When the consuls Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus and Publius Sulpicius Galba had entered upon their magistracy on the Ides of March, the senate being called to the Capitol, the fathers were consulted concerning the commonwealth, the conduct of the war, and the provinces and armies. To Quintus Fulvius and Appius Claudius, the consuls of the year before, the command was prolonged, and the armies they had were decreed to them, with this added: that they should not withdraw from Capua, which they were besieging, before they had stormed it. This care now held the Romans most intent of all—not from anger only, though against no state was anger ever juster, but because a city so noble and so powerful, as by its own defection it had drawn several peoples after it, so once recovered seemed likely to bend men’s minds again to respect for the old dominion. And to the praetors of the year before, Marcus Junius in Etruria and Publius Sempronius in Gaul, the command was prolonged, with the two legions apiece they had held. Prolonged too was the command of Marcus Marcellus, that as proconsul in Sicily he should finish what was left of the war with the army he had; if he needed a supplement, he should draw it from the legions which Publius Cornelius commanded as propraetor in Sicily, provided he chose no soldier from that number to whom the senate had denied discharge and return to their country before the war’s end. To Gaius Sulpicius, on whom Sicily had fallen, the two legions which Publius Cornelius had held were decreed, and a supplement from the army of Gnaeus Fulvius, who the year before had been foully cut to pieces and routed in Apulia. For this kind of soldiers the senate had fixed the same term of service as for the men of Cannae; and there was added, to the disgrace of both, that they should not winter in towns, nor build their winter quarters within ten miles of any city. To Lucius Cornelius in Sardinia were given the two legions which Quintus Mucius had commanded; the supplement, if there were need, the consuls were ordered to enroll. To Titus Otacilius and Marcus Valerius the coasts of Sicily and Greece were decreed, with the legions and fleets they commanded; Greece had fifty ships with one legion, Sicily a hundred with two legions. With twenty-three Roman legions the war that year was waged by land and sea.

At the beginning of that year, when the letter of Lucius Marcius was brought up, his exploits seemed magnificent to the senate; but the title of honor—that, with a command given neither by the people’s order nor by the fathers’ authority, he had written to the senate as propraetor—offended a great part of the members: it was a thing of evil precedent, they said, that generals should be chosen by their armies, and that the solemn auspice-taking of the elections should be transferred into the camps and the provinces, far from the laws and the magistrates, to the rashness of soldiers. And when some thought the matter should be referred to the senate, it seemed better to put off that deliberation until the horsemen had departed who had brought the letter from Marcius. It was resolved that a reply be written about the army’s grain and clothing, that both these matters should be the senate’s care; but to address it to "the propraetor Lucius Marcius" was not approved, lest he take for already adjudged the very point they had left for deliberation. The horsemen dismissed, the consuls brought up nothing before this, and the votes of all agreed in one: that there must be dealing with the tribunes of the plebs, that they should bring before the plebs, at the first opportunity, whom it pleased to send with command into Spain to that army which Gnaeus Scipio had commanded as general. The matter was treated with the tribunes and published; but another contest had seized men’s minds.

Gaius Sempronius Blaesus, having named a day for him, harried Gnaeus Fulvius in the assemblies for the loss of the army in Apulia, declaring that many generals had by rashness and ignorance led their army into a desperate place, but that none before Gnaeus Fulvius had corrupted his legions with every vice before he betrayed them. And so it could be truly said, he urged, that they had perished before they saw the enemy, and had been conquered not by Hannibal but by their own commander. No man, when he casts his vote, sees clearly enough to whom he entrusts a command, to whom an army. What difference had there been between Tiberius Sempronius and Gnaeus Fulvius? Tiberius Sempronius, when an army of slaves had been given him, had by discipline and command in a short time so wrought that not one of them, in the line of battle, was mindful of his birth and blood; they had been a defense to the allies, a terror to the enemy. Cumae, Beneventum, and other cities they had snatched, as it were, from the jaws of Hannibal and restored to the Roman people. Gnaeus Fulvius, on the other hand, had steeped in slavish vices an army of Roman Quirites, men nobly born and liberally bred. He had thus made them fierce and turbulent among the allies, cowardly and unwarlike among the enemy, so that they could endure not the charge only of the Carthaginians but not even their shout. Nor, by Hercules, was it a wonder that the soldiers gave way in the battle-line, when their commander first of all fled: he wondered rather that any had fallen standing fast, and that not all had been companions of Gnaeus Fulvius in panic and flight. Gaius Flaminius, Lucius Paulus, Lucius Postumius, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio had chosen to fall in the line rather than desert their surrounded armies; Gnaeus Fulvius had come back to Rome almost the sole messenger of his army’s destruction. It was a shameful thing that the army of Cannae, because it had fled from the battle, had been carried off into Sicily, not to be discharged thence before the enemy departed from Italy, and that this same sentence had lately been decreed upon the legions of Gnaeus Fulvius—while to Gnaeus Fulvius himself the flight from a battle joined by his own rashness was unpunished, and he would pass his old age in the cookshops and brothels where he had spent his youth, while the soldiers, who had sinned in nothing else than that they had been like their commander, were banished well-nigh into exile and suffered a service of disgrace. So unequal was liberty at Rome for the rich man and the poor, for the honored and the unhonored.

The accused tried to shift the blame from himself onto the soldiers: that they, fiercely demanding battle, had been led out to the line, not on the day they wished, because it was late in the day, but the next day, drawn up at a fair time and on fair ground, and yet had not withstood either the fame or the force of the enemy. When all fled in disorder, he too had been swept off by the throng, as Varro at the battle of Cannae, as many other commanders. And how could he, by standing alone, have profited the commonwealth, unless his death were to be a remedy for the public disasters? He had not been led incautiously, through want of supplies, into unfavorable ground; he had not been surrounded by an ambush while marching with his column unreconnoitered: he had been conquered by open force, by arms, in the line. The spirits neither of his own men nor of the enemy had been in his power: each man’s own nature made his daring or his panic. Twice was he accused and a fine demanded; the third time, when witnesses had been produced, when—besides that he was loaded with every reproach—very many on oath declared that the beginning of the flight and panic had arisen from the praetor, that by him the soldiers had been deserted, and that they, believing the leader’s fear not groundless, had turned their backs, so great a wrath was kindled that the assembly shouted that the inquiry must be on a capital charge. And concerning this too a new contest arose; for when he had twice demanded a money fine, and the third time said that he was holding inquiry on a capital charge, the tribunes of the plebs were appealed to, and the colleagues replied that they were not standing in the way of his holding inquiry, by the law or by custom as he preferred—what had been permitted him by the usage of the ancestors—until he had passed judgment on a private citizen either on a capital charge or for a money fine. Then Sempronius said that he was passing judgment on Gnaeus Fulvius for treason, and asked of Gaius Calpurnius, the city praetor, a day for the assembly. Thereupon another hope was tried by the accused: whether his brother Quintus Fulvius could be present at the trial, then flourishing both in the fame of his exploits and in the near hope of taking Capua. When Fulvius had sought this by a letter pitifully written for his brother’s life, and the fathers had answered that it was not for the commonwealth’s good to withdraw from Capua, after the day of the assembly was at hand, Gnaeus Fulvius went into exile at Tarquinii. The plebs voted that this was a lawful exile for him.

Amid these things the whole force of the war had been turned upon Capua; yet it was beleaguered more sharply than assaulted, and neither could the slaves and the commons endure the hunger, nor send messengers to Hannibal through guards so close. A Numidian was found who, taking the letter and professing that he would get through, made his promise good. Going out by night through the midst of the Roman camp, he kindled hope in the Campanians of trying a sally on every side while any strength remained. For the rest, in their many engagements they were generally successful in the cavalry battles, but were overmatched in the foot. Yet by no means was victory in any quarter as glad a thing as defeat was bitter, at the hands of an enemy besieged and well-nigh stormed. At last a plan was hit upon, that what was lacking in strength should be made even by craft. From all the legions were chosen young men foremost in vigor and lightness of body for swiftness; to these were given bucklers shorter than the cavalry carried, and seven javelins apiece, four feet long, tipped with iron such as is on the spears of the skirmishers. Each of these the horsemen took up upon his own horse, and trained them both to ride behind and to leap down nimbly when the signal was given. After it seemed, by daily practice, to be done with steadiness enough, they advanced into the plain that lay between the camp and the wall, against the drawn-up cavalry of the Campanians; and when it came to a javelin’s throw, at the signal given the skirmishers leap down. Then a line of foot, suddenly out of the cavalry, charges upon the enemy’s horse, and hurls its javelins with a rush, one upon another. With these, very many flung at random into horses and men, they wounded a great number; but more panic was struck in by the strange and unlooked-for thing, and the horsemen, charging upon the dismayed enemy, made a rout and slaughter of them as far as the gates. From that time the Roman side was superior in cavalry too; and it was made a standing institution that there should be skirmishers in the legions. They say the author of mingling foot with horse was the centurion Quintus Navius, and that this was an honor to him with the general.

While things stood thus at Capua, Hannibal was drawn two ways by his cares, to take the citadel of Tarentum and to keep Capua. Yet regard for Capua prevailed, upon which he saw the minds of all the allies and enemies turned, as upon a thing that would be a proof of whatever issue defection from the Romans might have. And so, leaving a great part of his baggage in Bruttium, and all his heavier-armed troops, with picked foot and horse, as fitted as could be for hastening the march, he pressed on into Campania. For all his speed, three-and-thirty elephants followed him. In a hidden valley behind Tifata, the mountain that overhangs Capua, he sat down. On his coming, when he had taken by force the fort of Galatia, driving out its garrison, he turned upon those who beleaguered Capua; and, sending messengers ahead to Capua to say at what time he would attack the Roman camp—so that they too, ready for a sally at the same hour, should pour themselves out from all the gates—he caused a vast terror. For on one side he himself attacked, on the other all the Campanians, horse and foot, and with them the Punic garrison, whose commanders were Bostar and Hanno, burst out.

The Romans, as in a critical case, lest by running together to one quarter they should leave anything undefended, so divided their forces among themselves: Appius Claudius was set against the Campanians, Fulvius against Hannibal; Gaius Nero the propraetor, with the cavalry of six legions, took post on the road that leads to Suessula, Gaius Fulvius Flaccus the legate, with the allied cavalry, over against the river Volturnus. The battle was begun not in the usual fashion of shout and tumult only, but, joined to the other sound of men and horses and arms, the unwarlike multitude of Campanians arrayed on the walls raised, with the clashing of bronze such as is wont to be sounded on a silent night at the moon’s eclipse, a cry so great that it turned aside even the spirits of the fighters. Appius easily kept the Campanians from the rampart; greater was the force on the other side, where Hannibal and the Carthaginians pressed Fulvius hard. There the sixth legion gave ground, and, it being driven back, a cohort of Spaniards with three elephants pushed through to the rampart, and had broken the middle of the Roman line, and was in doubtful hope and peril whether it should burst into the camp or be cut off from its own. When Fulvius saw this panic of the legion and this peril of the camp, he urges Quintus Navius and the other foremost of the centurions to fall upon the enemy cohort fighting beneath the rampart: the matter, he said, was come to the utmost crisis; either a way must be given them—and with less effort than they had broken the dense line they would burst into the camp—or they must be made an end of beneath the rampart. Nor would the thing be a great struggle: they were few and cut off from their own, and the line which, while the Roman was afraid, seemed broken, would, if it turned upon the enemy on both sides, surround them in the middle by a battle on two fronts. Navius, when he had received these words of his general, snatched the standard of the second hastatus from the standard-bearer and bears it against the enemy, threatening to fling it into their midst unless the soldiers speedily followed him and took their share of the fight. He was of huge body, and his arms set him off; and the standard, lifted on high, had turned citizens and enemies alike to the spectacle. But after he had now reached the standards of the Spaniards, then from every side javelins were hurled upon him, and well-nigh the whole line was turned against one man; yet neither the multitude of the enemy nor the force of their weapons could ward off the charge of that man.

And Marcus Atilius, legate of the first maniple of the principes from the same legion, began to bear his standard into the cohort of Spaniards; and those who were in charge of the camp, the legates Lucius Porcius Licinus and Titus Popilius, fight fiercely before the rampart and dispatch the elephants as they crossed over upon the very rampart. When the ditch was filled with their bodies, it gave the enemy a passage, as though a mound or a bridge had been thrown across. There, over the heap of fallen elephants, a savage slaughter was made. On the other part of the camp the Campanians and the Punic garrison had now been driven back, and the fighting was beneath the very gate of Capua that leads to the Volturnus; nor did armed men so resist the Romans breaking in as the gate, furnished with ballistas and scorpions, kept off the enemy from afar with its missiles. And the Romans’ onset was checked by the wound of the commander Appius Claudius, who, while he urged on his men before the first standards, was struck on the top of the chest, beneath the left shoulder, by a gaesum. A great force of the enemy, nevertheless, was slain before the gate, the rest driven trembling into the city. And Hannibal, after he saw the slaughter of the Spanish cohort and that the enemy’s camp was defended with the utmost force, abandoning the assault, began to draw back his standards and to wheel his column of foot, the cavalry thrown across to the rear that the enemy might not press on. The legions’ ardor to pursue the enemy was great; but Flaccus ordered the recall to be sounded, judging enough had been gained for both ends—that the Campanians should perceive how little defense there was in Hannibal, and Hannibal himself perceive it. Slain that day, certain who are authorities for this battle hand down, were eight thousand men of Hannibal’s army, three thousand of the Campanians; and fifteen standards were taken from the Carthaginians, eighteen from the Campanians.

In other writers I have found by no means so great a mass of battle, but that there was more panic than fighting, when the Numidians and Spaniards with the elephants suddenly broke into the Roman camp, the elephants going through the midst of it and making, with vast noise, a havoc of the tents and a stampede of the pack-animals snapping their tethers; that a trick too was added to the tumult, men being sent in by Hannibal in Italian dress and skilled in the Latin tongue, to bid, in the consuls’ name, since the camp was lost, each soldier to flee for himself to the nearest hills; but that this trick was quickly recognized and crushed with a great slaughter of the enemy, and the elephants driven from the camp by fire. This, however it was begun and ended, was the last battle before the surrender of Capua.

The medix tuticus—which is the highest magistracy among the Campanians—was that year Seppius Loesius, sprung from an obscure station and slender fortune. They tell that his mother, once performing for him, while a ward, the expiation of a household portent, when the soothsayer had answered that the highest power there was at Capua would come to that boy, said, recognizing nothing that answered to such a hope: "Surely it is the ruined estate of the Campanians that you tell of, when the highest honor shall come to my son." This mockery of the truth turned itself into truth; for when they were pressed by famine and the sword, and no hope was left that a stand could be made, while those who were born to the hope of honors declined the honors, Loesius, complaining that Capua had been deserted and betrayed by its chief men, last of all the Campanians took the highest magistracy.

