The History of Rome, Book 25

While these things were doing in Africa and in Spain, Hannibal spent the summer in the Sallentine country, in hope of getting the city of the Tarentines by betrayal. Meanwhile the obscure towns of the Sallentini themselves went over to him. At the same time in Bruttium, of the twelve peoples that the year before had revolted to the Carthaginians, the Consentini and the Tauriani returned to the faith of the Roman people, and more would have returned, had not Titus Pomponius Veientanus, prefect of the allies, having gotten the look of a lawful commander by several successful raids in the Bruttian land, with a hastily gathered army joined battle with Hanno. A great force of men, but of a disordered rabble of peasants and slaves, was there slain or taken; the least part of the loss was that the prefect was captured among the rest—the author then of the rash battle, and before that a tax-farmer faithless and ruinous, by every evil art, both to the commonwealth and to the companies. Sempronius the consul in Lucania fought many small battles, none worth the recording, and stormed several obscure towns of the Lucanians. The longer the war was drawn out, and the more prosperous and adverse turns shook men’s spirits no less than their fortune, the greater grew the superstition—and that for the most part a foreign one—that came over the state, so that either men or the gods seemed of a sudden to have been made other than they were. And now the Roman rites were being abolished not in secret only and within the walls, but in public too: in the Forum and on the Capitol there was a throng of women neither sacrificing nor praying to the gods after the manner of the fathers. Petty sacrificers and seers had seized men’s minds, and the rustic commons swelled their number, driven into the city out of fields untilled by the long war and unsafe, by want and by fear; and the gain from another’s delusion was easy, which they plied as though by the practice of a sanctioned art. At first the indignant murmurs of the good were heard in secret; then the matter passed even to the senators and to public complaint. The aediles and the capital commissioners were heavily blamed by the senate for not preventing it; yet when they tried to drive that multitude from the Forum and to break up the apparatus of the rites, they came within little of being roughly handled. When it appeared that the evil was now too strong to be quelled by the lesser magistrates, the task was given by the senate to Marcus Aemilius the city praetor, to free the people of those superstitions. He both read out the decree of the senate in the assembly, and made edict that whoever had books of prophecy, or prayers, or a written art of sacrificing, should bring all those books and writings to him before the kalends of April, and that no one should sacrifice in a public or holy place by a new or foreign rite.

Several public priests died that year: Lucius Cornelius Lentulus the pontifex maximus, and Gaius Papirius Masso, son of Gaius, a pontiff, and Publius Furius Philus an augur, and Gaius Papirius Masso, son of Lucius, a decemvir-sacris-faciundis/">decemvir of the sacred rites. In Lentulus’ place Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, in Papirius’ Gnaeus Servilius Caepio, were chosen pontiffs in their stead; as augur was created Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, as decemvir of the sacred rites Lucius Cornelius Lentulus. The time of the consular elections now drew near; but because it was not thought well to call the consuls away, intent as they were upon the war, Tiberius Sempronius the consul named, for the elections’ sake, a dictator, Gaius Claudius Cento. By him Quintus Fulvius Flaccus was named master of the horse. The dictator on the first election-day created as consuls Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, the master of the horse, and Appius Claudius Pulcher, whose province in his praetorship had been Sicily. Then were created praetors Gnaeus Fulvius Flaccus, Gaius Claudius Nero, Marcus Junius Silanus, and Publius Cornelius Sulla. The elections finished, the dictator laid down his magistracy. Curule aedile that year, with Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, was Publius Cornelius Scipio, who afterward had the surname Africanus. When the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs opposed him as he sought the aedileship, saying that no account ought to be taken of him because he was not yet of the lawful age for seeking it, "If," said he, "all the Quirites wish to make me aedile, I have years enough." Thereupon, with so great a favor, there was a rush into the tribes to cast the vote, that the tribunes suddenly desisted from their undertaking. The aedile’s bounty was this: the Roman games were held magnificently for the resources of that time, and repeated for a single day, and a congius of oil was given to each ward. Lucius Villius Tappulus and Marcus Fundanius Fundulus, plebeian aediles, arraigned several matrons before the people for misconduct; some of them, condemned, they drove into exile. The plebeian games were repeated over two days, and there was a feast of Jupiter for the games’ sake.

Quintus Fulvius Flaccus for the third time, and Appius Claudius, enter on the consulship; and the praetors drew lots for their provinces: Publius Cornelius Sulla the city and the foreign jurisdiction, which before had been the lot of two men; Gnaeus Fulvius Flaccus Apulia; Gaius Claudius Nero Suessula; Marcus Junius Silanus the Etruscans. To the consuls the war with Hannibal and two legions apiece were decreed; the one to receive his from Quintus Fabius, the previous year’s consul, the other from Fulvius Centumalus; of the praetors, Fulvius Flaccus’ legions should be those that had been at Luceria under Aemilius the praetor, Claudius Nero’s those that had been in Picenum under Gaius Terentius; the supplement for these they should enroll for themselves; to Marcus Junius for Etruria were given the city legions of the year before. To Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Publius Sempronius Tuditanus the command and the provinces of Lucania and Gaul were prolonged, with their own armies; likewise to Publius Lentulus where his old province in Sicily was, to Marcus Marcellus Syracuse and where Hiero’s kingdom had been, to Titus Otacilius the fleet, to Marcus Valerius Greece, to Quintus Mucius Scaevola Sardinia, to Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius the Spains. To the old armies two city legions were enrolled by the consuls, and the sum of twenty-three legions was made up that year. The consuls’ levy was hindered by the affair of Marcus Postumius of Pyrgi, with a great upheaval of the state nearly upon it. Postumius was a tax-farmer who for many years had had no equal in the state for fraud and greed save Titus Pomponius Veientanus, whom, as he heedlessly plundered the fields in Lucania under Hanno’s leadership, the Carthaginians had taken the year before. These men, because the public bore the risk from the violence of storms in the things that were carried to the armies, had both lied of false shipwrecks, and those very losses which they reported as true had been brought about by their own fraud, not by chance. Old and shattered ships, a few things of small price put aboard, they would sink in the deep, the sailors taken off into boats made ready beforehand, and would then lie that the cargoes had been many times greater. This fraud had been disclosed to Marcus Aemilius the praetor the year before, and through him brought to the senate, yet marked by no decree of the senate, because the senators did not wish the order of the tax-farmers offended at such a time. The people was a sterner avenger of the fraud; and at last two plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, Spurius and Lucius Carvilius, roused, when they saw the matter hated and infamous, set a fine of two hundred thousand asses upon Marcus Postumius. When the day for contesting it had come, and a council of the plebs so crowded was present that the area of the Capitol scarcely held the multitude, the cause being pleaded out, the one hope seemed to lie in this: if Gaius Servilius Casca, tribune of the plebs, who was a kinsman and relative of Postumius, should interpose his veto before the tribes were called to the vote. The witnesses given, the tribunes moved the people back, and the urn was brought out to draw lots where the Latins should cast their vote. Meanwhile the tax-farmers pressed Casca to take the day from the council; the people cried out against it; and by chance Casca sat first on the wing, whose mind fear and shame at once swayed. When there was too little defense in him, the tax-farmers, to throw the matter into confusion, broke in a wedge through the empty space whence the people had been moved, wrangling at once with the people and the tribunes. Nor was the matter far from a fight, when Fulvius the consul said to the tribunes: "Do you not see that you have been reduced to the ranks, and that the matter looks toward sedition, unless you speedily dismiss the council of the plebs?"

The plebs dismissed, the senate is called, and the consuls bring forward the matter of the council of the plebs disturbed by the violence and audacity of the tax-farmers: that Marcus Furius Camillus, whose exile the ruin of the city had followed, had suffered himself to be condemned by angry citizens; that the decemvirs before him, by whose laws they lived to that day, and many afterward of the leading men of the state, had borne the people’s judgment upon themselves; but that Postumius of Pyrgi had wrested the suffrage from the Roman people, abolished the council of the plebs, reduced the tribunes to the ranks, drawn up a battle-line against the Roman people, and seized a place to cut off the tribunes from the plebs and to forbid the tribes’ being called to the vote. That nothing else had held men back from slaughter and a fight but the patience of the magistrates, in that they had yielded for the present to the frenzy and audacity of a few, and had suffered themselves and the Roman people to be overcome, and had of their own will abolished the elections—which the accused was about to prevent by force and arms—lest a cause for fighting be given to those who sought it. When these things had been received by all the best men according to the atrocity of the matter, and the senate had decreed that this violence had been done against the commonwealth and by a ruinous example, at once the Carvilii, tribunes of the plebs, the contest over the fine laid aside, named a day for Postumius on a capital charge, and ordered that, unless he gave sureties, he be seized by the officer and led to prison. Postumius, sureties given, did not appear. The tribunes put it to the plebs, and the plebs so resolved: that if Marcus Postumius had not come forward before the kalends of May, and, summoned on that day, had neither answered nor been excused, he should be held to be in exile, and his goods should be sold, and that it was their pleasure he be interdicted from water and fire. Then, upon each one of those who had been the stirrers of the riot and tumult, they began to name a day on a capital charge and to demand sureties. At first those who did not give them, then even those who could give them, they cast into prison; and, avoiding the peril of this, the greater part went into exile.

This was the end that the fraud of the tax-farmers, and then the audacity that shielded the fraud, came to. Then elections were held for creating a pontifex-maximus/">pontifex maximus; these the new pontiff Marcus Cornelius Cethegus held. Three sought it with a vast contest: Quintus Fulvius Flaccus the consul, who had been twice consul before and censor; and Titus Manlius Torquatus, himself too distinguished by two consulships and a censorship; and Publius Licinius Crassus, who was about to seek the curule aedileship. This youth conquered the old and honored men in that contest. Before him, within a hundred and twenty years, no one save Publius Cornelius Calussa had been created pontifex maximus who had not sat in the curule chair. The consuls completed the levy with difficulty, because the scarcity of the younger men did not easily suffice for both, that new city legions and a supplement for the old should be enrolled; yet the senate forbade them to desist from the undertaking, and ordered two boards of three to be created, the one to inspect, this side of the fiftieth milestone, in the villages and markets and meeting-places, all the supply of free-born men, the other beyond it; and, if any seemed to have strength enough to bear arms, even though they were not yet of military age, to make them soldiers; and the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, if it seemed good to them, should put it to the people, that those who had taken the oath under seventeen years should have their campaigns count just as if they had been made soldiers at seventeen years or older. By this decree of the senate the two boards of three, once created, held a levying of free-born men through the fields. At the same time letters from Marcus Marcellus out of Sicily, concerning the demands of the soldiers who were serving with Publius Lentulus, were read out in the senate. This army was the remnant of the disaster of Cannae, banished into Sicily, as was said before, that they should not be carried back into Italy before the end of the Punic war.

