Now spring was drawing on when Hannibal moved out of his winter quarters, having before attempted in vain to cross the Apennine, held back by cold past all enduring and amid great peril and dread. The Gauls, whom the hope of plunder and pillage had stirred up, when in place of carrying off and driving spoil from another’s land they saw their own territories made the seat of war and pressed by the winter quarters of both sides’ armies, turned their hatred back from the Romans against Hannibal; and, often sought by the plots of their chiefs—saved by the very treachery of the plotters among themselves, who with the same fickleness with which they had conspired betrayed the conspiracy—he had been preserved, and by changing now his dress, now the covering of his head, he had fenced himself against the snares even by the confusion he sowed. But this fear too was for him a cause of moving the sooner out of winter quarters. About the same time Gnaeus Servilius the consul entered upon his magistracy at Rome on the Ides of March. There, when he had laid the state of the commonwealth before the senate, the resentment against Gaius Flaminius was kindled afresh: two consuls, men said, they had created, but one they had; for what lawful command, what auspice, had he? Magistrates carried that with them from home, from the public and private Penates, when the Latin Festival had been held, the sacrifice completed on the Mount, the vows duly pronounced on the Capitol; nor could a private man take the auspices with him, nor, having set out without auspices, conceive them anew and entire on foreign soil. The dread was swelled by prodigies reported from several places at once: in Sicily several of the soldiers’ javelins, and in Sardinia, as a horseman went his round of the watches upon the wall, the staff which he held in his hand, had taken fire; the shores had blazed with thick-set fires; two shields had sweated blood; some soldiers had been struck by lightning; the sun’s disk had seemed to be diminished; at Praeneste glowing stones had fallen from the sky; at Arpi shields had been seen in the sky and the sun fighting with the moon; at Capena two moons had risen in the daytime; the waters of Caere had flowed mingled with blood, and the very fountain of Hercules had run sprinkled with spots of gore; at Antium, as men reaped, bloody ears of corn had fallen into the basket; at Falerii the sky had seemed to be split as with a great cleft, and where it gaped a vast light had shone forth; the lots had of their own accord shrunk, and one had fallen out written thus: "Mavors brandishes his spear"; and about the same time at Rome the statue of Mars on the Appian Way and the images of the wolves had sweated; and at Capua there had been the look of a burning sky and of the moon falling amid rain. Thereafter belief was given even to prodigies smaller in the telling: that the goats of certain men had grown woolly fleeces, that a hen had turned into a cock and a cock into a hen. These things laid before the senate as they had been reported, and the authorities for them brought into the Curia, the consul consulted the fathers concerning religion. It was decreed that those prodigies should be expiated partly with full-grown victims, partly with sucklings, and that a supplication be held for three days at all the sacred couches; the rest, when the decemvirs had consulted the books, should be done in such manner as the divine verses should foretell to be pleasing to the gods. By the decemvirs’ warning it was decreed that the first gift, a golden thunderbolt of fifty pounds’ weight, be made to Jupiter; that gifts of silver be given to Juno and Minerva; that to Juno the Queen on the Aventine and to Juno Sospita at Lanuvium sacrifice be made with full-grown victims; and that the matrons, contributing money, each so much as was convenient for her to give, should carry a gift to Juno the Queen on the Aventine, and a lectisternium be held; and that the freedwomen too should contribute money, according to their means, from which a gift might be given to Feronia. When this was done, the decemvirs sacrificed with full-grown victims at Ardea in the forum. Finally, the month being now December, sacrifice was offered at the temple of Saturn at Rome, and a lectisternium ordered—and senators spread that couch—and a public banquet; and through the city for a day and a night the Saturnalia was proclaimed, and the people were bidden to keep that day as a festival and to observe it forever.

While the consul gave his pains to appeasing the gods at Rome and to holding the levy, Hannibal, having set out from winter quarters—because it was now rumored that Flaminius the consul had reached Arretium—when another route, longer but easier, was pointed out to him, chose the nearer way through the marshes, where the river Arnus had in those days overflowed more than its wont. The Spaniards and Africans—that whole body was the veteran strength of the army—with their own baggage mingled in, lest, wherever they were forced to halt, the things needful for use should fail them, he ordered to go first; the Gauls to follow, that they might be the middle of the column; the cavalry to go last; Mago then with the light-armed Numidians to close the column, keeping in check chiefly the Gauls, if from weariness of toil and the length of the way—as that nation is soft for such things—they should straggle off or fall behind. The foremost, wherever their guides only led the way, through the deep and bottomless eddies of the river, all but swallowed in the mud and sinking in it, nevertheless followed the standards. The Gauls, once fallen, could neither hold themselves up nor rise out of the quagmires, nor did they sustain their bodies with spirit or their spirits with hope—some dragging their wearied limbs with difficulty, others, when once their spirits had sunk, overcome with weariness, dying here and there among the baggage-beasts that themselves lay prostrate. But above all the want of sleep wore them down, endured now through four days and three nights. When, the waters covering everything, no dry place could be found where they might stretch their wearied bodies, they lay down upon their packs heaped in the water, or the piles of baggage-animals prostrate all along the road gave, to those who sought it, only so much as stood out above the water—a couch needful for a brief rest. Hannibal himself, ailing in his eyes from the first inclemency of spring with its veering heats and colds, borne upon the one elephant that had survived, that he might stand the higher above the water, yet, with the watching and the night damp and the marshy air weighing upon his head, and because there was neither place nor time for treatment, lost the sight of one eye.

When, with many men and beasts foully lost, he had at last emerged from the marshes, as soon as he could on dry ground he pitched his camp, and learned for certain through scouts sent ahead that the Roman army was about the walls of Arretium. The consul’s plans and temper, the lie of the country and the roads, the resources for getting supplies, and all else that it was to his purpose to know, he set himself to ascertain by inquiry, all with the utmost care. The region was among the most fertile of Italy, the Etruscan plains that lie between Faesulae and Arretium, rich in corn and cattle and abundance of all things; the consul was headstrong from his former consulship, and not duly fearful—not only of the laws or the majesty of the fathers, but not even of the gods; this rashness, native to his temper, fortune had fed with prosperous success in things civil and military. And so it was plain enough that, taking counsel of neither gods nor men, he would do everything fiercely and overhastily; and that he might be the more prone to his own faults, the Carthaginian prepares to stir and provoke him: leaving the enemy on his left, and passing by Faesulae, setting out to plunder through the midst of the Etruscan country, he displayed from afar to the consul as great a devastation as he could by slaughter and burning. Flaminius, who would not have kept quiet even had the enemy been quiet, then indeed, after he saw the goods of the allies carried off and driven away well-nigh before his very eyes, counting it his own disgrace that the Carthaginian now roved through the midst of Italy and, with none to withstand him, went to assault the very walls of Rome—though all the rest in the council urged the more salutary rather than the more showy course: that he should await his colleague, so that with their armies joined they might wage the war with one mind and counsel, and meanwhile with cavalry and the auxiliaries of the light-armed restrain the enemy from his unbridled license of plundering—wrathful, he flung himself out of the council, and when he had at once ordered the signal for the march and for battle to be given out, "Nay," he said, "let us sit before the walls of Arretium; for here are our fatherland and our household gods. Let Hannibal slip from our hands and ravage Italy, and by wasting and burning all things reach the walls of Rome; nor let us stir from here before the fathers have summoned Gaius Flaminius from Arretium, as once they summoned Camillus from Veii." Railing thus, when he bade the standards be plucked up the more quickly and had himself leaped upon his horse, the horse suddenly fell and threw the consul, slipping, over its head. All who were about him being terrified, as at a foul omen for the beginning of the enterprise, there is besides brought word that the standard, though the standard-bearer strove with all his might, could not be plucked up. Turning to the messenger, "Do you bring letters too," he said, "from the senate, forbidding me to do my work? Go, tell them to dig out the standard, if their hands have grown numb with fear for the plucking of it." Then the column began to advance, the chief men—besides that they had dissented from the council—terrified also by the double prodigy, but the common soldier glad at the fierceness of his leader, since he looked rather to the hope itself than to the ground of the hope.

Hannibal lays waste with every calamity of war all of the country that lies between the city of Cortona and Lake Trasimene, the more to whet the enemy’s anger to avenge the wrongs of the allies; and now they had come to a place made for ambush, where the mountains of Cortona sink most steeply down to Trasimene. Only a very narrow road lies between, as if the space had been left of set purpose for that very thing; then a somewhat broader plain opens out; thereafter hills rise up. There, in the open, he pitches his camp, where he himself with the Africans only and the Spaniards should take post; the Balearic slingers and the rest of the light-armed he leads round behind the mountains; the cavalry, at the very mouth of the pass, the hillocks aptly screening them, he stations, so that, when the Romans had entered, the cavalry thrown across should shut all in, with the lake and the mountains. Flaminius, having come to the lake the day before at sunset, on the next day, without reconnoitering, while the light was scarcely yet sure, having passed the defile, after the column began to spread into the more open plain, descried only that part of the enemy which was opposite him: the ambush at his rear and above his head went undetected. The Carthaginian, when he had the enemy—as he had aimed—shut in by lake and mountains and surrounded by his own forces, gives all the signal to fall on at once. And they, when each had run down where it was nearest to him, the thing was the more sudden and unforeseen to the Romans because a mist risen from the lake had settled denser upon the plain than upon the mountains, and the columns of the enemy, from the several hills well enough seen each by the other, had for that reason run down all the more together. The Roman, by the shout raised on every side, perceived that he was surrounded before he could well see it, and the fighting began on front and flanks before the line could be well drawn up, or arms made ready, or swords drawn.

The consul, while all were dismayed, himself fearless enough for so perilous a case, marshals the disordered ranks—as he too turned this way and that toward the discordant shouts—as time and place allowed, and wherever he could come and be heard, he exhorts them and bids them stand and fight: for not from there, by vows or the imploring of the gods, but by force and valor must they win their way out; through the midst of the battle-lines a road was made by the sword, and the less the fear, the less, for the most part, the peril. But for the din and the uproar neither counsel nor command could be received, and so far was the soldier from knowing his own standards and ranks and place, that scarce had he spirit enough to take up his arms and make them ready for the fight, and some were overwhelmed, burdened by them rather than guarded. And in so great a murk there was more use of the ears than of the eyes. Toward the groans of the wounded, the blows on bodies or on armor, and the mingled cries of men shouting and quailing, they turned their faces and their eyes. Some, fleeing, were borne into a knot of fighters and stuck fast; others, returning into the fight, the column of fugitives turned away. Then, when charges had been attempted in vain in every quarter, and on the flanks the mountains and the lake, on front and rear the enemy’s line, shut them in, and it appeared that there was no hope of safety save in the right hand and the sword, then each man became for himself his own leader and exhorter to the work, and the battle arose wholly anew—not that ordered battle by principes and hastati and triarii, nor such that the antesignani fought before the standards and another line behind them, nor that the soldier was in his own legion or cohort or maniple: chance massed them together, and each man’s own spirit gave him his place for fighting, in van or rear; and so great was the ardor of their spirits, so intent the mind upon the fight, that not one of the combatants felt that earthquake which laid low great portions of many cities of Italy, turned swift rivers from their courses, drove the sea up into the rivers, and threw down mountains with a vast collapse.

For nearly three hours the fighting went on, and everywhere fiercely; but about the consul the battle was the sharper and the more deadly. Him both the flower of the men followed, and he himself, wherever he perceived his own hard pressed and laboring, briskly bore aid; and, marked out by his arms, the enemy assailed him with all their might and the citizens guarded him, until an Insubrian horseman—Ducarius was his name—knowing the consul by his face as well, cried to his countrymen, "See, here is the man who cut down our legions and laid waste our fields and our city; now will I offer this victim to the shades of my fellow-citizens foully slain." And, setting spurs to his horse, he charges through the thickest press of the enemy, and, having first cut down the armor-bearer who had thrown himself in the way of his furious onset, ran the consul through with his lance; the triarii, thrusting their shields before, kept him off as he longed to strip the body. Thence first the flight of a great part began; and now neither lake nor mountains barred their panic; through all the narrows and the precipices, like blind men, they make their escape, and arms and men are flung headlong one upon another. A great part, where room for flight failed, going forward into the water through the first shallows of the marsh, plunge themselves in so far as they could stand out with their heads; there were some whom an unreasoning panic drove even to attempt flight by swimming, which, since it was measureless and without hope, they were either swallowed in the depths when their spirits failed, or, wearied to no purpose, with the utmost difficulty made their way back again to the shallows, and there were slaughtered here and there by the enemy’s horsemen who had entered the water. Some six thousand of the foremost column, an outbreak briskly made through the enemy in front, ignorant of all that was being done behind them, escaped from the pass, and, when they had halted on a certain hillock, hearing only the shouting and the clash of arms, could neither know nor make out, for the mist, what the fortune of the battle was. At last, the issue decided, when the sun growing hot had scattered the mist and laid the day open, then in the now clear light the mountains and the plains showed the cause lost and the Roman line foully strewn. And so, lest the cavalry should be sent against them, descried from afar, they snatched up their standards in haste and tore themselves away in as quick a march as they could. On the next day, when, beyond all the rest of their extremity, extreme famine too pressed upon them, on the pledge of Maharbal—who with all the cavalry had come up in the night—that, if they would give up their arms, he would suffer them to depart each with a single garment, they surrendered themselves; which faith was kept by Hannibal with Punic scruple, and they were all thrown into chains.

This is the famous battle at Trasimene, and among the few of the Roman people’s disasters that are remembered. Fifteen thousand Romans were slain in the line; ten thousand, scattered in flight through all Etruria, made for the city by roundabout ways; two thousand five hundred of the enemy fell in the line, and many afterward died on both sides of their wounds. A slaughter many times greater on both sides is recorded by some; but I—besides that I would have nothing swelled out of vanity, to which the minds of writers commonly lean too far—have taken Fabius, contemporary with the times of this war, as my chief authority. Hannibal, when he had let go without ransom those of the captives who were of the Latin name, and given the Romans into chains, and had bidden the bodies of his own men, sorted out from the heaps of the enemy piled together, be buried, sought also for the body of Flaminius, that it might have burial, with great care, but did not find it. At Rome, at the first message of that disaster, with vast terror and uproar, there was a rush of the people into the forum. The matrons, wandering through the streets, ask those they met what sudden calamity had been brought, or what was the fortune of the army; and when the crowd, after the manner of a thronged assembly, turned toward the comitium and the curia, kept calling for the magistrates, at last, not long before sunset, Marcus Pomponius the praetor said: "In a great battle we are beaten." And although nothing more certain was heard from him, yet, filled one from another with rumors, they bring back to their homes that the consul with a great part of the forces was slain; that there survived but a few, either scattered in flight here and there through Etruria, or taken by the enemy. As many as had been the chances of the beaten army, into so many cares were the minds distracted of those whose kinsfolk had served under Gaius Flaminius the consul, ignorant what was the fortune of each of their own; nor has any man certain enough what he should hope or fear. On the next day, and for several days thereafter, at the gates a multitude almost greater of women than of men stood, awaiting either some one of their own or news of them; and they gathered round those they met, questioning them, nor could they be torn away—especially from acquaintances—before they had inquired into all things in order. Then you might have seen, as men parted from the bringers of news, faces of every kind, according as glad things or sad were told to each, and people crowding about those who returned to their homes with congratulations or with consolings. Of the women above all both the joys and the griefs were marked. One, met of a sudden at the very gate by her son safe and sound, they say expired in his embrace; another, to whom the death of her son had been falsely reported, sitting mournful at home, at the first sight of her returning son was undone by excess of joy. The praetors keep the senate for several days, from the rising even to the setting of the sun, in the curia, deliberating under what leader or with what forces resistance could be made to the victorious Carthaginians.

