Such was the state of affairs in Spain. In Italy the consul Marcellus, having recovered Salapia by betrayal, took Marmoreae and Meles from the Samnites by storm. About three thousand of Hannibal’s soldiers, who had been left there as a garrison, were overwhelmed; the plunder—and there was a good deal of it—was made over to the soldiers. There were found, besides, two hundred and forty thousand measures of wheat and a hundred and ten thousand of barley. Yet the joy from this was nothing like so great as the disaster that was suffered within a few days near the city of Herdonea. There the proconsul Gnaeus Fulvius had his camp, in hope of recovering Herdonea, which had revolted from the Romans after the disaster of Cannae; and it was pitched in no position safe enough, nor strengthened with outposts. The carelessness native to the commander’s temper was heightened by the hope that he had felt their loyalty toward the Carthaginian to be wavering, once it was heard that Hannibal, on the loss of Salapia, had withdrawn from those parts into Bruttium. All this, carried to Hannibal from Herdonea by secret messengers, gave him at once a concern to keep an allied city and a hope of attacking an unwary enemy. With his army stripped for speed, so that he almost outran the report of his coming, he pressed by forced marches toward Herdonea, and, to cast the more terror upon the enemy, drew up his line as he approached. The Roman, his equal in daring but his inferior in judgment and in strength, led out his forces in haste and engaged. The fifth legion and the left wing entered the fight keenly; but Hannibal had given the signal to his cavalry that, when the lines of foot had fastened eyes and minds upon the struggle before them, they should ride round and fall, part upon the enemy’s camp, part upon the rear of the panicking men; and he himself, jeering at the likeness of the name of Gnaeus Fulvius—because two years before he had utterly defeated a Gnaeus Fulvius, the praetor, in those same places—kept affirming that the outcome of the battle would be the same. Nor was that hope vain; for when, in the close fighting of the line and the struggle of the infantry, many of the Romans had fallen, yet the ranks and standards still held, the cavalry tumult in the rear, and with it the enemy’s shout heard from the camp, turned to flight first the sixth legion—which, posted in the second line, was the first to be thrown into disorder by the Numidians—and then the fifth, and those who stood at the front standards. Part poured away in flight, part were cut down where they stood, and there Gnaeus Fulvius himself fell, with eleven military tribunes. How many thousands of Romans and allies were slain in that battle, who could affirm for certain, when in one source I find thirteen thousand, in another no more than seven? The victor took the camp and the plunder. Herdonea—because he learned that it would have gone over to the Romans and would not stay faithful once he had withdrawn—he burned, after transferring the whole population to Metapontum and Thurii; and he put to death the leading men who were found to have held secret conferences with Fulvius. The Romans who had escaped from so great a disaster fled by various routes, half-armed, to the consul Marcellus in Samnium.

Marcellus, not in the least dismayed by so great a disaster, wrote to the senate at Rome about the commander and the army lost at Herdonea; but added that he—the same man who after the battle of Cannae had crushed Hannibal, then fierce with victory—was going against him, and would make short the joy in which he now exulted. And at Rome there was indeed great grief for the past and fear for the future. The consul, crossing from Samnium into Lucania, pitched his camp on level ground at Numistro, in sight of Hannibal, while the Carthaginian held a hill. He added another show of confidence, in that he was the first to lead out into line; nor did Hannibal decline, when he saw the standards carried out of the gates. Yet they so drew up their lines that the Carthaginian raised his right wing up the hill, the Romans set their left against the town. On the Roman side the first legion and the right wing fought, on Hannibal’s the Spanish soldiers and the Balearic slingers, the elephants too being driven into the battle once the engagement was joined; and for a long time the fight stood, inclining to neither side. From the third hour, when they had drawn the battle out toward night, and the front lines were worn with fighting, the third legion relieved the first and the left wing the right, and on the enemy’s side fresh men took over the fight from the weary. A new and fierce battle suddenly blazed up out of one already flagging, with bodies and spirits renewed; but night parted the combatants with victory still in doubt. Next day the Romans stood in line from sunrise far into the day; and when none of the enemy came forward against them, they gathered the spoils at their leisure and burned their own dead, heaped into one place. The following night Hannibal moved his camp in silence and went off into Apulia. Marcellus, when daylight revealed the enemy’s flight, left the wounded at Numistro with a small garrison, setting over them the military tribune Lucius Furius Purpurio, and pressed on to follow in his tracks. He came up with him at Venusia. There for some days, with sallies from the outposts, there were skirmishes mingled of horse and foot, tumultuous rather than great, and almost all of them went well for the Romans. From there the armies were led through Apulia without any memorable engagement, since Hannibal would move his standards by night, seeking ground for an ambush, while Marcellus would not follow except in clear daylight and after reconnoitering ahead.