These men, by Lentulus’ leave, sent to Marcus Marcellus in his winter quarters, as envoys, the foremost of the cavalry and the centurions and the pick of the foot from the legions; and one of them, the power of speaking being granted him, said: "We would have come to you as consul, Marcus Marcellus, in Italy, when first that decree of the senate, if not unjust, at least grievous, was made concerning us, had we not hoped this—that we were being sent into a province troubled by the death of its kings, to a heavy war against the Sicilians and the Carthaginians at once, and that by our blood and our wounds we should make satisfaction to the senate, even as in our fathers’ memory those who had been taken by Pyrrhus at Heraclea made satisfaction by fighting against Pyrrhus himself. Yet for what desert of ours were you angry, conscript fathers, or are you angry with us? Both consuls and the whole senate I seem to behold when I behold you, Marcus Marcellus, whom, had we had for consul at Cannae, both the commonwealth’s fortune and our own would have been the better. Suffer me, I pray, before I complain of our condition, to clear ourselves of the guilt with which we are charged. If it was not by the wrath of the gods, nor by fate, by whose law the unalterable order of human affairs is woven, but by our own fault that we perished at Cannae—whose fault, pray, was it? The soldiers’ or the commanders’? For my part, as a soldier I will never say anything of my commander, to whom especially I know thanks were rendered by the senate because he did not despair of the commonwealth, and to whom after the flight at Cannae the command has been prolonged through all the years. The rest likewise, of the survivors of that disaster, whom we had for our tribunes of the soldiers, we have heard seek and hold offices and obtain provinces. Do you forgive yourselves and your own children easily, conscript fathers, and rage against these cheap heads of ours? Was it no shame for a consul and the other chief men of the state to flee, when there was no other hope, while the common soldiers, doomed to die in any case, you sent into the line? At the Allia well-nigh the whole army fled; at the Caudine Forks the army handed over its arms to the enemy without even trying the contest—to say nothing of the other shameful disasters of armies; yet so far was it from any disgrace being sought against those armies, that by that very army which had fled from the Allia to Veii the city of Rome was recovered, and the Caudine legions, which had returned to Rome without their arms, sent back armed into Samnium, drove under the yoke that same enemy who had gloated over this disgrace of theirs. But can anyone charge the army of Cannae with flight or panic, where more than fifty thousand men fell, whence the consul fled with seventy horsemen, whence no man is left save him whom the enemy, wearied with slaying, has left? When ransom was denied to the captives, men everywhere praised us, because we had kept ourselves for the commonwealth, because we had returned to the consul at Venusia and made the appearance of a regular army; now we are in a worse condition than the captives were in our fathers’ day. For to them only their arms and the rank of their service and the place where they should pitch in camp were changed—things which yet, once they had done good service to the commonwealth in a single fortunate battle, they recovered; none of them was banished into exile, from none was the hope of earning out his campaigns taken away; an enemy, in fine, was given them, fighting with whom they might once for all end either their life or their disgrace. But we, against whom nothing can be charged—save that we brought it about that any Roman soldier survived the line of Cannae—have been banished not only far from our country and from Italy but even from the enemy, there to grow old in exile, where there is no hope, no occasion of wiping out the disgrace, none of appeasing the anger of our fellow-citizens, none, in fine, of dying well. We seek neither an end of disgrace nor a reward of valor; only let it be allowed us to prove our spirit and to exercise our valor. Toil and peril we seek, that we may do the office of men, the office of soldiers. The war in Sicily is now waged a second year with mighty struggle; the Carthaginian storms some cities, the Roman others; lines of foot and horse clash; at Syracuse the matter is carried on by land and sea; we hear the shout of the fighters and the clash of arms, ourselves idle and sluggish, as though we had neither hands nor weapons. With legions of slaves Tiberius Sempronius the consul has now so often fought the enemy in pitched battle; they have for the wage of their toil freedom and citizenship. Let us at least be to you as slaves bought for this war; let us be allowed to close with the enemy and by fighting to seek our freedom. Will you have us prove our valor by sea, by land, in the line, in the storming of cities? Whatever is harshest in toil and peril we demand for ourselves, that what ought to have been done at Cannae may be done as soon as may be—since whatever we have lived since then is all of it marked out for disgrace."

After these words they fell at Marcellus’ knees. Marcellus said that this was neither of his right nor of his power; that he would write to the senate and would do all according to the senators’ judgment. That letter was brought to the new consuls and through them read out in the senate; and the senate, consulted about the letter, thus decreed: that the senate saw no cause why the commonwealth should be entrusted to soldiers who had deserted their fellow-soldiers fighting at Cannae. If it seemed otherwise to Marcus Claudius the proconsul, let him do what he judged to be for the commonwealth and his own good faith, provided that none of them be exempt from service, nor be given a military gift for valor’s sake, nor be carried back into Italy so long as the enemy was in the land of Italy. Then elections were held by the city praetor, by decree of the senate and ordinance of the plebs, in which were created five commissioners for repairing the walls and towers, and two boards of three: the one for seeking out sacred things and recording the offerings, the other for repairing the temples of Fortune and of Mater Matuta within the Carmental gate, and of Hope outside the gate, which the year before had been consumed by fire. There were foul tempests; on the Alban Mount it rained stones for two days together; many things were struck from heaven—two temples on the Capitol, the rampart in the camp above Suessula in many places, and two sentries killed; the wall and certain towers at Cumae were not only struck by lightning but even thrown down. At Reate a huge stone was seen to fly about, and the sun to redden more than its wont and like to blood. Because of these prodigies there was a supplication for one day, and for several days the consuls gave heed to the divine rites, and through the same days there was a nine-day rite. While the defection of the Tarentines was now long both in Hannibal’s hope and in the Romans’ suspicion, a cause for hastening it chanced to come from without. Phileas of Tarentum, who had now long been at Rome under show of an embassy, a man of restless spirit and least able to bear the idleness in which he then seemed to grow old by long inaction, found himself an access to the Thurian and Tarentine hostages. They were guarded in the Hall of Liberty with the less care, because it was to the advantage neither of themselves nor of their states to deceive the Romans. These, solicited by frequent talks, when he had—two of the keepers being bribed—led out of custody at first dark, he himself, made the companion of their secret journey, fled. At first light the flight was noised through the city, and men sent to follow them dragged them all back, seized at Tarracina. Led into the comitium and beaten with rods, the people approving, they are cast down from the rock.

The atrocity of this punishment provoked the minds of two of the noblest Greek states in Italy, both as states, and the more each man privately, as he was touched by kinship or friendship with those so foully slain. Of these some thirteen noble young Tarentines conspired, whose chiefs were Nico and Philemenus. These, thinking they must confer with Hannibal before they stirred anything, by night, under show of hunting, went out of the city and set out to him; and when they were not far from the camp, the rest hid themselves in a wood near the road, while Nico and Philemenus, going forward and seized by the outposts—themselves seeking it—were brought to Hannibal. When they had set forth both the reasons of their design and what they were preparing, praised and loaded with promises, they are bidden—that they might give their countrymen faith—to drive to the city the cattle of the Carthaginians that had been put out to pasture, as though they had gone out of the city to plunder; it was promised they should do this safely and without a struggle. This booty of the young men was beheld, and that they ventured it again and oftener was the less a wonder. Having met with Hannibal again, they confirmed by pledge that the Tarentines should be free, should keep their own laws and all their own, should pay no tribute to the Carthaginian, nor receive a garrison unwilling; that the garrisons should be betrayed to the Carthaginians. When these things were agreed, then indeed Philemenus made his custom of going out by night and returning to the city the more frequent. And he was notable for his zeal in hunting, and dogs and the rest of the gear followed him; and bringing back something usually caught, or brought from the enemy by arrangement, he would give it either to the prefect or to the keepers of the gates; mostly by night did they believe he passed to and fro because of fear of the enemy. When the matter had now been brought to such a custom that, at whatever hour of the night he gave the signal by a whistle, the gate would be opened, the time seemed to Hannibal for doing the deed. He was three days’ march away; where, that it might be the less a wonder that he kept his standing camp so long in one and the same place, he feigned sickness. To the Romans too, who were in garrison at Tarentum, his sluggish delay had now ceased to be suspected.

But after he resolved to go to Tarentum, ten thousand foot and horse being chosen, whom he judged the fittest for the enterprise by swiftness of body and lightness of arms, at the fourth watch of the night he moved his standards, and, some eighty Numidian horsemen being sent ahead, charged them to scour about the roads and survey all things with their eyes, lest any of the countrymen, a watcher of the column from afar, should escape notice; those who had gone forward they were to drag back, those they met to kill, that there might be to the dwellers-by the appearance of raiders rather than of an army. He himself, the column driven swiftly on, pitched camp about fifteen miles from Tarentum; and not even there, when it was announced whither they were bound, did he do more than warn the soldiers, called together, that all should go by the road, and suffer no man to turn aside or to leave the order of the column, and that above all they should be intent to receive commands and do nothing save by the leaders’ order; he would in due time set forth what he wished done. About the same hour rumor had outrun him to Tarentum, that a few Numidian horsemen were laying waste the fields and casting terror far among the country-folk. At which news the Roman prefect, stirred no further, only bade part of the horse go out at first light the next day to keep the enemy from his plunderings; in all else so little was care intent in him that, on the contrary, it served for a proof that Hannibal and his army had not moved from camp, that the Numidians had made that sally. Hannibal moved in the dead of night. The guide was Philemenus, with his wonted load of caught game; the other traitors awaited what had been agreed. It had been arranged that Philemenus, bringing in his game by the accustomed wicket, should lead in armed men, while by another part Hannibal should approach the Temenid gate; that is the inland quarter, looking eastward, and tombs enclose some space within the walls. When he drew near the gate, a fire was raised by Hannibal as had been agreed, and the same signal, given back by Nico, shone in answer; then on both sides the flames were put out. Hannibal led in silence to the gate. Nico, falling unawares upon the drowsing sentries, cut them down in their very beds and opened the gate. Hannibal enters with the column of foot, and bids the horse halt, that they might be free to meet, in the open field, wherever the case should require. And Philemenus on another side, at the wicket by which he was wont to pass, drew near. His known voice, and the now familiar signal, having roused the sentry, the wicket is opened for him as he says that the load of a great beast can scarce be borne. Two young men carrying in a boar, he himself followed with a light-armed hunter, and the sentry, turned too heedlessly by wonder at its size upon those who bore it, he runs through with a hunting-spear. Then some thirty armed men, entering, cut down the rest of the sentries and broke open the nearest gate, and the column under its standards burst in at once. Thence, led in silence into the forum, they joined themselves to Hannibal. Then the Carthaginian sends two thousand Gauls, divided into three parts, through the city; to them he joins two Tarentine guides apiece; he bids the most frequented streets be seized, and, when the tumult had risen, the Romans be cut down everywhere, but the townsmen spared. But that this might be done, he charges the young Tarentines that, whenever they saw any of their own people from afar, they should bid them be quiet and silent and of good cheer.

Now there was tumult and shouting such as is wont to be in a captured city; but what the matter was no one knew well enough for certain. The Tarentines believed the Romans had risen to plunder the city; to the Romans it seemed some sedition stirred by the townsmen with treachery. The prefect, roused at first by the tumult, fled to the harbor; thence, taken up in a skiff, he is carried round to the citadel. A trumpet heard from the theater added to the error; for it was both Roman, prepared by the traitors for this very purpose, and, blown unskillfully by a Greek, made it doubtful who, or to whom, gave the signal. When it grew light, both the Punic and the Gallic arms, recognized, took away the Romans’ doubt; and the Greeks, seeing the Romans strewn everywhere in slaughter, perceived that the city had been taken by Hannibal. After the light was surer, and the Romans who had survived the slaughter had fled into the citadel, and the tumult was gradually hushing, then Hannibal bids the Tarentines be called together without their arms. All came together, save those who, following the Romans as they withdrew into the citadel, had pursued them to share their every fortune. There Hannibal, having addressed the Tarentines kindly and called to witness what he had shown to those of their citizens whom he had taken at Trasimene or at Cannae, and at the same time having inveighed against the proud domination of the Romans, bade each withdraw to his own house and write his name upon the doors; that he would order the houses which were not inscribed to be plundered, the signal being at once given; and that if anyone should write his name upon the lodging of a Roman citizen—and these they held empty of dwellers—he would hold him for an enemy. The assembly dismissed, when the doors marked with their titles had made the difference between a peaceable and a hostile house, the signal being given, men ran this way and that to plunder the Roman lodgings; and there was a good deal of booty.

