger from them or the seed of a greater war, that he had thought the Ilergetes must be overpowered before he left his province. [11] It was in the first place in order that so criminal a rebellion might not go unpunished, and then that it might not possibly be said that any enemy had been left in a province which had been thoroughly conquered by such courage combined with such success. [12] Wherefore with the kind aid of the gods let them follow him, not so much to carry on a war —for it was no conflict with a well-matched enemy —as to exact punishment from criminals.