At Capua, meanwhile, while Flaccus was wasting time in selling the property of the leading men and in leasing the land that had been confiscated—and he leased it all for grain—a fresh crime, swelling in secret, was dragged into the open by an informer, that he might not lack material for visiting his severity upon the Campanians. He had removed the soldiers from the buildings—partly so that the houses of the city might be leased for use together with the land, partly fearing that the excessive charm of the city might soften his own army too, as it had Hannibal’s—and had compelled them to build themselves quarters in soldierly fashion at the gates and on the walls. But these were for the most part made of wattles and boards, some woven of reeds, all thatched with straw, as if on purpose to feed a fire. To set fire to all of these in one hour of the night a hundred and seventy Campanians had conspired, under the lead of the brothers Blossius. When information of the thing was laid by one of the household of the Blossii, and the gates were on a sudden closed by the proconsul’s order, and the soldiers, at the signal given, had run together to arms, all who were in the guilt were seized, and, after a sharp inquiry, condemned and put to death; to the informers were given liberty and ten thousand asses apiece. The people of Nuceria and Acerrae, complaining that they had nowhere to live—Acerrae having been partly burned and Nuceria destroyed—Fulvius sent to Rome to the senate. The Acerrans were allowed to rebuild what had been burned; the Nucerians, since they had so preferred, were removed to Atella, the people of Atella being ordered to migrate to Calatia.

Amid the many great matters, now favorable, now adverse, that occupied men’s thoughts, not even the memory of the Tarentine citadel slipped away. Marcus Ogulnius and Publius Aquilius set out as commissioners into Etruria to buy up grain to be carried to Tarentum, and a thousand soldiers from the city army, an equal number of Romans and allies, were sent to the same place as a garrison along with the grain. Now the summer was at its close, and the time of the consular elections was at hand; but a letter from Marcellus, declaring that it was against the public interest to withdraw a foot’s breadth from Hannibal—on whom, as he gave ground and refused battle, he himself pressed hard—had thrown men into anxiety, lest they either call the consul away from the war just when he was driving his enterprise hardest, or be left without consuls for the year. It seemed best to recall Valerius the consul from Sicily, though he was outside Italy. A letter was sent to him, by the senate’s order, by the city praetor Lucius Manlius, together with the letter of the consul Marcus Marcellus, that from these he might learn what reason the fathers had for recalling him rather than his colleague from the province. About that time envoys came to Rome from king Syphax, recounting the successful battles he had fought with the Carthaginians: they affirmed that the king was no people’s enemy more than the Carthaginians’, and no people’s friend more than the Romans’; that he had earlier sent envoys into Spain to the Roman commanders Gnaeus and Publius Cornelius, and that now he had wished to seek Roman friendship from the very fountainhead. The senate not only answered the envoys graciously, but itself sent envoys with gifts to the king—Lucius Genucius, Publius Poetelius, Publius Popillius. They carried as gifts a toga and a purple tunic, an ivory curule chair, and a bowl made of five pounds of gold. They were ordered to go on at once to the other princes of Africa as well; for these too gifts were carried, bordered togas and golden bowls of three pounds each. And to Alexandria, to king Ptolemy and queen Cleopatra, Marcus Atilius and Manius Acilius were sent as envoys to commemorate and renew the friendship; they too bore gifts, to the king a toga and a purple tunic with an ivory chair, to the queen an embroidered mantle with a purple cloak. Many prodigies were reported that summer, in which these things were done, from the neighboring towns and countryside: at Tusculum a lamb was born with an udder full of milk, and the roof-ridge of the temple of Jupiter was struck by lightning and stripped of nearly its whole covering; in nearly the same days, at Anagnia, the earth before the gate was struck and burned a day and a night without any fuel of fire, and the birds at the Anagnian crossroads, in the grove of Diana, abandoned their nests in the trees; at Tarracina, in the sea not far from the harbor, snakes of marvelous size leaped about in the manner of sporting fish; at Tarquinii a pig was born with a human face, and in the territory of Capena, at the grove of Feronia, four statues sweated much blood a day and a night. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims by decree of the pontiffs; and a supplication was proclaimed, for one day at Rome at all the sacred couches, for another in the territory of Capena at the grove of Feronia.