But Hannibal, when he saw that the enemy could no longer be drawn out to battle, nor a way be broken through their camp to Capua, resolved—lest the new consuls cut off his own supplies as well—to depart with his attempt baffled and to move his camp from Capua. As he turned over much within himself whither he should go from there, the impulse came into his mind to make for Rome itself, the very head of the war—an occasion always desired and let slip after the battle of Cannae, as others commonly murmured and he himself did not dissemble. By an unlooked-for panic and tumult it was not to be despaired of that some part of the city might be seized; and if Rome were in danger, the Roman commanders would at once leave Capua, either both or one of them; and if they divided their forces, each made the weaker, they would give the chance of a good stroke either to himself or to the Campanians. This one care vexed him: lest, when he had withdrawn, the Campanians be at once surrendered. He wins over with gifts a Numidian, ready to dare and do anything, to take a letter and, entering the Roman camp in the guise of a deserter, to pass through secretly by the farther side to Capua. The letter was full of exhortation: that his own departure, which would be their salvation, would draw off the Roman commanders and armies from the assault of Capua to the defense of Rome; that they should not lose heart; by holding out a few days they would break the whole siege. Then he ordered the ships that had been seized on the river Volturnus to be brought up to the fort which he had earlier made for protection’s sake. When it was reported that there was so great a store of them that the army could be carried over in a single night, having prepared rations for ten days, he led the legions down to the river by night and carried them across before light.

Before this was done, Fulvius Flaccus, having learned from deserters that it would so be, had written to the senate at Rome; and men’s minds were variously affected, each according to his nature. As in a matter so alarming, the senate being at once called, Publius Cornelius, who had the surname Asina, would have recalled all the generals and armies from all Italy to the defense of the city, mindful neither of Capua nor of any other thing. Fabius Maximus held it shameful to withdraw from Capua and to be terrified and wheeled about at Hannibal’s nod and threats: he who, victor at Cannae, had not dared to go to the city, should he, repulsed from Capua, conceive the hope of taking the city of Rome? It was not to besiege Rome that he came, but to raise the siege of Capua. Rome, with the army that was at the city, Jupiter—witness of the treaties broken by Hannibal—and the other gods would defend. These opposite opinions were overcome by the middle counsel of Publius Valerius Flaccus, who, mindful of both, advised that the commanders at Capua be written to, what defense there was at the city; but how great forces Hannibal was leading, or with how great an army the siege of Capua needed to be kept up, they themselves knew. If so one of the generals and a part of the army could be sent to Rome, that by the remaining general and army Capua might still be duly besieged, let Claudius and Fulvius arrange between themselves which should besiege Capua, which should come to Rome to ward the siege from his country. When this decree of the senate had been carried to Capua, Quintus Fulvius the proconsul—since his colleague, sick of his wound, had to return to Rome—choosing soldiers from the three armies, leads across the Volturnus about fifteen thousand foot and a thousand horse. Then, when he had learned for certain that Hannibal would go by the Latin Way, he himself sent ahead to the towns along the Appian Way and those near that road—to Setia, Cora, and Lavinium—word that they should keep supplies ready in the cities and bring them out from the byways onto the road, and should draw garrisons into the cities, so that each commonwealth might have its affairs in its own hand.

Hannibal, the day he crossed the Volturnus, pitched camp not far from the river; the next day, past Cales, he came into the Sidicine territory. There, delaying one day in ravaging, he leads his army through the Suessan, the Allifan, and the Casinate country by the Latin Way. Beneath Casinum a two-days’ halt was kept, and ravagings made on every side. Thence past Interamna and Aquinum he came into the Fregellan country, to the river Liris, where he found the bridge cut by the Fregellans to delay his march. And Fulvius too had been held by the river Volturnus, the ships burned by Hannibal, while in a great scarcity of timber he hardly got together rafts to carry the army over. The army ferried across on rafts, the rest of the way was clear for Fulvius, supplies set out kindly not only in the cities but along the road; and the soldiers, eager, urged one another, this man and that, to lengthen his stride, mindful that they were going to defend their country. To Rome a Fregellan messenger, his journey continued day and night, brought a vast terror. More tumultuously than it had been brought, the danger was spread abroad by the running to and fro of men who added empty things to what they heard, and it set the whole city in an uproar. The wailing of the women was heard not from private houses only, but on every side the matrons, poured out into public, ran about the shrines of the gods, sweeping the altars with loosened hair, sinking upon their knees, stretching their upturned hands to heaven and the gods, and praying that they would snatch the city of Rome from the hands of the enemy and keep the Roman mothers and their little children inviolate. The senate was at hand for the magistrates in the forum, if they should wish to consult on anything. Some receive their orders and depart, each to his own part of the duties; others offer themselves, if there be any use for their service. Garrisons are set on the citadel, on the Capitol, on the walls, around the city, on the Alban mount too and the stronghold of Aefula. Amid this tumult it is brought word that Quintus Fulvius the proconsul had set out with his army from Capua; and, lest his command be diminished if he entered the city, the senate decrees that Quintus Fulvius have command equal with the consuls. Hannibal, having the more savagely laid waste the Fregellan country because of the cut bridges, came through the Frusinate, the Ferentinate, and the Anagnine territory into the Labican. Thence by Algidus he made for Tusculum, and, not received within the walls, below Tusculum bore off to the right down to Gabii. Thence, his army let down into the Pupinia, he pitched his camp eight miles from Rome. The nearer the enemy came, the greater grew the slaughter of the fleeing, the Numidians going before, and the more were taken, of every kind and every age.

In this tumult Fulvius Flaccus, entering Rome with his army by the Porta Capena, made through the middle of the city by the Carinae to the Esquiliae; thence going out, he pitched camp between the Esquiline and Colline gates. The plebeian aediles brought supplies thither; the consuls and the senate came into the camp; there it was deliberated upon the highest interests of the commonwealth. It was resolved that the consuls pitch camp about the Colline and Esquiline gates; that Gaius Calpurnius the city praetor have charge of the Capitol and the citadel; and that a full senate be kept in the forum, in case there should be need of deliberation in such sudden matters. Meanwhile Hannibal moved his camp up to the river Anio, three miles from the city. There, his standing camp pitched, he himself with two thousand horse went forward from the Colline gate as far as the temple of Hercules, and, riding up as close as he could, surveyed the walls and the lie of the city. That he did this so freely and at such leisure seemed shameful to Flaccus; and so he sent out his cavalry and bade the enemy’s horse be driven off and forced back into camp. When the engagement was joined, the consuls ordered the Numidian deserters—who then were on the Aventine, about twelve hundred—to cross through the middle of the city to the Esquiliae, judging that none would be fitter for fighting among the hollows and the buildings of the gardens, the tombs and the sunken roads on every hand. When certain men saw these galloping down on horseback from the citadel and the Capitol by the Publician slope, they cried out that the Aventine was taken. That thing gave such tumult and flight that, had the Punic camp not been outside the city, the whole panicked multitude would have poured itself out; as it was, they fled back into the houses and roofs, and pelted their own people, straying in the streets, as enemies, with stones and weapons. Nor could the tumult be checked nor the error cleared, the streets being choked with a throng of country folk and cattle that the sudden panic had driven into the city. The cavalry battle was successful, and the enemy were driven off. And because in many places tumults that sprang up at random had to be put down, it was resolved that all who had been dictators, consuls, or censors should hold command until the enemy had withdrawn from the walls. And through what was left of the day and the night that followed many tumults were rashly stirred up and put down.

The next day Hannibal, crossing the Anio, led out all his forces into line; nor did Flaccus and the consuls decline the contest. The armies drawn up on either side for the hazard of that battle, in which the city of Rome should be the victor’s prize, a vast rain mixed with hail so confounded both lines that, scarcely keeping hold of their arms, they betook themselves back to camp, with fear of nothing less than of the enemy. And the next day, the lines drawn up in the same place, the same storm parted them; and when they had withdrawn to camp, a wondrous fair weather rose with calm. Among the Carthaginians this thing was turned into a religious scruple, and a saying of Hannibal’s is reported: that now the will, now the fortune, of taking the city of Rome was not granted him. Two other things besides diminished his hope, the one small, the other great: the great, that, while he himself sat in arms before the walls of the city of Rome, he heard that soldiers had marched out under the standards as a reinforcement for Spain; the small, that he learned from a certain captive that during those very days the ground on which he himself had his camp had come up for sale, with nothing abated of its price on that account. That indeed seemed so insolent and unworthy a thing—that a buyer should have been found at Rome for that very soil which he held and possessed as taken in war—that he straightway called a crier and ordered the bankers’ shops about the Roman forum to be put up for sale.

Moved by these things, he carried his camp back to the river Tutia, six miles from the city. Thence he goes on to the grove of Feronia, a temple in that age renowned for its riches. The Capenates and the others who dwelt near it, bringing the first-fruits of their crops and other gifts according to their means, kept it richly adorned with much gold and silver. Of all these gifts the temple was then despoiled; great heaps of bronze, since the soldiers from religious scruple cast in the rough pieces, were found after Hannibal’s departure. About the plundering of this temple there is no doubt among the writers. Coelius hands down that Hannibal, on his way to Rome, turned aside thither from Eretum, and traces his march from Reate and Cutiliae and from Amiternum: that from Campania he came into Samnium, thence into the Paeligni, and, past the town of Sulmo, crossed into the Marrucini, thence through the Alban territory into the Marsi, and from there came to Amiternum and the village of Foruli. Nor is there error there, as though the tracks of so great a leader and so great an army could be confused within the memory of so brief an age—for it is agreed that he went that way—; the only question is whether he came to the city by that route, or returned by it from the city into Campania.

For the rest, Hannibal had not so much constancy in defending Capua as the Romans in pressing the siege of it. For through Samnium and Apulia and the Lucanians into the Bruttian land, to the strait and Rhegium, he pressed his march at such a pace that he all but overwhelmed the unwary by his sudden coming. Capua, though through those days it had been besieged no whit more slackly, yet felt the return of Flaccus, and wonder arose that Hannibal had not come back at the same time. Then through conferences they understood that they had been left and deserted, and that among the Carthaginians the hope of keeping Capua had been bewailed as lost. There was added the edict of the proconsuls, set forth by decree of the senate and published among the enemy, that whatever Campanian citizen came over before a fixed day should be without harm. Yet no going-over was made, fear rather than good faith holding them back, because in their defection they had done greater wrongs than could be forgiven. But as no one passed to the enemy by his private counsel, so nothing salutary was deliberated in common. The nobility had abandoned the commonwealth and could not be gathered into the senate; in the magistracy was a man who had not added honor to himself, but had by his own unworthiness taken away the force and the right of the magistracy he bore. Now not even in the forum nor in any public place did any of the chief men appear; shut in their houses, they awaited their country’s fall together with their own destruction, from day to day.

The whole sum of the cares was turned upon Bostar and Hanno, the prefects of the Punic garrison, anxious for their own peril, not their allies’. They, in a letter written to Hannibal not freely only but even sharply, charged that not Capua alone had been delivered into the enemy’s hand, but themselves too and the garrison betrayed to every torture: he had gone off into Bruttium, as though turning himself aside, that Capua might not be taken under his eyes. But the Romans, by Hercules, could not be drawn off from besieging Capua even by the assault upon the city of Rome itself; so much more constant an enemy was the Roman than a friend the Carthaginian. If he would return to Capua and turn the whole war thither, both they and the Campanians would be ready for a sally. They had not crossed the Alps to wage war with the men of Rhegium or of Tarentum: where the Roman legions were, there ought the Carthaginian armies too to be. So at Cannae, so at Trasimene, had things been well done—by coming up and joining camps with the enemy, by putting fortune to the trial. The letter written to this purport is given to Numidians who, at a stated reward, professed that service. They, in the guise of deserters, when they had come to Flaccus in the camp—so as thence, their moment taken, to slip away again—and the famine, which so long had been at Capua, made for any man a plausible cause of going over: suddenly a Campanian woman came into the camp, the mistress of one of the deserters, and discloses to the Roman commander that the Numidians had come over by a contrived trick and were carrying a letter to Hannibal: this she was ready to prove against one of them, who had laid the matter open to her. Brought forward, at first steadily enough he feigned not to know the woman; little by little, then, convicted by the truth, when he saw the racks demanded and made ready, he confessed it was so, and the letters were produced. There was added to the disclosure what was being concealed: that other Numidians too, in the guise of deserters, were ranging through the Roman camp. These, above seventy, were seized, and, with the new deserters, beaten with rods and, their hands cut off, sent back to Capua.