The next day he leads his force to assault the citadel; which, when he saw it fenced—on the side of the sea, by which the greater part is washed round in the manner of a near-island, with sheer high cliffs, and on the side of the city itself with a wall and a huge ditch—and thereby not to be stormed either by force or by siegeworks, then, lest either the care of guarding the Tarentines should hold him back from greater matters, or the Romans, when they wished, should make a sally from the citadel upon the Tarentines left without a strong garrison, he resolved to fence the city off from the citadel by a rampart—not without this hope too, that when the Romans tried to hinder the work a hand-to-hand engagement might be brought on, and, if they had charged out too fiercely, the garrison’s strength might be so thinned by great slaughter that the Tarentines might easily of themselves guard the city against them. When the work was begun, the Romans, the gate flung suddenly open, made a charge upon the builders; and the outpost which stood before the work suffered itself to be driven, that audacity might grow with success and they might pursue men more numerous and routed further off. Then, the signal given, the Carthaginians rose up on every side, whom Hannibal had kept drawn up for this; nor did the Romans withstand the charge; but the narrowness of the place and the work already begun hindered them in their headlong flight—some delayed by the work itself, some by the apparatus of the work; very many plunged headlong into the ditch, and more were killed in flight than in the battle. Thereafter the work too was begun, with none to hinder it. A huge ditch was drawn, and a rampart is raised within it, and, after a moderate interval, he prepares to add a wall as well in the same line, that they might guard themselves against the Romans even without a garrison. He left, nonetheless, a moderate garrison, at once to help in finishing the wall; he himself, setting out with the rest of his forces, pitched camp at the river Galaesus—it is five miles from the city. Returning from this standing camp to inspect the work, which had grown somewhat faster than his expectation, he conceived the hope that the citadel too might be stormed. And it is safe not by height, as the others are, but is set on level ground and divided from the city only by a wall and a ditch. When it was now being assailed with every kind of engine and with siegeworks, a garrison sent from Metapontum gave the Romans heart to attack the enemy’s works by night, unlooked-for. Some they scattered, some they ruined with fire; and that was the end, on that side, of Hannibal’s assaulting the citadel. The remaining hope lay in a blockade, and that not effective enough, because those who held the citadel—which, set on a near-island, overhangs the jaws of the harbor—had the sea free, while the city, on the contrary, shut off from supplies by sea, and the besiegers were nearer to want than the besieged. Hannibal, the chief men of the Tarentines called together, set forth all the present difficulties: that he could see no way of storming a citadel so fortified, nor any hope in a blockade so long as the enemy was master of the sea; but that, if there were ships by which he might prevent supplies being brought in, the enemy would at once either withdraw or surrender. The Tarentines assented; but they judged that he who brought the counsel ought to bring aid as well to that end. For Punic ships summoned from Sicily could do it: their own, shut up within in a narrow inlet, when the enemy held the bars of the harbor—how were they to get out thence into the open sea? "They shall get out," said Hannibal. "Many things which by nature are impeded are made easy by counsel. You have a city set on a plain; level and broad enough streets lie open in every direction. By the street which runs from the harbor through the middle of the city to the sea I will carry the ships across on wagons, with no great effort, and the sea—of which the enemy is now master—will be ours, and from there by sea, from here by land, we will beset the citadel round; nay, in a short while we will take it, either abandoned by the enemy or together with the enemy themselves." This speech made not only hope of the result but even a vast admiration of the leader. Wagons were at once gathered from every quarter and coupled together, and machines were brought up for hauling the ships out, and the road between was made smooth, that the wagons might run the easier and the mass be the less in the passage. Beasts then and men were gathered, and the work briskly begun; and a few days after, a fleet, equipped and ready, is carried round the citadel and casts anchor before the very mouth of the harbor. This state of things Hannibal leaves at Tarentum, and himself returns into winter quarters. As to whether the defection of the Tarentines was made the year before or this year, the authorities pull different ways; the more of them, and those nearer in age to the memory of the events, hand down that it was made this year.

At Rome the consuls and praetors were held back until the fifth day before the kalends of May by the Latin Festival; on that day, the rite on the Mount performed, they each set out into their provinces. Then a new religious dread was thrown in their way out of the verses of Marcius. This Marcius had been an illustrious seer, and when, the year before, by decree of the senate, a search for such books was being made, they had come into the hands of Marcus Aemilius the city praetor, who was conducting that business; he had at once handed them over to Sulla, the new praetor. Of this Marcius’ two prophecies, the authority of the one—published after the event it foretold had been ascertained—lent credit to the other as well, whose time had not yet come. In the earlier prophecy the disaster of Cannae had been foretold in words nearly these: "Flee, son of Troy, the river Canna, lest aliens force you to join battle on the plain of Diomedes. But you will not believe me, until you have filled the plain with blood, and the river shall carry down many thousands of your slain into the great sea from the fruitful land; to the fishes and the birds and the wild beasts that dwell upon the lands let your flesh be food; for so has Jupiter declared to me." And both the plains of Argive Diomedes and the river Canna those who had served in those parts recognized, just as they did the disaster itself. Then the other prophecy was read out, the obscurer not only because things to come are more uncertain than things past, but more tangled too by its kind of writing: "Romans, if you wish to drive the enemy from your land—the plague that has come from far among the nations—I counsel that games be vowed to Apollo, to be held graciously to Apollo year by year; when the people shall have given a part from the public treasury, let private men contribute for themselves and their own; over the holding of those games let that praetor preside who gives the people and the plebs their highest justice; let the decemvirs perform the rites in the Greek manner with victims. If you do this aright, you shall ever rejoice, and your fortune shall be the better; for he shall blot out your foes who feeds your fields in peace." To expiate this prophecy they took one day; the next day a decree of the senate was made that the decemvirs should inspect the books concerning the games to be held for Apollo and the divine service to be performed. When these had been inspected and reported back to the senate, the fathers resolved that games should be vowed and held to Apollo, and that, when the games had been held, twelve thousand asses should be given to the praetor for the divine service, and two full-grown victims. A second decree of the senate was made, that the decemvirs should perform the rite in the Greek manner with these victims: to Apollo an ox with gilded horns and two white she-goats with gilded horns, to Latona a heifer with gilded horns. When the praetor was about to hold the games in circus-maximus/">the Circus Maximus, he made edict that the people during those games should contribute to Apollo an offering, as much as was convenient. This is the origin of the Apolline games, vowed and held for the sake of victory, not of health, as most suppose. The people watched garlanded, the matrons made supplication; commonly, with open doors, they feasted in the open, and the day was thronged with every kind of ceremony.

While Hannibal was about Tarentum, and both consuls were in Samnium but seemed about to besiege Capua, the Campanians were now feeling the famine which is wont to be the evil of a long siege, because the Roman armies had prevented them from sowing. They therefore sent envoys to Hannibal, begging that, before the consuls led their legions into their fields and all the roads were beset with garrisons of the enemy, he would order grain to be carried in to Capua from the neighboring places. Hannibal ordered Hanno to cross from Bruttium with his army into Campania and to take pains that a supply of grain be provided for the Campanians. Hanno, setting out from Bruttium with his army, shunning the camp of the enemy and the consuls who were in Samnium, when he was now drawing near Beneventum, pitched camp on a height three miles from the city itself; thence he ordered the grain that had been gathered in the summer to be carried down from the allied peoples round about into his camp, garrisons being assigned to escort the convoys. Then he sent word to Capua on what day they should be present in the camp to receive the grain, every kind of vehicle and beast of burden being gathered from the fields. This, with their usual sloth and negligence, was so done by the Campanians: a little more than four hundred vehicles were sent, and a few beasts of burden besides. For this, chidden by Hanno—because not even hunger, which kindles the dumb beasts, could spur their care—another day was appointed for fetching the grain with a greater apparatus. All this, just as it had been done, when it was reported to the Beneventans, they at once sent ten envoys to the consuls—the Roman camp was about Bovianum. When these had heard what was doing at Capua, the consuls arranged between themselves that one should lead his army into Campania; and Fulvius, to whom that province had fallen, setting out by night, entered the walls of Beneventum. From near at hand he learns that Hanno had set out with part of his army to forage; that grain had been given to the Campanians through the quaestor; that two thousand wagons and another disorderly and unarmed crowd had come; that everything was being done in tumult and trepidation, and that the form of a camp and military order had been done away with by the country-folk mingled in. With these things sufficiently ascertained, the consul gives the soldiers edict that they make ready only their standards and their arms for the coming night: the Punic camp must be stormed. Setting out at the fourth watch, all their baggage and impedimenta left at Beneventum, when a little before light they had reached the camp, they cast such terror that, had the camp been pitched on level ground, it could without doubt have been taken at the first charge. The height of the place and the defenses protected it, which could be approached from no side save by a steep and difficult ascent. At first light a mighty battle was kindled. Nor do the Carthaginians defend the rampart only, but, since their ground was the fairer, they dislodge the enemy as they strive up the steep.

Yet stubborn valor conquers all, and at several points at once the rampart and the ditches were reached, but with many wounds and the destruction of the soldiers. Therefore, his lieutenants and the tribunes of the soldiers called together, the consul says he must desist from the rash undertaking; it seemed to him safer that the army be led back that day to Beneventum, then on the next that camp be joined to the enemy’s camp, that the Campanians might not get out thence nor Hanno return; and that this might be the more easily obtained, he would summon his colleague too and his army, and they would turn the whole war thither. These plans of the leader, when he was now sounding the retreat, the shout of the soldiers spurning so sluggish a command broke up. Nearest by chance was the Paelignian cohort, whose prefect, Vibius Accaus, snatched up the standard and hurled it across the enemy’s rampart. Then, having cursed himself and the cohort if the enemy got possession of that standard, he himself, the foremost, burst through the ditch and rampart into the camp. And now the Paelignians were fighting within the rampart, when, on the other side, Valerius Flaccus, tribune of the soldiers of the third legion, reproaching the Romans with cowardice for yielding to the allies the glory of a captured camp, Titus Pedanius, chief centurion of the first rank, when he had taken the standard from the standard-bearer, says: "Now this standard and this centurion shall be within the enemy’s rampart; let those follow who would keep the standard from being taken by the enemy." His own maniple followed him first as he crossed the ditch, then the whole legion. And now the consul too, at the sight of those crossing the rampart, his plan changed, turned from recalling to urging and exhorting the soldiers, showing in how great a crisis and peril were the bravest cohort of the allies and a legion of citizens. Therefore each man for himself, all of them, through fair ground and foul, while weapons were hurled from every side and the enemy opposed their arms and their bodies, push through and burst in; many wounded, even those whom strength and blood were forsaking, strove to fall within the enemy’s rampart; and so in a moment of time the camp was taken, as though set on a plain and not fully fortified. Thereafter it was slaughter, no longer a battle, all being mingled within the rampart. Above six thousand of the enemy were slain, above seven thousand persons taken, together with the Campanian foragers and all the apparatus of wagons and beasts; and there was other vast booty, which Hanno, ranging far and wide in his plundering, had dragged from the fields of the allies of the Roman people. Then, the enemy’s camp destroyed, there was a return to Beneventum, and there both consuls—for Appius Claudius too came thither a few days after—sold and divided the booty. And those by whose work the enemy’s camp had been taken were rewarded, before all others Accaus the Paelignian and Titus Pedanius, chief centurion of the third legion. Hanno, from Cominium Ocritum, whither the news of the camp’s disaster was brought, returned into Bruttium with a few foragers whom he chanced to have with him, in the manner rather of flight than of a march.

And the Campanians, hearing of their own disaster and their allies’ alike, sent envoys to Hannibal to announce that the two consuls were at Beneventum, a day’s march from Capua; that the war was all but at the gates and walls; that, unless he came speedily to aid, Capua would come into the enemy’s power sooner than Arpi had. Not even Tarentum, much less its citadel, ought to be of such worth that he should hand over to the Roman people, deserted and undefended, Capua, which he had been wont to set equal to Carthage. Hannibal, having promised that the Campanian cause should be his care, in the meantime sends two thousand horse with the envoys, by which garrison they might keep their fields from being laid waste. To the Romans meanwhile, as of other things, so of the citadel of Tarentum and the garrison besieged there, there was care. Gaius Servilius, a lieutenant, sent by the authority of the fathers by Publius Cornelius the praetor into Etruria to buy up grain, came with several laden ships into the harbor of Tarentum through the enemy’s watches. At his coming, those who before, in scanty hope, had often been summoned to come over by the enemy in parleys, now themselves summoned and solicited the enemy to come over. And the garrison was strong enough, the soldiers who were at Metapontum having been brought over to guard the citadel of Tarentum. And so the Metapontines, at once freed from the fear that had held them, went over to Hannibal. The same thing, on the same coast, the Thurians did. They were moved not so much by the defection of the Tarentines and Metapontines—with whom, sprung from the same Achaean stock, they were joined even by kinship—as by anger against the Romans on account of the hostages lately put to death. Their friends and kinsmen sent letters and messengers to Hanno and Mago, who were near at hand in Bruttium, that, if they brought their army up to the walls, they would hand over the city into their power. Marcus Atinius was in command at Thurii with a moderate garrison, whom they thought could easily be drawn out to a battle rashly begun—by reliance not on the soldiers, of whom he had very few, but on the Thurian youth; he had of set purpose enrolled them by centuries and armed them against such chances. The Punic leaders, having divided their forces between them, when they had entered the Thurian territory, Hanno with the column of foot proceeds against the city with hostile standards, while Mago with the cavalry, screened by hills set opposite for the hiding of an ambush, halts. Atinius, having learned through his scouts only of the column of foot, leads his forces out into line, ignorant both of the treachery within and of the enemy’s ambush. The infantry battle was very sluggish, few of the Romans fighting in the front line, the Thurians awaiting rather than aiding the outcome; and the Carthaginian line of set purpose drew back its foot, that it might draw the unwary enemy on to the rear of the hill beset by its own cavalry. When it had come thither, the horsemen, rising up with a shout, at once turned to flight the all but disorderly crowd of Thurians, who stood with no firm enough spirit where they fought. The Romans, although the foot pressed them on this side, the horse on that, hemmed in, nevertheless drew out the battle for some while; at last they too turn their backs and flee to the city. There the traitors, gathered in a body, when they had received the column of their own people through the open gates, on seeing the Romans routed and borne toward the city, cry out that the Carthaginian was at hand and that the enemy mingled among them would burst into the city unless they speedily shut the gates. Thus they shut out the Romans and offered them to the enemy for slaughter; Atinius nonetheless was received with a few. Then sedition held them a little while, since some thought they must yield to fortune and hand over the city to the victors. But, as for the most part happens, fortune and bad counsels prevailed; Atinius with his men being conducted to the sea and the ships—rather because they wished it, on account of his mild and just command over them, than out of regard for the Romans—the Carthaginians receive into the city. The consuls lead their legions from Beneventum into the Campanian territory, not only to spoil the grain, which was now in the blade, but to besiege Capua, thinking they would make their consulship famous by the destruction of so wealthy a city, and at the same time take a vast disgrace from the empire, in that the defection of a city so near had gone unpunished now for a third year. But, that Beneventum might not be without a garrison, and that they might be able to withstand the force of cavalry against the sudden chances of war, if Hannibal—as they doubted not he would—came to Capua to bring aid to his allies, they bid Tiberius Gracchus come from Lucania to Beneventum with his cavalry and light-armed, and set someone over the legions and the standing camp to hold matters in Lucania.