The consul Marcus Valerius, roused by the letter, committed the province and the army to the praetor Lucius Cincius, and sent Marcus Valerius Messalla, the prefect of the fleet, with part of the ships into Africa, both to plunder and to spy out what the Carthaginian people was doing and preparing; he himself set out for Rome with ten ships, and, having arrived there prosperously, at once held a meeting of the senate, where he recounted his achievements: that, when for nearly sixty years there had been war in Sicily by land and sea, often with great disasters, he had brought that province to its end. No Carthaginian was in Sicily; no Sicilian was not; all who had been driven off and kept away by fear had been brought back to their cities and their own fields, to plough and to sow; the deserted land was under cultivation again, fruitful at last to its own tillers, and to the Roman people, in peace and war, a most faithful support of its grain supply. Then, when Muttines and any others who had deserved well of the Roman people had been brought into the senate, honors were paid to all of them, to discharge the consul’s pledge. Muttines was even made a Roman citizen, by a bill carried to the plebs by the tribunes on the authority of the fathers. While this was being done at Rome, Marcus Valerius, having reached Africa with fifty ships before daylight, made an unexpected landing in the territory of Utica; and, having ravaged it far and wide and taken many people, with other plunder of every kind, he returned to his ships and crossed over into Sicily, brought back to Lilybaeum on the thirteenth day after he had set out from it. From the prisoners an inquiry was held, and the following was learned and written out in full order for the consul Laevinus, that he might know in what state the affairs of Africa stood: that five thousand Numidians under Masinissa, the son of Gala, a young man of the keenest spirit, were at Carthage; that other soldiers throughout all Africa were being hired for pay, to be carried over into Spain to Hasdrubal, so that he, crossing into Italy at the earliest moment with the largest army he could, might join himself to Hannibal; that on this the Carthaginians believed their victory rested; that, besides, a huge fleet was being made ready to recover Sicily, and that he believed it would cross over before long. These things, read out by the consul, so moved the senate that they judged the consul ought not to wait for the elections, but, a dictator having been named to hold them, should return at once to his province. But this dispute held them up: the consul said that he would name as dictator, in Sicily, Marcus Valerius Messalla, who then commanded the fleet, while the fathers denied that a dictator could be named outside Roman soil—and that, they held, was bounded by Italy. When the tribune of the plebs Marcus Lucretius consulted them on the matter, the senate decreed thus: that the consul, before he left the city, should ask the people whom they wished named dictator, and should name as dictator the man the people had ordered; if the consul were unwilling, the praetor should ask the people; if not even he were willing, then the tribunes should bring it before the plebs. When the consul refused to ask the people, since it lay within his own power, and forbade the praetor to ask, the tribunes asked the plebs, and the plebs voted that Quintus Fulvius, who was then at Capua, should be named dictator. But on the day on which that assembly of the plebs was to meet, the consul slipped away by night into Sicily; and the fathers, left in the lurch, voted that a letter should be sent to Marcus Claudius, that he should come to the aid of the commonwealth, deserted by his colleague, and should name as dictator the man the people had ordered. So by the consul Marcus Claudius, Quintus Fulvius was named dictator, and by the same vote of the plebs, by Quintus Fulvius the dictator, Publius Licinius Crassus the pontifex maximus was named master of the horse.