The sight of so grim a punishment broke the spirits of the Campanians. A concourse of the people to the senate-house forced Loesius to call the senate; and the chief men, who now this long while had held aloof from the public councils, they openly threatened that, unless they came into the senate, they would go about their houses and drag them all forth into public by force. That fear furnished the magistrate a full senate. There, while the rest spoke of sending envoys to the Roman commanders, Vibius Virrius, who had been the author of the defection from the Romans, asked his opinion, says that those who speak of envoys and of peace and surrender remember neither what they themselves would have done had they had the Romans in their power, nor what they themselves must suffer. "What?" he said, "do you suppose that surrender will be such as once, when, to win aid against the Samnites, we gave ourselves and all that was ours to the Romans? Has it now slipped from memory at what time and in what fortune we revolted from the Roman people? how in our defection we slew, by torture and for insult, the garrison that might have been let go? how often, and how spitefully, we sallied upon the besiegers, stormed their camp, called Hannibal to crush them? and this, which is the latest, that we sent him from here to assault Rome? Come now, on the other side, recall what they have done against us in hatred, that from that you may have wherewith to reckon your hopes. When a foreign enemy was in Italy, and that enemy Hannibal, and all things blazed with war, setting all else aside, setting Hannibal himself aside, they sent both consuls and two consular armies to assault Capua. This is the second year that they keep us walled round and shut in and waste us with famine, themselves enduring with us the utmost perils and the heaviest toils, often slaughtered about the rampart and the ditches, and at the last all but stripped of their own camp. But I pass these things over: it is an old and common thing to suffer toils and perils in besieging an enemy’s city. This is the token of their wrath and of an accursed hatred: Hannibal with vast forces of foot and horse assaulted their camp and in part took it; by so great a peril they were nothing moved from the siege. He crossed the Volturnus and burned up the Calene country: by no such disaster of their allies were they called away. He bade his standards be borne against the very city of Rome: that gathering storm too they despised. He crossed the Anio and pitched camp three miles from the city; last he came up to the very walls and gates, and showed that he would take Rome from them unless they let go Capua: they let it not go. Wild beasts, driven on by blind rush and frenzy, if you go on toward their lairs and their cubs, you turn aside to bring aid to their own: but the Romans—Rome beleaguered, their wives, their children, whose wailing was well-nigh heard from here, their altars, their hearths, the shrines of the gods, the tombs of their ancestors profaned and violated—Capua did not turn away from any of these; such is their greed to exact a penalty, such their thirst to drink our blood. Nor without cause, perhaps; we too would have done the same, had the like fortune been given us. Therefore, since it has seemed otherwise to the immortal gods, although I ought not even to refuse death, yet the tortures and insults which the enemy prepares I can, while I am free, while I am master of myself, escape by a death not only honorable but even gentle. I shall not look upon Appius Claudius and Quintus Fulvius upborne by an insolent victory, nor be dragged in chains through the city of Rome as the spectacle of a triumph, then to be shut in a dungeon and there breathe out my life, or, bound to a stake, my back torn with rods, to lay my neck beneath the Roman axe; nor shall I see my country razed and burned, nor the Campanian matrons and maidens and the freeborn boys haled off to outrage. Alba, whence they themselves drew their origin, they overthrew from the foundations, that no stock, no memory of their beginnings, might stand: far be it from me to believe they will spare Capua, to which they are more hostile than to Carthage. And so, for those of you whose purpose it is to give way to fate before they see all these so many and so bitter things, a banquet is set ready and prepared at my house this day. When you are filled with wine and food, the same cup that shall be given to me will be carried round; that draught will deliver the body from torture, the mind from insults, the eyes and ears from the seeing and hearing of all the bitter and unworthy things that await the conquered. There shall be men ready, when a great pyre has been kindled in the open court of the house, to cast the lifeless bodies upon it. This is the one road, at once honorable and free, to death. The enemy themselves will marvel at our valor, and Hannibal will know that he deserted and betrayed brave allies."

This speech of Virrius more men heard with assent than could carry out with brave spirit what they approved. The greater part of the senate, not doubting that the clemency of the Roman people, proved often in many wars, would be placable toward them too, decreed and sent envoys to surrender Capua to the Romans. Some seven-and-twenty senators followed Vibius Virrius to his house, and feasted with him, and, so far as they could with minds estranged by wine from the sense of the impending evil, all took poison; then, the banquet broken up, giving right hands to one another and in a last embrace weeping together over their own lot and their country’s, some stayed to be burned upon the same pyre, others went off to their homes. Their veins filled with food and wine made the force of the poison less effective for the hastening of death; and so most of them, after they had been giving up the ghost the whole night through and part of the day that followed, all nevertheless breathed their last before the gates were opened to the enemy.

The next day the gate of Jupiter, which faced the Roman camp, was opened by order of the proconsuls. Through it were admitted one legion and two allied wings, with the legate Gaius Fulvius. He, when first of all he had seen to it that all the arms and weapons that were at Capua were brought together to himself, and had set guards at every gate, lest anyone could go out or be smuggled out, seized the Punic garrison and ordered the Campanian senate to go into the camp to the Roman commanders. When they had come thither, chains were at once thrown upon them all, and they were bidden to bring to the quaestors what gold and silver they had. There was of gold two thousand and seventy pounds, of silver thirty thousand pounds and twelve hundred. Twenty-five senators were sent into custody at Cales, eight-and-twenty to Teanum—those by whose counsel above all it was agreed that the revolt from the Romans had been made.

Concerning the punishment of the Campanian senate Fulvius and Claudius by no means agreed: Claudius was inclined to make pardon easy to win, while Fulvius’ opinion was the harder. And so Appius would refer the whole arbitration of that matter to the senate at Rome: it was fair, besides, that the fathers be given the power to inquire whether they had shared their counsels with any of the allies of the Latin name, and whether they had been aided by their help in the war. That, said Fulvius, was by no means to be permitted—that the minds of faithful allies be harried by doubtful charges and laid open to informers, to whom it had never been of the least moment what they said or did; and so he would suppress and extinguish that inquiry. When they had parted from this conversation, and Appius, however fiercely his colleague spoke, doubted not that he would nevertheless wait for a letter from Rome upon so great a matter, Fulvius, lest that very thing prove a hindrance to his design, dismissing the council, commanded the tribunes of the soldiers and the prefects of the allies to give notice to two thousand picked horsemen to be ready at the third trumpet-call.

With this cavalry, having set out by night for Teanum, at first light he entered the gate and made his way to the forum; and a concourse being made at the first entry of the horsemen, he ordered the Sidicine magistrate to be summoned and commanded him to bring forth the Campanians whom he held in custody. All were brought out, and beaten with rods and struck with the axe. Then, with horse at full gallop, he sped to Cales; where, when he had taken his seat upon the tribunal and the Campanians, brought forward, were being bound to the stake, a horseman came in haste from Rome and hands to Fulvius a letter from Gaius Calpurnius the praetor and a decree of the senate. A murmur ran from the tribunal through the whole assembly, that the matter of the Campanians was being deferred entire to the fathers. And Fulvius, supposing it to be so, having taken the letter and not unsealed it, when he had laid it in his lap, ordered the crier to bid the lictor proceed as the law required. So upon those too who were at Cales the punishment was exacted. Then the letter was read, and the decree of the senate—too late to hinder a deed which had been driven on with all effort precisely that it might not be hindered. As Fulvius was now rising, Taurea Vibellius, a Campanian, going through the midst of the crowd, called him by name; and when Flaccus, wondering what he would have with him, had sat down again, "Order me too," said he, "to be slain, that you may have it to boast that a man far braver than yourself was slain by you." When Flaccus said that the man was surely not in his right mind, and that, even were it his wish, he was now forbidden by the decree of the senate, then Vibellius said: "Since my country is taken, my kinsmen and friends lost, since I myself with my own hand have slain my wife and children, that they might suffer nothing unworthy, and to me not even the same means of death is granted as to these my fellow-citizens, let a release from this hated life be sought from valor." And so, with a sword that he had hidden beneath his garment, he ran himself through the breast, and fell dying before the commander’s feet.

Because both as to the punishment of the Campanians and in most other matters things had been done by the judgment of Flaccus alone, certain writers hand down that Appius Claudius died just before the surrender of Capua. This very Taurea too, they say, neither came to Cales of his own accord nor died by his own hand, but, while he was being bound among the rest to the stake, because what he was crying out could scarcely be heard amid the uproar, Flaccus ordered silence to be made; then Taurea said those things that have been mentioned before, that he, a most brave man, was being done to death by one nowise his equal in valor; and upon these words, by the proconsul’s order, the crier proclaimed thus: "Lictor, lay on more rods for the brave man, and on him first do as the law requires." Some authorities have it that the decree of the senate too was read before he struck with the axe, but that, because it was written in the decree of the senate that, if it seemed good to him, he should refer the matter entire to the senate, he interpreted this to mean that the appraisal of what he judged more for the commonwealth’s good had been left to him.

From Cales the return was made to Capua, and Atella and Calatia were received into surrender. There too those who were the heads of affairs were punished. Thus about seventy chief men of the senate were put to death, some three hundred Campanian nobles were shut in prison, others were given into custody through the cities of the allies of the Latin name and by various chances perished; the rest of the multitude of Campanian citizens was sold into slavery. There remained the deliberation about the city and the land, certain men holding that a city so strong, so near, so hostile, ought to be destroyed. But the present advantage prevailed; for on account of the land—which it was agreed well enough to be the first in all Italy for the fertility of its soil—the city was preserved, that there might be some abode for the tillers of it. For the peopling of the city a multitude of inhabitants and freedmen and dealers and craftsmen was kept; all the land and the public buildings were made the property of the Roman people. But it was resolved that Capua should be only inhabited and frequented as a city, that there should be no body of a commonwealth, no senate, no council of the plebs, no magistrates: the multitude, without a public council, without authority, partner with one another in nothing, would be unfit for concord; they would send a prefect from Rome each year to render justice. Thus the affairs at Capua were settled by a counsel praiseworthy on every side. Severely and swiftly were the most guilty punished; the multitude of citizens was scattered into no hope of return; there was no raging with fire and ruin upon innocent roofs and walls; and, with profit, there was won even among the allies a show of leniency by the preservation of a city most noble and most wealthy, at whose ruin all Campania and all the peoples who dwell about Campania would have groaned; and there was wrung from the enemy the confession of how great a power there was in the Romans for exacting penalties from faithless allies, and how no help was there in Hannibal for guarding those whom he had received into his faith.

The Roman fathers, having discharged their care so far as it touched Capua, decree to Gaius Nero, out of those two legions which he had had at Capua, six thousand foot and three hundred horse, whom he himself should choose, and of the allies of the Latin name an equal number of foot and eight hundred horse. This army Nero embarked in ships at Puteoli and carried over into Spain. When he had come with his ships to Tarraco, and, his forces landed there and his ships drawn up on shore, had armed the crews of the fleet besides to swell his numbers, he set out to the river Ebro and took over the army from Tiberius Fonteius and Lucius Marcius. Thence he goes on to march against the enemy. Hasdrubal son of Hamilcar had his camp at the Black Stones; that place is among the Ausetani, between the towns of Iliturgi and Mentissa. The jaws of this pass Nero seized. Hasdrubal, lest he be caught in a strait, sent a herald to promise that, if he were let go thence, he would carry off the whole army out of Spain. When the Roman had received this with glad mind, Hasdrubal asked for the next day for a conference, that face to face the terms might be set down in writing concerning the handing over of the citadels of the cities, and the fixing of a day by which the garrisons should be withdrawn and the Carthaginians carry off all their own goods without loss. As soon as he had got this, straightway in the first darkness, and then all the night through, Hasdrubal ordered the heaviest part of his army to slip out of the pass wherever it could. Pains were carefully taken that not many should go out that night, so that their very fewness might be both the fitter to deceive the enemy by silence and the easier to get away through the narrow and difficult paths. The next day they came to the conference; but, the day being spent on purpose in speaking and writing more things than were to the point, it was put off to the morrow. The night thus added gave room for sending out others too; nor on the next day did the matter find an end. So several days were consumed in disputing openly about the terms, and the nights in secretly sending men out of the Carthaginian camp. And after the greater part of the army had been sent off, now not even those things were stood by which had of free will been said; and less and less, as their fear dwindled together with their good faith, was there agreement. Now well-nigh all the foot forces had escaped from the pass, when at first light a thick mist covered the whole defile and the plains around. When Hasdrubal perceived this, he sends to Nero to put off the conference to the next day: that day, he said, was for the Carthaginians a holy day for the doing of any serious matter. Not even then was the trick suspected; leave being given for that day, Hasdrubal straightway, going out of camp with his cavalry and his elephants, without any tumult got away into safety. About the fourth hour the mist, scattered by the sun, opened the day, and the Romans beheld the enemy’s camp empty. Then at last Claudius, recognizing the Punic guile, when he perceived himself taken by craft, pressed on to follow the departing enemy, ready to join battle in the line; but the enemy declined the fight; light skirmishes, however, were made between the rear of the Punic column and the Roman vanguard.

Meanwhile, of the peoples of Spain, neither did those who after the disaster received had revolted return to the Romans, nor did any new ones fall away. And at Rome, with the senate and the people, after the recovery of Capua, the care for Spain was now no less than that for Italy. It was resolved both that the army be increased and that a commander be sent; nor was it so well settled whom they should send as this—that, where two supreme commanders had fallen within thirty days, the man who should succeed into the place of the two must be chosen with extraordinary care. When one named one man and another another, at last they came down to this, that an assembly be held for the creating of a proconsul for Spain; and the consuls appointed a day for the assembly. At first they had waited for men who thought themselves worthy of so great a command to put their names forward. When that expectation was left empty, the grief for the disaster received was renewed, and the longing for the commanders that had been lost.

The state, therefore, mournful and well-nigh destitute of counsel, on the day of the assembly nevertheless went down into the Campus; and, turning toward the magistrates, men look round on the faces of the chief men, who gazed one upon another, and they murmur that affairs are so desperate and the commonwealth so given over that no one dares to take the command in Spain—when suddenly Publius Cornelius, the son of that Publius Cornelius who had fallen in Spain, about four-and-twenty years old, declaring that he sought it, took his stand upon a higher place, whence he could be seen. After the eyes of all were turned upon him, with shout and applause they at once augured a command happy and of good omen. Then, bidden to enter upon the vote, to a man—not the centuries only, but the very men—they ordered that Publius Scipio should have the command in Spain. But after the matter was done, when now the impulse and the ardor of their minds had settled, a sudden silence arose and a quiet thought of what they had done. Had not favor prevailed more than reason? Of his age above all they repented; some shuddered too at the fortune of his house, and at his name, going out of two bereaved families into those provinces where, amid the tombs of his father and his uncle, his campaigns must be waged.

When he marked this anxiety and care of men over a matter carried with so great an impulse, having called an assembly, he discoursed about his age and the command laid upon him and the war that was to be waged with a spirit so great and so lofty that he stirred up again and renewed the ardor that had settled, and filled men with a hope surer than the trust of a human promise, or reasoning drawn from confidence in the facts, is wont to inspire. For Scipio was wonderful not only for his true virtues, but also by a certain art, framed from his youth for the display of them, doing most things before the multitude either as through visions seen in the night or as if warned in mind by some divine prompting—whether he himself too was held by a certain superstition of mind, or that men might carry out his commands and counsels without hesitation, as though sent by the lot of an oracle. To this end, preparing men’s minds from the very beginning, from the time he took the manly gown, on no day did he transact any business public or private before he went to the Capitol and, entering the temple, sat down and for the most part spent the time there alone in secret. This habit, which he kept through his whole life, made for some—whether of set purpose or by chance the belief was spread abroad—a credence that the man was of divine stock; and it brought back the tale, in former times spread about concerning Alexander the Great, and equal to it in vanity and in fable, that he had been conceived by the embrace of a monstrous serpent, and that the shape of that portent had very often been seen in his mother’s bedchamber, and at the coming-in of men had suddenly uncoiled and slipped from sight. The credit of these marvels was never made light of by him; rather it was increased by a certain art of neither denying any such thing nor openly affirming it. Many other things of the same kind, some true, some counterfeited, had in that young man passed the measure of human admiration; trusting in which the state then committed to an age by no means ripe so great a mass of affairs and so great a command.