Before counsels were certain enough, of a sudden another disaster is announced: four thousand cavalry, sent with Gaius Centenius the propraetor to the colleague by Servilius the consul, who had turned their march into Umbria after the battle at Trasimene was heard of, surrounded by Hannibal. The report of that thing affected men variously. Part, their minds beset with a greater grief, accounted the recent loss of cavalry light by comparison with the former; part judged not by the thing itself that had happened, but—as in a stricken body any cause, however slight, is more felt than a graver one in a sound body—so then to a sick and stricken state whatever of adversity should fall must be reckoned, not by the greatness of the matter, but by the weakened strength, which could endure nothing that should weigh it down. And so the state took refuge in a remedy long neither desired nor applied: the naming of a dictator; and because both the consul was away, by whom alone it seemed it could be done, and through Italy beset with Punic arms it was not easy to send either messenger or letters, the people created—which never before that day had been done—Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator and Marcus Minucius Rufus as master of the horse; and to them the charge was given by the senate to strengthen the walls and towers of the city and to dispose garrisons in such places as should seem good, and to break down the bridges of the rivers: for the city must they fight, and for their household gods, since they had not been able to guard Italy.

Hannibal by a direct march through Umbria came as far as Spoletium. Thence, when, having thoroughly laid waste the country, he had set about assaulting the city, and was repulsed with great slaughter of his own men, conjecturing from the strength of a single colony less prosperously attempted how vast a mass the city of Rome was, he turned his march into the Picene country, abounding not only in plenty of every kind of produce but crammed with booty, which the greedy and the needy snatched up lavishly. There for several days a standing camp was kept, and the soldier was refreshed, after the winter marches and the marshy road and a battle won at a cost rather than light or easy. When rest enough had been given—men rejoicing rather in plunder and pillage than in ease or repose—setting out, he devastates the Praetutian and the Hadrian territory, then the Marsi and Marrucini and Paeligni, and the region nearest to Apulia about Arpi and Luceria. Gnaeus Servilius the consul, having fought light actions with the Gauls and stormed one obscure town, after he heard of the slaughter of his colleague and the army, now fearing for the walls of his fatherland, lest he be absent in the uttermost crisis, bent his march toward the city. Quintus Fabius Maximus, dictator for the second time, on the day he entered upon his magistracy, having called the senate, beginning from the gods, when he had taught the fathers that more by neglect of the ceremonies than by rashness and unskill had Gaius Flaminius the consul sinned, and that the gods themselves must be consulted as to what should be the expiations of their wrath, prevailed that—what is not commonly decreed save when foul prodigies are announced—the decemvirs should be bidden to approach the Sibylline books. They, having inspected the books of fate, reported to the fathers that the vow which for the sake of that war had been made to Mars had not been duly performed, and must be made anew and more amply; and that to Jupiter great games, and temples to Venus Erycina and to Mens, must be vowed; and that a supplication and a lectisternium be held; and that a sacred spring be vowed, if the war should be waged prosperously and the commonwealth should abide in the same state in which it had been before the war. The senate, since the care of the war would occupy Fabius, bids Marcus Aemilius the praetor see, according to the judgment of the college of pontiffs, that all those things be done in good time.

These decrees of the senate being completed, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus the pontifex maximus, when the praetor consulted the college, judges that first of all the people must be consulted concerning the sacred spring: that without the people’s bidding it could not be vowed. The people was asked in these words: "Is it your will and your command that these things be so done? If the commonwealth of the Roman people, the Quirites, shall to the next five years—as I would wish, and do vow—be kept safe and preserved through these wars, the war which the Roman people has with the Carthaginian, and the wars which there are with the Gauls who are on this side of the Alps, then let the Roman people, the Quirites, give as a gift whatever the spring shall have brought forth from the herds of swine, of sheep, of goats, of oxen, and whatsoever shall not have been consecrated, to be offered to Jupiter, from the day the senate and people shall have ordered it. Whoever shall perform it, let him perform it when he will and by what rule he will; in whatever manner he shall do it, let it be held rightly done. If that which ought to be offered dies, let it be unconsecrated, and let there be no guilt. If any man unwitting shall break or slay it, let it be no wrong. If any man shall have stolen it, let there be no guilt to the people, nor to him from whom it shall have been stolen. If on a black day he shall do it unwitting, let it be held rightly done. Whether by night or by light, whether a slave or a free man shall do it, let it be held rightly done. If it be done before the senate and people shall have ordered it to be done, let the people thereby be loosed and free." For the same cause great games were vowed, at three hundred and thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three asses and a third; and besides three hundred oxen to Jupiter, and to many other gods white oxen and the rest of the victims. The vows being duly pronounced, a supplication was proclaimed; and they went to the supplication with their wives and children, not the city multitude only but those of the country too, whom in some fortune of their own the public care also touched. Then a lectisternium was held for three days, the decemvirs of the sacred rites attending: six couches were in view—one to Jupiter and Juno, a second to Neptune and Minerva, a third to Mars and Venus, a fourth to Apollo and Diana, a fifth to Vulcan and Vesta, a sixth to Mercury and Ceres. Then temples were vowed. The temple to Venus Erycina, Quintus Fabius Maximus the dictator vowed, because it had been so set forth from the books of fate that he should vow it who had the greatest command in the state; the temple to Mens, Titus Otacilius the praetor vowed.

The divine matters being thus performed, the dictator then brought before the fathers the question of the war and the commonwealth: with what legions, and how many, they judged that he should go to meet the victorious enemy. It was decreed that he should receive the army from Gnaeus Servilius the consul; and besides should enroll from citizens and allies as many horse and foot as should seem good; and do and order all else as he should judge to be for the commonwealth’s good. Fabius said that he would add two legions to the Servilian army. These enrolled through the master of the horse, he proclaimed Tibur as the day’s meeting-place. And having put forth an edict that those whose towns and forts were unfortified should remove into safe places, and that all should depart likewise from the fields of that region through which Hannibal was to pass—their dwellings first burned and their crops spoiled, that there might be plenty of nothing—he himself set out by the Flaminian Way to meet the consul and the army; and when, at the Tiber about Ocriculum, he had descried the column and the consul advancing toward him with his horsemen, he halted, and sent a courier to tell the consul to come to the dictator without his lictors. And when he had obeyed the word, and their meeting had made, among citizens and allies, a mighty show of the dictatorship—an authority now well-nigh forgotten through age—letters were brought from the city that merchant ships carrying supplies from Ostia into Spain to the army had been taken by the Punic fleet about the harbor of Cosa. And so at once the consul was bidden set out for Ostia, and, having filled with soldiers and marines the ships that were at the city of Rome or at Ostia, pursue the enemy’s fleet and guard the shores of Italy. A great force of men had been enrolled at Rome; even freedmen who had children and were of military age had sworn the oath. Of this city army, those who were under thirty-five years were put aboard the ships, the rest left to guard the city.

The dictator, having received the consul’s army from Fulvius Flaccus the legate, came through the Sabine country to Tibur, the day he had proclaimed for the new soldiers to assemble. Thence to Praeneste, and by cross-roads he came out upon the Latin Way, whence, having reconnoitered his marches with the utmost care, he leads against the enemy, meaning to commit himself to fortune in no place save so far as necessity should compel. On the first day that he pitched his camp not far from Arpi, in sight of the enemy, no delay was made by the Carthaginian in leading out into line and offering the chance of battle. But when he sees all quiet among the enemy and the camp stirred by no uproar, railing indeed that those Martian spirits had at last been conquered out of the Romans, and that the war was openly given up and the field of valor and glory yielded, he returned to his camp; yet a silent care entered his mind, that he would now have to do with a leader by no means like Flaminius or Sempronius, and that the Romans, taught at last by their misfortunes, had sought out a leader a match for Hannibal. And the prudence of the dictator he feared at once indeed; his steadiness, not yet tried, he began to assail and to tempt by frequently shifting his camp and ravaging the fields of the allies before his eyes; and now with a quickened column he would pass out of sight, now suddenly at some bend of the road he would halt in hiding, if he might catch him come down into the level. Fabius led his column along the heights, at a moderate interval from the enemy, so as neither to let him go nor to engage him. In camp, save so far as needful use compelled, the soldier was kept; for fodder and wood neither went they few nor scattered; a post of cavalry and light-armed, arranged and drawn up against sudden alarms, made all things safe for his own soldier and dangerous for the enemy’s scattered plunderers; nor was the sum of things committed to a general hazard, and the small weights of slight skirmishes, begun from safety with a neighboring retreat, were accustoming the soldier, frightened by former disasters, to be at last less dissatisfied with his own valor and fortune. But he had Hannibal no more hostile to counsels so sound than the master of the horse, who had nothing else than that he was inferior in command to delay the headlong ruin of the commonwealth. Fierce and rash in counsel and unbridled of tongue, at first among a few, then openly before the crowd, he kept calling him slothful for cautious, timid for wary, fastening upon him vices neighbor to virtues, and, by pressing down his superior—the worst of arts, which has grown with the all-too-prosperous successes of many—he exalted himself.

Hannibal crosses from the Hirpini into Samnium, lays waste the Beneventan territory, takes the city of Telesia, and provokes too, of set purpose, the Roman leader, if perchance, kindled by so many indignities done to the allies, he might be able to draw him down to a fair contest. Among the multitude of the allies of Italian race who had been taken at Trasimene by Hannibal and let go, there were three Campanian horsemen, already enticed by many gifts and promises of Hannibal to win over the minds of their countrymen. These, bringing word that, if he moved his army into Campania, there would be a chance of seizing Capua, when the matter was greater than the authorities for it, moved Hannibal—doubtful, and by turns trusting and distrusting—yet to make for Campania out of Samnium. He let them go, having warned them again and again to confirm their promises by deeds, and bidden them return to him with more, and with some of the chief men. He himself bids his guide lead him into the Casinate country, having been taught by men skilled in the regions that, if he should seize that pass, he would cut off the Roman’s road for bringing help to the allies; but his Punic mouth, ill at speaking the Latin names, made the guide take Casilinum for Casinum, and, turned aside from his route, he came down through the Allifan and Caiatine and Calene country into the Stellate plain. There, when he had looked round upon the region shut in by mountains and rivers, he summoned the guide and asked him where in the world he was. When the man said that he would lodge that day at Casilinum, then at last the error was known, and that Casinum was far thence in another quarter; and, the guide scourged with rods and, for the terror of the rest, raised upon a cross, having fortified his camp he sent Maharbal with the cavalry into the Falernian country to plunder. That ravaging reached as far as the waters of Sinuessa. A vast havoc, and flight too and terror, the Numidians spread more widely; nor yet did that terror, though all things were ablaze with war, move the allies from their faith—plainly because they were ruled by a just and moderate sway, and did not refuse, which is the one bond of fidelity, to obey their betters.

But indeed, after the camp was pitched by the river Volturnus, and the most delightful country of Italy was being burned, and the villas everywhere smoked with the fires, while Fabius led along the ridge of Mount Massicus, then a mutiny was kindled well-nigh anew; for they had been quiet for some few days, because, when the column had been led more swiftly than usual, they had believed there was haste to keep Campania from being ravaged. But when they came to the farthest ridges of Mount Massicus, and the enemy were under their eyes, burning the dwellings of the Falernian country and of the colonists of Sinuessa, and there was no mention of battle, "Have we come hither," said Minucius, "to a spectacle, to feast our eyes on the slaughter and burning of our allies? And, if we are ashamed before no other, are we not ashamed even before these our own citizens, whom our fathers sent as colonists to Sinuessa, that this coast might be safe from the Samnite foe—the coast which now no neighbor Samnite burns, but the Punic stranger, advanced even hither, by our delay and sloth, from the farthest bounds of the world? So far—the shame of it!—are we degenerate from our fathers, that, whereas they held it a disgrace to their empire that Punic fleets should rove along that coast, we now see it filled with the enemy, made by this time the haunt of Numidians and Moors? We, who but lately, indignant that Saguntum was besieged, called to witness not men only but treaties and the gods, look on gladly while Hannibal scales the walls of a Roman colony. The smoke from the burning of villas and fields comes into our eyes and faces; our ears ring with the cries of our wailing allies, who oftener invoke our help than the gods’; and we here, like cattle, lead our army through summer pastures and trackless byways, hidden in clouds and woods. If by thus ranging over peaks and passes Marcus Furius had been minded to recover the city from the Gauls, as this new Camillus—our one dictator, sought out in our broken fortunes—prepares to recover Italy from Hannibal, Rome would be the Gauls’; which I fear lest, while we thus delay, our ancestors have so often saved it only for Hannibal and the Carthaginians. But that man, and truly a Roman, on the day that word was brought to Veii that he had been named dictator by the authority of the fathers and the command of the people—though the Janiculum was high enough for him to sit and look out upon the enemy—came down into the level, and on that very day, in the midst of the city, where now the Gallic graves are, and on the next day on this side of Gabii, cut down the legions of the Gauls. What of this? Many years after, when at the Caudine Forks we were sent under the yoke by the Samnite foe, was it by ranging over the ridges of Samnium, or by pressing and besieging and harassing Luceria, that Lucius Papirius Cursor drove off the victorious enemy and set the yoke, struck from Roman necks, upon the proud Samnite? To Gaius Lutatius but lately, what else than swiftness gave the victory, in that on the day after he saw the enemy he overwhelmed a fleet heavy with supplies, hampered by its very gear and apparatus? It is folly to believe that the war can be ended by sitting still or by vows. You must take up arms and come down into the level and meet man with man. By daring and doing has the Roman state grown great, not by these sluggish counsels which the timid call cautious." While Minucius thus spoke, as in a public harangue, a multitude of tribunes and Roman knights gathered round him, and to the ears of the soldiers too his fierce words were rolled out; and were it a matter of a soldiers’ vote, beyond doubt men declared they would prefer Minucius to Fabius for their leader.