After the dictator came to Rome, he sent Gaius Sempronius Blaesus, the lieutenant whom he had had at Capua, into the province of Etruria to the army, in place of the praetor Gaius Calpurnius, whom he summoned by letter to take charge of Capua and of his own army. He himself proclaimed the elections for the first day he could; but they could not be carried through, a dispute having arisen between the tribunes and the dictator. The junior century of the Galerian tribe, which by lot had the prerogative vote, had named as consuls Quintus Fulvius and Quintus Fabius, and the centuries called in the same right would have inclined the same way, had not the tribunes of the plebs Gaius and Lucius Arrenius interposed, who said that it was not consistent enough with civil order that a magistracy be continued, and that it set a far fouler precedent that the very man who held the election should himself be chosen; and so, if the dictator accepted his own name, they would veto the election; but if account were taken of others than himself, they would put no delay in the election’s way. The dictator defended the legality of the election by the senate’s authority, by a vote of the plebs, and by precedents: for in the consulship of Gnaeus Servilius, when Gaius Flaminius, the other consul, had fallen at Trasimene, it had been brought before the plebs on the fathers’ authority, and the plebs had voted that, so long as the war was in Italy, the people should have the right to re-elect as consuls, from among those who had been consuls, whom and as often as it wished; and he had precedents for the matter—an old one of Lucius Postumius Megellus, who as interrex had been elected consul, with Gaius Junius Bubulcus, at the very election he himself was holding; a recent one of Quintus Fabius, who would assuredly never have suffered the consulship to be continued to himself, had it not been for the public good. When the contest had long been waged with these speeches, at last it was so agreed between the dictator and the tribunes that they should abide by whatever the senate should decide. To the fathers the crisis of the state seemed such that the commonwealth should be conducted by old commanders, tried and skilled in war; and so they were not pleased that any delay be made in the election. The tribunes giving way, the election was held; declared consuls were Quintus Fabius Maximus for the fifth time, Quintus Fulvius Flaccus for the fourth. Then praetors were chosen: Lucius Veturius Philo, Titus Quinctius Crispinus, Gaius Hostilius Tubulus, Gaius Aurunculeius. The magistrates for the year having been chosen, Quintus Fulvius laid down the dictatorship.

At the very end of this summer a Carthaginian fleet of forty ships, with Hamilcar as its prefect, crossed over into Sardinia, and first laid waste the territory of Olbia; then, after the praetor Publius Manlius Volso appeared there with his army, it was carried round from there to the other side of the island, ravaged the territory of Carales, and returned to Africa with plunder of every kind. That year several Roman priests died and were replaced: Gaius Servilius was made pontiff in the place of Titus Otacilius Crassus; Tiberius Sempronius Longus, son of Tiberius, was made augur in the place of Titus Otacilius Crassus; as decemvir for the conduct of sacred rites, likewise, in the place of Tiberius Sempronius Longus, son of Gaius, was substituted Tiberius Sempronius Longus, son of Tiberius. Marcus Marcius the rex sacrorum died, and Marcus Aemilius Papus the chief curio; nor were priests substituted in their places that year. And this year had as censors Lucius Veturius Philo and Publius Licinius Crassus, the pontifex maximus. Licinius Crassus had been neither consul nor praetor before he was made censor; he made the step to the censorship straight from the aedileship. But these censors neither revised the roll of the senate nor transacted any public business: death broke it off in the case of Lucius Veturius, and thereupon Licinius too laid down the censorship. The curule aediles Lucius Veturius and Publius Licinius Varus repeated the Roman Games for one day. The plebeian aediles Quintus Catius and Lucius Porcius Licinus gave bronze statues at the temple of Ceres from money collected in fines, and held games splendidly appointed for the resources of that time. At the close of this year Gaius Laelius, Scipio’s lieutenant, came to Rome on the thirty-fourth day after he had set out from Tarraco; and entering the city with a column of prisoners he drew a great throng of people together. The next day, brought before the senate, he set forth that New Carthage—the capital of Spain—had been captured in a single day, that several cities which had revolted had been recovered, and new ones taken into alliance. From the prisoners was learned much that agreed with what had been in the letter of Marcus Valerius Messalla. What moved the fathers most was the crossing of Hasdrubal into Italy, when they could scarcely hold out against Hannibal and his arms. Laelius, brought before the assembly too, set forth the same things. The senate, for the things successfully done by Publius Scipio, decreed a supplication of one day, and ordered Gaius Laelius to return to Spain at the earliest moment with the ships in which he had come.—The storming of New Carthage I have assigned to this year, following many authorities, though not unaware that there are some who have recorded its capture in the following year; which seemed to me less like the truth, that Scipio should have spent a whole year doing nothing in Spain.