To the forces which Spain had from the old army, and those which had been carried over with Gaius Nero from Puteoli, ten thousand soldiers and a thousand horse were added; and Marcus Junius Silanus the propraetor was given him as a helper in the conduct of affairs. So, with a fleet of thirty ships—all, however, were quinqueremes—setting out from the mouths of the Tiber, he sailed along the coast of the Tuscan sea, and the Alps... and the Gallic gulf, and then, having rounded the promontory of the Pyrenees, landed his forces at Emporiae, a Greek city—they too are sprung from Phocaea. From there, bidding the ships follow, he set out on foot to Tarraco and held an assembly of all the allies; for embassies, at the report of him, had poured out from the whole province. There he ordered the ships to be drawn up on shore, sending back the four triremes of the Massiliots which out of courtesy had escorted him from home. Then he began to give answers to the embassies, held in suspense by the variety of so many chances, with a spirit so uplifted by the vast confidence in his own virtues that no overbold word escaped him, and in all that he said there was both a great majesty and a great trustworthiness.

Setting out from Tarraco, he went round both the states of the allies and the winter quarters of the army, and praised the soldiers because, smitten by two such disasters one upon another, they had held the province, and, not suffering the enemy to feel the fruit of his successes, had kept them off from all the country this side of the Ebro and had faithfully protected the allies. Marcius he kept with him with so great honor that it was easily plain he feared nothing less than that anyone should stand in the way of his own glory. Silanus then succeeded Nero, and the new soldiers were led into winter quarters. Scipio, all things that had to be approached and done being approached and dispatched in season, withdrew to Tarraco. No less was the fame of Scipio among the enemy than among the citizens and the allies, and a certain divination of the future, which—the less the reason of the dread that had risen at random could be given—brought on the greater fear. They had withdrawn to winter quarters in different directions: Hasdrubal son of Gisgo as far as the Ocean and Gades, Mago into the interior, chiefly above the Castulonian forest; Hasdrubal son of Hamilcar wintered nearest the Ebro, about Saguntum.

At the end of that summer in which Capua was taken and Scipio came into Spain, a Punic fleet, summoned from Sicily to Tarentum to cut off supplies from the Roman garrison that was in the citadel of Tarentum, had indeed closed all the approaches to the citadel from the sea, but by sitting there too long was making provisions scantier for the allies than for the enemy. For not so much could be brought in to the townsmen, along the peaceful shores and through the open ports under the protection of the Punic ships, as the fleet itself—a naval throng mixed of every kind of men—consumed of grain; so that the garrison of the citadel, even without imports, since they were few, could be maintained out of what had been prepared beforehand, whereas for the Tarentines and the fleet not even what was imported sufficed. At last the fleet was dismissed with more thanks than it had come with; the price of grain had not eased much, because, the sea-protection once removed, grain could not be brought in.

At the end of the same summer Marcus Marcellus, when from his Sicilian province he had come to the city, was given an audience of the senate by Gaius Calpurnius the praetor at the temple of Bellona. There, when he had set forth his exploits, complaining gently not so much of his own case as of the soldiers’—that, the province being finished, it had not been permitted to bring back the army—he demanded that he be allowed to enter the city in triumph. This he did not obtain. When it had been debated with many words which was the less fitting—to deny a triumph, when present, to him in whose name, while absent, a thanksgiving had been decreed for things prosperously done under his lead and auspices, and honor paid to the immortal gods, or that he should triumph, as though the war were ended, when the army, the witness of a triumph deserved or undeserved, was away, and when they had bidden him hand over the army to a successor—a thing not decreed save while war remains in the province—a middle way seemed best, that he should enter the city in ovation. The tribunes of the plebs, by authority of the senate, brought before the people that on the day Marcus Marcellus should enter the city in ovation he should have command. The day before he entered the city he triumphed on the Alban mount; then, in ovation, he brought much booty before him into the city. With a representation of captured Syracuse were borne catapults and ballistas and engines of war of every kind, and the ornaments of a long peace and of royal opulence—a mass of wrought silver and bronze, other furniture and costly raiment, and many noble statues, with which Syracuse had been adorned among the foremost cities of Greece. As a token of the Punic victory too eight elephants were led; and not the least spectacle were Sosis the Syracusan and Moericus the Spaniard, going before with golden crowns, of whom the one had been the night-guide for the entry into Syracuse, the other had betrayed the Island and the garrison that was there. To both of these citizenship was given, and five hundred iugera of land apiece—to Sosis in the Syracusan territory, of land that had been either the king’s or the enemies’ of the Roman people, and a house at Syracuse, of any of those who had been punished by the law of war; to Moericus and the Spaniards who had come over with him a city and land in Sicily were ordered to be given, out of those that had revolted from the Roman people. This was charged to Marcus Cornelius, that, where it seemed good to him, he should assign them their city and land. In the same territory four hundred iugera of land were decreed to Belligenes, through whom Moericus had been lured to come over.

After Marcellus’ departure from Sicily, a Punic fleet landed eight thousand foot and three thousand Numidian horse. To them the cities Murgentia and Ergetium revolted. Their defection was followed by Hybla and Macella and certain others more obscure. And the Numidians, with Muttine their prefect, ranging through all Sicily, burned the fields of the allies of the Roman people. On top of this the Roman army, angry—partly because it had not been carried home from the province with its commander, partly because they had been forbidden to winter in the towns—performed its service slackly, and lacked rather an instigator to mutiny than the spirit for it. Amid these difficulties Marcus Cornelius the praetor both calmed the soldiers’ minds, now by consoling, now by chiding, and reduced into subjection all the states that had revolted; and of these he assigned Murgentia, by decree of the senate, to the Spaniards to whom a city and land was owed.

The consuls, since both had Apulia for their province, and there was now less terror from the Carthaginians and Hannibal, were ordered to draw lots for the provinces of Apulia and Macedonia. To Sulpicius Macedonia fell, and he succeeded Laevinus. Fulvius, summoned to Rome for the elections, when he held the assembly for naming consuls, the prerogative century—the juniors of the Voturian tribe—named as consuls Titus Manlius Torquatus and, in his absence, Titus Otacilius. When a crowd gathered to congratulate Manlius, who was present, and there was no doubt of the people’s consent, surrounded by a great throng he came to the consul’s tribunal and asked that he hear a few words of his and order the century that had cast its vote to be recalled. All being on edge with expectation of what he would demand, he pleaded the weakness of his eyes: it was a shameless pilot and a shameless commander who, when all things must be done for him with another’s eyes, should demand that the lives and fortunes of others be entrusted to him. Therefore, if it seemed good to him, let him bid the juniors of the Voturian tribe return to the vote, and remember, in creating consuls, the war that was in Italy and the crisis of the commonwealth. Their ears had scarce yet rested from the din and tumult of the enemy, wherein a few months before they had blazed well-nigh about the walls of Rome. After this, when the century shouted that it changed nothing of its opinion and would name the same men consuls, then Torquatus said: "Neither, as consul, shall I be able to bear your ways, nor you my command. Return to the vote, and consider that the Punic war is in Italy and that the enemy’s leader is Hannibal." Then the century, moved both by the man’s authority and by the murmur of admiration around it, asked of the consul that he summon the seniors of the Voturian tribe: they wished to confer with their elders and by their authority to name the consuls. The seniors of the Voturian tribe being summoned, time was given to confer with them in secret in the Ovile. The seniors said there must be deliberation about three men: two now full of honors, Quintus Fabius and Marcus Marcellus, and, if they wished by all means that some new man be made consul against the Carthaginians, Marcus Valerius Laevinus, who had borne himself admirably against king Philip by land and sea. So, deliberation having been given about three, the seniors dismissed, the juniors enter on their vote. They named as consuls Marcus Claudius, then resplendent with Sicily subdued, and Marcus Valerius, both absent. All the centuries followed the authority of the prerogative. Let them now mock who marvel at the old days: for my part, were there any commonwealth of the wise, such as the learned imagine rather than know, I do not think that either its chief men could be made graver and more temperate from the lust of command, or its multitude better-mannered. But that a century of juniors should have wished to consult the seniors as to those to whom it should commit command by its vote—this the cheap and light authority of parents among their children in this age makes scarce to be believed.

Then the praetorian elections were held. Publius Manlius Vulso and Lucius Manlius Acidinus and Gaius Laetorius and Lucius Cincius Alimentus were created. It chanced so that, the elections finished, it was announced that Titus Otacilius—whom the people seemed about to give, absent, as colleague to Titus Manlius, had the order of the elections not been interrupted—had died in Sicily. The Apollinarian games had been held both the year before and this year; on the praetor Calpurnius’ motion that they be held, the senate decreed that they be vowed in perpetuity. In the same year several prodigies were seen and reported. In the temple of Concord the Victory which was on the roof, struck by lightning and dashed down, lodged among the Victories that were on the antefixes and did not fall from there. And at Anagnia and at Fregellae it was reported that the wall and the gates had been touched from heaven, and that in the forum of Subertum streams of blood had flowed the whole day through, and that at Eretum it had rained stones, and at Reate a mule had foaled. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims, and a supplication for one day was proclaimed to the people, and a nine-day sacrifice. Several public priests died that year and new ones were chosen in their room: in place of Manius Aemilius Numida, decemvir of the sacred rites, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus; in place of Marcus Pomponius Matho the pontiff, Gaius Livius; in place of Spurius Carvilius Maximus the augur, Marcus Servilius. Because Titus Otacilius Crassus the pontiff had died at the year’s end, no nomination was made in his place. Gaius Claudius, the flamen of Jupiter, because he had presented the entrails amiss, withdrew from the flaminate.

About the same time Marcus Valerius Laevinus, having first sounded out the minds of the chief men through secret conferences, came with a light fleet to a council of the Aetolians, proclaimed beforehand for that very purpose. There, when he had displayed Syracuse and Capua taken, as a proof of prosperous fortune in Italy and in Sicily, and had added that there was a custom, handed down to the Romans from their ancestors, of cherishing their allies—of whom some they had received into citizenship and an equal right with themselves, others they kept in such a fortune that they preferred to be allies rather than citizens; that the Aetolians would be in the greater honor because they would be the first of the nations beyond the sea to come into friendship; that Philip and the Macedonians were grievous neighbors to them, whose force and spirit he had already broken, and would reduce them to such a pass that they should not only withdraw from those cities which they had taken by force from the Aetolians, but should have Macedonia itself beset; and that the Acarnanians, whom the Aetolians took it ill to have been severed from their body, he would restore to the ancient formula of their right and jurisdiction—these things spoken and promised by the Roman commander, Scopas, who was then praetor of the nation, and Dorimachus, a chief of the Aetolians, confirmed by their own authority, extolling, with less modesty and more credit, the force and majesty of the Roman people. But most of all the hope of gaining Acarnania moved them. So conditions were drawn up upon which they should come into the friendship and alliance of the Roman people; and it was added that, if it pleased them and they wished, in the same right of friendship should be the Eleans and the Lacedaemonians, and Attalus and Pleuratus and Scerdilaedus—Attalus of Asia, these last the kings of the Thracians and Illyrians; that the Aetolians should at once wage war by land with Philip; that the Roman should aid with not fewer than twenty-five quinqueremes; that of the cities, from Aetolia as far as Corcyra, the soil and the roofs and the walls with their lands should be the Aetolians’, all the rest of the booty the Roman people’s; and that the Romans should give their endeavor that the Aetolians should hold Acarnania; that if the Aetolians made peace with Philip, they should write into the treaty that the peace would so hold good if Philip kept his arms from the Romans and the allies and those who were of their jurisdiction; and likewise that if the Roman people were joined by treaty to the king, it should provide that he have no right of bringing war upon the Aetolians and their allies. These things were agreed; and, written out two years later, they were set up at Olympia by the Aetolians, on the Capitol by the Romans, that they might be attested by hallowed monuments. The cause of the delay had been that the Aetolian envoys had been detained too long at Rome; yet that was no hindrance to the conduct of affairs. Both the Aetolians at once moved war against Philip, and Laevinus took Zacynthus—a small island near Aetolia, which has one city of the same name as itself; this, except the citadel, he took by force—and, having captured Oeniadae and the Nasus of the Acarnanians, made them over to the Aetolians; and, thinking Philip sufficiently entangled in a war with his neighbors, that he might not be able to look back toward Italy and the Carthaginians and the pacts made with Hannibal, he himself withdrew to Corcyra.

The defection of the Aetolians was brought to Philip while he wintered at Pella. And so, because he was about to move his army into Greece at the first of spring, that he might keep Macedonia quiet on its rear from the fear of the Illyrians and the cities that border on them, he made a sudden expedition into the territory of the Oricini and the Apolloniates, and drove the Apolloniates, who had come out, within their walls with great terror and panic. Having laid waste the nearest parts of Illyricum, with the same speed he turned his march into Pelagonia; thence he took Sintia, a city of the Dardanians, which would afford the Dardanians a passage into Macedonia. These things done in haste, mindful of the Aetolian war and the Roman war joined with it, through Pelagonia and Lyncus and Bottiaea he went down into Thessaly—he believed men could be roused to take up war at his side against the Aetolians—and, leaving Perseus at the jaws of Thessaly with four thousand armed men to keep the Aetolians from the entrance, he himself, before he should be caught up in greater matters, led his army into Macedonia and thence into Thrace and against the Maedi. That nation had been wont to make inroads into Macedonia whenever it perceived the king busied with a foreign war and the kingdom without protection. To break, therefore, the strength of the nation, he both laid waste their fields and began to assault the city Iamphorynna, the head and citadel of Maedica. Scopas, when he heard that the king had set out into Thrace and was there busied with war, having armed all the youth of the Aetolians, prepares to bring war upon Acarnania. Against them the nation of the Acarnanians—both unequal in strength and seeing that Oeniadae and Nasus were now lost and Roman arms besides bearing down—arrays its war by anger rather than by counsel. Their wives and children and the men above sixty years they sent into the neighboring Epirus; those from fifteen to sixty bind themselves by oath not to return unless victorious: him who, beaten, should quit the line, let no one receive in city, house, table, or hearth. They framed a dire imprecation against their countrymen, and against their hosts an adjuration as solemn as they could make; and they prayed the Epirotes at the same time that those of their men who fell in the line they would cover in one mound, and affix to the buried this title: "Here lie the Acarnanians, who, fighting for their country against the violence and wrong of the Aetolians, met their death." With spirits roused by these things, they pitched camp on the farthest borders of their land, to face the enemy. By messengers sent to Philip, what a crisis they were in, they forced him to drop the war he had in hand—Iamphorynna being received by surrender and other affairs prospering. The onset of the Aetolians had first been slowed by the report of the Acarnanian conspiracy; then, Philip’s coming heard of, it forced them to retire even into their innermost borders. Nor did Philip, although he had gone by great marches lest the Acarnanians be overwhelmed, advance beyond Dium. Thence, when he had heard of the Aetolians’ return out of Acarnania, he too went back to Pella.

