The army, which, without reckoning the allies, numbered twenty thousand men, was allowed to march off without disgrace, and independence and friendship were stipulated for Numantia. Mancinus afterwards played at Rome the same part which Sp. Postumius had done after the Caudine peace: he recommended the senate to yield up himself and the officers, to atone for the unauthorized peace. The people agreed to this, so far as he was concerned; but it threw out the clause as to the officers, out of regard for Tib. Gracchus. Mancinus was delivered up: the noble-minded Numantines would not have him, that the curse of a broken oath might fall upon those who were guilty. The war lasted yet a few years longer without any result; so that the Romans were driven, in spite of the laws, (as Appian says,) to elect Scipio Africanus consul. Ten years had already passed away since his first consulship, and the _leges annales_ could not have prescribed an age which he had not reached already; perhaps there was a law that no one should be consul twice. Scipio went forth with many recruits, allies, and volunteers from all parts, with Numidians and men from the far East, against that small people, to root it out from the earth. All the proffers of the Numantines were rejected. Scipio found a great degeneracy in the Roman troops; and it cost him a vast deal of trouble to restore discipline, as the loose morals and the luxury which were rife among individuals, were likewise spreading in the army: he purified it, and then marched with sixty thousand men against Numantia. This city was surrounded on three sides by the Douro, and it lay therefore on an isthmus, which was strongly fortified. Around the town, the circumference not being more than three Roman miles, (one German,) Scipio now drew a line of pallisades with a rampart, and behind it a second one,--just as Platææ was shut in by the Spartans,--and here he distributed his army. On these lines, he placed engines for hurling missiles, with which the Romans tried to keep off their desperate foes, as they wanted to destroy them by hunger. For a while, some of them escaped on the Douro, by which the besieged also got supplies; but he cut them off even from this, by sinking above the town huge beams armed with saws into the river, so that the rafts with flour could no longer float down that way. How long this dreadful blockade lasted, is more than we can tell. Once, however, some Numantines climbed over the walls, and came to a distant town where some hundred youths enthusiastically took up arms; and thus a general rising against the Romans was on the eve of bursting forth. When Scipio found this out, he forthwith marched thither, and had the hands of those who were guilty cut off. Such an atrocity stamps the man. The Numantines, when they had fed, first on the dead bodies of the enemy, and then on those of their own countrymen, and gone through all those horrors which Missolunghi