When Quintus Fabius Maximus for the fifth time and Quintus Fulvius Flaccus for the fourth were consuls, on the Ides of March, the day they entered office, Italy was decreed as the province of both, but the command divided by regions: Fabius was to conduct affairs at Tarentum, Fulvius in Lucania and Bruttium. To Marcus Claudius the command was prolonged for a year. The praetors drew their provinces: Gaius Hostilius Tubulus the city jurisdiction, Lucius Veturius Philo the foreign together with Gaul, Titus Quinctius Crispinus Capua, Gaius Aurunculeius Sardinia. The armies were thus divided among the provinces: to Fulvius the two legions Marcus Valerius Laevinus had in Sicily; to Quintus Fabius those Gaius Calpurnius had commanded in Etruria; the city army was to move up into Etruria; Gaius Calpurnius was to command that same province and army; Capua and the army Quintus Fulvius had held, Titus Quinctius was to hold. Gaius Hostilius was to take over from the propraetor Gaius Laetorius the province and the army then at Ariminum. To Marcus Marcellus were decreed the legions with which he had campaigned as consul. To Marcus Valerius, with Lucius Cincius—for to these too the command in Sicily was prolonged—was given the army of Cannae, and they were ordered to fill it up from the soldiers who survived of the legions of Gnaeus Fulvius. These the consuls hunted out and sent to Sicily; and there was laid on them the same disgrace of service under which the men of Cannae served, and on those too who, from the army of the praetor Gnaeus Fulvius, had been sent there by the senate out of a like anger at their flight. To Gaius Aurunculeius were decreed the same legions in Sardinia with which Publius Manlius Volso had held that province. To Publius Sulpicius, ordered to hold Macedonia with the same legion and the same fleet, the command was prolonged for a year. Thirty quinqueremes were ordered sent from Sicily to Tarentum, to the consul Quintus Fabius; with the rest of the fleet it was resolved that either Marcus Valerius Laevinus himself should cross to plunder Africa, or that he should send whichever he chose, Lucius Cincius or Marcus Valerius Messalla. Nor was anything changed about Spain, except that the command was prolonged for Scipio and Silanus, not for a year, but until they should be recalled by the senate. So were the provinces and the commands of the armies parceled out for that year. Amid the cares of greater matters, the election of the chief curio, when a priest was being chosen in the place of Marcus Aemilius, stirred up an old contest, the patricians denying that account should be taken of Gaius Mamilius Atellus, the one man of the plebs who was a candidate, because no one before him, save from the patricians, had held that priesthood. The tribunes, appealed to, referred the matter to the senate; the senate left it to the people’s power; and so the first chief curio chosen from the plebs was Gaius Mamilius Atellus. And Publius Licinius the pontifex maximus compelled Gaius Valerius Flaccus, against his will, to be inaugurated as flamen Dialis (the priest of Jupiter); as decemvir for the conduct of sacred rites, in the place of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, deceased, Gaius Laetorius was chosen. The reason for the flamen’s being compelled to be inaugurated I would gladly have passed over in silence, had it not turned from ill repute to good. On account of his careless and dissolute youth, Gaius Flaccus had been seized as flamen by Publius Licinius the pontifex maximus, being hateful, for those same vices, to his own brother Lucius Flaccus and to his other kinsmen. But as soon as the care of the rites and ceremonies took hold of his mind, he so suddenly put off his old ways that no one in all the youth was held higher, nor more approved by the foremost of the fathers, kinsmen and strangers alike. Raised by the unanimity of this repute to a just confidence in himself, he revived a right that had lapsed for many years through the unworthiness of earlier flamens—that he should enter the senate. When he had entered the senate-house and the praetor Publius Licinius had led him out of it, he appealed to the tribunes of the plebs. The flamen claimed the ancient right of his priesthood: that it had been given to that flaminate along with the bordered toga and the curule chair. The praetor held that the right rested not on precedents grown obsolete with the age of the annals, but on the usage of the most recent custom in each case: that within the memory of neither fathers nor grandfathers had any flamen of Jupiter exercised that right. The tribunes, judging it fair that a matter blotted out by the flamens’ own slackness should be a loss to them and not to the priesthood, brought the flamen into the senate—the praetor himself now no longer striving against it—with great assent of fathers and plebs, all reckoning that the flamen had carried his point more by the sanctity of his life than by the right of his priesthood.