To Gracchus, before he moved from Lucania, as he was sacrificing, a grim prodigy befell. At the entrails, the sacrifice performed, two snakes, gliding out of a hidden place, gnawed the liver, and, suddenly caught sight of, vanished from the eyes. And when, at the soothsayers’ warning, the sacrifice was repeated and the entrails watched the more intently, a second and a third time, they relate, when the liver had been tasted, the snakes departed untouched. Though the soothsayers had forewarned that the prodigy concerned the commander, and that he must beware of hidden men and their counsels, yet by no foresight could the impending fate be moved. There was a certain Flavus, a Lucanian, head of that part of the Lucanians which, when a part had gone over to Hannibal, stood with the Romans; and he was now in his year’s magistracy, created praetor by those same men. He, his will suddenly changed, seeking a place of favor with the Carthaginian, thought it not enough to go over himself nor to draw the Lucanians into defection, unless he had ratified his compact with the enemy by the betrayed life and blood of his commander, who was also his guest. He came secretly into conference with Mago, who was in command in Bruttium, and, having received a pledge from him that, if he handed over the Roman commander to them, the Lucanians should come free, with their own laws, into friendship, he leads the Carthaginian into a place to which, he said, he would bring Gracchus with a few men: there let Mago hide armed foot and horse—and the lurking-place could hold a vast number. The place sufficiently inspected and explored on every side, a day was agreed for doing the deed. Flavus came to the Roman commander. He says he has set on foot a great matter, for the completing of which Gracchus’ own help is needed: that he had persuaded the praetors of all the peoples who had revolted to the Carthaginian in that common upheaval of Italy to return into the friendship of the Romans, since the Roman power too, which had come near to ruin by the disaster of Cannae, was day by day growing better and greater, while Hannibal’s strength was waning and had come almost to nothing: that the Romans would not be implacable for the old offense; that no nation had ever been more easily entreated and readier to grant pardon; how often had even the rebellion of their own forefathers been forgiven? These things had been said by him to his own people; but they would rather hear these same things from Gracchus himself, and touch his right hand in person, and carry that pledge of faith away with them: he had named for them, as the place of meeting, one removed from sight, not far from the Roman camp; there in few words the matter could be transacted, that the whole Lucanian name should be in the faith and alliance of Rome. Gracchus, thinking that treachery was absent both from the words and from the matter, and caught by the likeness of truth, set out from the camp with his lictors and a troop of horse, and, his guest his guide, plunges into the ambush. The enemy rose up suddenly; and, that the treachery might not be doubtful, Flavus joined himself to them. Weapons are hurled at Gracchus and the horsemen from every side. Gracchus leaps down from his horse; he bids the rest do the same, and exhorts them that what alone fortune has left them they should honor by valor: but what was left to a few hemmed in by a multitude in a valley fenced by wood and mountains, save death? It mattered only whether, offering their bodies like cattle, they were slaughtered unavenged, or whether, turned wholly from suffering and awaiting the issue to assault and wrath, acting and daring, drenched in the enemy’s blood, they fell among the heaped arms and bodies of their dying foes. Let all aim at the Lucanian, the traitor and deserter; whoever sent that victim before him to the shades would find an extraordinary glory, an excellent solace for his own death. Amid these words, his cloak wound about his left arm—for they had not even brought their shields out with them—he made a charge upon the enemy. A greater fight than their number warranted is fought. The Romans’ bodies, exposed especially, are pierced by javelins; and, since they had been showered upon from higher ground on every side into the hollow valley, they are run through. The Carthaginians strive to take Gracchus alive, now stripped of his guard; but, catching sight of his Lucanian guest among the enemy, he charged so fiercely into their close ranks that he could not be spared without the destruction of many. Mago at once sent him, lifeless, to Hannibal, and bade him be set, together with the captured fasces, before the commander’s tribunal. If this report is true, Gracchus perished in Lucania at the plains which are called the Old.

There are those who maintain that in the Beneventan territory near the river Calor, having gone forward from the camp with his lictors and three slaves for the sake of bathing, when by chance the enemy lay hidden among the willows grown on the banks, he was killed, naked and unarmed, defending himself with the stones that the stream rolled. There are those who write that, at the soothsayers’ warning, having gone five hundred paces from the camp to make expiation in a clean place for the prodigies before mentioned, he was hemmed in by two troops of Numidians who chanced to be set in that place. So little is agreed, either of the place or of the manner of death, in a man so famous and distinguished. Of Gracchus’ funeral too the report is various. Some hand down that he was buried in the Roman camp by his own men; some, that by Hannibal—and that is the more current report—a pyre was built up in the entrance of the Punic camp, and that the army in arms paraded, with the war-dances of the Spaniards and the movements of arms and bodies customary to each nation, Hannibal himself celebrating the obsequies with every honor of deed and word. These things they hand down who make Lucania the scene of the deed. If you would believe those who relate that he was killed at the river Calor, the enemy got possession only of Gracchus’ head; and when it had been brought to Hannibal, Carthalo was sent by him at once to carry it into the Roman camp to Gnaeus Cornelius the quaestor; and he held the commander’s funeral in the camp, the Beneventans celebrating it together with the army.

The consuls, having entered the Campanian territory, while they ravaged it far and wide, were terrified by a sally of the townsmen and of Mago with the cavalry, and in alarm recalled their soldiers, scattered everywhere, to the standards; and, the line scarcely yet drawn up, they were routed and lost above one thousand five hundred soldiers. Thereafter a vast ferocity grew in that people, proud by its own nature, and they provoked the Romans in many battles; but the consuls one battle, begun incautiously and inconsiderately, had made the more intent on caution. Yet one small thing restored spirit to these and lessened audacity in those; but in war nothing is so slight that it does not sometimes turn the scale of a great matter. Titus Quinctius Crispinus had as a guest Badius the Campanian, joined to him in a most familiar bond of hospitality. The intimacy had grown, because Badius, sick at Rome in Crispinus’ house before the Campanian defection, had been generously and kindly tended. This Badius, then, going forward before the outposts that stood before the gate, bade Crispinus be called. When this was announced to Crispinus, thinking that a friendly and familiar conference was sought, the memory of their private right remaining even in the sundering of the public treaties, he went forward a little from the rest. After they had come into each other’s sight, "I challenge you to fight, Crispinus," said Badius; "let us mount our horses, and, the others removed, let us decide which is the better in war." To this Crispinus said that neither he nor the other lacked enemies on whom to show their valor; that he, even if he met him in the line, would turn aside, lest he stain his right hand with a guest’s blood; and, turning, he was going away. But then the more fiercely the Campanian railed at his softness and cowardice, and cast reproaches worthy of himself upon the guiltless man, calling him a guest who was an enemy, and one who pretended to spare him to whom he knew himself no match. If he thought that, the public treaties broken, private rights were too little dissolved along with them, then Badius the Campanian renounced his hospitality to Titus Quinctius Crispinus the Roman, openly, two armies hearing it. Nothing was shared between them, nothing in league; enemy with enemy was he, whose country and household gods, public and private, he had come to assail. If he were a man, let him close. The troopers urged the long-hesitating Crispinus not to suffer the Campanian to insult him with impunity. And so, having delayed only while he consulted the commanders whether it were permitted him to fight out of his rank against a challenging enemy, by their leave he took up his arms and mounted his horse, and, calling Badius by name, summoned him to fight. No delay was made by the Campanian; with hostile charge of horses they ran together. Crispinus pierced Badius above the shield through the left shoulder with his spear, and, as he slipped down with the wound, leaped from his horse to dispatch him on foot as he lay. But Badius, before he could be overpowered, leaving his buckler and his horse, fled to his own people; Crispinus, the horse and arms captured, displaying the bloody spear-point, conspicuous with the spoils, was conducted to the consuls amid great praise and congratulation of the soldiers, and there magnificently praised and presented with gifts.

Hannibal, when he had moved his camp from the Beneventan territory to Capua, on the third day after he came led his forces out into line, by no means doubting—since, in his absence a few days before, the battle had been favorable to the Campanians—that the Romans would be far less able to withstand him and his army, so often victorious. But after the fighting was begun, the Roman line was hard pressed, chiefly by the charge of the cavalry, while it was overwhelmed with javelins, until the signal was given to the horsemen to let their horses go against the enemy. So it was a cavalry battle, when the army of Sempronius, seen from afar—over which Gnaeus Cornelius the quaestor was in command—gave each side an equal fear that fresh enemies were approaching. As if by arrangement, on both sides the signal for retreat was given, and, led back into camp, they parted with the contest almost even; yet more fell on the Roman side at the first charge of the horsemen. Then the consuls, to draw Hannibal away from Capua, on the night that followed went off in different directions, Fulvius into the Cumaean territory, Claudius into Lucania. On the next day, when it was announced to Hannibal that the Roman camp was empty and that they had gone off in two columns in different directions, uncertain at first which he should follow, he set himself to follow Appius. He, having led the enemy round whither he would, returned by another route to Capua. To Hannibal another chance of success in these parts was offered. There was one Marcus Centenius, surnamed Paenula, conspicuous among the centurions of the first rank both for the size of his body and for his spirit. He, his service discharged, brought into the senate through Publius Cornelius Sulla the praetor, asks of the fathers that five thousand soldiers be given him: that, skilled both in the enemy and in the regions, he would in a short time do something worth the while, and that the very arts by which our generals and armies had thus far been entrapped he would use against their inventor. This was promised no less foolishly than it was foolishly believed, as though the arts of the soldier and of the commander were one. Instead of five thousand, eight thousand soldiers were given him, half citizens, half allies; and he himself stirred up a good many volunteers from the fields along the way, and with his army nearly doubled came into Lucania, where Hannibal, having followed Claudius in vain, had halted. There was no doubt of the issue, between Hannibal as leader and a centurion, and the two armies—the one a veteran grown old in conquering, the other wholly new, in great part even hastily levied and half-armed. When the columns came in sight of each other, and neither side declined the fight, at once the lines were drawn up. The battle nonetheless was fought, as in no evenly matched encounter, with spirit for more than two hours, so long as the leader stood, on the Roman side. After he, not only for his old fame but also from fear of the dishonor to come, should he survive a disaster brought on by his own rashness, threw himself in the way of the enemy’s weapons and fell, the Roman line was at once routed; but so little was even a way of flight open—all the roads being beset by the cavalry—that out of so great a multitude scarcely a thousand escaped, the rest being destroyed, some here, some there, by every kind of ruin.

Capua began to be besieged a second time by the consuls with the utmost force, and the things needful for that purpose were being carried in and prepared. Grain was carried to Casilinum; at the mouth of the Volturnus, where the city now is, a fort was strengthened, and there—and at Puteoli, which Fabius Maximus had fortified before—a garrison was set, that the nearest sea and the river might be in their power. Into these two seaboard forts the grain which had lately been sent from Sardinia, and which Marcus Junius the praetor had bought up from Etruria, was carried from Ostia, that the army might have a supply through the winter. But, over and above that disaster which had been received in Lucania, the army of slave-volunteers too, which, while Gracchus lived, had served with the utmost fidelity, as though discharged by the death of its leader, departed from the standards. Hannibal did not wish Capua neglected, nor his allies deserted in so great a crisis; but, after the prosperous success arising from the rashness of one Roman leader, he was watching for an occasion of crushing another leader and his army. Apulian envoys announced to him that Gnaeus Fulvius the praetor, at first, while he assaulted certain cities of the Apulians that had revolted to Hannibal, had pressed the matter rather intently; afterward both he and his soldiers, filled with booty by too great success, had run out into such license and sloth that there was no discipline of soldiering. Having, as often at other times, so within a few days before, proved what an army is under an ignorant leader, he moved his camp into Apulia.