Laevinus, at the beginning of spring setting out from Corcyra with his ships and having passed the promontory of Leucata, when he had come to Naupactus, gave out that he would make for Anticyra from there, that Scopas and the Aetolians might be at hand there. Anticyra lies in Locris, on the left as one enters the Corinthian gulf; the way thither is short by land, the voyage short from Naupactus. On about the third day after, it began to be assaulted on both sides. The assault from the sea was the heavier, because both the artillery and machines of every kind were in the ships, and the Romans assaulted from there. And so within a few days the city, recovered by surrender, is delivered to the Aetolians; the booty, by the compact, fell to the Romans. Meanwhile a letter was delivered to Laevinus, that he had been declared consul in his absence, and that Publius Sulpicius was coming as his successor; but, entangled there by a long sickness, he came to Rome later than all had hoped.

Marcus Marcellus, when on the Ides of March he had entered upon the consulship, held the senate that day for form’s sake only, professing that, his colleague being absent, he would deal with nothing either concerning the commonwealth or concerning the provinces. He knew, he said, that crowds of Sicilians were near the city in the country-houses of his detractors; and so far was it from his hindering them from publishing openly at Rome the charges put out by his enemies, that, were they not feigning some fear of speaking about a consul while his colleague was absent, he himself would at once have given them an audience of the senate. But when his colleague came, he would suffer nothing to be done before the Sicilians were brought into the senate. A levy had been held by Marcus Cornelius almost throughout all Sicily, that as many as possible might come to Rome to complain of him; and the same man had filled the city with false letters, that there was war in Sicily, to lessen his glory. Having won that day the renown of a temperate spirit, the consul dismissed the senate; and there seemed about to be well-nigh a suspension of all business until the other consul should come to the city.

Leisure, as it is wont, stirred up the rumors of the plebs: they complained of the long duration of the war, and of the fields laid waste about the city where Hannibal had passed with his hostile column, of Italy drained by levies and of armies cut to pieces well-nigh every year, and that both the consuls created were warlike men, and too keen and fierce—such as could rouse up a war even in untroubled peace, much less would let the state take breath in war.

These talks were broken off by a fire that arose by night, on the eve of the Quinquatrus, in several places at once about the forum. At the same time seven shops—which afterward were five—and the bankers’ stalls which are now called the New caught fire; then private buildings caught (for there were not yet basilicas), and the Lautumiae caught, and the fish-market and the Atrium Regium. The temple of Vesta was scarcely saved, chiefly by the work of thirteen slaves, who were bought into public ownership and set free. The fire was kept up night and day, nor was it doubtful to anyone that it had been done by human guilt, because fires had broken out in several places at once, and those apart from one another. And so the consul, by authority of the senate, proclaimed before the assembly that whoever disclosed by whose work that fire had been kindled should have a reward—money, if free; freedom, if a slave. Drawn by that reward, a slave of the Campanian Calavii—his name was Manus—informed that his masters, and five young Campanian nobles besides, whose parents had been struck with the axe by Quintus Fulvius, had made that fire, and would commonly do other such things unless they were seized. They themselves and their households were seized. And at first the informer and his information were made light of: the day before he had been chastised with stripes and had left his masters; out of anger and levity he had framed a charge from a chance happening. But when they were confronted, and the inquiry by torture of the underlings of the deed began to be held in the middle of the forum, all confessed, and upon the masters and the slaves who were privy punishment was exacted; to the informer freedom was given, and twenty thousand asses.

As the consul Laevinus was passing by Capua, a multitude of Campanians poured about him, beseeching him with tears that it be allowed them to go to Rome to the senate, to beg, if by any pity they could at last be bent, that they should not be gone to the utmost in ruining them, nor suffer the name of the Campanians to be blotted out by Quintus Flaccus. Flaccus denied that he had any private quarrel with the Campanians: public enmity he had and would have, so long as he knew them to be of such a mind toward the Roman people. For there was no nation on earth, no people, more hostile to the Roman name. For that reason he kept them shut within their walls, because, if any got out anyhow, like wild beasts they wandered through the fields and tore and slaughtered whatever was put in their way. Some had deserted to Hannibal, others had set out to burn Rome. The consul would find in the half-burnt forum the traces of the Campanians’ crime: the temple of Vesta had been aimed at, and the eternal fires, and the fatal pledge of Roman dominion laid up in the inner shrine. He thought it by no means safe that the Campanians be given power to enter the Roman walls. Laevinus ordered the Campanians, bound by Flaccus with an oath that they would return to Capua on the fifth day after they had received an answer from the senate, to follow him to Rome. Surrounded by this multitude, and at the same time by the Sicilians who had come out to meet him and followed him to Rome, he presented the appearance of one grieving at the destruction of two most famous cities, and bringing into the city, against most renowned men, accusers conquered in war. Yet first concerning the commonwealth and concerning the provinces both consuls referred to the senate.

There Laevinus set forth in what state Macedonia and Greece, the Aetolians, the Acarnanians, and the Locrians were, and what he himself had done there by land and sea: that Philip, while bringing war upon the Aetolians, had been driven back by him into Macedonia and had withdrawn to the inmost depths of his kingdom, and that the legion could be drawn off from there; the fleet was enough to keep the king from Italy. These things about himself and the province he had governed the consul reported; then came the joint reference about the provinces. The fathers decreed that to one of the consuls Italy and the war with Hannibal should be the province; that the other should hold the fleet which Titus Otacilius had commanded, and the province of Sicily, with Lucius Cincius the praetor. To them two armies were decreed, those that were in Etruria and in Gaul; they were four legions: the two city legions of the previous year should be sent into Etruria, the two which the consul Sulpicius had commanded into Gaul. Gaul and its legions should be commanded by whomever the consul whose province was Italy should appoint; into Etruria Gaius Calpurnius was sent, his command after his praetorship prolonged for a year. And to Quintus Fulvius Capua was decreed as a province, and his command prolonged for a year; the army of citizens and allies was ordered to be reduced, so that out of two legions there should be one legion of five thousand foot and three hundred horse—those discharged who had the most campaigns—and of the allies seven thousand foot and three hundred horse be left, the same reckoning of campaigns being kept in discharging the old soldiers. To Gnaeus Fulvius, consul of the previous year, nothing was changed either as to the province of Apulia or as to the army he had had; only his command was prolonged for a year. Publius Sulpicius, his colleague, was ordered to discharge his whole army except the naval allies. Likewise the army in Sicily which Marcus Cornelius commanded was ordered to be discharged when the consul should come into the province. To Lucius Cincius the praetor, for the holding of Sicily, the soldiers of Cannae were given, to the number of two legions. As many legions in Sardinia were decreed to Publius Manlius Vulso the praetor as Lucius Cornelius had commanded in the same province the previous year. The consuls were ordered so to enroll the city legions that they should make no soldier who had been in the army of Marcus Claudius, Marcus Valerius, or Quintus Fulvius, nor that there should be more than one-and-twenty Roman legions that year.

These decrees of the senate accomplished, the consuls drew lots for the provinces. Sicily and the fleet fell to Marcellus, Italy with the war against Hannibal to Laevinus. This lot, as if Syracuse were taken a second time, so dismayed the Sicilians—who stood in sight of the consuls in expectation of the drawing—that their lamentation and tearful cries both at once turned men’s eyes upon them and afterward furnished matter for talk. For they went round the houses of the senators in mourning garb, declaring that they would leave not only each his own country but all Sicily, if Marcellus came back there a second time with command. By no desert of theirs had he been before implacable toward them: what would he do, angered, when he knew that Sicilians had come to Rome to complain of him? Better for that island to be overwhelmed by the fires of Aetna or sunk in the strait than to be handed over, as it were, to punishment to an enemy. These complaints of the Sicilians, carried first round the houses of the nobles and made common by the talk which partly pity of the Sicilians, partly ill-will toward Marcellus stirred up, came even into the senate. It was demanded of the consuls that they consult the senate about exchanging the provinces. Marcellus said that, if the Sicilians had already been heard by the senate, his opinion would perhaps have been other: as it was, lest anyone could say that they were curbed by fear from complaining freely of him into whose power they would soon come, if it made no difference to his colleague, he was ready to exchange his province; he deprecated a prejudgment of the senate. For since it would have been unfair to give his colleague the choice of a province outside the lot, how much greater a wrong—nay, an insult—was it that his own lot be transferred to that man?

So the senate, having shown rather what it would have than decreed it, is dismissed. Between the consuls themselves an exchange of the provinces was made, fate hurrying Marcellus to Hannibal, that, as from him he had first won the glory of a not-adverse battle after most adverse ones, so to his praise he should be the last of the Roman commanders to fall, and that just when affairs of war were most prosperous.

The provinces exchanged, the Sicilians were brought into the senate and made many words about the perpetual good faith of king Hiero toward the Roman people, turning it to the credit of their state at large: that Hieronymus, and afterward the tyrants Hippocrates and Epicydes, had been hateful to them, among other causes, by reason of the defection from the Romans to Hannibal. For that cause both Hieronymus had been slain by the chief men of the youth almost by public counsel, and a conspiracy of seventy of the noblest young men had been formed to kill Epicydes and Hippocrates; who, failed by the tardiness of Marcellus, because he had not moved his army up to Syracuse at the appointed time, had all, upon information given, been slain by the tyrants. This tyranny too of Hippocrates and Epicydes Marcellus had stirred up by the cruel sack of Leontini. Never afterward had the chief men of the Syracusans ceased to go over to Marcellus and to promise that they would deliver the city to him when he wished; but he had first preferred to take it by force; then, when, having tried all things by land and by every sea, he could not, he had preferred to have as the authors of the betrayal of Syracuse Sosis the coppersmith and Moericus the Spaniard, rather than the chief men of the Syracusans, who so often offered it in vain of their own accord—doubtless that on a juster ground he might butcher and plunder the most ancient allies of the Roman people. If it were not Hieronymus that had revolted to Hannibal, but the Syracusan people and senate, if the gates had been shut to Marcellus by the Syracusans in their public capacity and not by their tyrants Hippocrates and Epicydes, the Syracusans being crushed, if they had waged war against the Roman people with Carthaginian spirit—what more could Marcellus have done in hostility than what he did, save to blot out Syracuse? Certainly, except the walls and roofs of the emptied city, and the shrines of the gods broken open and despoiled, the gods themselves and their ornaments carried off, nothing was left at Syracuse. From many, too, their goods had been taken, so that not even upon the bare soil, with the remnants of their plundered fortune, could they support themselves and their own. They begged the conscript fathers that, if they could not have all, at least those things that were to be found and could be identified might be ordered restored to their owners. When they had so complained, and Laevinus had bidden them withdraw from the temple that the fathers might be consulted about their demands, "Nay, let them stay," said Marcellus, "that I may answer in their presence, since on this condition we wage wars for you, conscript fathers, that we have for accusers those whom we have conquered in arms: let the two cities taken this year, Capua have Fulvius for a defendant, Syracuse Marcellus."

The envoys brought back into the senate-house, the consul then said: "I am not so forgetful, conscript fathers, of the majesty of the Roman people and of this command, that, if my own crime were in question, I, a consul, should be about to plead my cause against accusing Greeks. But it is not what I have done that comes into inquiry—for whatever I did against enemies the law of war defends—but what these men ought to have suffered. If they were not enemies, it makes no difference whether I have outraged Syracuse now or while Hiero lived. But if they revolted from the Roman people, if they assailed our envoys with sword and arms, if they shut their city and walls and defended themselves against us with a Carthaginian army, who is indignant that they suffered hostilities, when they did them? The chief men of the Syracusans, as they offered to deliver the city, I turned away; Sosis and Moericus the Spaniard I held fitter to entrust so great a matter to. You are not the lowest of the Syracusans, you who cast lowliness in others’ teeth: who is there of you who promised that he would open the gates to me, that he would receive my armed soldiers into the city? You hate and curse those who did it, and not even here do you spare to heap insults upon them; so far are you from being likely ever to have done any such thing yourselves. The very lowliness of these men, conscript fathers, which these cast in their teeth, is the greatest proof that I turned away no one who wished to render service to our commonwealth. And before I besieged Syracuse, now by sending envoys, now by going to a conference, I tried for peace; and after there was in them no shame at violating envoys, and no answer was given me even when I came in person to a conference at the gates with the chief men, then, having drained many toils by land and sea, at last by force and arms I took Syracuse. What befell the captured they would more justly complain of before Hannibal and the conquered Carthaginians than before the senate of the conquering people. For my part, conscript fathers, were I going to deny that Syracuse was despoiled, I would never adorn the city of Rome with its spoils. But what, as victor, I took from or gave to individuals, I am well assured I did both by the law of war and according to each man’s desert. Whether you hold these acts ratified, conscript fathers, or not, concerns the commonwealth more than me. For my own good faith is discharged: it touches the commonwealth that, by rescinding my acts, you make not other commanders the slacker hereafter. And since you have heard, face to face, both the Sicilians’ words and mine, conscript fathers, we will withdraw from the temple together, that the senate may be consulted the more freely in my absence." So the Sicilians were dismissed, and he himself withdrew to the Capitol to the levy.

The other consul referred to the fathers concerning the demands of the Sicilians. There, when there had been long contention of opinions, and a great part of the senate—the chief of that opinion being Titus Manlius Torquatus—held that the war ought to have been waged with the tyrants, enemies both of the Syracusans and of the Roman people; that the city should have been recovered, not stormed; and, recovered, established by its ancient laws and freedom, not, worn out with wretched servitude, afflicted with war; that, between the contests of the tyrants and of the Roman general, a city most beautiful and most noble, set in the midst as the victor’s prize, had perished—once the granary and treasury of the Roman people, by whose munificence and gifts on many occasions, and lastly in this very Punic war, the commonwealth had been aided and adorned. If king Hiero, that most faithful cultivator of Roman dominion, should rise from the dead, with what face could either Syracuse or Rome be shown to him, when, after he had looked back upon his half-ruined and despoiled fatherland, on entering Rome he would behold, in the vestibule of the city, almost in the gate, the spoils of his own fatherland?—when these things and the like were said to the ill-will of the consul and the pity of the Sicilians, the fathers nevertheless decreed more mildly: that the acts of Marcus Marcellus, which he had done while waging the war and as victor, should be held ratified; for the future the senate would have the Syracusan state in its care, and would charge the consul Laevinus to take thought for the fortunes of that city, so far as could be done without loss to the commonwealth. Two senators having been sent to the Capitol to the consul, to ask that he return to the senate-house, and the Sicilians brought in, the decree of the senate was read out; and the envoys, kindly addressed and dismissed, cast themselves at the knees of the consul Marcellus, beseeching that he would grant them pardon for what they had said to bewail and to lighten their calamity, and would receive into his faith and patronage themselves and the city of Syracuse. The consul, promising this, addressed them kindly and dismissed them.