The consuls, before they went into their provinces, enrolled two city legions, as a supplement of soldiers, as far as was needed for the rest of the armies. The old city army the consul Fulvius gave to his lieutenant Gaius Fulvius Flaccus—this man was the consul’s brother—to lead into Etruria, and the legions that were in Etruria to be led back to Rome. And the consul Fabius ordered his son Quintus Maximus to lead into Sicily, to the proconsul Marcus Valerius, the gathered remnants of Fulvius’s army—and they were about four thousand three hundred and forty-four men—and from him to take over two legions and thirty quinqueremes. The withdrawal of these legions from the island diminished the defense of that province neither in strength nor in show; for besides the two old legions, excellently filled up, Valerius had a great force of Numidian deserters, horse and foot, and he enrolled as soldiers Sicilians too who had been in the army of Epicydes or of the Carthaginians, men skilled in war. When he had joined these foreign auxiliaries, one body to each of the Roman legions, he kept up the appearance of two armies: with the one he ordered Lucius Cincius to guard the part of the island that had been the kingdom of Hiero; with the other he himself guarded the rest of the island, once divided by the boundaries of Roman and Carthaginian rule, the fleet of seventy ships likewise divided, so that they might be a protection to the seacoast around the whole sweep of the shores. He himself ranged over the province with Muttines’s cavalry, to look at the fields and to mark the tilled from the untilled, and accordingly to praise or to chide the owners. By that care so much grain came in that he both sent some to Rome and conveyed some to Catina, from which it could be supplied to the army that was to keep its summer quarters at Tarentum. But the soldiers transported into Sicily—and they were for the greater part of the Latin name and of the allies—were nearly the cause of a great upheaval: so often do the turns of great events hang upon small things. For a murmuring arose among the Latins and allies in their councils, that for ten years now they had been drained by levies and by pay; that almost every year they fought with great slaughter; that some were killed in the line, others carried off by disease; that a fellow-countryman who was chosen a soldier by the Roman perished more surely for them than one captured by the Carthaginian; for by the enemy he was sent home for nothing, while by the Romans he was packed off outside Italy—into exile, more truly than into service. For eight years now the soldier of Cannae had been growing old there, doomed to die before the enemy left Italy, who now, more than ever, was flourishing in strength. If the old soldiers did not return to their country, and new ones were levied, in a short time none would be left. And so what the very thing itself would soon refuse, must be refused to the Roman people, before they came to the utmost desolation and want. If the Romans saw the allies agreed in this, they would assuredly think of making peace with the Carthaginians; otherwise Italy would never, while Hannibal lived, be without war. This was done in the councils. There were then thirty colonies of the Roman people; of these twelve, when the deputations of all were at Rome, declared to the consuls that they had nothing from which to give soldiers and money. These were Ardea, Nepete, Sutrium, Alba, Carseoli, Sora, Suessa, Circeii, Setia, Cales, Narnia, Interamna. Struck by the novelty of the thing, the consuls, wishing to deter them from so detestable a purpose, and thinking they would accomplish more by rebuking and reproaching than by dealing gently, said that the colonists had dared to say to the consuls what the consuls could not bring themselves to announce in the senate: for it was no mere shirking of the burdens of service, but open revolt from the Roman people. Let them therefore return in haste to their colonies and, as though the matter were yet untouched—having spoken so great an impiety rather than dared it—take counsel with their own people. Let them be reminded that they were not Campanians or Tarentines, but Romans; that thence they sprang, thence they had been sent into colonies and onto land captured in war to increase the stock. What children owed to parents, that they owed to the Romans, if there were any loyalty in them, any memory of their ancient fatherland. Let them therefore deliberate afresh; for what they had now rashly stirred up was to betray the Roman empire and to hand the victory to Hannibal. When the consuls had long urged these things by turns, the envoys, in no way moved, said that they had nothing to report at home, nor had their senate anything new to consider, where there was neither a soldier to be levied nor money to be given for pay. When the consuls saw them obstinate, they brought the matter before the senate, where so great a terror was thrown into men’s minds that a great part said the empire was finished: that the other colonies would do the same, the allies the same; that all had agreed to betray the city of Rome to Hannibal.