About Herdonea were the Roman legions and the praetor Fulvius. When word was brought thither that the enemy was approaching, it was all but brought to pass that, without the praetor’s command, the standards torn up, they marched out into line; nor did anything hold them back more than the assured hope that they would do it at their own discretion whenever they wished. On the night following, Hannibal—knowing that there had been an uproar in the camp, and that very many had fiercely beset the leader to give the signal, calling him to arms, and in no doubt that an occasion for a prosperous battle was being given—posts three thousand light-armed soldiers in the farmsteads round about and in the thickets and woods, who at the signal should all together rise up at once from their hiding-places; and he bids Mago, with nearly two thousand horse, beset all the roads by which he believed the flight would incline. These things prepared by night, at first light he leads his forces out into line; nor did Fulvius hesitate, drawn on not so much by any hope of his own as by the soldiers’ chance impulse. And so, with the same rashness with which the advance into line was made, the line itself is drawn up—at the caprice of the soldiers, running forward at random and halting in whatever place their own spirit had carried them, and then, through caprice or fear, deserting their place. The legion/">first legion and the left wing were drawn up in the front, and the line stretched out lengthwise. Though the tribunes cried that there was no strength or force within, and that wherever the enemy made their charge they would break through, no counsel of safety did he admit, not only to his mind but not even to his ears. And Hannibal was at hand, a leader by no means alike, neither with a like army nor one so drawn up. And so the Romans did not withstand even the first shout and charge of them. Their leader, equal to Centenius in folly and rashness but by no means to be compared in spirit, when he sees the matter going against him and his men in alarm, seized a horse and fled with nearly two hundred horsemen; the rest of the line, driven back in front, then hemmed in from the rear and on the wings, was cut down to such a degree that out of eighteen thousand men no more than two thousand escaped. The enemy got possession of the camp.

When these disasters, one upon another, had been announced at Rome, a vast grief indeed and dread seized the state; yet, because the consuls, where the chief weight of things lay, were thus far conducting matters prosperously, men were the less shaken by these disasters. They send envoys to the consuls, Gaius Laetorius and Marcus Metilius, to announce that they should carefully gather up the remnants of the two armies, and take pains that the men should not, through fear and despair, give themselves up to the enemy—as had happened after the disaster of Cannae—and that they should hunt out the deserters from the army of the volunteers. The same business was given to Publius Cornelius, to whom the levy too had been entrusted; and he made edict through the markets and meeting-places that a search for the volunteers be made, and that they be brought back to the standards. All this was done with the most intent care. Appius Claudius the consul, having set Decimus Junius in charge at the mouth of the Volturnus, and Marcus Aurelius Cotta at Puteoli, to send into the camp at once whatever grain-ships came in from Etruria and Sardinia, himself returned to Capua, and found his colleague Quintus Fulvius carrying everything away from Casilinum and making ready to assault Capua. Then both beset the city round, and summoned Claudius Nero the praetor from Suessula, out of the Claudian camp. He too, leaving a moderate garrison there to hold the place, came down with all his other forces to Capua. So three headquarters were raised about Capua; three armies, setting to the work in different parts, prepare to surround the city with a ditch and rampart and raise forts at moderate intervals; and in many places at once, the Campanians hindering the works, they fight with such success that at last the Campanian kept himself within the gates and the wall. Yet before these works could be carried unbroken round, envoys were sent to Hannibal to complain that Capua had been deserted by him and all but given back to the Romans, and to adjure him that he would now at least bring aid to men not only beset but even walled round. Letters were sent to the consuls by Publius Cornelius the praetor, that, before they shut Capua in with their works, they should give the Campanians the power, that those of them who wished might go out from Capua and carry their goods with them: that those who went out before the Ides of March should be free and keep all their own; that after that day, both those who went out and those who stayed there should be reckoned among the enemy. This was proclaimed to the Campanians, and so spurned that they even of themselves uttered insults and threats. Hannibal had led his legions from Herdonea to Tarentum, in hope of getting the citadel of Tarentum by hope or force or guile; and when this made too little progress, he turned his march to Brundisium, thinking that town was being betrayed. There too, when he was wasting time in vain, Campanian envoys came to him, complaining and at once entreating; to whom Hannibal answered magnificently, that he had broken the siege once before and that now the consuls would not bear his coming. Dismissed with this hope, the envoys could scarcely get back to Capua, now girt with a double ditch and rampart.

While Capua was being most actively walled round, the siege of Syracuse came to its end—aided, besides the force and valor of the leader and the army, by treachery within as well. For Marcellus, at the beginning of spring, uncertain whether to turn the war to Agrigentum against Himilco and Hippocrates, or to press Syracuse with a siege, although he saw that the city, impregnable by its situation on land and sea, could be taken neither by force nor by famine—since supplies almost free from Carthage fed it—yet, that he might leave nothing untried, ordered the Syracusan deserters—there were among the Romans some men of the noblest birth, driven out during the defection from the Romans because they shrank from the new counsels—to sound the minds of the men of their own party by parleys, and to give a pledge that, if Syracuse were handed over, they should be free and live under their own laws. There was no opportunity for parley, because the minds of many being suspected had turned the watch and the eyes of all to this, that no such design should be admitted unseen. One slave of the exiles, brought into the city as a deserter, having met with a few, made a beginning of conferring about such a matter. Then certain men, covered with nets in a fishing-boat and so carried round to the Roman camp, conferred with the deserters, and the same men more than once in the same way, and others and still others; at last they came to be eighty. And when everything was now arranged for the betrayal, the design being disclosed to Epicydes through one Attalus, indignant that the matter had not been entrusted to him, they were all put to death with torture. Soon another hope took its place, after this had come to nothing. A certain Damippus, a Lacedaemonian, sent from Syracuse to King Philip, had been captured by the Roman ships. To ransom this man Epicydes’ care above all was great, nor did Marcellus refuse, the Romans even then courting the friendship of the Aetolians, whose allies the Lacedaemonians were. To those sent to a parley about his ransom, a place midmost and most convenient for both seemed to be at the harbor of Trogili, near the tower which they call Galeagra. When they came thither rather often, one of the Romans, contemplating the wall from near at hand, by counting the stones and reckoning to himself how much each presented in front, having measured the height of the wall as nearly as he could by conjecture, and judging it somewhat lower than his own former opinion and that of all the rest, and surmountable even by ladders of middling size, reports the matter to Marcellus. It seemed not to be despised; but since the place could not be approached, because for that very reason it was guarded the more intently, an occasion was sought; and this a deserter offered, announcing that a festival of Diana was being held for three days, and that, because other things were lacking in the siege, the feasts were being celebrated rather lavishly with wine, supplied by Epicydes to the whole commons and divided among the tribes by the leading men. When Marcellus learned this, having conferred with a few of the tribunes of the soldiers, and fitting centurions and soldiers having been chosen through them for a deed so great and so daring, and ladders prepared in secret, he bids the signal be given to the rest that they should tend their bodies betimes and give themselves to rest: by night they must go upon an enterprise. Then, when the hour seemed to have come at which those who had feasted by day would now be sated with wine and at the beginning of sleep, he bade the soldiers of one standard carry the ladders; and nearly a thousand armed men were brought thither in a thin column through the silence. When the first had got up onto the wall without noise or tumult, the others followed in order, the audacity of the first giving spirit even to the doubting.

Now a thousand armed men had taken a part of the wall, when the rest of the forces were brought up and were mounting the wall by more ladders, the signal being given from the Hexapylon, to which they had come through a vast solitude, because a great part of the men in the towers had either feasted and were sunk in wine, or, half-drunken, were still drinking; a few of them, however, surprised in their beds, they killed. Near the Hexapylon is a postern; this they began to break open with great force, and from the wall, as had been arranged, the signal was given with a trumpet, and now everywhere the matter was carried on, not by stealth but by open force. For they had come to Epipolae, a place thronged with watchmen, and the enemy were now to be terrified rather than deceived—as indeed they were terrified. For as soon as the blare of the trumpets was heard, and the shout of those holding the walls and a part of the city, the watchmen, thinking all was held, some fled along the wall, some leaped from the wall and were dashed down in the crowd of the panic-stricken. Yet a great part were ignorant of so great an evil, all being weighed down with wine and sleep, and, in a city of vast magnitude, the sense of its parts not reaching sufficiently to the whole. Toward dawn, the Hexapylon broken open, Marcellus entered the city with all his forces, and roused and turned all to taking up arms and bringing what aid they could to the city now all but taken. Epicydes, setting out at a quick pace from the Island, which they themselves call Nasos, in no doubt that he would drive out the few who, through the watchmen’s negligence, had crossed the wall, kept telling the panic-stricken who met him that they were swelling the tumult and reporting things greater and more terrible than the truth; but after he beheld everything about Epipolae filled with arms, having only provoked the enemy with a few missiles, he turned his column back into Achradina, fearing not so much the force and multitude of the enemy as lest some treachery within should arise through the occasion, and find the gates of Achradina and the Island shut amid the tumult. Marcellus, when, having entered the walls, he saw from the higher ground the city—well-nigh the most beautiful of that age—lying subject to his eyes, is said to have wept, partly for joy at so great a thing accomplished, partly at the city’s ancient glory. The sunken fleets of the Athenians, and two huge armies with two most famous leaders destroyed, came before him, and so many wars waged with the Carthaginians at so great a hazard, so many tyrants and kings so opulent, and beyond the rest Hiero—a king both of most recent memory, and above all conspicuous by the benefits which his own valor and fortune had given him, toward the Roman people. When all this came together before his mind, and the thought stole upon him that in a moment of an hour all those things would be ablaze and reduced to ashes, before he moved his standards toward Achradina he sends ahead the Syracusans who, as was said before, had been within the Roman lines, to entice the enemy with gentle address to surrender the city.

The gates and walls of Achradina were held chiefly by the deserters, for whom there was no hope of pardon by terms; these suffered no man either to approach the walls or to address anyone. And so Marcellus, after that attempt had proved vain, ordered the standards to be carried back to Euryalus. It is a hill on the farthest part of the city, turned away from the sea and overhanging the road that leads into the fields and the inland of the island, very conveniently situated for intercepting supplies. Over this fort presided Philodemus the Argive, set there by Epicydes; to whom Sosis, one of the slayers of the tyrant, being sent by Marcellus, when, a long conversation held, he had been put off by evasion, reported to Marcellus that he had taken time for deliberation. When he was deferring day after day, until Hippocrates and Himilco should bring up their camp and legions—in no doubt that, if he received them into the fort, the Roman army shut within the walls could be destroyed—Marcellus, when he saw that Euryalus could be neither surrendered nor taken, pitched camp between Neapolis and Tycha—these are names of parts of the city and are the size of cities—fearing lest, if he entered the thronged quarters, the soldier, greedy for booty, could not be kept from scattering. Envoys came thither from Tycha and Neapolis with fillets and suppliant garlands, begging that there be sparing of slaughter and of burnings. About whose prayers rather than demands a council being held, Marcellus, by the judgment of all, made edict to the soldiers that no man should violate a free person: the rest should be for booty. The camp, fenced by the screen of walls in place of a rampart, with the gates lying open in the line of the streets, he set posts and guards, that no charge upon the camp could be made amid the soldiers’ scattering. Then, the signal given, the soldiers ran in every direction; and, the doors broken open, though everything resounded with terror and tumult, there was nonetheless a forbearance from slaughter; but of plunder there was no measure before they had carried out all the goods heaped up by a long-lasting prosperity. Meanwhile Philodemus too, since there was no hope of help, a pledge received that he should return unharmed to Epicydes, withdrew his garrison and handed over the hill to the Romans. All being turned to the tumult from the part of the city that had been captured, Bomilcar, taking that night in which, because of the violence of a storm, the Roman fleet could not lie at anchor in the open roadstead, set out from the harbor of Syracuse with thirty-five ships and gave his sails to the deep over the free sea, fifty-five ships being left to Epicydes and the Syracusans; and, the Carthaginians being instructed in how great a crisis the Syracusan cause was, he returned a few days after with a hundred ships, presented, as the report is, with many gifts from Hiero’s treasure by Epicydes.