Then audience of the senate was given to the Campanians, whose speech was the more pitiable, their cause the harder. For they could neither deny that they had deserved punishment, nor were there tyrants on whom they might lay the blame; but they believed that enough of penalty had been paid, so many senators consumed by poison, so many struck with the axe: a few of the nobility survived, whom neither their own conscience had driven to take any heavier counsel against themselves, nor the victor’s anger had condemned to death; these begged freedom for themselves and their families and some part of their goods—Roman citizens, most of them joined by ties of marriage and now by near kinship from an old right of intermarriage.

Then, the Campanians removed for a while from the temple, there was doubt whether Quintus Fulvius should be summoned from Capua—for the consul Claudius had died after the capture—that in the presence of the commander who had done the deeds the matter might be disputed, as it had been disputed between Marcellus and the Sicilians. But when they saw in the senate Marcus Atilius and Gaius Fulvius, brother of Flaccus, his legates, and Quintus Minucius and Lucius Veturius Philo, likewise the legates of Claudius, who had been present at the doing of all things, and wished neither that Fulvius be called away from Capua nor that the Campanians be put off, Marcus Atilius Regulus, who of those that had been at Capua had the greatest authority, being asked his opinion, said: "I think I was in the council of the consuls when, Capua taken, it was inquired whether any of the Campanians had deserved well of our commonwealth. Two women were found to have done so: Vestia Oppia of Atella, dwelling at Capua, and Pacula Cluvia, who had once made her living by her body—the one had daily sacrificed for the safety and victory of the Roman people, the other had secretly supplied food to needy captives; of all the rest of the Campanians the mind toward us had been the same as the Carthaginians’, and those struck with the axe by Quintus Fulvius were rather those whose rank stood out among the rest than those whose guilt did. I do not see that the Campanians, who are Roman citizens, can be dealt with through the senate without the people’s order; and that this was so done among our ancestors too in the case of the Satricans, when they had revolted—that Marcus Antistius the tribune of the plebs first brought a bill, and the plebs voted, that the senate should have the right of pronouncing judgment about the Satricans. And so I think there must be dealing with the tribunes of the plebs, that one or more of them bring a bill before the plebs by which the right of deciding about the Campanians be made ours." Lucius Atilius the tribune of the plebs, by authority of the senate, put it to the plebs in these words: "Concerning all the Campanians, Atellani, Calatini, Sabatini, who surrendered themselves into the arbitration and jurisdiction of the Roman people to Quintus Fulvius the proconsul, and whomsoever and whatsoever they surrendered together with themselves—land and city, things divine and human, utensils, or whatever else they surrendered—concerning these matters what you would have done I ask you, Quirites." Thus the plebs ordered: "What the senate upon oath, the greater part of them who are present, shall vote, that we will and command."

From this plebiscite the senate, being consulted, first restored to Oppia and Cluvia their goods and their freedom: if they wished to seek any other rewards from the senate, they should come to Rome. Decrees were made for the Campanians family by family, which it is not worth while to enumerate all: of some the goods to be confiscated, themselves and their children and wives to be sold, except the daughters who had married before they came into the power of the Roman people; others to be cast into chains, and about them deliberation to be had later; of other Campanians they distinguished even by the amount of the census whether their goods should be confiscated or not. Captured cattle, except horses, and slaves except those of the male sex past boyhood, and all things that were not attached to the soil, they decreed to be restored to their owners. All the Campanians, Atellani, Calatini, Sabatini, except those of them who either themselves or whose parents were among the enemy, they ordered to be free, on this footing: that none of them be a Roman citizen or of the Latin name, nor any of those who had been at Capua while the gates were shut remain within a fixed day in the city or in the Campanian territory; a place to dwell beyond the Tiber, that should not touch the Tiber, should be given them. Those who had been neither at Capua nor in any Campanian city that had revolted from the Roman people during the war they decreed to be removed to this side of the river Liris, toward Rome; those who had come over to the Romans before Hannibal came to Capua, to this side of the Volturnus, with this proviso, that none of them have land or building nearer the sea than fifteen miles. Those of them who had been removed beyond the Tiber—that neither they nor their posterity should acquire or hold anything anywhere save in the Veientine, the Sutrine, or the Nepesine territory, provided that to no one should there be a measure of land greater than fifty iugera. The goods of all the senators, and of those who had held magistracies at Capua, Atella, and Calatia, they ordered to be sold at Capua; the free persons whom it had been resolved to sell, to be sent to Rome and sold at Rome. The statues and bronze images that were said to have been taken from the enemy—which of them were sacred and which profane—they referred to the college of the pontiffs. On account of these decrees they sent the Campanians away somewhat sadder than they had come to Rome. And now they accused, not the cruelty of Quintus Fulvius toward themselves, but the injustice of the gods and their own accursed fortune.

The Sicilians and Campanians dismissed, a levy was held. Then, the army enrolled, the supplement of rowers began to be dealt with; for which thing, since there were neither men enough, nor at that time any money in the public treasury from which they might be procured and receive pay, the consuls made an edict that private persons, according to their census and their ranks, as before, should furnish rowers with pay and rations for thirty days. At that edict there was so great a murmur of men, so great an indignation, that it lacked rather a leader than matter for sedition: after the Sicilians and the Campanians, the consuls had taken upon themselves the Roman plebs, to ruin and tear it to pieces. Drained by tribute through so many years, they had nothing left save the bare and wasted earth. Their roofs the enemy had burned; their slaves, the tillers of the field, the commonwealth had carried off, now buying them for the war at a small price, now commandeering them as rowers; if anyone had any silver or bronze, it had been taken from him by the rowers’ pay and the yearly tributes. That they should give what they had not, by no force, by no command, could they be compelled. Let them sell their goods; let them rage upon the persons that were left; not even anything wherewith they might be ransomed remained over. These things they murmured, not in secret, but openly in the forum and before the very eyes of the consuls, a vast crowd thronging round them; nor could the consuls calm them, now by chiding, now by consoling. Then they said they gave them a space of three days to consider; which the consuls themselves used to look into the matter and to clear it. The next day they held the senate about the supplement of rowers; where, when they had argued many things why the plebs’ refusal was just, they turned their speech to this point—that they said the burden, whether just or unjust, must be laid upon private persons; for whence, since there was no money in the treasury, were they to procure naval allies? But how, without fleets, could either Sicily be held, or Philip be kept from Italy, or the coasts of Italy be safe?

When in this difficulty of affairs counsel stuck fast, and a kind of torpor had nearly seized men’s minds, then Laevinus the consul said: the magistrates ought to be to the senate, and the senate to the people, as in honor they excel, so leaders in undergoing all that is hard and harsh. If, what you would lay upon an inferior, you first establish for a law upon yourself and yours, you would more easily have all men obedient. Nor is the expense grievous, when men see that of the chief men each takes upon himself more than his fair share. And so, if we would have the Roman people own and equip fleets, and private men give rowers without refusal, let us first lay the command upon our own selves. Let all of us senators bring tomorrow into the public store all our gold, silver, and coined bronze, in such wise that each leave to himself rings for himself and for his wife and children, and a bulla for his son, and, for those who have a wife or daughters, an ounce weight of gold apiece; of silver, let those who have sat in the curule chair leave the trappings of a horse and a pound weight, that they may have a saltcellar and a patera for the gods’ sake; the rest of the senators a pound of silver only; of coined bronze let us leave five thousand asses to each head of a household; the rest—all our gold, silver, and coined bronze—let us at once carry to the triumvirs of the bank, no decree of the senate passed beforehand, that the voluntary contribution and the rivalry of aiding the commonwealth may rouse to emulation the spirits, first of the equestrian order, then of the rest of the plebs. This one road, after much talk among ourselves, we the consuls have found; enter upon it, the gods well aiding. The commonwealth safe keeps private fortunes too easily safe; by betraying the public you would save your own in vain.

To these words there was assent with so great a spirit that thanks were even given to the consuls of free will. The senate then dismissed, each man for himself brings gold and silver and bronze into the public store, with so great a contention thrown in—each wishing to have his name first, or among the first, in the public records—that neither did the triumvirs suffice for the receiving nor the scribes for the entering. This unanimity of the senate the equestrian order followed, and the equestrian order’s the plebs. So, without edict, without the compulsion of the magistrate, the commonwealth lacked neither rowers for the supplement nor pay; and, all things made ready for war, the consuls set out for the provinces.

Nor was there any other time of the war in which the Carthaginians and the Romans alike, mingled in various chances, were more in doubtful hope and fear. For to the Romans, both in the provinces—on this side adverse affairs in Spain, on that prosperous ones in Sicily—had mingled grief and gladness; and in Italy, while Tarentum lost was a loss and a sorrow, the citadel held with its garrison was, beyond hope, a joy; and the sudden terror and panic of the city of Rome besieged and assailed, Capua taken a few days after turned into gladness. Affairs across the sea, too, were balanced by a certain alternation: Philip made an enemy at a season not very opportune, the Aetolians newly enrolled as allies, and Attalus king of Asia—fortune now, as it were, betrothing to the Romans the dominion of the East. The Carthaginians too set the capture of Tarentum against the loss of Capua, and, as they reckoned it a glory that they had reached the walls of the city of Rome with none to hinder, so they were vexed at the fruitlessness of the attempt, and ashamed that they had been so despised that, while they themselves sat before the Roman walls, by another gate a Roman army was being led into Spain. The Spains themselves, too, the nearer they had come to the hope that, with two such great leaders and armies cut to pieces, the war was there ended and the Romans driven out, gave the more matter for indignation in that the victory had been reduced to a vain and empty thing by Lucius Marcius, a leader chosen in a tumult. So, fortune balancing all, everything was in suspense for both sides, with hope entire and fear entire, as though at that time they were first beginning the war.

Hannibal above all things was vexed that Capua, more stubbornly assaulted by the Romans than defended by himself, had turned away the minds of many peoples of Italy—whom he could neither all hold with garrisons, unless he were willing to break up his army into many small parts, which then was least expedient, nor, the garrisons withdrawn, leave the loyalty of the allies free or subject to fear. His mind, headlong into greed and cruelty, inclined to despoil what he could not protect, that the wasted lands might be left to the enemy. This foul counsel was foul both in its beginning and in its issue. For not the minds of those only who suffered unworthy things were estranged, but of the rest as well; for the example reached more men than the suffering of the evils. Nor was the Roman consul wanting in trying the cities, if from anywhere some hope showed itself.

At Salapia the chief men were Dasius and Blattius; Dasius a friend to Hannibal, Blattius, so far as he safely could, favoring the Roman cause and through secret messengers having given Marcellus a hope of betrayal; but without Dasius as helper the thing could not be carried through. After much and long hesitation, and then too rather for want of a better counsel than in hope of effect, he addresses Dasius; but he, both averse from the matter and an enemy to his rival for power, lays the thing open to Hannibal. Both being summoned, while Hannibal was transacting some business before the tribunal, about to take cognizance of Blattius presently, and the accuser and the accused stood, the people removed, Blattius addresses Dasius about the betrayal. He indeed, as in a manifest matter, cries out that under the eyes of Hannibal the betrayal is being negotiated with him. To Hannibal and those who were present, the bolder the thing was, the less like the truth it seemed: it was surely rivalry and hatred, and that charge was brought which, because it could have no witness, was the freer to invent. So they were dismissed from there. Nor did Blattius desist from his bold undertaking until, by dinning the same thing and by showing how salutary that affair was to themselves and to their country, he prevailed that the Punic garrison—and they were five hundred Numidians—and Salapia be handed over to Marcellus. Nor could it be handed over without much slaughter. They were by far the bravest of the cavalry in the whole Punic army. And so, although the thing was unforeseen, and there was no use of horses in the city, yet, their arms snatched up amid the tumult, they attempted a sally, and, when they could not get away, fell fighting to the last; nor did more than fifty of them come alive into the enemy’s power. And the loss of this squadron of cavalry was somewhat more to Hannibal than that of Salapia; nor was the Carthaginian ever afterward superior in cavalry, the arm wherein he had by far been strongest.

About the same time, when in the citadel of Tarentum the want was scarcely to be endured, the Roman garrison that was there, and the prefect of the garrison and the citadel, Marcus Livius, placed all their hope in supplies sent from Sicily; and, that these might be conveyed safely along the coast of Italy, a fleet of about twenty ships lay at Rhegium. Over the fleet and the supplies was Decimus Quinctius, sprung of obscure stock, but illustrious in military glory by many brave deeds. At first five ships, of which the two largest were triremes, had been given him by Marcellus; afterward, as he often pushed the matter vigorously, three quinqueremes were added; at the last, he himself, by exacting from the allies and the Reginians and from Velia and from Paestum the ships due by treaty, made up a fleet of twenty ships, as was said before. To this fleet, setting out from Rhegium, Democrates, with an equal number of Tarentine ships, came up about fifteen miles from the city, at Sapriportis. The Roman was then by chance coming under sail, unforeseeing of the coming contest; but about Croton and Sybaris he had filled up his ships with rowers, and had a fleet excellently equipped and armed for the size of the ships. And then by chance, at about the same moment, both all the force of the wind fell and the enemy came into view, so that there was time enough to set the tackle in order and to make rower and soldier ready for the imminent contest. Seldom else have regular fleets clashed with such spirit, since they fought for the hazard of a greater matter than they themselves were: the Tarentines, that, having recovered their city from the Romans after well-nigh a hundred years, they might free the citadel too, and in the hope, besides, of cutting off the enemy from supplies, if by a naval battle they should take from them the possession of the sea; the Romans, that, by keeping possession of the citadel, they might show that Tarentum had been lost not by force and valor but by betrayal and theft.