The consuls heartened and consoled the senate, and said that the other colonies would stand in their loyalty and ancient duty; and that even those very ones which had fallen from their duty would feel a respect for the empire, if envoys were sent round those colonies to chide them, not to entreat them. Leave being given them by the senate to act and do as they judged for the public good, they first sounded the temper of the other colonies, then summoned their envoys and asked of them whether they had soldiers ready according to the formula. On behalf of eighteen colonies, Marcus Sextilius of Fregellae answered both that the soldiers were ready according to the formula, and that, if more were needed, they would give more, and would do zealously whatever else the Roman people should command and wish: for this they lacked neither means, and had spirit to spare besides. The consuls, saying that it seemed to them too little, for their desert, that they should be praised by their own voice alone, unless the whole body of the fathers should give them thanks in the senate-house, ordered them to follow into the senate. The senate, addressing them in the most honoring decree it could, charged the consuls to bring them before the people too, and, among many other splendid services they had rendered to itself and to their forefathers, to commemorate this recent service of theirs to the commonwealth. Not even now, after so many ages, let them be passed over in silence or cheated of their praise: they were the men of Signia and Norba and Saticula, of Fregellae and Luceria and Venusia, of Brundisium and Hadria and Firmum and Ariminum; and, from the other sea, of Pontiae and Paestum and Cosa; and inland, of Beneventum and Aesernia and Spoletium, and of Placentia and Cremona. By the support of these colonies the empire of the Roman people then stood, and thanks were given them in the senate and before the people. Of the twelve other colonies which had refused their duty the fathers forbade any mention to be made, and that they be neither dismissed nor detained nor addressed by the consuls; that silent rebuke seemed most in keeping with the dignity of the Roman people. While the consuls were dispatching the other things needed for the war, it was resolved that the gold of the twentieth—which was kept in the more sacred treasury against the last extremities—should be brought out. About four thousand pounds of gold were brought out. Of this five hundred pounds were given to each of the consuls, and to the proconsuls Marcus Marcellus and Publius Sulpicius, and to the praetor Lucius Veturius, who had drawn Gaul as his province; and there was added to the consul Fabius a hundred pounds of gold, expressly to be carried into the citadel of Tarentum. The rest of the gold they used to contract, with cash down, for clothing for the army that was waging war in Spain with good fortune of its own and of its commander.