Fabius, intent upon his own men no less than upon the enemy, first shows toward them an unconquered spirit. Although he well knows that not in his own camp only but now even at Rome his delaying was of ill repute, yet, fixed in the same tenor of counsel, he drew out the remainder of the summer, until Hannibal, baffled of the hope of the contest he had sought with all his might, now looked round for a place for winter quarters, since that region was of present, not of lasting, plenty—plantations and vineyards, and all things planted, of pleasant rather than of needful fruits. This was reported to Fabius by his scouts. And since he knew well enough that the enemy would return by the same defiles by which he had entered the Falernian country, he seizes Mount Callicula and Casilinum with modest garrisons—the city which, parted by the river Volturnus, divides the Falernian from the Campanian country; he himself leads back his army by the same ridges, having sent to reconnoiter, with four hundred horse of the allies, Lucius Hostilius Mancinus. He, one of the throng of young men who had often heard the master of the horse haranguing fiercely, advancing at first in the manner of a scout, that from a safe place he might watch the enemy, when he saw the Numidians wandering scattered through the villages and laying all waste, killed a few too as the chance offered; and at once his spirit was caught up in the contest, and the dictator’s precepts slipped from him—who had bidden him advance as far as he safely could and withdraw himself before he came into the enemy’s sight. The Numidians, one party after another, meeting him and fleeing, dragged him, with the wearying of horses and men, almost to their camp. Then Carthalo, in whose hands was the chief command of the cavalry, charging with horses spurred on, when, before he came within a javelin’s throw, he had turned the enemy, followed the fugitives some five miles at an unbroken run. Mancinus, after he saw that the enemy did not desist from pursuit and that there was no hope of escape, having exhorted his men, returned to the fight, in every part of his strength unequal. And so he himself and the chosen of the horsemen are surrounded and slain; the rest, again at headlong gallop, fled first to Cales, thence by well-nigh trackless paths to the dictator. On that day, as it chanced, Minucius had joined Fabius, sent to make secure with a garrison the pass which, above Tarracina contracted into a narrow gorge, overhangs the sea, lest from Sinuessa the Carthaginian might come by the line of the Appian Way into Roman territory. The armies joined, the dictator and master of the horse bring down their camp into the road by which Hannibal was to lead; the enemy were two miles thence.

On the next day the Carthaginians filled with their column what space of road lay between the two camps. Though the Romans had taken their stand right beneath their own rampart, on ground beyond doubt more favorable, yet the Carthaginian came up with his light-armed and his cavalry to provoke the enemy. By snatches the Carthaginians fought, charging forward and drawing back; the Roman line held its own place; the battle was slow, and by the dictator’s will rather than Hannibal’s. Two hundred fell on the Roman side, eight hundred of the enemy. Thereafter Hannibal seemed shut in, the road to Casilinum being beset, since Capua and Samnium and so many wealthy allies were bringing up supplies behind them to the Romans, while the Carthaginian must winter among the rocks of Formiae and the sands of Liternum and the meres and the bristling woods; nor did it escape Hannibal that he was being assailed with his own arts. And so, since he could not get out by way of Casilinum, and must make for the mountains and surmount the ridge of Callicula, lest anywhere the Roman should fall upon his column shut in among the valleys, he devised a mockery of the eyes, terrible in show, to baffle the enemy, and resolved at the beginning of night to steal up to the mountains. Of his deceitful plan such was the apparatus. Torches gathered everywhere from the fields, and faggots of twigs and dry brushwood, are bound fast to the horns of oxen, of which—tamed and untamed—he was driving many among the rest of the rustic plunder. Some two thousand head of oxen were made up, and the task was given to Hasdrubal to drive that herd by night, with their horns kindled, toward the mountains, and above all, if he could, over the passes beset by the enemy.

At the first darkness the camp was moved in silence; the oxen were driven some way ahead of the standards. When they came to the roots of the mountains and the narrow ways, the signal is at once given that, the horns kindled, the herds be driven against the mountains opposite; and the very terror of the flame glaring from their heads, and the heat now coming to the quick, to the very base of the horns, drove the oxen as though goaded with frenzy. At this sudden scattering, just as if the woods and mountains had been set ablaze, all the brushwood round about takes fire; and the vain tossing of their heads, fanning the flame, gave the look of men running this way and that. Those who had been posted to beset the crossing of the pass, when they descried upon the mountain-tops and above themselves certain fires, thinking themselves surrounded, quitted their post. Where the flames flashed least thickly, making as if for the safest road, the highest ridges of the mountains, they nevertheless fell in with some oxen straying from their droves. And at first, when they descried them from afar, they stood still, thunderstruck as at a marvel of beasts breathing flame; then, when the human fraud appeared, then indeed, judging it to be an ambush, with greater uproar they fling themselves into flight. They ran too upon the enemy’s light-armed; but the night, with fear made equal, held both sides from beginning the battle until daylight. Meanwhile Hannibal, his whole column led across through the pass, and some of the enemy crushed in the pass itself, pitched his camp in the Allifan country.

This uproar Fabius perceived; but, both judging it an ambush and shrinking in any case from a night battle, he kept his men within their works. At first light there was a fight beneath the ridge of the mountain, in which the light-armed, cut off from their own, the Romans would easily have overcome (for in number they were somewhat the stronger), had not a cohort of Spaniards, sent back by Hannibal for that very purpose, come up. These, more used to mountains, and apter and lighter for skirmishing among rocks and crags, both by the swiftness of their bodies and by the fashion of their arms, easily eluded, by their manner of fighting, an enemy of the plain, heavy with armor and standing fast. So, having parted on by no means equal terms, the Spaniards nearly all unhurt, the Romans with some of their men lost, made for their camp. Fabius too moved his camp, and, having crossed the pass, took post above Allifae on a high and fortified place. Then Hannibal, feigning to make for Rome through Samnium, returned, plundering as he went, even into the Paeligni; Fabius, midway between the enemy’s column and the city of Rome, led along the ridges, neither standing off nor closing. From the Paeligni the Carthaginian bent his march, and, seeking Apulia again, came to Gerunium, a city deserted by its people for fear, because part of its walls had fallen in ruins: the dictator fortified his camp in the Larinate country. Thence recalled to Rome for the sake of the sacred rites, dealing with the master of the horse not by command only but by counsel too, and well-nigh by entreaty, that he should trust more to counsel than to fortune, and should imitate himself, rather as a leader, than Sempronius and Flaminius: that he should not think nothing had been done, the summer being nearly drawn out by the mockery of the enemy; that physicians too sometimes profit more by rest than by stirring and acting; that it was no small thing to have ceased to be conquered by an enemy so often victorious, and to have breathed again after continual disasters—having thus, to no purpose, forewarned the master of the horse, he set out for Rome.

At the beginning of the summer in which these things were being done, in Spain too war was begun by land and sea. Hasdrubal, to that number of ships which he had received, equipped and made ready, from his brother, added ten; a fleet of forty ships he hands over to Himilco; and so, having set out from New Carthage, he led his ships near the land and his army along the shore, ready to engage with whatever part of his forces the enemy should meet him. Gnaeus Scipio, after he heard that the enemy had moved out of winter quarters, was at first of the same mind; then, less daring to engage by land because of the vast report of the new reinforcements, putting chosen soldiers aboard the ships, he proceeds to go to meet the enemy with a fleet of thirty-five ships. On the second day from Tarraco he came to an anchorage ten miles distant from the mouth of the river Ebro. Thence two Massiliot scouting-vessels, sent ahead, brought back that the Punic fleet lay in the mouth of the river and the camp was pitched on the bank. And so, that he might overwhelm them unforeseeing and unwary, terror spread over all at once, he weighed anchor and goes against the enemy. Spain has many towers set on high places, which they use both as watch-posts and as strongholds against robbers. From there, the enemy’s ships being first descried, the signal was given to Hasdrubal, and the uproar arose on land and in the camp before it did at the sea and at the ships—the beat of oars and the other sea-noise not yet being heard, nor the headlands opening the fleet to view—when suddenly horseman after horseman, sent by Hasdrubal, bids the men, straying on the shore and resting in their tents, expecting that day anything rather than an enemy or a battle, mount the ships in haste and take up arms: that the Roman fleet was now not far from the harbor. These things the horsemen, sent in every direction, kept commanding; soon Hasdrubal himself was present with all the army, and all things ring with diverse uproar as oarsmen and soldiers rush together into the ships, in the manner rather of men fleeing from the land than going into battle. Scarcely had all embarked when some, the hawsers cast off, are carried out to their anchors; others, lest anything hold them, cut their anchor-cables; and, all things being done hurriedly and overhastily, the sailors’ tasks are hampered by the soldiers’ gear, and by the sailors’ flurry the soldier is hindered from taking up and fitting his arms. And now the Roman not only drew near but had even ranged his ships for battle. And so the Carthaginians, troubled not more by the enemy and the fight than by their own uproar, having tried rather than joined a battle, turned their fleet to flight; and, since the mouth of the river, against the current, was by no means passable for a broad column and so many coming at once, they drove their ships ashore here and there, and—taken up, some on the shoals, some on the dry shore, part armed, part unarmed—fled to the line of their own men drawn up along the beach; yet two Punic ships had been taken in the first encounter, and four sunk.

The Romans, although the land was the enemy’s and they saw an armed line stretched out along the whole shore, following without hesitation the enemy’s panic-stricken fleet, dragged out into the deep, made fast to their sterns, all the ships that had not either broken their prows dashed against the shore or fixed their keels in the shoals; some five-and-twenty ships out of forty they took. Nor was this the fairest part of that victory, but that by one slight battle they had gained the mastery of the whole sea of that coast. And so they sailed forward with the fleet to Onusa; a landing from the ships was made. When they had taken the city by force and, taken, had plundered it, they make thence for New Carthage, and, having laid waste all the country round about, at last burned the buildings too, joined to the wall and the gates. Thence, the fleet now heavy with booty, it came to Longuntica, where a great store of esparto-grass had been gathered by Hasdrubal for naval use. What was enough for their need being taken, all the rest was burned. Nor was the coast of the mainland only skirted, but a crossing was made to the island of Ebusus. There, the city which is the head of the island having been assaulted two days in vain with the utmost toil, when it was perceived that time was being wasted to no purpose upon an idle hope, they turned to the ravaging of the country, and, several villages plundered and burned, with greater booty won than from the mainland, when they had betaken themselves to the ships, envoys came to Scipio from the Balearic Islands seeking peace. Thence the fleet was bent back and a return made to the hither part of the province, whither flocked envoys of all the peoples that dwell on this side of the Ebro, and of many of the farthest Spain too; but those who were in truth brought under the sway and command of Rome, hostages given, were more than a hundred and twenty peoples. And so, trusting well enough in his land forces too, the Roman advanced as far as the Castulo pass; Hasdrubal withdrew into Lusitania and nearer the Ocean.

Thereafter it seemed that the remainder of the summer would be quiet, and so it would have been, so far as the Carthaginian foe was concerned; but, besides that the tempers of the Spaniards themselves are restless and greedy of new things, Mandonius and Indibilis—who had before been a petty king of the Ilergetes—after the Romans withdrew from the pass to the seaboard, having stirred up their countrymen, came to plunder the pacified country of the Roman allies. Against them the military tribunes, sent with light auxiliaries by Scipio, in a slight engagement routed them like an undisciplined band, a thousand men slain, some taken, and a great part stripped of their arms. Yet this disturbance drew back Hasdrubal, withdrawing toward the Ocean, to this side of the Ebro, to guard the allies. The Punic camp was in the country of the Ilergavonenses, the Roman camp at the New Fleet, when a sudden report turned the war elsewhere. The Celtiberians, who, as the chief men of their region, had before sent envoys to meet the Romans and had given hostages, roused by a message sent from Scipio, take up arms and invade the province of the Carthaginians with a strong army. Three towns they storm; then, fighting two battles brilliantly with Hasdrubal himself, they slew fifteen thousand of the enemy and took four thousand with many military standards.

This being the state of things in Spain, Publius Scipio came into the province, sent by the senate with his command prolonged after his consulship, with thirty warships and eight thousand soldiers and a great convoy of supplies. That fleet, vast with its train of transports, descried from afar, with great gladness of citizens and allies made the harbor of Tarraco from the deep. There, the soldiery landed, Scipio set out and joined his brother, and thereafter they waged the war with one mind and counsel. And so, the Carthaginians being occupied with the Celtiberian war, they cross the Ebro without hesitation, and, no enemy seen, proceed to go to Saguntum, because there, by report, the hostages of all Spain, handed over by Hannibal, were kept in the citadel under a modest guard. This one pledge held back the minds of all the peoples of Spain, inclined to the Roman alliance, lest by the blood of their children the guilt of revolt should be paid. From that bond one man freed Spain, by a counsel more clever than faithful. Abelux there was, a Spaniard of Saguntum, noble, before this faithful to the Carthaginians; then, as the tempers of barbarians for the most part are, when fortune changed he had changed his faith. But, judging that a deserter coming to the enemy without the betrayal of some great matter is nothing but one cheap and infamous person, he set himself to make of himself the greatest possible profit to his new allies. And so, having surveyed all that the fortune of his power could effect, he set his mind above all on the handing over of the hostages, judging that this one thing would most win for the Romans the friendship of the chief men of Spain. But since he knew well enough that the keepers of the hostages would do nothing without the bidding of Bostar the commandant, he approaches Bostar himself by craft. Bostar kept his camp outside the city on the very shore, to bar approach on that side to the Romans. There, having drawn him aside into a secret place, he warns him, as if he knew it not, in what state things stood: that fear had restrained the minds of the Spaniards to that day, because the Romans were far off; now the Roman camp was on this side of the Ebro, a safe citadel and refuge for those wishing a change; therefore those whom fear did not hold must be bound fast by kindness and favor. To Bostar, wondering and asking what that sudden gift in so great a matter could be, "Send the hostages back," he said, "to their cities. That will be welcome both privately to the parents, whose name is greatest in their own cities, and publicly to the peoples. Each man wishes to be trusted, and trust given for the most part itself binds trust. The service of restoring the hostages to their homes I demand for myself, that by my labor and outlay too I may help my own counsel, and to a thing by its own nature welcome may add what further favor I can." When he had persuaded a man not, for the rest of Punic tempers, shrewd, going forth by night secretly to the enemy’s outposts, and meeting certain Spanish auxiliaries and by them led to Scipio, he sets forth what he brings; and, faith taken and given, and place and time appointed for the handing over of the hostages, he returns to Saguntum. He spent the following day with Bostar in receiving his charge for the doing of the business. Dismissed, when he had resolved to go by night, that he might cheat the enemy’s watches, at the hour agreed with them he roused the keepers of the children and set out, and, as though unwitting, leads them into the ambush prepared by his own fraud. They were brought to the Roman camp; all the rest about the restoring of the hostages, as had been settled with Bostar, was done in the same order as if the business were so done in the name of the Carthaginians. The favor toward the Romans was somewhat greater, in an equal case, than the Carthaginians’ would have been. For those, men found harsh in prosperity, fortune and fear might seem to have softened: the Roman, at his first coming, unknown before, had made his beginning from a deed merciful and generous, and Abelux, a man of prudence, seemed not in vain to have changed allies. And so with vast accord all looked toward revolt; and arms would at once have been stirred, had not winter—which forced the Romans too and the Carthaginians to withdraw under roof—come between.