Marcellus, Euryalus recovered and a garrison added, was free of one care, lest some force of the enemy received into the fort from the rear should throw into confusion his own men, shut in and hampered by the walls. Then he beset Achradina with three camps disposed through suitable places, in hope of reducing those shut in to a want of all things. When for several days the posts on both sides had been quiet, suddenly the coming of Hippocrates and Himilco brought it about that the Romans were assailed from every side at once. For both Hippocrates, his camp fortified at the Great Harbor, and a signal given to those who held Achradina, attacked the old camp of the Romans, over which Crispinus presided, and Epicydes made a sally upon the posts of Marcellus, and the Punic fleet was brought to the shore which was between the city and the Roman camp, that no aid might be sent up by Marcellus to Crispinus. Yet the enemy afforded more tumult than contest; for both Crispinus not only repulsed Hippocrates from his works but even pursued him as he fled in alarm, and Marcellus drove Epicydes back into the city; and it now seemed sufficiently provided for the future too, that there should be no danger from their sudden sallies. There was added to this a pestilence, a common evil, such as easily turned the minds of both sides from the counsels of war. For, it being the season of autumn and the places by nature heavy, yet far more outside the city than within it, an intolerable force of heat moved well-nigh all the bodies through both camps. And at first, by the fault of the season and the place, men were both sick and dying; afterward the very tending and the contact of the sick spread the diseases, so that either those who had fallen sick died neglected and deserted, or those who sat by and tended them were dragged down, filled with the same violence of the disease, along with them; and daily funerals and death were before men’s eyes, and on every side, day and night, lamentations were heard. At last they had so brutalized their minds by the habit of the evil that they not only did not follow the dead with tears and lawful mourning, but did not even carry them out or bury them, and the lifeless bodies lay strewn in the sight of those awaiting a like death, and the dead destroyed the sick, the sick the sound, both by fear and by the wasting and the pestilent stench of the bodies; and, that they might rather die by the sword, some went alone against the enemy’s posts. Yet by far a greater violence of the plague had afflicted the Carthaginians’ camp than the Roman; for the Romans, by long besieging Syracuse, had become the more inured to the climate and the waters. Of the enemy’s army the Sicilians, as soon as they saw the diseases spreading from the heaviness of the place, slipped away each to his own neighboring cities; but the Carthaginians, for whom there was nowhere a refuge, perished all, to the last man, together with their very leaders Hippocrates and Himilco. Marcellus, when so great a violence of the evil was pressing on, had led his men over into the city, and the shelter and the shade had restored their weakened bodies; yet many of the Roman army too were carried off by the same plague.

The Punic land-army destroyed, the Sicilians who had been Hippocrates’ soldiers held some towns not large, but safe both by situation and by their defenses; the one is three miles from Syracuse, the other fifteen; thither they both gathered supplies from their own states and summoned reinforcements. Meanwhile Bomilcar, having set out a second time with his fleet to Carthage, so set forth the fortune of the allies that he raised the hope that not only could saving aid be brought to them, but the Romans too could in a manner be taken in a captured city; and he prevailed that they should send with him as many transports as possible, laden with every supply of things, and should augment his fleet. And so, having set out from Carthage with a hundred and thirty ships of war and seven hundred transports, he had winds prosperous enough for crossing into Sicily; but the same winds prevented him from rounding Pachynum. The fame of Bomilcar’s coming, first, and then his delay, beyond expectation, having afforded joy and fear in turn to the Romans and the Syracusans, Epicydes, fearing lest, if the same winds that then held went on blowing from the east for several days, the Punic fleet should make again for Africa, handed over Achradina to the leaders of the mercenary soldiers and sailed to Bomilcar. Him, having his fleet at its station turned toward Africa and fearing a naval battle—not so much because he was unequal in strength or in number of ships, since he had even more, as because the winds blew fitter for the Roman fleet than for his own—he nonetheless prevailed upon to be willing to try the fortune of a naval contest. And Marcellus, when he saw both that the Sicilian army was being roused from the whole island and that the Punic fleet was approaching with a vast convoy, lest, shut in at once by land and sea, he should be pressed by the enemy’s city, although he was unequal in number of ships, resolved to keep Bomilcar from approaching Syracuse. The two fleets, hostile, stood about the promontory of Pachynum, ready to engage as soon as the first calm of the sea should have carried them out into the deep. And so, the east wind now falling, which for some days had raged, Bomilcar first moved; and his fleet at first seemed to make for the deep, that it might the more easily round the promontory; but after he saw the Roman ships making toward him, terrified—it is uncertain by what sudden thing—Bomilcar gave his sails to the deep, and, messengers being sent to Heraclea to bid the transports make back again for Africa, himself, sailing past Sicily, made for Tarentum. Epicydes, suddenly deprived of so great a hope, lest he should return to the siege of a city in great part already captured, sailed to Agrigentum, intending rather to await the issue than to set anything in motion from there.

When it had been announced in the camp of the Sicilians that Epicydes had withdrawn from Syracuse, that the island had been abandoned by the Carthaginians and all but handed over again to the Romans, they send envoys to Marcellus about the terms of surrendering the city, the will of those who were besieged having first been explored by parleys. When there was well-nigh no disagreement but that whatever had anywhere belonged to the kings should be the Romans’, the rest should be preserved to the Sicilians with their liberty and their own laws, having called to a parley those to whom affairs had been entrusted by Epicydes, they say that they had been sent at once to Marcellus and to them by the army of the Sicilians, that the fortune of all who were besieged and who had been outside the siege might be one, and that neither party should bargain for anything privately for itself. Then, received by them, that they might address their kinsmen and guests, having set forth what terms they now held agreed with Marcellus, the hope of safety being offered, they prevailed upon them to attack with them Epicydes’ prefects, Polyclitus and Philistio and Epicydes, whose surname was Sindon. These being killed, and the multitude called to an assembly, having complained of the want and of the things which they themselves had been wont to murmur secretly among themselves, although so many evils pressed them, they denied that fortune was to be accused of what lay in their own power—how long they should suffer it; that the Romans’ cause for assaulting Syracuse had been affection for the Syracusans, not hatred; for when they had heard that affairs had been seized by the satellites of Hannibal, then of Hieronymus—Hippocrates and Epicydes—then they had moved war and begun to besiege the city, that they might storm its cruel tyrants, not the city itself. But Hippocrates being slain, Epicydes shut off from Syracuse and his prefects killed, the Carthaginians driven from all possession of Sicily by land and sea, what cause remained to the Romans why they should not wish Syracuse safe, just as if Hiero himself were living, that peerless cultivator of Roman friendship? And so neither to the city nor to the men was there any other danger than from their very selves, if they let slip the occasion of reconciling themselves to the Romans; but such an occasion as it was at that moment of an hour, there would thereafter be none, if it appeared that they had at once been freed from their imperious tyrants.

With the vast assent of all that speech was heard. Yet it was resolved that praetors should be created before envoys were named; then, from the number of the praetors themselves, spokesmen were sent to Marcellus, whose chief said: "Neither at the first did we Syracusans revolt from you, but Hieronymus—by no means so impious toward you as toward us—nor afterward did any Syracusan break the peace composed by the tyrant’s death, but the royal satellites Hippocrates and Epicydes, who overwhelmed us, here by fear, there by fraud. Nor can anyone say that there was ever a time of liberty for us which was not also a time of peace with you. Now at least, by the slaying of those who held Syracuse overwhelmed, as soon as we have begun to be at our own discretion, we have come at once to surrender our arms, to give up ourselves, the city, the walls, refusing no fortune that shall be laid upon us by you. The gods have given you, Marcellus, the glory of taking the noblest and most beautiful of the Greek cities. Whatever memorable thing we have ever done by land and sea accrues to the title of your triumph. Would you have it believed by report alone how great a city was taken by you, rather than that it be a spectacle to posterity too, so that whoever comes by land, whoever by sea, may show now our trophies over the Athenians and the Carthaginians, now yours over us, and that you hand over Syracuse, safe, to be held under the clientship and tutelage of the name of the Marcelli? Let not the memory of Hieronymus weigh more with you than that of Hiero. He was your friend far longer than this man your enemy, and his good deeds you felt even in fact, while this man’s madness availed only to the ruin of himself." Everything was both obtainable and safe with the Romans: among themselves there was more of war and peril. For the deserters, thinking themselves handed over to the Romans, drove the auxiliaries of the mercenary soldiers too into the same fear; and, snatching up their arms, they first cut down the praetors, then ran to and fro to the slaughter of the Syracusans, and in their wrath killed whomever chance offered, and plundered everything that was at hand. Then, that they might not be without leaders, they created six prefects, that three should preside over Achradina and three over Nasos. When the tumult was at last allayed, as men pursued by inquiry what had been done with the Romans, it began to grow clear—what was the truth—that their cause and the deserters’ was different.

In good time the envoys returned from Marcellus, relating that they had been roused by a false suspicion, and that there was no cause for the Romans to seek their punishment. There was, of the three prefects of Achradina, a Spaniard, Moericus by name. To him, among the companions of the envoys, of set purpose one of the Spanish auxiliaries was sent, who, having got Moericus without witnesses, first sets forth in what state he had left Spain—and he had lately come thence: that everything there was held by the Romans’ arms. He could, if he made it worth the while, be the chief of his countrymen, whether it pleased him to serve with the Romans or to return to his fatherland; but, on the contrary, if he chose to go on being besieged, what hope was there for one shut in by land and sea? Moved by these things, when it had been resolved that envoys should be sent to Marcellus, Moericus sends his brother among them, who, through that same Spaniard, led apart from the rest to Marcellus, when he had received a pledge and arranged the order of doing the deed, returns to Achradina. Then Moericus, to turn the minds of all away from the suspicion of treachery, says that it does not please him that envoys pass to and fro: that no one should be received or sent, and that, in order that the watches might be kept the more intently, the strong points should be divided among the prefects, that each might be answerable for guarding his own part. All assented. In dividing the parts, there fell to himself the region from the fountain Arethusa to the mouth of the Great Harbor; that the Romans might know this, he brought it about. And so Marcellus by night ordered a transport with armed men to be drawn by the tow of a quadrireme to Achradina, and the soldiers to be set ashore in the quarter of the gate that is near the fountain Arethusa. When this had been done at the fourth watch, and Moericus, as had been agreed, had received the soldiers set ashore at the gate, at first light Marcellus attacks the walls of Achradina with all his forces, so that he turned upon himself not only those who held Achradina, but even from Nasos columns of armed men ran together, their stations being left, to ward off the force and charge of the Romans. In this tumult the swift galleys, equipped beforehand and carried round to Nasos, set ashore armed men, who, attacking unawares the half-filled stations and the open leaves of the gate by which a little before the armed men had run out, took Nasos with no great struggle, deserted in the alarm and flight of its guards. Nor in any was there less of resolution or of stubbornness for staying than in the deserters, because, not trusting even their own people enough, they fled from the midst of the struggle. Marcellus, when he saw that Nasos was taken and that one region of Achradina was held and that Moericus with his garrison had joined himself to his men, sounded the retreat, lest the royal treasures, whose fame was greater than the reality, be plundered.

The soldiers’ charge being checked, when to those deserters who were in Achradina space and a place of flight had been given, the Syracusans, at last freed from fear, the gates of Achradina being opened, send spokesmen to Marcellus, seeking nothing else than safety for themselves and their children. Marcellus, having called a council and admitted also the Syracusans who, driven from home by the factions, had been within the Roman lines, answered that the good deeds of Hiero through fifty years were not more numerous toward the Roman people than the misdeeds, in these few years, of those who had held Syracuse; but that most of these had fallen back where they ought, and that the men themselves had exacted from themselves, for the broken treaties, far heavier penalties than the Roman people had wished. For himself, he was now besieging Syracuse a third year, not that the Roman people might hold the city enslaved, but that the leaders of the deserters might not hold it captured and overwhelmed. What the Syracusans could have done was shown by the example either of those Syracusans who had been within the Roman lines, or of the Spanish leader Moericus who had handed over his garrison, or, last of all, of the Syracusans’ own resolve—late indeed, but brave. To himself, of all the toils and perils so long undergone about the walls of Syracuse by land and sea, the fruit was by no means so great in that it had fallen to him to take Syracuse, as it would have been had he been able to save it. Then the quaestor was sent with a garrison to Nasos to receive and guard the royal money. The city was given to the soldier to plunder, guards being set through the houses of those who had been within the Roman lines. While many foul examples of wrath, many of greed, were displayed, it has been handed down to memory that Archimedes, amid so great a tumult as the running to and fro of plundering soldiers through the streets of a captured city could stir, intent upon the figures which he had drawn in the dust, was killed by a soldier ignorant of who he was; that Marcellus bore this ill, and had care for his burial, and that his name and memory, his kinsmen too being sought out, were to them an honor and a protection. In this manner, chiefly, was Syracuse taken; in which there was so much booty as there would scarcely have been at the taking of Carthage, with which the contest was waged on equal strength. A few days before Syracuse was taken, Titus Otacilius crossed with eighty quinqueremes from Lilybaeum to Utica, and, having entered the harbor before light, captured transports laden with grain, and, going ashore, laid waste a good deal of the territory about Utica and drove booty of every kind back to the ships. He returned to Lilybaeum on the third day after he had set out thence, with a hundred and thirty transports laden with grain and booty, and sent that grain at once to Syracuse; and, had it not come to aid so timely, a destructive famine was threatening victors and vanquished alike.

