Scipio sails at the commissioners' bidding from Sicily in 204 BCE at the head of his army of volunteers and lands near Utica.

Carthage, meanwhile, has secured the friendship of Syphax, whose advance compels Scipio to abandon the siege of Utica and dig in on the shore between there and Carthage.

Scipio feigns negotiations, then mounts a treacherous surprise attack on Syphax, approaching by stealth and setting fire to the enemy camp, where the combined armies of the Carthaginians and Numidians become panicked and flee, and are mostly killed by Scipio's army.

Though not a "battle," both Polybius and Livy estimate that the death toll in this single attack exceeded forty thousand Carthaginian and Numidian dead, and more captured.

Hasdrubal Gisco and Syphax, both men having succeeded in escaping from their camps, which Scipio and his Numidian ally Masinissa had destroyed with the aid of and Laelius, fall back with a few followers who had also escaped the massacre.

Scipio, his command extended until the end of the war, marches to meet Hasdrubal and Syphax at a place called the Great Plains.

The charge of the Roman cavalry causes the Carthaginian infantry and cavalry flee from the field; only the Spanish infantry remain standing, defending themselves fiercely.

The number of Spanish mercenaries is about equal to the first line of the Romans, the hastati.

Then Scipio orders his principes and triarii to march from behind the hastati and attack the flanks of the Spanish mercenaries, who are routed, with only a handful managing to escape.

Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had taken the side of Marius in latter's civil war with Sulla.

Proscribed when Sulla obtained the supreme power in 82 BCE, Ahenobarbus had fled to Africa, where he was joined by many who were in the same condition as himself.

He has collected an army ith the assistance of the Numidian king, Hiarbas, but is defeated near Utica by Pompey, whom Sulla had sent against him, and is afterwards killed in the storming of his camp, in 81 BCE.

According to some accounts, he was executed after the battle on the orders of Pompey.

The Romans had added Western Numidia to the lands of Bocchus, king of Mauretania, after the death of Jugurtha in 104 BCE, while the remainder (excluding Cyrene and its locality) had continued to be governed by native princes until the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.

Cato the Younger, who has held several posts during the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, had fled to Africa upon Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus and become governor of Utica.

Caesar proceeds to Utica, where Cato the Younger is garrisoned.

On the news of the defeat of his allies, Cato commits suicide.

Caesar is upset by this and is reported by Plutarch to have said: Cato, I must grudge you your death, as you grudged me the honor of saving your life.

The battle precedes peace in Africa—Caesar pulls out and returns to Rome on July 25 of the same year.

Opposition, however, will rise again.

Titus Labienus, the Pompeian brothers and others have managed to escape to the Hispania provinces.

The civil war is not finished, and the Battle of Munda will soon follow.

The Arabs drive the Romans from Utica in 669, totally destroying the city in the process.