These things were done in Spain in the second summer of the Punic war, while in Italy the clever delaying of Fabius had made a little interval in the Roman disasters; which, as it held Hannibal anxious with no slight care—perceiving that the Romans had at last chosen a master of soldiering who would wage the war by reason, not by fortune—so it was despised among the citizens, armed and gowned alike, especially after, in his absence, by the rashness of the master of the horse, a battle had been fought with an issue I would more truly call glad than prosperous. There had been added two things to swell the envy of the dictator: one by the fraud and guile of Hannibal, in that, when the dictator’s land had been pointed out to him by deserters, all around being leveled with the ground, from that one estate he bade iron and fire and all violence be withheld, so that it might seem the wage of some secret compact; the other by his own act, at first perhaps doubtful, because the senate’s authority was not awaited in it, but at the last turned, without ambiguity, to his greatest praise. In the exchange of captives—which had been done thus in the First Punic War—it had been agreed between the leaders, Roman and Carthaginian, that whichever side received more than it gave should pay two pounds and a half of silver for each soldier. When the Roman had received two hundred and forty-seven more than the Carthaginian, and the silver owed for them, the matter being often tossed about in the senate, because he had not consulted the fathers, was paid out too slowly, he sent his son Quintus to Rome, sold the land left unharmed by the enemy, and discharged the public faith at private cost. Hannibal was in standing camp before the walls of Gerunium, a city captured and burned by him, of which he had left a few buildings for the use of granaries. Thence he sent two parts of the army to forage; with the third, in light order, he himself was on guard, at once a protection to the camp and looking about lest from any quarter an attack be made on the foragers.

The Roman army was then in the Larinate country; over it presided Minucius the master of the horse, the dictator having set out, as was said before, for the city. But the camp, which had been pitched on a high and safe place, is now brought down into the plain; and counsels were stirred, after the leader’s temper, hotter—that an attack should be made either on the foragers straying abroad or on the camp left with a light guard. Nor did it escape Hannibal that with the change of leader the method of the war was changed, and that the enemy would conduct the matter more fiercely than wisely; he himself, however—which one would least believe, when the enemy was nearer—sent a third part of the soldiers to forage, two parts kept in the camp; then he moved the camp itself nearer the enemy, some two miles from Gerunium, onto a hillock in the enemy’s view, that they might know him intent on guarding the foragers, if any force should be brought against them. Thence there appeared a hillock nearer to him and overhanging the very camp of the Romans; and to seize it, if one went openly by day—because beyond doubt the enemy, by a shorter way, would forestall him—Numidians sent secretly by night took it. As they held the place, the Romans, despising their fewness, having dislodged them the next day, transfer their own camp thither. And so a scant space of ground lay between rampart and rampart, and that very space the Roman line had nearly filled, when at the same time, through the rear of the camp, the cavalry with the light-armed, sent out against the foragers, made wide slaughter and flight of the enemy scattered abroad. Nor did Hannibal dare to contend in line, because, with so great fewness—part of the army was now away, with famine weighing on him—he could scarcely guard the camp if it were assaulted; and now by Fabius’s arts, sitting and delaying, he was waging the war, and had drawn back his men into the former camp, which was before the walls of Gerunium. Some authorities say that it was fought too in regular line, with standards joined: that at the first onset the Carthaginian was routed up to his camp; then a sally being made, the terror was suddenly turned upon the Romans; and that by the coming of Numerius Decimius the Samnite the battle was restored. This man, foremost in birth and riches, not of Bovianum only—whence he was—but of all Samnium, leading by the dictator’s order eight thousand foot and some five hundred horse into the camp, when he appeared at Hannibal’s rear, presented to either side the look of a new reinforcement coming with Quintus Fabius from Rome. Hannibal, fearing too some ambush, drew back his men; the Roman, following, with the Samnite’s help, stormed two forts that day. Six thousand of the enemy were slain, only about five hundred of the Romans; yet, in a loss so nearly equal, an empty rumor of a brilliant victory, with still emptier letters of the master of the horse, was carried to Rome.

Of these matters it was very often debated both in the senate and in the assembly. While the state rejoiced, the dictator alone, trusting neither the rumor nor the letters, said that, even were all true, he feared prosperity more than adversity; then Marcus Metilius, tribune of the plebs, declares that this one thing in truth could not be borne—that the dictator had not only present hindered a thing being well done, but, absent, hindered even a thing done, and in protracting the war was diligently wasting time, that he might be the longer in his magistracy and alone hold command both at Rome and in the army. For of the consuls, one had fallen in the line, the other, on the pretense of pursuing the Punic fleet, had been sent far from Italy; two praetors were taken up by Sicily and Sardinia, of which neither province at this time needed a praetor; Marcus Minucius the master of the horse, lest he see the enemy, lest he do any deed of war, was kept well-nigh in custody. And so, by Hercules, not Samnium only—which had now, as a land beyond the Ebro, been yielded to the Carthaginians—but the Campanian and Calene and Falernian country too had been laid waste, while the dictator sat at Casilinum and guarded his own land with the legions of the Roman people. The army longing to fight, and the master of the horse, had been kept shut up well-nigh within the rampart; their arms had been taken from them as from captive enemies. At last, when the dictator had departed thence, as if freed from a siege, having gone out beyond the rampart, they had routed and put to flight the enemy. For which causes, if the old spirit of the Roman plebs were there, he would have boldly proposed the abrogation of Quintus Fabius’s command; now he would publish a modest bill, for making equal the right of the master of the horse and of the dictator. Nor yet, even so, should Quintus Fabius be sent to the army before he had filled the place of Gaius Flaminius with a consul. The dictator held aloof from the assemblies, in a business by no means popular. Not even in the senate was he heard, then, with ears fair enough, when he extolled the enemy in words and laid the disasters of two years to the rashness and unskill of the leaders, and said that the master of the horse must render an account for having fought against his order. If the sum of command and counsel were in his own hands, he would soon bring it to pass that men should know that with a good commander fortune was of small moment, that mind and reason were master, and that to have saved an army in season and without dishonor was a greater glory than to have slain many thousands of the enemy. Such speeches being made to no purpose, and Marcus Atilius Regulus created consul, lest he be present to contend over the right of command, on the day before that on which the day for proposing the bill should come, he went away by night to the army. When at daybreak there was a council of the plebs, a silent envy of the dictator and favor toward the master of the horse swayed their minds, rather than that men dared enough to come forward to urge what was commonly approved; and, though favor was uppermost, authority nevertheless was wanting to the bill. One man was found to support the law, Gaius Terentius Varro, who the year before had been praetor, sprung from a station not only humble but even base. His father, they say, was a butcher who sold his own meat, and used his son in this very servile ministry of that trade.

This young man, as soon as the money left by his father from that kind of gain had raised his spirits to the hope of a more liberal fortune, and the gown and the forum pleased him, by bawling on behalf of base men and causes against the substance and the good name of honest folk, came first into the people’s notice, then to honors; and, having passed through the quaestorship and two aedileships, the plebeian and the curule, and at last the praetorship too, now, when he was lifting his spirits to the hope of the consulship, he sought, with no little cunning, the breeze of popular favor out of the dictator’s unpopularity, and alone carried off the credit of the plebiscite. All—both those at Rome and those in the army, friends and foes alike, save the dictator himself—took that bill as proposed to insult him. He himself, with the same gravity of spirit with which he had borne his enemies arraigning him before the multitude, bore also the injury of the people raging against him; and, having received, on his very journey, the letters concerning the equalizing of the command, trusting well enough that the art of commanding had by no means been equalized with the right of command, he returned to the army with a spirit unconquered by citizens and enemies alike.

But Minucius, who even before had been scarcely tolerable in prosperity and in the favor of the crowd, then indeed beyond measure and beyond modesty boasted, not more of Hannibal conquered by him than of Quintus Fabius: that he, the one leader sought out in hard times and matched against Hannibal, the greater to the lesser, the dictator to the master of the horse—which no memory of the annals records—had by the people’s command been made equal, in the same state in which masters of the horse had been wont to tremble and shudder at the dictator’s rods and axes; so greatly had his own good fortune and valor shone forth. Therefore he would follow his own fortune, if the dictator persisted in a delaying and sloth condemned by the judgment of gods and men. And so, on the first day that he met with Quintus Fabius, he says that first of all it must be settled in what way they should use a command made equal: that he thought it best either on alternate days, or, if longer intervals were preferred, in divided periods, that the supreme right and command should be the other’s, that he might be a match for the enemy not only in counsel but in strength too, if he had any occasion of doing some deed. To Quintus Fabius this was by no means pleasing: that everything would have such fortune as his colleague’s rashness should have; that command had been shared with another, not taken from him; and so he would never willingly yield, in the part where he could, the counsel of conducting affairs, nor would he divide with him the times or days of command, but the army, and would by his own counsels, since not all was permitted, save what he could. So he prevailed that they should divide the legions between them, as is the custom with consuls. The first and the fourth fell to Minucius, the second and the third to Fabius. Likewise they divided the cavalry in equal number, and the auxiliaries of the allies and the Latin name. The master of the horse wished to be separated in camp too.

Thence a double gladness was Hannibal’s; for nothing of what was done among the enemy escaped him, both by deserters telling much and by his own men scouting it out: for he would both, in his own way, catch the unfettered rashness of Minucius, and half the strength had departed from the cleverness of Fabius. There was a hillock between the camp of Minucius and the Carthaginians, which whoever seized would beyond doubt make the ground more unfavorable to the enemy. This Hannibal wished not so much to take without a contest—though that was worth the pains—as to draw on, through it, a cause of contest with Minucius, who, he knew well enough, would always run to oppose him. All the ground between was at first sight useless to an ambusher, because it had nothing not only of woodland but not even of bramble-cover; in very truth it was made for hiding an ambush, the more because in a bare valley no such fraud could be feared; and there were in its windings hollow rocks, so that some of them could hold two hundred armed men. In these lurking-places, as many as could aptly beset each spot, five thousand foot and horse are hidden. Yet, lest anywhere either the movement of some man rashly straying forth or the flash of arms should disclose the fraud in a valley so open, having sent a few at first light to seize the hillock we spoke of before, he turned away the eyes of the enemy. At the very first sight their fewness was despised, and each man for himself demanded that the enemy be driven thence and the place seized; the leader himself, among the most stolid and the most fierce, calls to arms and rails at the enemy with idle threats. At first he sends out the light-armed, then the cavalry in a packed column; last, when he saw supports sent to the enemy too, with his legions drawn up he advances. And Hannibal, sending to his men, as they struggled, one reinforcement of foot and horse after another as the contest grew, had now filled out a regular line, and with all their strength on both sides the struggle goes on. The Roman light-armed first, coming up from the lower ground against the hillock already seized, beaten and thrust down, brought terror upon the cavalry coming up behind, and fled back to the standards of the legions. The line of foot alone, amid the panic-stricken, was undismayed, and seemed, if it were a fair and straight fight, by no means likely to be unequal; so much spirit had the success of a few days before given; but the ambushers, rising suddenly, made such an uproar and terror, charging upon both flanks and the rear, that neither spirit for the fight nor hope of flight was left to any man.

Then Fabius, when he had heard the first shout of the panic-stricken, then descried from afar the line in confusion, said: "So it is; fortune has caught rashness not faster than I feared. Made equal in command to Fabius, he sees Hannibal his superior both in valor and in fortune. But there will be another time for chiding and being angry: now bear the standards beyond the rampart; let us wring victory from the enemy, and from our citizens a confession of their error." When, a great part being now slain, and others looking round for flight, the Fabian line suddenly showed itself, as though let down from heaven, to their help. And so, before it came within a javelin’s throw or joined hand to hand, it held back both its own men from headlong flight and the enemy from over-fierce fighting. Those who, their ranks broken, had been scattered loose, fled together from every side to the intact line; those who in greater numbers at once had turned their backs, wheeling round upon the enemy and rolling themselves into a ring, now step by step drew back their foot, now, massed together, stood fast. And now well-nigh one line had been made of the beaten and the intact army, and they were bearing their standards against the enemy, when the Carthaginian sounded the retreat, Hannibal openly avowing that, while he had conquered Minucius, he himself had been conquered by Fabius. So, the greater part of the day passed through the varying fortune of the day, when they had returned to camp, Minucius, having called the soldiers together, said: "Often, soldiers, have I heard that the first man is he who himself takes counsel what is fitting, the second he who obeys one who counsels well; that he who can neither take counsel himself nor obey another is of the lowest understanding. To us, since the first lot of spirit and understanding has been denied, let us hold the second and the middle, and, while we learn to command, let us bring ourselves to obey the prudent. Let us join camps with Fabius. When we have borne our standards to his headquarters, where I shall call him father—which is worthy of his kindness toward us and of his majesty—you, soldiers, shall salute as patrons those whose arms but now sheltered your right hands; and, if nothing else, this day will at least have given us the glory of grateful spirits."

