It was not till the year after his consulship, 548, when his proconsular _imperium_ was prolonged, that Scipio with four hundred transports, protected by forty quinqueremes, crossed over to Africa. If the Carthaginians had had their ships of war assembled, they must have baffled Scipio’s undertaking; but this could hardly have been the case, or else their inactivity would have been quite unaccountable. How many troops he carried over, was unknown, even to the ancients themselves; as an average number, we may assume sixteen thousand men foot, several thousand horse, and a considerable fleet: when these departed, there were great tremblings of heart in the timid party among the Romans, who thought of nothing but the fate of Regulus. Scipio’s arrangements were admirable. In three days he made the passage, and landed north of Carthage, not far from Utica, near a headland at the mouth of the river Bagradas, which, like almost all the rivers which fall into the Mediterranean, has formed another mouth farther on, its old one having been choked up with sand; Shaw, however, in his travels, fixes the point with admirable precision. Its memory was kept up as long as the Roman empire lasted, by the name of _Castra Cornelia_; it was a headland with an offing, a gradually sloping beach of gravel, on which the ships had to be drawn up. Here Scipio entrenched himself, and from thence made excursions. In the meanwhile, Syphax had been entirely gained over to the Carthaginians, having married Sophonis (in Hebrew Zephaniah), or, as Livy has it, Sophonisbe, the daughter of Hasdrubal, the son of Gisgo. When Scipio had landed, a Carthaginian army under Hasdrubal, a great Numidian one under Syphax, and a smaller Numidian one under Masinissa, went out to meet him. Masinissa was hereditary prince of the Massylians, a people on the frontier of what is now Tunis, which dwelt at the foot of the mountains. He was a vassal of the Carthaginians, had served under their standards in Spain, and in that country already had entered into some correspondence with the Romans. He is known to have been the guest-friend of Scipio; in the _Somnium Scipionis_, he makes his appearance as a venerable old man; he was brought up in Carthage, and, at least in his later years, understood Greek or Latin. These African princes were all of them thoroughly faithless. That his truth to the Romans ever became so renowned, was merely owing to the fact that it was his object to enrich himself at the expense of Carthage, in which he was aided by the Romans; but his son, who already stood in a different relation to them, in the third Punic war certainly did them a great deal of mischief. A romance has been got up, in which Masinissa is in love with Sophonisbe, and therefore jealous of Syphax; with the latter, he is said to have been involved in a war, and afterwards reconciled. He now came, it would seem, as an ally of the Carthaginians against Scipio, who enticed him to go over.