Mago had landed at Genoa, Liguria, two years before, in an effort to keep the Romans busy to the North and thus hamper indirectly their plans to invade Carthage's hinterland in Africa (modern Tunisia).

The strategy to divert the enemy's forces failed as the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio laid waste to Africa and wiped out the Carthaginian armies that were sent to destroy the invader.

However, the remnants of the Carthaginian forces in Cisalpine Gaul continued to harass the Romans for several years after the end of the war.

It instructed Mago to abandon Iberia and go by sea to northern Italy with the objective to reinvigorate the war there in coordination with Hannibal who was in the south.

For the first time since the beginning of the war Carthage was left directly vulnerable to attack, which it could not prevent because of the naval supremacy of Rome.

Despite the victorious campaigns in the Po valley before the outbreak of the Second Punic war and the extensive colonization, Rome did not entirely manage to subjugate the local Gauls.

[2] It looked as if the Romans were going to pay for their failure to capitalize from the victory at the Metaurus river by conquering the Cisalpine Gauls once and for all, but the danger caused by Mago's landing was not to be overestimated.

This call was spurred by the raids of C. Laelius, a legate of Scipio, on the African mainland, plundering the environs of Hippo Regius during the same summer (205 BC).

To keep the Romans in check, soldiers and supplies were sent to Hannibal in Bruttium and Mago, and an embassy to Philip V of Macedon with the mission to negotiate a Macedonian invasion of either Italy or Sicily.

[4] All these measures had little effect, because Philip had just concluded the peace of Phoenice with P. Sempronius Tuditanus, a Roman general, thereby bringing the First Macedonian war to an end, and the Carthaginian alliance with the most powerful Numidian king Syphax did not stop Scipio from sailing to Africa in 204 BC.

The Ligurians committed themselves immediately, but the Gauls, threatened by the Roman armies on the borders and inside their homeland, declined to revolt openly.

[7] They were preoccupied with problems such as forcing the Latin colonies, which had refused to provide any more money and soldiers several years before, to do their duty.

The proconsul M. Cornelius Cethegus and the praetor P. Quintilius Varus led an army of four legions against Mago in a regular battle in the Insubrian land (not far from modern Milan).

The description by Livy in his "History of Rome" (Ab urbe condita)[10] shows that each of the opponents deployed their forces in two battle lines.

Yet, as Livy himself states, the Romans owed their success to the wounding of the Carthaginian commander, who had to be carried away almost fainting from the field because his thigh was pierced.

(In 218 BC, the victory in the battle of Trebia, in which Mago also distinguished himself, was followed by a general uprising of the Cisalpine Gauls, who joined Hannibal and made possible his march to the south.)

[12] Some sources claim that Mago died during this voyage from the wound that he suffered in the battle,[12] but others state that he returned to Liguria soon after his departure[13] and stayed there for at least two more years.