The signal given, the order is thereupon shouted that the baggage be gathered up. Setting out and advancing in column into the dictator’s camp, they turned to wonder both him and all who were about him. When the standards were set before the tribunal, the master of the horse, advancing before the rest, having called Fabius father, and saluted his whole gathered throng of soldiers as patrons, said: "To my parents, dictator, to whom but now I matched you by the name which in speech I can, I owe only my life; to you both my own safety, and that of all these. And so the plebiscite, by which I was burdened rather than honored, I first repeal and abrogate; and—may it be happy for these your armies, and for you and for me, the saved and the saviour—I return under your command and auspice, and restore these standards and legions. Do you, I pray you, appeased, bid me hold my mastership of the horse, and these their several ranks." Then right hands were joined, and, the assembly dismissed, the soldiers were kindly and hospitably invited by acquaintances and strangers, and a glad day was made out of one but a little before exceedingly sad and well-nigh accursed. At Rome, when the report of the thing done was brought, then confirmed by letters not more of the commanders themselves than of the common soldiers from each army, each man for himself bore Maximus to the sky with praises. Equal glory there was with Hannibal and the Carthaginian enemy; and then at last they felt that the war was with Romans and in Italy; for two years before they had so despised both the Roman leaders and the soldiers that they scarce believed it was war with the same people whose terrible fame they had received from their fathers. They say too that Hannibal, returning from the line, said that the cloud which was wont to sit upon the ridges of the mountains had at last, with a storm, given rain.

While these things were doing in Italy, Gnaeus Servilius Geminus the consul, with a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships, having sailed round the coast of Sardinia and Corsica and taken hostages from both, crossed over into Africa; and, before he made landings on the mainland, having laid waste the island of Menix, and, from the inhabitants of Cercina—lest their land too be burned and plundered—having received ten talents of silver, he approached the shores of Africa and put his forces ashore. Thence the soldiers and the marines, led out to plunder the country, were scattered abroad just as if they were taking booty in islands of cultivators that wanted defenders. And so, rashly carried into an ambush, when, straggling, they were surrounded by men in close array, and, ignorant of the ground, by men who knew it, with much slaughter and foul flight they were driven back to the ships. About a thousand men, with Tiberius Sempronius Blaesus the quaestor, were lost; the fleet, cast loose in alarm from the shores full of the enemy, held its course to Sicily, and was handed over at Lilybaeum to Titus Otacilius the praetor, to be brought back to Rome by his legate Publius Cincius. He himself, having set out on foot through Sicily, crossed the strait into Italy, summoned by the letters of Quintus Fabius—both he and his colleague Marcus Atilius—that they should receive the armies from him, his command, now of nearly six months, being well-nigh run out. Almost all the annals record that Fabius as dictator did the deeds against Hannibal; Coelius even writes that he was the first dictator created by the people. But it escaped both Coelius and the rest that the right of naming a dictator belonged to the one consul, Gnaeus Servilius, who was then far away in the province of Gaul; and that, because the state, now terrified by the disaster, could not wait for that delay, it was come to this, that one should be created by the people to be in the dictator’s stead; and that thereafter the deeds done and the leader’s signal glory, and his descendants enlarging the title of his portrait-mask, easily prevailed that he who had been created in the dictator’s stead should be believed a dictator.

The consuls—Atilius having received the Fabian army, Geminus Servilius the Minucian—their winter-quarters fortified in good time, waged the war, for what was left of autumn, by the arts of Fabius, with the utmost concord between them. To Hannibal, going out to forage, they were at hand in various places, opportunely, plucking at his column and catching the stragglers; into the hazard of a general engagement, which the enemy sought by every art, they did not come; and so far was Hannibal driven by want that, had he not feared he must depart with the look of flight, he would have made for Gaul again, no hope being left of feeding his army in those places, if the consuls, following him, should wage the war by the same arts. When, winter now hindering, the war had come to a stand at Gerunium, envoys from Naples came to Rome. By them forty golden bowls of great weight were brought into the Curia, and words were made to this effect: that they knew the treasury of the Roman people was being drained by the war, and, since it was being waged alike for the cities and lands of the allies and for the head and citadel of Italy, the city of Rome and her empire, the Neapolitans had judged it fair that, of what gold had been left them by their ancestors, both for the adornment of their temples and for a help in fortune, they should with it aid the Roman people. If they thought there were any help in them, they would have offered it with the same zeal. The Roman fathers and people would do them a welcome thing if they had counted all the Neapolitans’ goods their own, and judged them worthy from whom they would receive a gift greater and ampler in the spirit and goodwill of those who gave it gladly than in the thing itself. Thanks were given to the envoys for their munificence and care; the bowl that was of the least weight was accepted.

In those same days a Carthaginian spy, who for two years had escaped notice, was caught at Rome, and, his hands cut off, let go; and five-and-twenty slaves were set upon the cross, because they had conspired in the Campus Martius; to the informer freedom was given, and twenty thousand asses of heavy bronze. Envoys too were sent both to Philip king of the Macedonians, to demand Demetrius of Pharos, who, conquered in war, had fled to him, and others into the country of the Ligurians, to expostulate that they had aided the Carthaginian with their resources and auxiliaries, and at the same time to look from near at hand at what was being done among the Boii and Insubres. To Pineus too, king of the Illyrians, envoys were sent, to demand the tribute whose day had passed, or, if he wished the day put off, to receive hostages. So, even though a vast war was on their necks, the care of no matter anywhere on earth, not even a far-off one, escaped the Romans. It came too into a matter of religion that the temple of Concord—which, during a military mutiny two years before, Lucius Manlius the praetor in Gaul had vowed—had not to that time been let out to contract. And so duumvirs created for that business by Marcus Aemilius the city praetor, Gaius Pupius and Caeso Quinctius Flamininus, let out the temple to be made on the citadel. By the same praetor, by decree of the senate, letters were sent to the consuls, that, if it seemed good to them, one of them should come to Rome to create consuls; that he would proclaim the elections for the day they should bid. To this it was answered by the consuls that without harm to the commonwealth one could not withdraw from the enemy; and so the elections should rather be held by an interrex than that one consul be called away from the war. It seemed to the fathers more proper that a dictator be named by a consul for the holding of the elections. There was named Lucius Veturius Philo; he named Marcus Pomponius Matho master of the horse. They having been created with a flaw, and bidden abdicate their magistracy on the fourteenth day, the matter came back to an interregnum.

The consuls had their command prolonged for the year. As interreges the fathers put forward Gaius Claudius Cento, son of Appius, then Publius Cornelius Asina. In his interregnum the elections were held with great contention of the fathers and the plebs. Gaius Terentius Varro—a man of his own kind, made dear to the plebs by his baiting of the chief men and by popular arts, shining with another’s unpopularity since the resources of Quintus Fabius and the dictatorial command had been shaken—the crowd strove to draw out to the consulship; the fathers with all their might opposed, lest men grow used, by baiting them, to make themselves their equals. Quintus Baebius Herennius, tribune of the plebs, kinsman of Gaius Terentius, by arraigning not the senate only but the augurs too—because they had prevented the dictator from completing the elections—through the envy of these won favor for his candidate: by men of noble birth, seeking war for many years, Hannibal had been brought into Italy; by the same men, though the war could be ended, by fraud it was being dragged out. With four legions all together it could be fought, as appeared from the fact that Marcus Minucius, in Fabius’s absence, had fought with success; two legions had been thrown to the enemy for slaughter, then snatched from the very slaughter, that he might be called father and patron who had first prevented the Romans from conquering before they were conquered. The consuls thereafter, by the Fabian arts, when they could end the war, had dragged it out. That compact was struck among all the nobles, and they would have no end of war before they had made a consul truly plebeian—that is, a new man; for the plebeian nobles were now initiated into the same rites, and had begun to despise the plebs from the time they ceased to be despised by the fathers. To whom was it not plain that this had been done and sought, that an interregnum should be entered upon, so that the elections might be in the fathers’ power? That the consuls had sought this by lingering, both of them, at the army; that afterward, because, against their will, a dictator had been named for the elections’ sake, it had been carried that a dictator be made flawed through the augurs. So they had the interregnum; the one consulship, at least, was the Roman plebs’; the people would hold it free, and would give it to him who would rather truly conquer than long command.

When the plebs had been kindled by these speeches, though three patricians sought it—Publius Cornelius Merenda, Lucius Manlius Volso, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus—and two plebeians of families now noble, Gaius Atilius Serranus and Quintus Aelius Paetus, of whom one was pontiff, the other augur, Gaius Terentius alone is created consul, that the elections might be in his hand for proposing a colleague. Then the nobility, having found that there had been too little strength in his rivals, drives Lucius Aemilius Paulus—who had been consul with Marcus Livius, and from the condemnation of his colleague had escaped well-nigh scorched, hostile to the plebs—long and much refusing, to stand. He, on the next election-day, all who had contended with Varro giving way, is given to the consul as a match rather to oppose him than as a colleague. Then the elections of praetors were held. There were created Marcus Pomponius Matho and Publius Furius Philus; to Philus the city jurisdiction at Rome fell by lot, to Pomponius that between Roman citizens and foreigners; two praetors were added, Marcus Claudius Marcellus for Sicily, Lucius Postumius Albinus for Gaul. All were created in their absence, nor was to any of them, save Terentius the consul, entrusted an office he had not already borne before, several brave and energetic men being passed over, because at such a time it seemed that to no one should a new magistracy be entrusted.

The armies too were multiplied; but how great forces of foot and horse were added, the authorities so vary, both in the number and in the kind of forces, that I would scarcely dare affirm anything certain enough. Ten thousand new soldiers, some have written, were enrolled for a supplement; others, four new legions, that they might wage the war with eight legions; in number too of foot and horse the legions were increased, a thousand foot and a hundred horse being added to each, so that there should be five thousand foot, three hundred horse; the allies furnished a double number of horse, and matched the foot; eighty-seven thousand two hundred armed men were in the Roman camp, some authorities say, when the battle was fought at Cannae. In this there is no disagreement at all, that the matter was conducted with greater effort and onset than in the former years, because the dictator had given hope that the enemy could be conquered. But before the new legions moved their standards from the city, the decemvirs were bidden to approach and inspect the books, on account of men everywhere terrified by new prodigies. For both at Rome on the Aventine and at Aricia it had been reported, about the same time, that it had rained stones; and that in the Sabine country the statues had run with much gore, and the waters of Caere had flowed mingled; that indeed—which had happened the oftener—terrified the more; and on the arched road that led to the Campus several men had been struck from heaven and killed. Those prodigies were expiated from the books. Envoys from Paestum brought golden bowls to Rome. To them, as to the Neapolitans, thanks were given; the gold was not accepted.

In those same days a fleet from Hiero approached Ostia with a great supply. The envoys, brought into the senate, announced that the slaughter of Gaius Flaminius the consul and the army, when it was brought to him, King Hiero had taken so hard that by no disaster of his own or of his kingdom could he have been more moved. And so, though he knew well that the greatness of the Roman people was well-nigh more to be admired in adversity than in prosperity, yet he had sent all the things wherewith wars are wont to be aided by good and faithful allies; and that they should not refuse to receive them, he earnestly begged the conscript fathers. First of all, for an omen’s sake, he was bringing a golden Victory of two hundred and twenty pounds’ weight. Let them receive it and hold it and have it for their own and forever. He had brought too three hundred thousand pecks of wheat, two hundred thousand of barley, that supplies should not fail, and would bring up whatever further was needed, to wherever they should bid. He knew that the Roman people used no soldier or horseman save of the Roman and the Latin name; auxiliaries of light arms, even foreign, he had seen in the Roman camp. And so he had sent a thousand archers and slingers, a band apt against the Balearians and the Moors and other peoples that fight with the missile weapon. To these gifts they added counsel too, that the praetor to whom the province of Sicily should fall should carry a fleet over into Africa, that the enemy too might have war in their own land, and less respite be given them to send reinforcements to Hannibal. By the senate it was thus answered to the king: that Hiero was a good man and an excellent ally, and with one unbroken tenor, from the time he came into the friendship of the Roman people, had cherished his faith and aided the Roman cause at every time and place munificently. That this was, as it ought to be, welcome to the Roman people. Gold brought by certain cities too, the kindness of the thing accepted, the Roman people had not accepted; the Victory and the omen they accepted, and to that goddess they gave and dedicated a seat, the Capitol, the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, that, hallowed in that citadel of the city of Rome, willing and propitious, she might be firm and steadfast for the Roman people. The slingers and archers and the grain were handed over to the consuls. To the fleet of fifty ships that was with Titus Otacilius the propraetor in Sicily, twenty-five quinqueremes were added, and he was permitted, if he judged it to be for the commonwealth’s good, to carry it over into Africa.

The levy finished, the consuls waited a few days while the soldiers should come from the allies and the Latin name. Then—which had never before been done—the soldiers were bound by an oath administered by the military tribunes; for to that day there had been nothing but the sacramentum, that they would assemble at the consuls’ bidding and not depart without bidding; and, when they had assembled for forming into decuries or centuries, of their own will the horsemen formed into decuries among themselves, and the foot into centuries, swore together that for flight or fear they would not depart nor fall back from the ranks, save to take up or fetch a weapon, and either to strike an enemy or to save a citizen. This was carried over from a voluntary compact among themselves to the tribunes and the lawful administering of the oath. The assemblies, before the standards were moved from the city, of the consul Varro were many and fierce, denouncing that the war had been fetched into Italy by the nobles and would abide in the vitals of the commonwealth, if it had more Fabii for commanders; he would finish it on the day he saw the enemy. Of his colleague Paulus there was one assembly, the day before he set out from the city, truer than welcome to the people, in which nothing was said harshly against Varro save only that he wondered at this—how a leader, before he knew either his own or the enemy’s army, the lie of the ground or the nature of the region, already now, gowned in the city, knew what he would have to do in arms, and could even foretell the day on which he would fight a pitched battle with the enemy: that he himself would not, before its time, untimely forestall the counsels which circumstances give to men rather than men to circumstances; that he prayed that what was done warily and advisedly might turn out prosperously enough; that rashness, besides that it was foolish, had also to that point been unlucky. And of his own accord it appeared that he would set the safe before the swift counsels; and, that he might the more steadfastly persevere in it, Quintus Fabius Maximus is reported to have addressed him thus, as he set out.