And so, the signal given on either side, when they had clashed with their beaks, and neither backed their ship astern nor suffered the enemy to part from them, whatever ship each had laid hold of, casting on the iron hand, they so joined battle at close quarters that the thing was waged not with missiles only but well-nigh foot to foot with swords. The prows, joined together, stuck fast; the sterns were swung about by the other’s oarage. So crowded were the ships in the narrow space that hardly any weapon fell vain into the sea; with their fronts, like a line of foot, they pressed, and the ships were passable for the fighters. Notable, however, beyond the rest, was the fight of the two that had clashed first at the head of the columns. In the Roman ship was Quinctius himself, in the Tarentine Nico, surnamed Perco—hateful and hostile to the Romans not by public hatred only but by private too, because he was of that faction which had betrayed Tarentum to Hannibal. He pierces Quinctius—fighting at once and exhorting his men, and off his guard—with a spear. As he fell headlong with his arms before the prow, the victorious Tarentine, briskly crossing into the ship, thrown into confusion by the loss of its leader, when he had driven off the enemy, and the prow was now the Tarentines’, while the Romans, ill-massed, guarded the stern—suddenly another trireme of the enemy appeared from astern; and so the Roman ship, surrounded in the midst, is taken. From this terror was struck into the rest, when they saw the flagship taken; and, fleeing this way and that, some were sunk in the deep, others, dragged by the oars to land, were soon the prey of the Thurians and the Metapontines. Of the transports, which followed with the supplies, very few came into the enemy’s power; the rest, shifting their slanting sails this way and that to the uncertain winds, were carried out to sea.

By no means with equal fortune were affairs carried on in those days at Tarentum. For about four thousand men, having gone out to forage, were wandering scattered through the fields, when Livius, who was over the citadel and the Roman garrison, intent upon every chance of action, sent out from the citadel Gaius Persius, an active man, with two thousand five hundred armed men, who, falling upon them scattered and straying through the fields, after he had long cut them down on every hand, drove a few out of the many, in a panic flight falling in at the half-open leaves of the gates, into the city; and it wanted little but the city was taken by the same onset. So affairs at Tarentum were made even, the Romans being victors by land, the Tarentines by sea. The hope of grain, which had been before the eyes of both, alike disappointed both.

About the same time the consul Laevinus, a great part of the year being already gone round, when he had come into Sicily, awaited by old and new allies, thinking it the first and most important of all things to settle at Syracuse the affairs disordered by the new peace, led his legions from there to Agrigentum, which was what remained of the war and was held by a strong Carthaginian garrison. And fortune was at hand for the undertaking. Hanno was the Carthaginian commander, but they had all their hope reposed in Muttine and the Numidians. Ranging through all Sicily, he drove off booty from the allies of the Romans, nor could he be cut off from Agrigentum by force or any craft, nor be hindered from bursting out where he would. This glory of his, because it now stood in the way of the commander’s fame too, at last turned into ill-will, so that not even things well done were now pleasing enough to Hanno because of their author. At last he gave Muttine’s prefecture to his own son, thinking that with the command he would take from him his authority too among the Numidians. It fell out far otherwise; for he increased Muttine’s old favor by his own ill-will besides; and Muttine brooked not the indignity of the wrong, and at once sent secret messengers to Laevinus about the betrayal of Agrigentum. When through them faith was established and the manner of doing the thing arranged, the Numidians having seized the gate that leads to the sea, the guards there driven off or slain, they received into the city the Romans sent for that very purpose. And while the column was now going with great tumult into the midst of the city and the forum, Hanno, thinking it nothing other than a tumult and secession of the Numidians, such as had happened before, came forward to quell the sedition. But he, when a multitude greater than the Numidians’ was seen by him from afar, and the Roman shout, by no means unknown, fell upon his ears, before he came within a weapon’s throw takes to flight. Sent out by a back gate, with Epicydes for companion, he came with a few to the sea, and, lighting opportunely on a small craft, leaving to the enemy Sicily—over which through so many years there had been contention—crossed into Africa. The rest of the multitude of Carthaginians and Sicilians, not even the contest tried, while they rushed blindly into flight and the exits were shut, were cut down about the gates.

The town taken, Laevinus had those who were the heads of affairs at Agrigentum beaten with rods and struck with the axe; the rest, and the booty, he sold; all the money he sent to Rome. When the fame of the Agrigentines’ disaster had spread through Sicily, all things suddenly inclined to the Romans. In a short time twenty towns were betrayed, six taken by force; some forty came by voluntary surrender into allegiance. When the consul had dealt out to the chief men of these states their rewards and punishments according to each man’s desert, and had compelled the Sicilians, their arms at last laid aside, to turn their minds to tilling the soil, that the island might be fruitful not for the sustenance of its inhabitants only, but might lighten the food-supply of the city of Rome and of Italy, as it had often done on many occasions, he carried over with him into Italy from Agathyrna a disorderly multitude. They were four thousand men, mixed of every dregs—exiles, debtors, men who had dared capital crimes, most of them, while they lived in their states and under laws, and, after a like fortune from various causes had gathered them at Agathyrna, supporting life by brigandage and rapine. These Laevinus thought it neither safe enough to leave in the island, then for the first time coalescing in a new peace, as it were a stuff for revolution, and they would be of use to the Reginians, who were seeking a band accustomed to brigandage for ravaging the Bruttian territory. And so far as concerns Sicily, the war was that year brought to an end.

In Spain, at the beginning of spring, Publius Scipio, the ships launched and the auxiliaries of the allies summoned by edict to Tarraco, bids the fleet and the transports make for the mouth of the river Ebro. Having ordered the legions to assemble there from their winter quarters, he himself with five thousand of the allies set out from Tarraco to the army. When he had come thither, thinking that he must above all address the old soldiers, who had survived such great disasters, an assembly being called, he discoursed thus: "No new commander before me could rightly and deservedly give thanks to his soldiers before he had made use of their service: to me fortune bound you before I saw the province or the camp—first, because you were of such loyalty toward my father and my uncle, living and dead, and then because the possession of the province, lost by so great a disaster, you have kept entire, by your valor, for the Roman people and for me, my father’s and my uncle’s successor. But since now, by the kindness of the gods, we make ready and act, not that we ourselves should stay in Spain, but that the Carthaginians should not stay; not that, standing before the bank of the Ebro, we should keep the enemy from crossing, but that we ourselves should cross over and carry the war beyond, I fear that to some of you the plan may seem greater and bolder than befits either the memory of the disasters lately received or my age. The adverse battles in Spain can be blotted from no man’s mind less than from mine, since within the space of thirty days my father and my uncle were slain, that one funeral of our house might be heaped upon another; but as the well-nigh orphaned bereavement and loneliness of my family breaks my spirit, so the public fortune, and valor too, forbid me to despair of the sum of things. It is given us by a certain fate that in all great wars, having been conquered, we conquer.

"Old things I pass over—Porsenna, the Gauls, the Samnites: I will begin from the Punic wars. How many fleets, how many leaders, how many armies were lost in the former war! And now, why should I recount this war? In all the disasters I was either present myself, or, of those I was absent from, I, alone of all men, most felt them. Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae—what else are they than monuments of slain Roman armies and consuls? Add the defection of Italy, of the greater part of Sicily, of Sardinia; add the last terror and panic, the Punic camp pitched between the Anio and the walls of Rome, and Hannibal seen victorious almost in the gates. In this ruin of affairs the valor of the Roman people alone stood unbroken and unmoved; this raised up and lifted again all these things that lay strewn upon the ground. You, soldiers, first of all, after the disaster of Cannae, withstood—under the lead and auspices of my father—Hasdrubal as he marched toward the Alps and Italy, who, had he joined himself with his brother, the name of the Roman people would now be none; and these successes upheld those reverses. Now, by the kindness of the gods, all things prosperous, favorable, day by day more joyful and better, are being done in Italy and in Sicily. In Sicily Syracuse, Agrigentum are taken, the enemy driven from the whole island, and the province received back into the jurisdiction of the Roman people; in Italy Arpi recovered, Capua taken. Hannibal, having measured the whole road from the city of Rome in trembling flight, driven into the farthest corner of the Bruttian land, now prays the gods for nothing greater than that it be allowed him to withdraw safe and go away out of the enemy’s land. What, then, soldiers, could less become you than that, when one disaster upon another was heaped, and the gods themselves almost stood with Hannibal, you here, with my parents—let them be made equal even in the honor of the name—upheld the tottering fortune of the Roman people, but now, when there all things are prosperous and joyful, you, the same men, should fail in spirit? The things too that lately befell—would they had befallen with as little grief of mine as...

... the immortal gods, the guardians of the Roman empire, who were the authors of moving all the centuries to order that command be given me, the same by auguries and auspices, and by visions of the night too, portend all things glad and prosperous. My own mind also, my greatest prophet up to this time, presages that Spain is ours, that shortly all the Punic name, driven hence, shall fill the seas and the lands with foul flight. What the mind divines of its own accord, the same a reasoning not deceptive suggests. Their allies, harried by them, implore our faith through envoys; three leaders at variance, almost as though they had revolted one from another, have drawn the army apart, threefold, into the most diverse regions. The same fortune bears down upon them which lately afflicted us; for they too are deserted by their allies, as we were before by the Celtiberians, and they have parted their armies, which was the cause of ruin to my father and my uncle. Nor will their intestine discord suffer them to come together into one, nor will they singly be able to resist us. Only do you, soldiers, favor the name of the Scipios, the offspring of your commanders, growing again, as it were, from stocks cut down. Come, old soldiers, lead a new army and a new leader across the Ebro—lead them into lands often traversed by you with many brave deeds. Shortly I will bring it about that, as now you discern in me the likeness of my father’s and my uncle’s face and countenance and the lineaments of the body, so I will render you back the image of their genius, their faith, and their valor, so that each man shall say that his commander Scipio has come to life again, or been born anew."

With the soldiers’ spirits kindled by this speech, leaving Marcus Silanus for the protection of that region with three thousand foot and three hundred horse, he led all the rest of his forces—they were twenty-five thousand foot, two thousand five hundred horse—across the Ebro. There, when some advised him that, since the Punic armies had withdrawn into three so diverse regions, he should attack the nearest, thinking there was danger lest by so doing he should draw them all together into one, and lest, single, he be no match for so many armies, he resolved meanwhile to assault New Carthage—a city both rich in its own resources and full of all the enemy’s warlike apparatus (there were arms, there money, there the hostages of all Spain), and besides set conveniently both for crossing into Africa and above a harbor large enough for a fleet of any size, and perhaps the only one on the Spanish coast where it borders the sea that washes our shores. No man of all knew whither they were going save Gaius Laelius. He, sent round with the fleet, had been ordered so to govern the course of the ships that at the same moment Scipio should show his army from the land and the fleet enter the harbor. On the seventh day from the Ebro they came to Carthage at once by land and by sea. The camp was pitched on the side of the city which faces north; behind it—for the front was safe by nature—a rampart was thrown across. For Carthage is situated thus: there is a bay of the sea about the middle of the Spanish coast, opposed chiefly to the southwest wind, drawn back inland about two thousand five hundred paces, a little more than twelve hundred paces in breadth. At the mouth of this bay a small island, set against the open sea, makes the harbor safe from all winds save the southwest. From the innermost part of the bay a peninsula runs out, the very hillock on which the city is built, girt on the east and on the south by the sea; on the west a lagoon shuts it in, spreading a little to the north as well, of uncertain depth as the sea swells or ebbs. A ridge about two hundred and fifty paces wide joins the city to the mainland. And so, although the fortifying there would have been so small a work, the Roman commander did not throw up a rampart—whether to display confidence to the enemy haughtily, or that, as he often came up to the walls of the city, the way back might lie open.

When he had finished the rest that had to be fortified, he also drew up the ships in the harbor, as though displaying a siege by sea too; and, having sailed round the fleet, when he had warned the captains of the ships to keep their night-watches attentively, since at the first a besieged enemy attempts everything everywhere, going back into the camp, that he might lay before the soldiers the reasoning of his plan—why he had begun the war especially from the assault of a city—and by exhortation make them hope to take it, an assembly being called, he discoursed thus: "If anyone believes you have been brought to assault one city only, soldiers, he reckons the measure of your toil rather than of your gain. For you will indeed assault the walls of one city, but in one city you will have taken all Spain. Here are the hostages of all the nobles, kings, and peoples; who, as soon as they shall be in your power, will at once deliver into your jurisdiction all that is now under the Carthaginians. Here is all the money of the enemy, without which they can neither wage war—since they maintain mercenary armies—and which will be of the greatest use to us for winning over the minds of the barbarians; here are the engines, the arms, all the apparatus of war, which at once will both equip you and strip the enemy. We shall gain besides a city most beautiful and most wealthy, and most convenient by its excellent harbor, whence the things that the uses of war demand may be supplied by land and sea. These great things we shall ourselves have, and shall have taken from the enemy things much greater. This is their citadel, this their granary, treasury, armory, this the receptacle of all things; hither is the straight course from Africa; this the one station between the Pyrenees and Gades; hence Africa overhangs all Spain...

... had armed. When he saw the assault being made ready by land and sea, he too thus disposes his forces: two thousand of the townsmen he sets against that part where the Roman camp was; with five hundred soldiers he occupies the citadel, five hundred he places on the hillock of the city turned to the east; the rest of the multitude he bids be intent upon everything and run wherever the shout, wherever a sudden emergency, should call. Then, the gate thrown open, he sends out those whom he had drawn up in the road that leads to the enemy’s camp. The Romans, the commander himself directing it, gave way a little, that they might be nearer the supports to be sent up in the very heat of the contest. And at first the lines stood not unequal; then the supports, sent up again and again from the camp, not only turned the enemy to flight, but pressed them so hard as they fled in disorder that, had not the recall been sounded, they seemed likely, mingled with the fugitives, to burst into the city.

But the alarm was no greater in the battle than throughout the whole city. Many posts were deserted in panic and flight, and the walls left, as each leaped down where it was nearest him. When Scipio, having gone out upon the hillock which they call Mercury’s, perceived the walls in many places bared of defenders, he orders all to be roused from the camp to go to assault the city and to bring ladders. He himself, the shields of three sturdy young men held before him—for now a great mass of weapons of every kind flew from the walls—comes up to the city, exhorts, commands what is to the purpose, and—what most of all availed to kindle the soldiers’ spirits—is present as the witness and beholder of each man’s valor or cowardice. And so they rush upon wounds and weapons, and neither the walls nor the armed men standing above can keep them from vying to climb up. And from the ships at the same time the part of the city that is washed by the sea began to be assaulted. But there the tumult was greater than the force that could be brought to bear; while they bring up the ladders, while they hastily set out ladders and soldiers, while they hasten, each where it is nearest him, to get out upon the land, by the very haste and rivalry they hinder one another.