That same summer in Spain, when for nearly two years nothing at all memorable had been done, and the war was being waged by counsels rather than by arms, the Roman commanders, leaving their winter quarters, joined their forces. There a council was called, and the opinions of all came together into one: that, since up to that time this only had been done, to keep Hasdrubal from making his way into Italy, it was now time to set about this, that the war in Spain be ended; and they believed strength enough for that had accrued in the twenty thousand Celtiberians stirred to arms that winter. There were three armies. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo and Mago, their camps joined, were nearly five days’ march from the Romans. Nearer was Hasdrubal son of Hamilcar, an old commander in Spain; he had his army by a city named Amtorgis. Him the Roman leaders wished to crush first; and there was hope of strength enough and to spare for it; that one care remained, lest, he being routed, the other Hasdrubal and Mago, in alarm, withdrawing themselves into pathless glades and mountains, should drag out the war. Thinking it best, therefore, their forces being divided in two, to embrace at once the war of all Spain, they so divided it between them that Publius Cornelius should lead two parts of the army of the Romans and the allies against Mago and Hasdrubal, and Gnaeus Cornelius, with the third part of the old army, the Celtiberians joined to it, should wage war with Hasdrubal Barca. Both leaders and their armies set out together, the Celtiberians going before, and pitch camp at the city of Amtorgis, in sight of the enemy, a river parting them. There Gnaeus Scipio halted with the forces before mentioned; Publius Scipio set out for the appointed part of the war.

Hasdrubal, after he perceived that the Roman army in the camp was scanty and that all its hope lay in the auxiliaries of the Celtiberians, skilled in all the perfidy of the barbarians, and above all of those nations among whom for so many years he was campaigning, and with an easy tongue—since both camps were full of Spaniards—through secret parleys bargains, for a great price, with the chiefs of the Celtiberians, that they should lead their forces away thence. Nor did the deed seem atrocious—for it was not that they should turn their arms against the Romans that was sought—and a price was given, as much as might even have sufficed for the war, that they should not wage war; and both rest itself, and the return home, and the pleasure of seeing their own people and their own things, were welcome to the multitude. And so the multitude was persuaded no more easily than the leaders. At the same time there was not even any fear from the Romans, since they were so few, should they try to hold them by force. This indeed will always have to be guarded against by Roman leaders, and these examples truly to be held as lessons, that they should not so trust to foreign auxiliaries as not to have more of their own strength and their own proper forces in the camp. The standards suddenly taken up, the Celtiberians depart, answering the Romans, who asked the cause and adjured them to stay, nothing else than that they were called away by a war at home. Scipio, after his allies could be held neither by prayers nor by force, and saw that without them he was neither a match for the enemy nor could be joined again to his brother, and that no other saving counsel was at hand, resolved to fall back as far as he could, intent with all care upon this, that nowhere should he commit himself to the enemy on equal ground—who, having crossed the river, was treading almost in the footsteps of the departing men.

In those same days a like terror, a greater peril from a new enemy, was pressing upon Publius Scipio. Masinissa was a young man, at that time an ally of the Carthaginians, whom afterward Roman friendship made famous and powerful. He then, with his cavalry of Numidians, both met Publius Scipio as he came, and thereafter was assiduously present as a hostile force, day and night, so that he not only cut off the stragglers who had gone far from the camp to fetch wood and forage, but rode up to the very camp, and, often charging into the midst of the outposts, threw everything into confusion with vast tumult. By night too there was often alarm at the gates and the rampart from a sudden inroad, nor was any place or time free from fear and anxiety for the Romans, who were driven within the rampart, the use of all things taken from them. When it was almost a regular siege, and it appeared it would be straiter still, should Indibilis—who, it was reported, was approaching with seven thousand five hundred Suessetani—join himself to the Carthaginians, the leader Scipio, cautious and provident, overcome by necessities, takes a rash resolve, to go by night to meet Indibilis and, in whatever place he should meet him, to join battle. Leaving therefore a moderate garrison in the camp and setting his lieutenant Tiberius Fonteius over it, having set out at midnight, he joined hands with the enemy he met. They fought as columns rather than lines; yet the Roman, as in a disorderly fight, was the superior. But the Numidian horsemen suddenly—whom the leader had thought he had eluded—poured round from the flanks and brought great terror; and, a new contest being joined against the Numidians, a third enemy besides came up, the Carthaginian leaders having overtaken them from the rear as they now fought; and the battle, doubtful, had hemmed the Romans round, uncertain against which enemy chiefly, or in what direction, they should mass and make their sally. As the commander fought and exhorted and offered himself where the toil was greatest, his right side is pierced by a lance; and that wedge of the enemy which had charged into the close ranks about the leader, when it saw Scipio slipping lifeless from his horse, ran to and fro, brisk with joy, announcing with a shout through the whole line that the Roman commander had fallen. This word, spread everywhere, made the enemy beyond doubt for victors and the Romans for vanquished. Flight from the line was at once begun, the leader lost; but, as breaking out among the Numidians and the other light-armed auxiliaries was not difficult, so to escape so many horsemen, and foot matching horses in swiftness, they scarcely could, and nearly more were slain in flight than in the battle; nor would any have survived, had not the night come on, the day now hastening toward evening.

Then the Punic leaders, using their fortune by no means slackly, at once from the battle, scarcely the necessary rest being given the soldiers, hurry their column in haste to Hasdrubal son of Hamilcar, in no doubtful hope that, if they joined themselves, the war could be finished. When they had come thither, between the armies and the leaders, glad with the recent victory, there was a vast congratulation, so great a commander with all his army being destroyed, and they awaiting a second victory, as a thing not doubtful, equal to the first. To the Romans the report of so great a disaster had not yet come, but there was a certain mournful silence and a tacit divination, such as is wont to be in minds already presaging an impending evil. The commander himself, besides that he felt himself deserted by his allies and the enemy’s forces only increased, even by conjecture and reasoning was more inclined to the suspicion of a disaster received than to any good hope: for in what way could Hasdrubal and Mago, unless they were done with their own war, have led their armies up without a contest? And how had his brother not stood in the way or followed from the rear, that, if he could not prevent the enemy’s leaders and armies from coming into one, he might himself at least join forces with his brother? Anxious with these cares, he believed this only to be saving for the present, to fall back thence as far as he could; whereupon in one night, the enemy unaware and therefore quiet, he measured off a good stretch of road. At daylight, when they perceived him departed, the enemy, the Numidians sent ahead, began to follow with as quick a column as they could. Before night the Numidians, overtaking, now from the rear, now charging on the flanks, forced him to halt and protect his column; yet as far as he safely could, Scipio kept exhorting them to fight and advance at once, before the foot forces should overtake.

But, now moving, now staying his column, when for some while not much progress was made and night was now at hand, Scipio recalls his men from the battle and, gathered upon a certain hill—not indeed safe enough, especially for a shaken column, yet higher than the rest around—he leads them up. There at first, the baggage and the cavalry received into the midst, the foot drawn round about not without difficulty warded off the charges of the inrushing Numidians; then, after, in their whole column, the three commanders with three regular armies were at hand, and it appeared that they would avail too little with arms to defend the place without a defense-work, the leader began to look about and consider whether in some way he could throw a rampart round. But the hill was so bare and of so rough a soil that neither brushwood for cutting a rampart, nor earth for making a turf-work or drawing a ditch or any other work, could be found apt; nor was anything by nature steep or sheer enough to afford the enemy a difficult approach or ascent; everything sloped up with a gentle incline. That they might nonetheless oppose some semblance of a rampart, they set round the pack-saddles, tied to their loads, as though building, to the accustomed height, a heap of baggage of every kind being thrown up where the pack-saddles had failed for the work. The Punic armies, after they came up, raised their column onto the hill quite easily; the strange aspect of the fortification at first held them, as by a kind of marvel, while the leaders cried out on every side why they stood, and did not pull apart and tear away that mockery, scarcely strong enough to delay women or boys? The enemy was caught and held, lurking behind the baggage. These things the leaders railed at contemptuously; but it was not easy either to leap over, or to heave aside the loads set against them, or to cut through the packed pack-saddles, buried in their own baggage. But when, with poles, they had heaved away the loads set against them and given the armed men a way, and the same was done at more points, the camp was now taken on every side. The few, by the many, the shaken, by the victors, were everywhere cut down; yet a great part of the soldiers, having fled into the neighboring woods, escaped into the camp of Publius Scipio, over which the lieutenant Tiberius Fonteius presided. Gnaeus Scipio some hand down was slain on the hill at the first charge of the enemy; others, that he fled with a few into a tower near the camp; that this, surrounded with fire, and so its doors burned through—which they had been able to heave open by no force—was taken, and all within, with the commander himself, were killed. In the eighth year after he had come into Spain, Gnaeus Scipio was killed on the twenty-ninth day after his brother’s death. The grief from their death was no greater at Rome than throughout all Spain; nay, among their countrymen a part of the sorrow was drawn also from the army lost, and the province alienated, and the public disaster; but the Spaniards mourned and missed the leaders themselves, Gnaeus the more, because he had presided over them longer and, being the earlier, had both won their favor and first given a specimen of Roman justice and self-restraint.

When the armies seemed destroyed and the Spains lost, one man restored the ruined cause. There was in the army Lucius Marcius, son of Septimius, a Roman knight, an active young man and of a spirit and talent somewhat greater than befitted the fortune into which he had been born. To his highest natural gifts had been added the discipline of Gnaeus Scipio, under which through so many years he had been taught all the arts of soldiering. He, both from the fugitives gathered, and certain men drawn down from the garrisons, had made a not contemptible army, and had joined it with Tiberius Fonteius, Publius Scipio’s lieutenant. But the Roman knight so prevailed in authority and honor among the soldiers that, the camp fortified on this side of the Ebro, when it had been resolved that a leader of the army be created by a military assembly, relieving one another in turn in the guard of the rampart and the posts, until the vote went through all, they conferred upon Lucius Marcius the supreme command. All the time thereafter—it was little—he spent in fortifying the camp and carrying in supplies, and the soldiers executed all his orders both actively and with a spirit by no means abject. But after it was brought word that Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, coming to destroy the remnants of the war, had crossed the Ebro and was drawing near, and the soldiers saw the signal for battle set out by the new leader, recalling what commanders they had had a little before, and on what leaders and forces relying they had been wont to go forth to battle, all suddenly fall to weeping and to beating their heads, and some to stretching their hands to heaven, accusing the gods, others, prostrate on the ground, to imploring each his own leader by name. Nor could the lamentation be stilled, though the centurions roused the men of the maniples, and Marcius himself soothed and chid them, that they had cast themselves into womanish and useless weeping rather than whet their spirits to defend themselves and the commonwealth with him, and not to suffer their commanders to lie unavenged; when suddenly a shout and the sound of trumpets—for the enemy were now near the rampart—is heard. Then, their grief turned suddenly to wrath, they run to arms, and, as though kindled with rage, run to the gates and rush upon the enemy, coming on carelessly and in disorder. At once the unforeseen thing strikes panic into the Carthaginians, wondering whence so many enemies had suddenly sprung up, the army nearly destroyed; whence such audacity, such confidence in themselves, in the conquered and routed; who had arisen as commander, the two Scipios being slain; who presided over the camp; who had given the signal for battle—at these things, so many and so unlooked-for, at first, all of them uncertain and stupefied, they give ground, then, driven by a strong onset, turn their backs. And either there would have been a foul slaughter of the fleeing, or a rash and perilous charge of the pursuers, had not Marcius speedily given the signal for retreat, and, withstanding at the foremost standards and himself holding back some, checked the excited line. Then he led them back into the camp, still greedy of slaughter and blood. The Carthaginians, driven at first in alarm from the enemy’s rampart, after they saw no one pursuing, thinking they had halted from fear, contemptuously again and at a slackened pace go off into their camp. There was a like negligence in guarding the camp; for, although the enemy was near, yet it occurred to them that he was the remnant of two armies destroyed a few days before. On this account, since everything was neglected among the enemy, Marcius, having explored these things, set his mind to a plan rash rather than daring in its first appearance, to assail the enemy’s camp of his own accord, thinking it easier that the camp of Hasdrubal alone be stormed than that, should the three armies and three leaders join themselves again, his own be defended; and at the same time that either, if his undertaking succeeded, he would raise the afflicted cause, or, if he were repulsed, would yet, by carrying arms forward of his own accord, take away the contempt of himself.