"If, Lucius Aemilius, you either had a colleague like yourself—which I should prefer—or were yourself like your colleague, my speech would be superfluous; for two good consuls, even without my telling, would do everything for the commonwealth’s good by your own honor, and two bad ones would receive neither my words in your ears nor my counsels in your minds. But now, looking on your colleague and on you, such a man as you are, all my speech is with you, whom I see will be in vain both a good man and a citizen, if, the commonwealth limping on the one side, bad counsels shall have the same right and power as good. For you err, Lucius Paulus, if you think there will be less of contention for you with Gaius Terentius than with Hannibal; I know not whether the one will not remain a more dangerous adversary than the other an enemy; with the one you will contend only in the line, with the other in all places and at all times; against Hannibal and his legions you must fight with your horse and foot, Varro as a leader will assail you with your own soldiers. Let the memory of Gaius Flaminius too, for the omen’s sake, be far from you. Yet he began to rage only as consul, and in his province, and at the army: this man, before he sought the consulship, then in seeking the consulship, now too as consul, before he sees a camp or an enemy, is mad. And he who already now stirs up such storms by tossing about battles and battle-lines among the gowned, what do you think he will do among the armed youth, and where word is straightway followed by deed? And yet, if this man, as he threatens he will do, shall fight at once, either I know nothing of soldiering, of this kind of war, of this enemy, or some place more famous than Trasimene will be made by our disasters. There is no time for boasting against one man, and I would rather have exceeded measure by despising glory than by seeking it; but the matter stands thus: there is one method of waging war against Hannibal, that by which I waged it. Nor does the issue only teach this—that is the master of fools—but the same reasoning, which was and will be, so long as the same things remain, is unchangeable. We wage war in Italy, in our own seat and soil; all around is full of citizens and allies; with arms, men, horses, supplies they help us and will help—that proof of their faith they have already given in our adversities; better, more prudent, more steadfast does time and the day make us. Hannibal, on the contrary, is in a foreign, in a hostile land, among all things unfriendly and hostile, far from home, from fatherland; neither by land nor by sea is there peace for him; no cities receive him, no walls; nothing of his own does he see anywhere; he lives by plunder from day to day; scarcely a third part of that army has he with which he crossed the river Ebro; more have been consumed by famine than by the sword; nor for these few is there now food enough. Do you doubt, then, that by sitting still we shall overcome a man who grows old by the day, who has no supplies, no reinforcement, no money? How long has he sat before Gerunium, a needy fort of Apulia, as though before the walls of Carthage? But I will not boast of myself, even against you: see how Servilius and Atilius, the last consuls, made sport of him. This is the one road of safety, Lucius Paulus, which your citizens will make difficult and dangerous to you more than your enemies. For your own soldiers will wish the same as the enemy’s; the same will Varro the Roman consul desire as Hannibal the Punic commander. Against two leaders you must stand alone. And you will stand, if against the fame and rumors of men you stand firm enough, if neither your colleague’s empty glory nor your own false ill-repute moves you. Truth, they say too often, is hard pressed, but never put out. He who has scorned glory shall have the true. Let them call you timid for cautious, slow for considerate, unwarlike for skilled in war. I had rather a wise enemy feared you than that foolish citizens praised you. Hannibal will despise one who dares all, will fear one who does nothing rashly. Nor do I urge that nothing be done, but that, as you act, reason lead you, not fortune; be ever in your own power and master of your own; be armed and intent; fail not your own opportunity, nor give the enemy his. To one who does not hurry, all will be clear and certain; haste is improvident and blind."

Against this the consul’s reply was by no means glad, rather confessing that what he said was true than easy to do; that the master of the horse had been intolerable to the dictator; what strength and authority would a consul have against a seditious and rash colleague? That he himself had escaped half-scorched the popular conflagration of his former consulship; that he prayed all might turn out prosperously; but that, if any adversity fell, he would offer his head to the enemy’s weapons rather than to the votes of angry citizens. From this conversation, they record, Paulus set out, the chief of the fathers escorting him; the plebeian consul his own plebs escorted, a throng more conspicuous, since dignities were wanting. When they came to the camp, the new army being mingled with the old, the camp made in two parts, that the new and smaller might be nearer Hannibal, and in the old should be the greater part and all the strength of the forces, of the consuls of the year before they sent Marcus Atilius, pleading his age, to Rome; Geminus Servilius, in the smaller camp, they set over a Roman legion and two thousand foot and horse of the allies. Hannibal, although he saw the enemy’s forces increased by a full half, yet at the coming of the consuls rejoiced wonderfully. For not only was nothing left over of the supplies snatched from day to day, but there was not even anything left whence he might snatch, all the grain everywhere, after the country was too little safe, having been carried into the fortified cities, so that scarcely ten days’ grain—which was learned afterward—was left, and a going-over of the Spaniards, for want, had been ready, had the ripeness of the times been awaited.

But to the rashness of the consul and his overhasty temper fortune gave material too, in that, in keeping off the plunderers, in a chance battle, sprung rather from the soldiers’ rushing forward than from preparation or the commanders’ order, the fighting was by no means equal for the Carthaginians. About one thousand seven hundred were slain, no more than a hundred of the Romans and allies killed. But as the victors followed in disorder, the fear of ambush was opposed by Paulus the consul, whose command it was that day—for they ruled by turns—while Varro chafed and cried out that the enemy had been let go out of their hands, and that the war could have been ended, had there been no shrinking. Hannibal bore that loss by no means too bitterly; nay rather he believed it was, as it were, a baited rashness of the fiercer consul and most of all of the new soldiers. And all things of the enemy were known to him no otherwise than his own: that unlike and discordant men ruled, that well-nigh two parts of the army were raw soldiers. And so, judging that he had place and time apt for an ambush, on the next night, the soldier carrying with him nothing but his arms, he leaves his camp full of all fortune, public and private, and beyond the nearest mountains, on the left, hides his foot drawn up, on the right his horse, and leads his baggage through the valley between, that he might overwhelm the enemy, occupied and hampered in plundering the camp as though deserted by its masters’ flight. Many fires were left in the camp, that the belief might be made—while he himself with his flight gained a longer space—that he had wished, by a false image of the camp, to hold the consuls in their places, as he had baffled Fabius the year before.

When it grew light, first the outposts withdrawn, then, as men came nearer, the unwonted silence bred wonder. Then, the solitude in the camp sufficiently ascertained, there is a rush to the headquarters of the consuls, men announcing the enemy’s flight, so panic-stricken that they had left the camp with the tents standing, and, that the flight might be the more hidden, had left many fires too. A shout thereupon arose that they should bid the standards be borne forth and lead to pursue the enemy and forthwith plunder the camp; and the one consul was as it were one of the soldier throng: Paulus said again and again that they must look ahead and beware; at last, when otherwise he could withstand neither the sedition nor the leader of the sedition, he sends Marius Statilius, prefect, with a Lucanian squadron, to reconnoiter. He, when he had ridden up to the gates, the rest bidden halt outside the works, himself with two horsemen entered the rampart, and, having spied out all with care, reports back that it was assuredly an ambush: that the fires were left in the part of the camp that faced toward the enemy; the tents open, and all things precious left in plain view; the silver, in some places, he had seen scattered carelessly along the ways, as though cast out for plunder. The things that had been announced to deter their minds from greed kindled them; and, a shout arisen from the soldiers that, unless the signal were given, they would go without leaders, by no means did a leader fail; for at once Varro gave the signal to set out. Paulus, when, as he hesitated of his own accord, the sacred chickens too gave no favorable auspice, bade it be announced to his colleague, now bearing the standards out of the gate. Though Varro took this hard, yet the recent fall of Flaminius, and the naval disaster of Claudius the consul, recorded in the First Punic War, struck religious dread into his mind. The gods themselves, on that day, all but deferred rather than forbade the impending ruin to the Romans; for it so chanced that, when the soldiers would not obey the consul bidding the standards be borne back into the camp, two slaves—one of a man of Formiae, the other of a Sidicine horseman, who under the consuls Servilius and Atilius had been caught among the foragers by the Numidians—fled that day to their masters; and, brought before the consuls, announce that the whole army of Hannibal was sitting in ambush beyond the nearest mountains. The opportune coming of these made the consuls masters of their command, when the canvassing of the one had first, by base indulgence, loosened his own majesty among them.

Hannibal, after he saw the Romans moved rather unadvisedly than carried out to the last in rashness, the fraud detected to no purpose, returned to his camp. There he could not stay many days for want of grain, and new counsels arose by the day, not among the soldiers only, mingled from the offscouring of all nations, but even with the leader himself. For when at first there had been a murmuring, then open clamor, of men demanding the wages owed and complaining first of the price of corn, at last of famine, and there was a report that the mercenary soldiers, chiefly of the Spanish race, had taken counsel of going over, Hannibal himself too is said to have at times turned over thoughts of flight into Gaul, in such wise that, leaving all the infantry, he should hurry off with the horse. While these counsels and this temper of mind were in the camp, he resolved to move thence into the warmer and therefore earlier-harvested places of Apulia, at once that, the farther he withdrew from the enemy, the more hampered desertion might be to light tempers. He set out by night, the fires made in like manner, and a few tents left for show, that a fear of ambush like the former might hold the Romans. But, through the same Lucanian Statilius, all beyond the camp and across the mountains having been reconnoitered, when it was reported that the enemy’s column had been seen far off, then counsels began to be stirred of following him. When the opinion of each consul was the same as it had always been before, but with Varro well-nigh all, with Paulus none save Servilius, the consul of the year before, agreed, by the opinion of the greater part, fate urging them on, they set out to make Cannae famous by a Roman disaster. Near that village Hannibal had pitched his camp, turned away from the Volturnus wind, which over the fields, parched with drought, carries clouds of dust. This was both very convenient for the camp itself, and would be especially salutary when they should draw up their line, themselves turned away, the wind blowing only on their backs, about to fight an enemy blinded by the dust cast over him.

The consuls, following the Carthaginian, their marches sufficiently reconnoitered, when they came to Cannae and had the Carthaginian in sight, fortify two camps, at about the same interval as at Gerunium, their forces, as before, divided. The river Aufidus, flowing past both camps, gave the water-carriers access, each from his own convenience, not without contention; from the smaller camp, however, which was pitched across the Aufidus, the Romans drew water more freely, because the farther bank had no garrison of the enemy. Hannibal, having got hope that the consuls, in ground made for a cavalry battle—the part of his strength in which he was unconquered—would give the chance of fighting, draws up his line and provokes the enemy by a sally of the Numidians. Thence again the Roman camp is troubled by military sedition and the discord of the consuls, when Paulus cast in Varro’s teeth the rashness of Sempronius and Flaminius, and Varro cast at Paulus Fabius, a specious example for timid and slothful leaders, and called gods and men to witness that there was no fault on his side that Hannibal had now, as it were, taken Italy by prescription; that he was held bound by his colleague; that the steel and the arms were taken from soldiers angry and longing to fight; while the other said that, if anything befell the legions flung away and betrayed to an unadvised and improvident battle, he would be free of all the fault, partaker of all the issue; let Varro see to it that those whose tongue was ready and rash should be as strong of hand in the fight.

While time is wasted in wranglings rather than counsels, Hannibal, withdrawing into camp the rest of his forces from the line which he had kept drawn up far into the day, sends the Numidians across the river to fall upon the water-carriers of the Romans from the smaller camp. This disorderly throng, when, scarcely yet gone out upon the bank, they had put to flight with shout and uproar, they rode forward even to the outpost set before the rampart and well-nigh to the very gates. This indeed seemed shameful, that the Roman camp should now even be terrified by an undisciplined auxiliary force; and that one cause alone held the Romans from at once crossing the river and drawing up their line—that the supreme command that day was in Paulus’s hands. And so, on the next day, Varro, whose was the lot of command for that day, without consulting his colleague set out the signal and led his drawn-up forces across the river, Paulus following, because he could more disapprove the counsel than fail to aid it. Having crossed the river, they join to their own those forces too which they had had in the smaller camp, and, the line thus drawn up, on the right wing—that was nearer the river—they place the Roman cavalry, then the foot; the left wing the cavalry of the allies held at the end, within them the foot, joined toward the middle to the Roman legions; the javelin-men, of the rest of the light-armed auxiliaries, were made the front line. The consuls held the wings, Terentius the left, Aemilius the right; to Geminus Servilius the middle of the battle was given to guard.

Hannibal at first light, the Balearians and the other light-armed sent forward, having crossed the river, as he had brought each over, so set them in line: the Gallic and Spanish horse near the bank on the left wing, opposite the Roman cavalry; the right wing given to the Numidian horse; the middle of the line made strong with foot, in such wise that both wings should be of Africans, and between them, in the center, were set the Gauls and Spaniards. You would believe the Africans a Roman line; so armed were they with arms taken at the Trebia, but for the greater part at Trasimene. The Gauls and Spaniards had shields well-nigh of the same shape, their swords unlike and dissimilar—the Gauls’ very long and without points; the Spaniard, used to assail his enemy with the thrust rather than the slash, handy by their shortness and with points. Beyond the rest the look of these nations, both for the bigness of their bodies and for their show, was terrible: the Gauls were naked above the navel; the Spaniards had taken their stand in linen tunics bordered with purple, gleaming with a wondrous whiteness. The number of all the foot who then stood in the line was forty thousand, of the horse ten thousand. The leaders commanded the wings, the left Hasdrubal, the right Maharbal; the middle of the line Hannibal himself held, with his brother Mago. The sun—whether by design they were so placed, or whether by chance they so stood—was very opportunely slantwise to both sides, the Romans turned to the south, the Carthaginians to the north; the wind—the dwellers of the region call it Volturnus—rising against the Romans, by rolling much dust into their very faces, took away their sight.

The shout raised, the auxiliaries charged forward, and the battle was first joined with the light arms; then the left wing of the Gallic and Spanish horse engaged with the Roman right, in a fashion least like a cavalry battle; for it had to be joined front to front, since, no space being left round about for ranging abroad, the river on this side, on that the line of foot, shut them in. Both sides straining straight forward, the horses standing at last and packed in a press, man grappled man and dragged him from his horse. The struggle had now become for the most part a battle on foot; yet they fought more sharply than long, and the Roman horse, beaten, turn their backs. Toward the end of the cavalry contest the battle of the foot arose, at first equal both in strength and in spirit while the ranks of the Gauls and Spaniards held; at last the Romans, after long and frequent effort, with even front and dense line drove in the enemy’s wedge, too thin and therefore too little strong, jutting out from the rest of the line. Then, as it was driven in and gave back its foot in disorder, they pressed on, and at one rush, through the headlong column of the panic-stricken in flight, carried first into the middle of the line, at last, with none resisting, came up to the supports of the Africans, who had taken their stand on either side with their wings drawn back, the line in the middle, where the Gauls and Spaniards had stood, jutting out somewhat. This wedge, when, driven in, it had first leveled the front, then by giving way had even made a hollow in the middle, the Africans had now formed wings round about, and, as the Romans rushed incautiously into the center, threw their wings around them; soon, extending their wings, they closed in the enemy from the rear too. From here the Romans, having ended one battle to no purpose, the Gauls and Spaniards, whose backs they had cut down, left aside, begin a fresh battle against the Africans, unequal not only in that they were shut in against men poured around them, but also that, wearied, they fought with men fresh and lusty.

