1While these things are being done in Italy, the consul Gnaeus Servilius Geminus, with a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships, sailed round the coast of Sardinia and Corsica and, having received hostages from both, crossed to Africa; and before making landings on the mainland he ravaged the island of Menix and accepted ten talents of silver from the inhabitants of Cercina, so that their land too should not be burnt and plundered; then he approached the shores of Africa and put his forces ashore. 3From there the soldiers and naval allies were led off to plunder the countryside, scattering just as if they were plundering islands short of inhabitants.
4So, rushing rashly into an ambush, since, straggling, they were surrounded by men in close order and, ignorant of the ground, by men who knew it, they were driven back to the ships with great slaughter and shameful flight. 5About a thousand men were lost, together with Tiberius Sempronius Blaesus, the quaestor. 5The fleet, setting sail in alarm from the shores crowded with enemies, held its course for Sicily, and was handed over at Lilybaeum to Titus Otacilius the praetor, to be taken back to Rome by his legate Publius Cincius. 7The consul himself, setting out on foot through Sicily, crossed the strait into Italy, summoned by a letter from Quintus Fabius, both he and his colleague Marcus Atilius, to take over the armies from him, since his six-month command had now almost run out.
8Almost all the annals record that Fabius conducted the campaign against Hannibal as dictator; 8Coelius even writes that he was the first dictator to be elected by the people. 9But both Coelius and the others overlook the fact that the right of naming a dictator belonged to the consul Gnaeus Servilius alone, who was then far away in his province of Gaul; 10and that, because the state, terrified by what was now a third disaster, could not wait for that delay, recourse was had to having the people elect a man to act in place of a dictator; 11and that the deeds then done and the commander's outstanding glory, and his descendants enlarging the inscription on his portrait mask, easily brought it about that the man elected to act as dictator was believed to have been dictator.