Actæon found Sónnica on the wall, gazing at the hostile camp in the first streak of dawn. The beautiful Greek had taken refuge in Saguntum the night before, followed by slaves and flocks, moving part of her riches from the villa to her warehouse. She had left behind rooms filled with paintings and mosaics; rich furniture, sumptuous table-service, all which would fall into the hands of the victor. And she and her fellow Greek saw peeping through the distant foliage the terrace of the villa with its statues, the tower of the doves and the roofs of the houses of the slaves, over which men, barely discernible, were running like insects. The invaders were there; perhaps they would amuse themselves by shooting their arrows at the brilliantly plumaged Asiatic birds, and by beating the old and sick slaves abandoned in the flight. Between the banana trees in the garden rose the smoke of a bonfire. The Greek woman and her lover guessed the destruction and rapine that were taking place. Sónnica grew sad, not at the loss of a part of her riches, but because they were rending her heart through destroying a place which had been witness to her first outbursts of love for the Athenian.
Some time after sunrise the Saguntine people cried out with indignation. Along the Road of the Serpent appeared groups of drunken and shouting women embracing soldiers. They were the _lupas_ of the port, the miserable harlots who thronged around the temple of Aphrodite by night, and who were denied entrance to the city. When the first Carthaginian horsemen passed through the port these creatures had followed them with enthusiasm. Accustomed to the coarse blandishments of men of all countries, the presence of these soldiers, so different in dress and nationality, did not seem strange to them. The 'wolves' of the land were the same as those of the sea. They adored strong men, birds of prey which could destroy them with their talons, and they followed the Carthaginians to their camp, rejoicing in their hearts at the chance to approach the city without fear of punishment, and at being able to mock the besieged inhabitants with the concentrated odium of long years of humiliation.
They sang like mad women, flitting from one pair of greedy and trembling hands to the next which disputed for them as if in their eagerness they would tear them to pieces. They drank to intoxication from amphoræ of rich wines sacked from the villas; around their shoulders they flung cloths with threads of gold, stolen but a moment before; the Numidians with their moist gazelle-like eyes, looked upon them admiringly, bedecking them with crowns of grass, and they in turn bursting into bacchanal laughter, petted the kinky hair of the Ethiopians, who giggled like children, displaying their sharp cannibal teeth.