Now on the Roman left wing too, where the cavalry of the allies had taken their stand against the Numidians, the battle was joined, slow at first and begun from Punic fraud. Some five hundred Numidians, besides their wonted arms and weapons having swords hidden under their cuirasses, in the guise of deserters, when, with their bucklers behind their backs, they had ridden up from their own, suddenly leap from their horses, and, their bucklers and javelins flung down before the enemy’s feet, received into the middle of the line and led to the rearmost, are bidden sit down behind the rear. And while the battle is joined on every side, they remained quiet; after the contest had taken up the minds and eyes of all, then, snatching up the shields that lay scattered everywhere among the heaps of slain bodies, they fall upon the Roman line from behind, and, striking their backs and hewing their hams, made a vast havoc and a panic and uproar somewhat greater. While in one place there was terror and flight, in another a battle stubborn in a hope now bad, Hasdrubal, who commanded in that part, drawing the Numidians out of the middle of the line, because their fight against men who faced them was slow, sends them to pursue the fugitives scattered abroad, and joins the Spanish and Gallic foot to the Africans, now well-nigh wearied with slaughter rather than with fighting.

In the other part of the battle Paulus, although at the very first onset he had been heavily struck by a sling-stone, yet both met Hannibal often with his men in close array and in several places restored the battle, the Roman cavalry protecting him, until at last they gave up their horses, because the strength even for guiding his horse failed the consul. Then, to one who reported that the consul had bidden the cavalry dismount, they say Hannibal said: "How much rather would I he handed them to me in chains!" The cavalry’s battle on foot was such as where the enemy’s victory was now beyond doubt, when the conquered preferred to die where they stood rather than flee, and the conquerors, angry at those who delayed the victory, butchered the men they could not drive off. Yet they drove off the few who now survived, wearied with toil and wounds. Thence all were scattered, and those who could sought again their horses for flight. Gnaeus Lentulus, military tribune, when, riding by on his horse, he had seen the consul seated on a rock, covered with gore, said: "Lucius Aemilius, whom alone the gods ought to regard as guiltless of the fault of this day’s disaster, take this horse, while there is still some strength left you, and I, your companion, can lift you and protect you. Make not this battle deadly by the death of a consul; even without this there is grief and weeping enough." To this the consul: "Do you, Gnaeus Cornelius, be blessed in your valor; but beware lest, by pitying me in vain, you waste in the enemy’s hands the little time there is of escaping. Go, announce publicly to the fathers that they fortify the city of Rome and make it strong with garrisons before the victorious enemy comes; privately, to Quintus Fabius, that Lucius Aemilius has lived to this hour mindful of his precepts, and dies mindful of them. Suffer me to breathe out my life in this slaughter of my soldiers, that I may not either be again a defendant after a consulship, or stand forth an accuser of my colleague, to shield my own innocence by another’s guilt." As they were thus dealing, first a throng of fleeing citizens, then the enemy overwhelmed them; the consul, not knowing who he was, they buried under their weapons; Lentulus, in the uproar, his horse snatched away. Then on all sides they flee in disorder. Seven thousand men fled into the smaller camp, ten into the greater, about two into Cannae itself, the village, who were at once surrounded by Carthalo and the cavalry, no fortification sheltering the village. The other consul, whether by chance or by design joined to no column of the fugitives, fled with some fifty horsemen to Venusia. Forty-five thousand five hundred foot, two thousand seven hundred horse, and well-nigh as great a part of citizens and allies, are said to have been slain; among these both quaestors of the consuls, Lucius Atilius and Lucius Furius Bibaculus, and twenty-nine military tribunes, certain men of consular and praetorian and aedilician rank—among them they count Gnaeus Servilius Geminus and Marcus Minucius, who had been master of the horse the year before, and consul some years earlier—and besides eighty either senators or men who had borne those magistracies from which they ought to be enrolled in the senate, who had of their own will been made soldiers in the legions. Taken in that battle, three thousand foot and one thousand five hundred horse are said to have been.

This is the battle of Cannae, equal in fame to the disaster at the Allia, but, as it was lighter than that in what befell after the battle, because the enemy held off, so it was heavier and fouler in the slaughter of the army. For the flight at the Allia, as it betrayed the city, so it saved the army: at Cannae scarcely fifty followed the fleeing consul, the dying one had well-nigh his whole army with him. When in the two camps there was a multitude half-armed, without leaders, those who were in the greater send a message that, while a night’s rest weighed upon the enemy wearied with battle and then with feasting out of their joy, they should cross over to them: that in one column they would go off to Canusium. That counsel some wholly spurn; for why, said they, do not those who summon them come themselves, since they could just as well be joined? Plainly because all between was full of the enemy, and they preferred to expose others’ bodies rather than their own to so great a peril. To others not so much did the counsel displease as the spirit was wanting: Publius Sempronius Tuditanus, a military tribune, said: "Do you, then, prefer to be taken by a most greedy and most cruel enemy, and your heads to be priced, and the ransom inquired by those who ask whether you are a Roman citizen or a Latin ally, and out of your shame and misery honor to be sought for another? Not so—if indeed you are citizens of Lucius Aemilius the consul, who preferred to die well rather than live basely, and of so many bravest men who lie heaped about him. But before the light overtakes us and greater columns of the enemy hedge the way, let us burst out through these who, disordered and unmarshaled, clamor at the gates. With steel and daring a way is made, however thick the enemy. In a wedge, indeed, you might scatter this loose and unbound column, as though nothing stood in the way. So come with me, you who wish both yourselves and the commonwealth saved." When he had thus spoken, he draws his sword, and, a wedge formed, goes through the midst of the enemy; and, when the Numidians hurled javelins at the right side, which lay open, the shields shifted to the right, some six hundred made their way to the greater camp, and thence straightway, another great column joined to them, come unhurt to Canusium. These things among the conquered were done rather by the impulse of spirits, which each man’s own temper or chance gave him, than out of any counsel of their own or any man’s command.

To Hannibal, the victor, while the rest, gathered round, gave their congratulations and urged that, having ended so great a battle, he should take for himself the rest of the day and the repose of the coming night, and grant it to his wearied soldiers, Maharbal, the prefect of the cavalry, thinking there should be no delay at all, said: "Nay, that you may know what has been done by this battle, on the fifth day you shall feast, victor, on the Capitol. Follow; with the cavalry I will go ahead, that they may know you have come before they know you are coming." To Hannibal the thing seemed too glad, and greater than that he could straightway take it in. And so he says that he praises Maharbal’s goodwill; but for weighing the counsel there was need of time. Then Maharbal: "In truth the gods have not given all things to the same man. You know how to conquer, Hannibal; you know not how to use a victory." The delay of that day is believed to have been enough for the safety of the city and the empire. On the next day, as soon as it grew light, they set themselves to gather the spoils and to look upon the slaughter, foul even to enemies. There lay so many thousands of Romans, foot and horse scattered, as chance had joined each in battle or in flight; some, rising bloody from the midst of the slaughter, whom their wounds, drawn tight in the morning cold, had roused, were overwhelmed by the enemy; some too they found lying alive, their thighs and hams cut through, baring their necks and throats and bidding the enemy drain the blood that was left; some were found with their heads sunk in earth they had dug, who, it appeared, had made the pits for themselves, and, heaping the earth thrown over upon their faces, had stopped their breath. Above all there turned all eyes a living Numidian, drawn out from beneath a dead Roman who lay over him, his nose and ears torn, when the Roman, his hands useless for taking a weapon, his anger turned to madness, had breathed his last in mangling his enemy with his teeth.

The spoils gathered far into the day, Hannibal leads to assault the smaller camp, and first of all, by a barrier thrown up, shuts them off from the river; but, all being wearied with toil, watching, and wounds too, the surrender was made sooner than even he himself hoped. Having bargained that they should give up their arms and horses, at three hundred quadrigate coins for each Roman head, two hundred for the allies, a hundred for the slaves, and that, this price paid, they should depart each with a single garment, they received the enemy into the camp, and all were handed over into custody, the citizens and the allies apart. While time is wasted there, meanwhile, when from the greater camp those who had strength or spirit enough, to the number of four thousand men and two hundred horse, some in a column, some scattered here and there through the fields—which was no less safe—had fled to Canusium, the camp itself was handed over to the enemy by the wounded and the timid, on the same terms as the other. A vast booty was won; and, save the horses and the men and whatever silver there was (which was most upon the trappings of the horses; for of plate for eating they had very little made, especially when on campaign), all the rest of the booty was given over to plunder. Then he bade the bodies of his own be gathered into one place for burial; there were, they say, some eight thousand of his bravest men. The Roman consul too, some authorities say, was sought out and buried. Those who had fled to Canusium an Apulian woman, Busa by name, distinguished in birth and riches, when the Canusines had received them only within their walls and roofs, helped with grain, clothing, and money for the road too; for which munificence honors were afterward, the war ended, paid her by the senate.

But, since there were there four military tribunes—Fabius Maximus of the first legion, whose father had been dictator the year before, and of the second legion Lucius Publicius Bibulus and Publius Cornelius Scipio, and of the third legion Appius Claudius Pulcher, who had lately been aedile—by the consent of all the supreme command was given over to Publius Scipio, quite a young man, and to Appius Claudius. As they took counsel among a few about the sum of things, Publius Furius Philus, son of a man of consular rank, announces that they cherished a lost hope in vain; that the commonwealth was despaired of and bewailed; that certain noble young men, whose chief was Lucius Caecilius Metellus, were looking to the sea and the ships, to desert Italy and flee across to some king. This evil, besides being atrocious, was, upon so many disasters, even new; and, when it had fixed those present, torpid with amazement and wonder, and they judged that a council should be called about it, the youth Scipio, the fated leader of this war, says it is no matter for a council: that in so great an evil one must dare and do, not deliberate. Let those who wished the commonwealth safe go with him at once, armed; nowhere more truly was there an enemy’s camp than where such things were thought. He proceeds to go, a few following, to the lodging of Metellus, and, when he had found there the gathering of the young men of whom word had been brought, his sword drawn over the heads of the deliberators, "According to the judgment of my mind," he said, "as I will not desert the commonwealth of the Roman people, nor suffer another Roman citizen to desert it; if I knowingly deceive, then may you, Jupiter Best and Greatest, afflict me, my house, my family, and my fortune with the worst of deaths. In these words, Lucius Caecilius, I demand that you swear, and the rest of you who are present. Let him who has not sworn know that this sword is drawn against him." No otherwise fearful than if they beheld Hannibal the victor, they all swear, and hand themselves over to Scipio to be kept.

At the time when these things were doing at Canusium, to Venusia, to the consul, came some four thousand five hundred foot and horse, who had been scattered through the fields in flight. All these the Venusines, when they had divided them among their households to be kindly received and tended, gave to each horseman togas and tunics and twenty-five quadrigate coins, and to the foot-soldier ten, and arms to those who lacked them, and the rest was done hospitably, publicly and privately, and there was a striving that the Venusine people should not be outdone in good offices by the Canusine woman. But the multitude made Busa’s burden the heavier; and now there were some ten thousand men; and Appius and Scipio, after they learned that the other consul was safe, send a messenger at once to tell how great forces of foot and horse were with them, and to ask at the same time whether he bade the army be brought to Venusia or stay at Canusium. Varro himself led his forces over to Canusium; and now there was some semblance of a consular army, and they seemed about to defend themselves from the enemy with walls at least, if not with arms. To Rome word had been brought that not even these remnants of citizens and allies survived, but that the army had been slain to the last man, with its two consular leaders, and all the forces destroyed. Never, the city being safe, was there so much of panic and uproar within the Roman walls. And so I shall sink under the burden, nor will I undertake to tell what by recounting I should make less than the truth. The consul and the army lost at Trasimene the year before were not a wound upon a wound, but a manifold disaster, when two consular armies with two consuls were announced lost, and that there was now no Roman camp, no leader, no soldier; that Apulia and Samnium, and now well-nigh all Italy, had become Hannibal’s. No other nation, assuredly, would not have been overwhelmed by so great a mass of disaster. Compare the disaster the Carthaginians took in the naval battle at the Aegates Islands, broken by which they gave up Sicily and Sardinia, and thereafter suffered themselves to be made tributaries and stipendiaries; or the lost battle in Africa, to which afterward this very Hannibal succumbed; in no part are they to be compared, save that they were borne with a lesser spirit.

Publius Furius Philus and Marcus Pomponius, the praetors, called the senate into the Hostilian Curia, to take counsel of the guarding of the city; for they doubted not that, the armies destroyed, the enemy would come to assault Rome—the one work of the war that remained. When, in evils as vast as they were unknown, they could not make out even a plan well enough, and the outcry of wailing women drowned them, and, the truth not yet made plain, the living and the dead were bemoaned together, well-nigh through every house, then Quintus Fabius Maximus judged that light horsemen should be sent out on the Appian and the Latin Way, who, by questioning those they met—for surely some, scattered here and there, would have escaped from the flight—should bring back what the fortune of the consuls and the armies was, and, if the immortal gods, taking pity on the empire, had left anything of the Roman name, where those forces were; whither Hannibal had betaken himself after the battle, what he was preparing, what he was doing and about to do. These things must be explored and learned through energetic young men; that other thing must be done by the fathers themselves, since there were too few magistrates—that they take away the uproar and the panic from the city, keep the matrons from the public, and force each to be confined within her own threshold; that they restrain the wailings of households, make silence through the city, see to it that messengers of all matters be brought to the praetors, and that each await at home the informant of his own fortune; and that besides they set guards at the gates to prevent anyone from leaving the city and to force men to hope for no safety save with the city and its walls safe. When the uproar had been hushed, then the fathers should be called back into the Curia and counsel taken of the guarding of the city.

When all had gone on foot into this opinion, and, the crowd removed from the forum by the magistrates, the fathers had parted in different directions to quell the disorders, then at last letters were brought from Gaius Terentius the consul: that Lucius Aemilius the consul and the army were slain; that he himself was at Canusium, gathering the remnants of so great a disaster, as out of a shipwreck; that there were some ten thousand soldiers, unmarshaled and disordered; that the Carthaginian was sitting at Cannae, haggling over the prices of the captives and the rest of the booty, with neither a victor’s spirit nor a great leader’s manner. Then private disasters too, through the households, were noised abroad, and so wholly did grief fill the city that the annual rite of Ceres was intermitted, because it is not lawful for mourners to perform it, and there was no matron in that storm free of mourning. And so, lest for the same cause other rites too, public or private, be forsaken, the mourning was ended, by a decree of the senate, at thirty days. But when, the city’s uproar appeased, the fathers had been called back into the Curia, other letters besides were brought from Sicily, from Titus Otacilius the propraetor, that the kingdom of Hiero was being laid waste by a Punic fleet; that, when he wished to bring help to him imploring it, it had been announced to him that another fleet lay at the Aegates Islands, ready and equipped, so that, when the Carthaginians should perceive him turned to guard the Syracusan coast, they might at once assail Lilybaeum and the other Roman province; and so there was need of a fleet, if they wished to guard the allied king and Sicily.