That, nonetheless, the sudden thing, and the nocturnal terror, and a counsel now beyond his own fortune, might not throw them into confusion, thinking the soldiers must be addressed and exhorted by him, an assembly being called, he discoursed thus: "Either my own devotion toward our commanders, living and dead, soldiers, or the present fortune of us all, can make any man believe that this command, ample as it is by your judgment, is yet in the very fact heavy and full of care. For at a time when, did not fear stupefy grief, I should scarcely be so master of myself as to be able to find any solaces for a sick mind, I am forced, alone, to take thought—what is hardest in mourning—for the turn of all of you. And not even then, when I must consider in what way I can preserve these remnants of two armies for the fatherland, is it permitted me to turn my mind from unceasing grief. For the bitter memory is present, and both the Scipios harry me day and night with cares and sleeplessness and often wake me from sleep, that I suffer neither them, nor their soldiers—your fellow-soldiers—unconquered through eight years in these lands, nor the commonwealth to lie unavenged, and they bid me follow their discipline and their institutions, and, as no one was more obedient than I alone to the commands of the living, so after their death to hold that best which I most judge they would have done in each matter. You too I would wish, soldiers, not to follow them with laments and tears as though dead—they live and flourish in the fame of their deeds—but, as often as the memory of them shall come, to go into battle as if you saw them exhorting you and giving the signal. Nor in truth was it any other vision, set before your eyes and minds yesterday, that produced that memorable battle, in which you gave the enemy a proof that the Roman name was not extinguished with the Scipios, and that a people whose force and valor were not overwhelmed by the disaster of Cannae will assuredly emerge from every cruelty of fortune. Now, because you have dared so much of your own accord, it pleases me to try how much you will dare with your leader as author. For not yesterday, when I gave the signal for retreat as you followed in disorder the routed enemy, did I wish to break your audacity, but to defer it to greater glory and opportunity, that afterward, prepared, you might be able to attack the unwary, armed the unarmed, and even, by the occasion, the sleeping. Nor have I conceived the hope of this occasion, soldiers, by chance or rashly, but from the very fact. For if anyone should ask you too in what way, few against many, conquered against conquerors, you defended your camp—you would answer nothing else than that, fearing everything, you both had it strengthened with works and were yourselves ready and drawn up. And so the matter stands: against that which fortune brings to pass that it be not feared, men are least safe, because what you have neglected you hold off your guard and open. Of all things the enemy now least fear this, that we, but now besieged and assailed ourselves, should of our own accord assail their camp. Let us dare what cannot be believed we would dare; by that very thing which seems hardest it will be the easier. At the third watch of the night I will lead you in a silent column. I hold it explored that there is no order of watches, no regular posts. A shout heard at the gates, and the first charge, will have taken the camp. Then, among men torpid with sleep and panic-stricken at the unlooked-for tumult and unarmed, surprised in their beds, let that slaughter be made from which yesterday you took it ill to be recalled. I know the counsel seems audacious; but in harsh affairs and with slender hope the bravest counsels are the safest, because, if in the moment of an occasion, whose opportunity flies past, you have hesitated a little, you will soon seek in vain the chance you let slip. One army is near at hand, two are not far off. Now, for those who attack, there is some hope—and you have now tried your strength and theirs: if we put it off to another day, and by the fame of yesterday’s sally cease to be despised, there is danger lest all the leaders, all the forces, come together. Shall we then withstand three leaders, three armies of the enemy, whom Gnaeus Scipio, with his army whole, did not withstand? As by dividing their forces our leaders perished, so, separated and divided, the enemy can be crushed. Of waging the war there is no other way. Therefore let us await nothing but the opportunity of the coming night. Go, the gods well aiding, tend your bodies, that, whole and vigorous, you may burst into the enemy’s camp with the same spirit with which you defended your own." Gladly they both heard a new counsel from a new leader, and the more audacious it was, the more it pleased them. The remainder of the day was spent in making ready their arms and tending their bodies, and the greater part

of the night was given to rest. At the fourth watch they moved. There were, beyond the nearest camp, at an interval of six miles, other forces of the Carthaginians. A hollow valley lay between, thick with trees; in the middle space of this wood, nearly, a Roman cohort is hidden by Punic art, and cavalry. So, the road being intercepted midway, the rest of the forces were led in a silent column to the nearest enemy, and, since there was no post before the gates nor any guards on the rampart, they penetrated, as into their own camp, none anywhere withstanding. Then the standards sound and a shout is raised. Part cut down the half-asleep enemy, part throw fire on the huts roofed with dry straw, part seize the gates to cut off flight. The enemy—fire, shout, slaughter at once—as though robbed of their senses, are suffered neither to hear nor to foresee anything. Unarmed, they fall among the bands of armed men. Some rush to the gates, others, the ways blocked, leap over the rampart, and as each had got out, they flee straightway to the other camp, where, hemmed in by the cohort and the cavalry rushing out from their hiding-place, they are cut down to a man; although, even if anyone had escaped from that slaughter, so swiftly did the Romans dash across from the nearer captured camp into the other camp, that no messenger of the disaster could outrun them. There indeed, the farther they were from the enemy, and because toward dawn certain men had slipped away to forage and gather wood and plunder, they found everything the more neglected and loose—only the arms set in the posts, the soldiers unarmed, either sitting and reclining on the ground or strolling before the rampart and the gates. With these, so careless and loose, the Romans, still warm from the recent battle and fierce with victory, join battle. And so resistance could by no means be made at the gates; within the gates, a rush being made from the whole camp at the first shout and tumult, a fierce battle arises; and long it would have held, had not the bloody shields of the Romans, seen, cast upon the Carthaginians a token of the other disaster, and thence a panic. This terror turned all to flight, and, pouring out wherever there was a way, save those whom the slaughter overwhelmed, they are stripped of their camp. So by night and by day two camps of the enemy were stormed under the leadership of Lucius Marcius. Up to thirty-seven thousand of the enemy were slain, according to Claudius, who translated the Acilian annals from Greek into the Latin tongue; about one thousand eight hundred and thirty taken, vast booty won; among it was a silver shield of a hundred and thirty-seven pounds with the likeness of Hasdrubal Barca. Valerius Antias hands down that one camp, Mago’s, was taken, seven thousand of the enemy slain; that in a second battle there was fighting by sally with Hasdrubal, ten thousand killed, four thousand three hundred and thirty taken. Piso writes that five thousand men, when Mago in disorder followed our retreating men, were slain from an ambush. With all, the name of the leader Marcius is great; and to his true glory they add even marvels—that a flame was poured from his head as he harangued, without his own feeling it, to the great panic of the soldiers standing about; and that a monument of his victory over the Carthaginians was, up to the burning of the Capitol, in the temple a shield, called the Marcian, with the likeness of Hasdrubal. Thereafter for some while affairs in Spain were quiet, both sides, after so great disasters received and inflicted in turn, hesitating to put the sum of things to the hazard.

While these things were doing in Spain, Marcellus, Syracuse taken, when he had ordered the rest in Sicily with such good faith and integrity that he increased not only his own glory but even the majesty of the Roman people, carried down to Rome the ornaments of the city, the statues and paintings in which Syracuse abounded—those, indeed, the spoils of the enemy and won by the right of war; but from this was made the first beginning of admiring the works of Greek arts, and from this of the license of plundering everything, sacred and profane alike, which at last turned upon the Roman gods, and upon that very temple, first, which was exceptionally adorned by Marcellus. For the temples dedicated by Marcus Marcellus at the Porta Capena were visited by strangers on account of the excellent ornaments of that kind, of which a very small part is to be seen. Embassies of well-nigh all the states of Sicily came together to him. As the cause of these was unlike, so was their condition. Those who, before Syracuse was taken, had either not revolted or had returned into friendship, were received and cherished as faithful allies; those whom fear, after Syracuse was taken, had surrendered, received laws from the victor as the vanquished. Yet there were no small remnants of the war about Agrigentum for the Romans: Epicydes and Hanno, the leaders left from the former war, and a third, new, sent by Hannibal in Hippocrates’ place, of the Liby-Phoenician stock, a man of Hippo—the people called him Muttines—an active man and, under Hannibal as his master, taught all the arts of war. To him Numidians were given as auxiliaries by Epicydes and Hanno, with whom he so ranged through the enemy’s fields, so visited the allies to keep their minds in fidelity, bringing each timely aid, that in a short time he filled all Sicily with his name, nor was there any greater hope among those who favored the Carthaginian cause. And so the Punic leader and the Syracusan, shut in up to that time within the walls of Agrigentum, having dared to go out beyond the walls—rather by Muttines’ counsel than by confidence—pitched camp at the river Himera. When this was brought word to Marcellus, he at once moved his forces and halted at an interval of about four miles from the enemy, intending to await what they would do or prepare. But Muttines gave no place or time for hesitation or counsel, having crossed the river and charged upon the enemy’s posts with vast terror and tumult. On the next day, in almost a regular battle, he drove the enemy within their defenses. Then, recalled by a sedition of the Numidians made in the camp—since nearly three hundred of them had withdrawn to Heraclea Minoa—having set out to soothe and recall them, he is said to have warned the leaders earnestly not to join hands with the enemy in his absence. Both leaders bore this ill, Hanno the more, anxious already before at his glory: that Muttines should set bounds to him, a degenerate African, to a Carthaginian commander sent by the senate and people? He prevailed upon the hesitating Epicydes that, having crossed the river, they should go out into line: for if they waited for Muttines, and a prosperous fortune of battle befell, beyond doubt the glory would be Muttines’.

But Marcellus, thinking it unworthy that he, who had repulsed from Nola Hannibal flushed with the victory of Cannae, should yield to these enemies, conquered by him by land and sea, bids the soldiers speedily take up arms and the standards be carried out. As he drew up his army, ten Numidians, their horses let loose, fly up from the enemy’s line, announcing that their countrymen—moved first by that sedition by which three hundred of their number had withdrawn to Heraclea, then because they saw their prefect sent away, on the very day of the contest, by leaders who envied his glory—would keep quiet in the battle. The treacherous race kept faith with its promise. And so both the Romans’ spirit rose, a swift message being sent through the ranks that the enemy whom they had most feared had been deserted by his cavalry, and the enemy were terrified—besides that they were unaided by the greatest part of their strength—fear being struck into them too lest they be assailed by their very own cavalry. And so it was no great contest; the first shout and charge decided the matter. The Numidians, since they had stood quiet on the wings at the encounter, when they saw their own men turning their backs, having become for a little while only companions of the flight, after they saw all making for Agrigentum in an alarmed column, themselves, from fear of a siege, slipped away here and there into the nearest cities. Many thousands of men were slain; six thousand taken and eight elephant-war/">elephants. This was the last battle of Marcellus in Sicily; victorious, he then returned to Syracuse. The year was now nearly at its end; and so the senate at Rome decreed that Publius Cornelius the praetor should send a letter to Capua to the consuls, that, while Hannibal was far off and no matter of great moment was being conducted at Capua, one of them, if it seemed good, should come to Rome to substitute the magistrates. The letter received, the consuls arranged between themselves that Claudius should complete the elections, Fulvius remain at Capua. Claudius created as consuls Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus and Publius Sulpicius Galba, son of Servius, who had held no curule magistracy before. Then were created praetors Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, Gaius Sulpicius, Gaius Calpurnius Piso. To Piso fell the city jurisdiction, to Sulpicius Sicily, to Cethegus Apulia, to Lentulus Sardinia. To the consuls the command was prolonged for a year.