Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 29
Frank Gardener Moore, Professor Emeritus in Columbia University, Ed.

19. After the envoys had thus spoken and Fabius¹ asked them whether they had carried such complaints to Publius Scipio, they replied that emissaries had been sent, but that he was occupied with preparations for war and had either already crossed over to Africa, or was about to do so within a few days; [2] and they had learned what partiality for his legatus was felt by the general-in-command when, after hearing the charges of Pleminius and those of the tribunes, he put the tribunes in chains and, though the legatus was equally guilty or even more so, left him in that command.

When the envoys had been ordered to retire from the Senate House,² not Pleminius only but also Scipio was savagely attacked in the speeches of leading men. [3] First and foremost Quintus Fabius charged that he was by nature adapted to corrupt his soldiers' discipline. [4] Thus even in Spain, he said, almost more soldiers had been lost in a mutiny than [p. 283]by war;³ that after the manner of a foreign tyrant he⁴ gave free rein to the excesses of his soldiers and was also cruel to them. [5] He then appended to his speech an equally ruthless resolution: that it was the will of the senate that Pleminius, the legatus, be brought to Rome bound and plead his cause in chains, and if the complaints of the Locrians should prove true, that he be put to death in the prison and his property confiscated; [6] that Publius Scipio, having left his province without orders of the senate, be recalled, and that the tribunes of the plebs be urged to bring before the people a bill to annul his command; that the senate should make answer to the Locrians face to face that neither the senate nor the Roman people approved of the wrongs which they complained had been inflicted upon them; that they be declared good men and good allies and friends; [7] that their children, their wives and whatever else had been taken away by violence be restored to them; that all the money removed from the treasure-chambers of Proserpina be sought out and twice that amount be restored to her treasury; [8] and that expiatory rites be performed, with the provision that the question be first laid before the college of pontiffs, in view of the removal, opening and profanation of the sacred treasure, what expiations they would order to be made, to what divinities, with what victims; that all the soldiers who were at Locri be transported to Sicily; [9] that four cohorts of Latin allies be brought to Locri as a garrison.

[10] Not all the senators could be asked their opinion on that day owing to the heat of party feeling for [p. 285]Scipio and against Scipio. In addition to the crime⁵ of Pleminius and the sufferings of the [11??] Locrians, they kept censuring even the personal appearance of the general-in-chief, as not even soldierly, not to say un- Roman; that wearing a Greek mantle and sandals he strolled about in the gymnasium, giving his attention to books in Greek and physical exercise;⁶ [12] that with equal indolence and self-indulgence his entire retinue⁷ was enjoying the charms of Syracuse; that Carthage and Hannibal had been forgotten; [13] that the entire army, being spoiled by lack of restraint and, like the army formerly at Sucro in Spain, like the troops now at Locri, was more to be feared by allies than by the enemy.