The letters of the consul and the praetor read, the fathers judged that Marcus Claudius, who commanded the fleet lying at Ostia, should be sent to the army at Canusium, and that it be written to the consul that, when he had handed the army over to the praetor, he should come to Rome at the first time he could, so far as could be done with the commonwealth’s convenience. Terrified, beyond such great disasters, both by the other prodigies and because two Vestals that year, Opimia and Floronia, had been found guilty of unchastity, and one had been put to death beneath the earth, as is the custom, by the Colline Gate, the other had laid violent hands upon herself; Lucius Cantilius, a pontifical scribe—those whom they now call the lesser pontiffs—who had done the unchastity with Floronia, had been so beaten with rods in the comitium by the pontifex maximus that he expired amid the blows. This impiety, since amid so many disasters, as happens, it had been turned into a prodigy, the decemvirs were bidden to approach the books, and Quintus Fabius Pictor was sent to Delphi, to the oracle, to ask by what prayers and supplications they might appease the gods, and what would be the end of so great disasters. Meanwhile, from the books of fate, some extraordinary sacrifices were made, among which a Gaul and a Gallic woman, a Greek and a Greek woman, were let down alive beneath the earth in the cattle-market, into a place walled about with stone, already before stained with human victims—a rite least Roman. The gods sufficiently appeased, as they thought, Marcus Claudius Marcellus sends from Ostia to Rome, to be a garrison for the city, fifteen hundred soldiers whom he had enrolled for the fleet; he himself, the marine legion—it was the third legion—having been sent ahead with its military tribunes to Teanum Sidicinum, and the fleet handed over to Publius Furius Philus his colleague, a few days after hastened to Canusium by great marches. Then Marcus Junius, named dictator by the authority of the fathers, and Tiberius Sempronius the master of the horse, the levy proclaimed, enroll the younger men from seventeen years, and some still in the boy’s gown; four legions of these, and a thousand horse, were made up. Likewise they send to the allies and the Latin name to receive soldiers according to the formula. Arms, weapons, and other things they bid be prepared, and they take down the old spoils of enemies from the temples and porticoes. And another fashion of a new levy the want of free persons and necessity gave: eight thousand stout young men from the slaves, asking each first whether they were willing to serve, they bought at the public cost and armed. This soldiery was preferred, though there was a chance of ransoming the captives at a lesser price.

For Hannibal, after a battle so prosperous at Cannae, intent on the cares of a victor rather than of one waging war, when, the captives brought forth and sorted, he had addressed the allies kindly—as before at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene—and let them go without ransom, the Romans too, called together, which never at any other time before, he addresses in speech mild enough: that he had no war of extermination with the Romans; that he contended for honor and for empire. And that his fathers had yielded to Roman valor, and that he himself was striving that, in turn, men should yield to his own good fortune and valor. And so he gives a chance of ransoming themselves to the captives: that the price would be, for each head, five hundred quadrigate coins for a horseman, three hundred for a foot-soldier, a hundred for a slave. Although something was added to the horsemen above that price at which they had bargained when surrendering, yet, glad, they accepted any condition of bargaining. It was resolved, by their own vote, that ten be chosen to go to Rome to the senate, and no other pledge of faith was taken than that they should swear they would return. There was sent with these Carthalo, a noble Carthaginian, who, if perchance their minds inclined to peace, should bring terms. When they had gone out of the camp, one of them, a man least of the Roman temper, as though he had forgotten something, having returned into the camp to acquit himself of the oath, overtakes his companions before night. When it was announced that they were coming to Rome, a lictor was sent to meet Carthalo, to announce, in the dictator’s words, that he should withdraw from Roman territory before night.

The senate was granted to the envoys of the captives by the dictator; their chief said: "Marcus Junius, and you, conscript fathers, none of us is ignorant that to no state were captives ever cheaper than to ours; yet, unless our own cause please us more than is just, no others ever came into the enemy’s power less to be neglected by you than we. For we did not give up our arms in the line through fear, but, when we had drawn out the battle almost to night, standing upon heaps of slain bodies, we withdrew into the camp; the rest of the day and the following night, wearied with toil and wounds, we guarded the rampart; on the next day, when, beset by a victorious army, we were kept from water, and there was now no hope of bursting out through the thronging enemy, nor did we count it impious that, fifty thousand men of our line butchered, some Roman soldier should survive from the battle of Cannae, then at last we bargained a price at which, ransomed, we should be let go, and gave up to the enemy the arms in which there was now no help. Our forefathers too we had heard had ransomed themselves from the Gauls with gold, and your fathers, those men hardest at the terms of peace, had nevertheless sent envoys to Tarentum to ransom captives. And yet both at the Allia with the Gauls and at Heraclea with Pyrrhus each battle was infamous not so much by disaster as by panic and flight: the fields of Cannae heaps of Roman bodies cover, nor do we survive the battle save those in whose butchering both the steel and the strength of the enemy failed. There are even some of us who were not even in the line, but, left to guard the camp, came into the enemy’s power when the camp was surrendered. I for my part envy the fortune or condition of no citizen and fellow-soldier, nor would I exalt myself by pressing down another: not even those—unless there be some reward for swift feet and running—who, most of them, fleeing unarmed from the line, halted not before Venusia or Canusium, would have deservedly preferred themselves to us and boasted that in them there was more protection for the commonwealth than in us. But you will use both them as good and brave soldiers, and us as even readier for our fatherland, because by your kindness we shall have been ransomed and restored to our fatherland. You hold a levy of every age and fortune; eight thousand slaves, I hear, are being armed. Our number is no less, nor can we be ransomed at a greater price than they are bought; for if I should compare ourselves with them, I should do an injury to the Roman name. This too I would think you should mark in such a deliberation, conscript fathers: if you wish now to be harder—which you would do by no desert of ours—to what enemy you would leave us. To Pyrrhus, forsooth, who held his captives in the number of guests? Or to a barbarian and a Carthaginian, of whom it can scarce be judged whether he is the more greedy or the more cruel? If you should see the chains, the squalor, the deformity of your fellow-citizens, that sight assuredly would move you no less than if, on the other side, you beheld your legions strewn over the fields of Cannae. You can behold the anxiety and the tears of our kinsfolk standing in the porch of the Curia and awaiting your answer. When these are so in suspense and anxious for us and for those who are absent, what spirit do you think theirs is whose very life and freedom are in the balance? If, so help me, Hannibal himself wished to be mild toward us, against his own nature, yet we should think we have no need of life, since we have seemed to you unworthy to be ransomed. There returned to Rome once captives sent back by Pyrrhus without ransom; but they returned with envoys, the chief men of the state, sent to ransom them. Shall I return to my fatherland a citizen not valued at three hundred coins? Each man has his own spirit, conscript fathers. I know that my life and body are in the balance; the peril of my good name moves me more—lest, condemned and rejected by you, we go away; for men will not believe that you spared the price."

When he had made an end, at once from that crowd which was in the comitium a tearful outcry was raised, and they stretched their hands toward the Curia, praying that their children, brothers, kinsmen be restored to them. Fear and necessity had mingled the women too in the forum with the throng of men. The senate, the bystanders removed, began to be consulted. There, when there was a diversity of opinions, and some judged they should be ransomed at the public cost, others that no public expense should be made, nor those forbidden to be ransomed from private means—that, if any lacked silver for the present, money should be given on loan from the treasury, and the people secured by sureties and estates—then Titus Manlius Torquatus, of an old-fashioned and, as it seemed to most, too harsh severity, asked his opinion, is reported to have spoken thus: "If the envoys had merely demanded, on behalf of those who are in the enemy’s power, that they be ransomed, without the arraignment of any of them I should have gone through my opinion briefly; for what else would there be than that you should be admonished to keep, by a necessary example for soldiering, the custom handed down by our fathers? But now, when they have well-nigh boasted that they surrendered themselves to the enemy, and have judged it fair to be preferred not only to those taken in the line by the enemy but even to those who reached Venusia and Canusium, and to Gaius Terentius the consul himself, I will not suffer you, conscript fathers, to be ignorant of any of the things that were done there. And would that I were pleading these things, which I am about to plead before you, at Canusium before the army itself, the best witness of each man’s cowardice and valor—or that this one man at least, Publius Sempronius, were present, whom if these men had followed as leader, they would today be soldiers in a Roman camp, not captives in the enemy’s power. But when the enemy were both wearied with fighting and glad with victory, and most of them themselves had withdrawn into their own camp, and they had the night free for bursting out, and seven thousand armed men could burst out even through the thronging enemy, they neither attempted to do it of themselves, nor were willing to follow another. Through nearly the whole night Publius Sempronius Tuditanus ceased not to warn and exhort them that, while the fewness of the enemy about the camp, while there was quiet and silence, while night could cover the attempt, they should follow him as leader: before light they could reach safe places, the cities of allies. If, as in our grandfathers’ memory Publius Decius the military tribune in Samnium, if, as in our own youth, in the former Punic war, Calpurnius Flamma, with three hundred volunteers, when he was leading them through the midst of the enemy to seize a hill, said, ’Let us die, soldiers, and by our death rescue the legions hemmed in from the siege’—if Publius Sempronius had said this, he would have held you neither men nor Romans, had no one come forth a companion of such valor. He shows you a road bearing not more to glory than to safety; he makes you returners to your fatherland, to your parents, your wives, and children. To save yourselves, spirit is wanting to you: what, if you had to die for your fatherland, would you do? Fifty thousand citizens and allies lie slain about you on that very day. If so many examples of valor do not move you, nothing ever will move you; if so great a disaster has not made life cheap, none will make it. Free and unharmed, long for your fatherland—nay, long for it while it is your fatherland, while you are its citizens. Too late now you long for it, diminished in standing, made slaves of the Carthaginians. Will you return for a price to that place whence by cowardice and worthlessness you went away? Publius Sempronius, your fellow-citizen, you did not hear bidding you take up arms and follow him; Hannibal, a little after, you heard bidding the camp be betrayed and the arms given up. But why do I accuse the cowardice of these men, when I can accuse a crime? For not only did they refuse to follow one who counseled well, but they tried to oppose and hold him back, had not the bravest men, with drawn swords, thrust the sluggards aside. Publius Sempronius, I say, had first to burst out through a column of citizens before he could through one of enemies. These citizens let the fatherland long for, of whom, if the rest had been like them, it would today have none of those who fought at Cannae for a citizen! Out of seven thousand armed men, six hundred came forth who dared to burst out, who returned to their fatherland free and armed, nor did the enemy stand in the way of these six hundred; how safe do you think the road would have been to a column of well-nigh two legions? You would have today twenty thousand armed men at Canusium, brave and faithful, conscript fathers. But now how can these be good and faithful—for ’brave’ not even they themselves would say—citizens? Unless one can believe either that they were present with those bursting out who tried to prevent their bursting out, or that they do not envy both the safety and the glory of those won by valor, while they know that fear and the cowardice of a shameful slavery is their own cause. They preferred, hiding in their tents, to await at once the light and the enemy, when in the silence of the night there was an occasion of bursting out. But for bursting out of the camp the spirit was wanting; for guarding the camp bravely they had spirit—forsooth! For some days and nights, besieged, with their arms they guarded the rampart, with the rampart guarded themselves; at last, having dared and suffered the utmost, when all the supports of life failed and, their strength wasted by famine, they could no longer bear their arms, they were conquered by human necessities rather than by arms. At sunrise the enemy approached the rampart; before the second hour, having tried no fortune of battle, they gave up their arms and themselves. This was these men’s soldiering for two days. When it behooved them to stand and fight in the line, they fled into the camp; when they had to fight before the rampart, they surrendered the camp, useful neither in the line nor in the camp. And shall I ransom you? When you ought to burst out of the camp, you linger and stay; when you must stay and guard the camp with arms, you hand over both the camp and the arms and yourselves to the enemy. I judge, conscript fathers, that these are no more to be ransomed than that those should be given up to Hannibal who through the midst of the enemy burst out of the camp and by the highest valor restored themselves to their fatherland."

After Manlius had spoken, although the captives touched even most of the fathers by kinship, yet, besides the example of a state by no means, even from of old, indulgent toward captives, the sum of money too moved men, because they wished neither the treasury to be drained—a great sum being now paid out for buying and arming slaves for soldiering—nor Hannibal to be enriched, who, most of all, lacked this very thing, as the report was. When the grim answer had been returned that the captives were not to be ransomed, and a new grief, upon the old, had been added by the loss of so many citizens, with great weeping and lamentation they escorted the envoys to the gate. One of them went home, because by a deceitful return into the camp he had acquitted himself of his oath. When this became known and was reported to the senate, all judged that he should be arrested and led to Hannibal under guards given at the public cost. There is also another report about the captives: that ten came first; that, when there had been doubt in the senate whether they should be admitted into the city or not, they were so admitted that, nevertheless, the senate should not be granted them; that then, as they lingered longer than all had hoped, three other envoys besides came, Lucius Scribonius and Gaius Calpurnius and Lucius Manlius; that then at last, by a kinsman of Scribonius, a tribune of the plebs, the matter of ransoming the captives was brought forward, and the senate had not judged them to be ransomed; that the three new envoys returned to Hannibal, the ten old ones remained, because, having on the way returned to Hannibal on the pretext of recognizing the names of the captives, they had acquitted themselves of their religious bond; that about giving them up the matter was debated in the senate with great contention, and that those who judged they should be given up were outvoted by a few opinions; but that, at the next censorship, they were so undone by every mark and ignominy that some of them straightway laid violent hands on themselves, and the rest were absent thereafter not only from the forum but for well-nigh all their life from the light and the public. One may wonder more that the authorities so disagree than discern what is true. But how much greater that disaster was than the former disasters, even this is for a sign—that the faith of the allies, which to that day had stood firm, then began to totter, for no other cause assuredly than that they had despaired of the empire. There revolted to the Carthaginians these peoples: the Atellani, the Calatini, the Hirpini, part of the Apulians, the Samnites except the Pentri, all the Bruttii, the Lucani, and besides these the Uzentini, and well-nigh all the coast of the Greeks, the Tarentines, the Metapontines, the Crotoniates and Locrians, and all the Cisalpine Gauls. Nor yet did those disasters and revolts of the allies move the Romans to make mention of peace anywhere, neither before the consul’s coming to Rome nor after he returned and renewed the memory of the disaster received; at which very time the state was of so great a spirit that, to the consul returning from so great a disaster, of which he himself had been the chief cause, men went out to meet him in throngs from all the orders, and thanks were given him because he had not despaired of the commonwealth—who, had he been a leader of the Carthaginians, would have had no punishment to refuse.