Meanwhile the Carthaginian had now filled the walls with armed men, and a great force of weapons heaped up from a vast store supplied them. But neither men nor weapons nor anything else so much defended them as the walls themselves. For few ladders could be made equal to the height, and the higher each was, the weaker. And so, when the topmost man could not get over, yet others mounting, they were broken by the very weight. Some, the ladders standing, when the height had spread a dimness over their eyes, were brought down to the ground. And when everywhere men and ladders were falling, and by the very success the boldness and eagerness of the enemy grew, the signal for retreat was given; which gave the besieged hope not of present rest only from so great a contest and toil, but for the future too, that the city could not be taken by ladders and escalade: the siege-works were both difficult and would give time for their commanders to bring aid.

The former tumult had scarce grown still when Scipio bids fresh and unwearied men take the ladders from those now worn out and wounded, and assault the city with greater force. He himself, when it was announced to him that the tide was ebbing—which he had learned for certain from the fishermen of Tarraco, who had ranged over the lagoon, now in light boats, now, when these grounded, wading, that an easy passage on foot to the wall was given—led thither five hundred armed men with himself. It was about the middle of the day, and, besides that the water was drawn off into the sea by the tide ebbing of its own accord, a sharp north wind too, having risen, drove the lagoon, already sloping the same way the tide bore it, and had so bared the shallows that in some places the water was up to the navel, in others scarce passed the knees. This, found out by care and reasoning, Scipio turned into a prodigy and the gods—who, for the passage of the Romans, turned aside the sea and drew off the lagoons and opened ways never before trodden by human foot—and bade them follow Neptune as the guide of their march and cross through the middle of the lagoon to the walls.

From the land there was a huge toil for those coming up; nor were they hindered by the height of the walls only, but because the defenders had the Romans, as they attacked, exposed to blows from both sides, so that the flanks of those coming up were more endangered than their fronts. But on the other side, for the five hundred, both the passage through the lagoon was easy, and the ascent to the wall from there; for it was neither strengthened by works—seeing that there the protection of the place itself and of the lagoon was sufficiently trusted—nor was any post or guard of armed men set against them, all being intent on bringing aid where the danger showed itself.

When they had entered the city without a contest, they make their way thence at the greatest run they could to that gate around which all the fighting was gathered. Upon it not the minds only of all, but the eyes and ears too of those fighting and those watching and those exhorting the fighters were so intent, that no one perceived from the rear that the city was taken before weapons fell upon their backs and they had the enemy on both sides. Then, the defenders thrown into confusion by fear, both the walls were taken, and the gate began to be broken open within and without alike; and soon, the leaves cut through and torn apart, that the way might not be hindered, the armed men made their charge. A great multitude too climbed over the walls, but these, scattered, turned to the slaughter of the townsmen; that body which had entered by the gate, a regular line with its leaders and its ranks, advanced through the midst of the city as far as the forum. Thence, when he saw the enemy fleeing by two ways, some to the hillock turned to the east, which was held by a garrison of five hundred soldiers, others to the citadel, into which Mago too, with nearly all the armed men who had been driven from the walls, had taken refuge, he sends part of his forces to storm the hillock, part he leads himself to the citadel. And both was the hillock taken at the first onset, and Mago, having tried to defend the citadel, when he saw all full of the enemy and no hope left, surrendered himself and the citadel and the garrison. Until the citadel was surrendered, slaughter was made everywhere throughout the city, nor was any of the grown men who met them spared; then, the signal given, an end was made of the killing; the victors turned to plunder, of which there was a vast amount of every kind.

About ten thousand free persons of the male sex were taken. Of these he dismissed those who were citizens of New Carthage, and restored to them their city and all their goods that the war had left them. There were artisans to the number of two thousand men; these he declared to be the public property of the Roman people, with the near hope of freedom, if they should strenuously bend their labor to the services of the war. The rest of the multitude of inhabitants, the young men and the sturdy slaves, he gave to the fleet for a supplement of rowers; and he had increased his fleet by eight captured ships. Besides this multitude there were the hostages of the Spaniards, of whom the like care was had as if they were the children of allies. Captured too was a vast apparatus of war: catapults of the largest make, a hundred and twenty; smaller, two hundred and eighty-one; ballistas larger, three-and-twenty, smaller, two-and-fifty; of scorpions larger and smaller, and of arms and weapons, a vast number; military standards, seventy-four. And a great quantity of gold and silver was brought to the commander: golden bowls there were two hundred and seventy-six, almost all of a pound in weight; of silver, wrought and coined, eighteen thousand three hundred pounds, a great number of silver vessels; all these were weighed out and counted to Gaius Flaminius the quaestor; of wheat four hundred thousand modii, of barley two hundred and seventy thousand. Sixty transports were assaulted and taken in the harbor, some with their cargoes—grain, arms, and besides bronze and iron and linen and esparto and other naval material for the building of a fleet—so that the least of all things, amid such great riches of war captured, was Carthage itself.

That day Scipio, having ordered Gaius Laelius with the naval allies to guard the city, himself led the legions back into camp and bade the soldiers, wearied as they were with all the works of war in one day—since they had both fought in line and undergone so much toil and peril in the taking of the city, and, the city taken, had fought, in an unfavorable place too, with those who had fled into the citadel—tend their bodies. The next day, the soldiers and naval allies being convened, he first gave praise and thanks to the immortal gods, who had not only made him, in one day, master of the most opulent of all the cities in Spain, but had before this heaped up there all the wealth of Africa and of Spain, so that nothing should be left to the enemy, and all should be over and above for himself and his men. Then he praised the valor of the soldiers, because neither the enemy’s sally, nor the height of the walls, nor the unexplored shallows of the lagoon, nor the fort set on the high hillock, nor the most strongly fortified citadel, had deterred them from surmounting and bursting through all. And so, although he owed all things to all, the special honor of the mural crown was his who had first mounted the wall; let him profess himself who judged himself worthy of that gift. Two professed it: Quintus Trebellius, a centurion of the fourth legion, and Sextus Digitius, a naval ally. Nor did they themselves so keenly contend with one another as they had stirred up the zeal of the men of each body. To the allies Gaius Laelius, the prefect of the fleet, to the legionaries Marcus Sempronius Tuditanus, lent his support. When this contention came near to sedition, Scipio, having announced that he would appoint three recoverers, who, the case heard and the witnesses examined, should judge which had first climbed over into the town, added to Gaius Laelius and Marcus Sempronius—advocates of either party—Publius Cornelius Caudinus from the neutral side, and ordered these three recoverers to sit and take cognizance of the cause. When the matter was conducted with the greater contention because the moderators of so great a dignity had been removed—being not so much advocates as moderators of the zeal—Gaius Laelius, leaving the council, comes to the tribunal to Scipio, and informs him that the matter was being conducted without measure or modesty, and that it was near to their coming to blows among themselves. But even if violence were absent, none the less was the thing being done by a detestable example, since by fraud and perjury the reward of valor was being sought. On this side stood the legionary soldiers, on that the marines, ready to swear by all the gods rather what they wished than what they knew to be true, and to bind with perjury not themselves alone and their own heads, but the military standards and the eagles and the religion of the oath. These things he reported to him by the judgment of Publius Cornelius and Marcus Sempronius. Scipio, having praised Laelius, called an assembly and announced that he had ascertained well enough that Quintus Trebellius and Sextus Digitius had climbed onto the wall together, and that he gave them both, for valor’s sake, mural crowns. Then he rewarded the rest, as each man’s desert and valor was; before all, Gaius Laelius, prefect of the fleet, he both made equal to himself in every kind of praise, and presented with a golden crown and thirty oxen.

Then he ordered the hostages of the states of Spain to be summoned; of whom how great a number there was it irks me to write, since in one place I find about three hundred, in another three thousand seven hundred and twenty-four. Likewise other matters are at variance among the authorities. The Punic garrison one writes was ten thousand, another seven, another not more than two thousand. Captured persons in one place I find ten thousand, in another above five-and-twenty thousand. Of scorpions larger and smaller I should write that about sixty were taken, if I follow the Greek author Silenus; if Valerius Antias, six thousand of the larger scorpions, thirteen thousand of the smaller: so utterly is there no measure of lying. Not even about the leaders is there agreement. Most say that Laelius commanded the fleet; there are those who say Marcus Junius Silanus. That Arines commanded the Punic garrison and was surrendered to the Romans, Valerius Antias says; other writers hand down that it was Mago. They do not agree about the number of ships captured, nor about the weight of gold and silver and of the money realized. If one must assent to some, the middle figures are likeliest the truth. But, the hostages being summoned, he first bade all of them be of good cheer: for they had come into the power of the Roman people, who preferred to bind men by kindness rather than by fear, and to have foreign nations joined to him by good faith and alliance rather than subjected to a grim servitude. Then, having received the names of their states, he counted up the captives, how many were of each people, and sent messengers home that each should come to recover his own. If by chance there were envoys of any states present, he restored their own to them on the spot; the care of kindly guarding the rest he assigned to Gaius Flaminius the quaestor.

Meanwhile, out of the midst of the throng of hostages, a woman advanced in years, the wife of Mandonius—who was the brother of Indibilis, the chieftain of the Ilergetes—weeping, fell at the commander’s feet and began to beseech him that he would more earnestly charge upon the keepers the care and tendance of the women. When Scipio said that surely nothing should be wanting to them, the woman said again: "These things we set little store by; for what is not enough for this fortune of ours? Another care stirs me, when I look upon the age of these girls—for I myself am now past the peril of a woman’s outrage." Around her were the daughters of Indibilis, flourishing in age and beauty, and others of like nobility, who all reverenced her as a parent. Then Scipio said: "For the sake of my own and the Roman people’s discipline I would take heed that nothing which is anywhere held sacred among us should be violated; now your virtue and worthiness make me have this care the more earnestly—you who, not even amid your misfortunes, have forgotten matronly decorum." He then delivered them to a man of proven integrity, and bade him guard them no otherwise—as modestly and reverently—than the wives and mothers of guests.

Then a captive maiden, full-grown, is brought to him by the soldiers, of beauty so surpassing that, wherever she went, she turned the eyes of all. Scipio, having inquired her country and her parents, learned among other things that she had been betrothed to a chief of the Celtiberians; the young man’s name was Allucius. Forthwith, therefore, the parents and the betrothed being summoned from home, when meanwhile he heard that the youth was pining for love of his betrothed, as soon as he came he addresses him in a speech more studied than he would a parent: "I, a young man," he said, "speak to a young man, that there may be the less shame between us in this discourse. When your betrothed, taken by our soldiers, had been brought to me, and I heard that she was dear to your heart, and her beauty made it credible—since I myself, if it were permitted to enjoy the sport of youth, especially in an upright and lawful love, and if the commonwealth had not occupied my mind, would wish that pardon be given me for loving a betrothed too earnestly—I favor your love, which I am able to favor. Your betrothed has been with me under the same reverence as with her father-in-law and her own parents; she has been kept for you, that she might be given to you a gift inviolate and worthy of me and of you. This one recompense I bargain for in return for that gift: be a friend to the Roman people, and, if you believe me to be a good man, such as these nations already knew my father and my uncle to be, know that there are many like us in the Roman state, and that no people on earth can today be named whom you would less wish to be an enemy to you and yours, or would rather have for a friend." When the youth, suffused at once with shame and joy, holding Scipio’s right hand, called upon all the gods to render him thanks in his stead—since he himself had by no means means enough in proportion to his own spirit and that man’s desert toward him—then the parents and kinsmen of the maiden were addressed; who, since the maiden was being restored to them for nothing, to ransom whom they had brought a weight of gold large enough, began to beg Scipio that he would accept that gift from them, affirming that the gratitude for that would be with them no less than for the maiden restored inviolate. Scipio, since they begged it so earnestly, having promised that he would accept it, ordered it to be laid before his feet, and, Allucius being called to him, said: "Over and above the dowry which you are to receive from your father-in-law, these dowry-gifts will come to you from me," and bade him take up the gold and keep it for himself. Glad at these gifts and honors and sent home, he filled his countrymen with the deserved praises of Scipio: that there had come a young man most like the gods, conquering all things as well by kindness and benefactions as by arms. And so, a levy of his clients held, with fourteen hundred picked horsemen he returned within a few days to Scipio.

Scipio, having kept Laelius with him while by his counsel he disposed of the captives, the hostages, and the booty, when all was settled well enough, gave him a quinquereme, and, the captives—with Mago and some fifteen senators who had been taken along with him—put aboard the ship, sends him to Rome as the messenger of the victory. He himself spent the few days he had resolved to tarry at Carthage in exercising the naval and the land forces. On the first day the legions ran a course of four miles under arms; on the second day they were bidden to tend and burnish their arms before their tents; on the third day they engaged with one another with wooden swords, in the manner of a regular battle, and hurled blunted missiles; on the fourth day rest was given; on the fifth they ran again under arms. This order of toil and rest they kept as long as they tarried at Carthage. The rowers and the marines, carried out to sea in calm weather, tried the agility of the ships in mock sea-fights. These things, outside the city by land and sea, sharpened at once their bodies and their spirits for war; the city itself rang with the apparatus of war, craftsmen of every kind shut up in a public workshop. The leader went about all things with equal care: now he was with the fleet and at the docks, now he ran courses with the legions, now he gave time to inspecting the works, and what the great multitude of craftsmen wrought day by day, with vast rivalry, in the workshops and in the armory and the docks. These things thus begun, and what had been shattered of the wall repaired, and garrisons set for the guard of the city, he set out for Tarraco, approached on the very road by many embassies, which he partly dismissed with an answer given on the march, partly deferred to Tarraco, whither he had proclaimed a meeting of all the allies, new and old. And nearly all the peoples that dwell this side of the Ebro, many too of the farther province, assembled.

The Carthaginian leaders at first of set purpose suppressed the report of the capture of Carthage; then, when the matter was clearer than that it could be covered and dissembled, they made light of it in words: that by an unlooked-for arrival and almost by the theft of a single day one city of Spain had been intercepted; that an insolent young man, elated by the reward of so small a thing, had by his immoderate joy put upon it the appearance of a great victory; but that, as soon as he heard that three leaders, three victorious armies of the enemy, were drawing near, the memory of his domestic funerals would at once meet him. These things they cast about among the common people, by no means themselves ignorant of how much had been taken from their strength for everything by the loss of Carthage.