Prodigies too, before the consuls set out from the city, it was resolved to expiate. On the Alban Mount a statue of Jupiter and a tree near the temple had been struck from heaven, and at Ostia a lake, and at Capua the wall and the temple of Fortune, and at Sinuessa the wall and a gate. These had been struck from heaven; and some authorities said also that the Alban water had flowed with blood, and that at Rome, inside the shrine of the temple of Fors Fortuna, a head from the statue—part of the crown—had slipped of its own accord into the hand; and it was well established that at Privernum an ox had spoken, and that a vulture had flown down into a shop in the crowded forum, and that at Sinuessa a child had been born of doubtful sex between male and female—androgynes, as the crowd calls them, the Greek tongue, as in most things, being readier for the doubling of words—and that it had rained milk, and that a boy had been born with the head of an elephant. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims, and a supplication around all the sacred couches, and an act of solemn entreaty for one day were proclaimed; and it was decreed that the praetor Gaius Hostilius should vow and hold games to Apollo, as in those years they had been vowed and held. In those days the consul Quintus Fulvius held the assembly for electing censors. Chosen as censors were two men who had not yet been consuls, Marcus Cornelius Cethegus and Publius Sempronius Tuditanus. That these censors should lease out the Campanian land for use was, on the authority of the fathers, brought before the plebs, and the plebs so voted. The revision of the senate’s roll was held up by a contest between the censors over the choosing of the leader of the senate. The choosing fell to Sempronius; but Cornelius held that the custom handed down from the fathers should be followed, that they choose as leader the man who, of those living, had first been censor; that was Titus Manlius Torquatus. Sempronius replied that, to the man on whom the gods had bestowed the lot of choosing, those same gods had given a free right; that he would do it by his own judgment, and would choose Quintus Fabius Maximus, whom he would prove, even with Hannibal as judge, to be then the leading man of the Roman state. When the matter had long been disputed in words, his colleague yielding, Quintus Fabius Maximus the consul was chosen by Sempronius as leader of the senate. Then a new senate was enrolled, eight men being passed over, among whom was Marcus Caecilius Metellus, the infamous author of deserting Italy after the disaster of Cannae. In the equestrian censure too the same ground was observed, but there were very few whom that infamy touched. From all of them—and they were many—who had been horsemen of the Cannae legions in Sicily, the public horse was taken away. They added to the harshness this too in point of time, that their past campaigns should not count toward those they had served on the public horse, but that they should serve ten campaigns on private horses. Besides, they hunted out a great number of those who ought to serve on horseback; and of those who at the beginning of this war had been seventeen years old and had not served, they made all of them tax-payers (aerarii). Then they let out, to be rebuilt, the things consumed by fire around the forum—seven shops, the meat-market, and the Royal Hall.

When all that had to be done at Rome was finished, the consuls set out for the war. Fulvius went ahead, in advance, to Capua; a few days later Fabius followed, who both adjured his colleague face to face, and Marcellus by letter, to hold Hannibal fast in the fiercest war while he himself assaulted Tarentum—for, that city once wrested from the enemy, who was now driven back on every side, with nowhere to make a stand and nothing faithful to look to, there would be no reason for him even to linger in Italy. He sent a messenger also to Regium, to the prefect of the garrison that had been stationed there by the consul Laevinus against the Bruttians—eight thousand men, the greater part brought over from Agathyrna, in Sicily, as was said before, men used to living by plunder; to these had been added Bruttian deserters from the same place, men matched both in daring and in the necessity that compels daring. This band he ordered to be led first to lay waste the Bruttian territory, then to attack the city of Caulonia. They carried out their orders not only briskly but greedily, and, the cultivators of the land plundered and put to flight, attacked the city with all their force. Marcellus, both roused by the consul’s letter and because he had so fixed it in his mind that no Roman commander was so much a match for Hannibal as he, as soon as there was plenty of fodder in the fields, set out from winter quarters and met Hannibal at Canusium. The Carthaginian was trying to draw the people of Canusium into revolt; but when he heard that Marcellus was drawing near, he moved his camp from there. The country was open, with no coverts for ambush; so he began to fall back into wooded places. Marcellus pressed upon his tracks, and pitched camp against camp; and, his works finished, would at once lead the legions out into line. Hannibal, sowing slight skirmishes by squadrons through his horsemen and the javelin-men of the foot, thought the hazard of a general battle not needful. Yet he was drawn into the very contest he was avoiding. Having gone ahead by night, Marcellus came up with him on level and open ground; and, as he was pitching camp, by fighting on every side he kept his men from their works. So the standards were joined and the battle was fought with all the forces, and, when now night was at hand, they parted on equal terms of war. The camps, parted by a small space, were hastily fortified before night. The next day, at first light, Marcellus led his forces out into line; nor did Hannibal decline the fight, exhorting his soldiers at length to remember Trasimene and Cannae and to crush the ferocity of their enemy: he was pressing and bearing hard upon them, would not let them march at ease nor pitch camp, would not let them breathe or look about; every day at once the rising sun and a Roman battle-line must be seen in the plains; if in one fight he went off not without blood, thereafter he would wage his war more quietly and more calmly. Stung by these exhortations, and at the same time out of weariness at the enemy’s ferocity, daily pressing and provoking them, they entered the fight keenly. The battle was fought for more than two hours. Then the right wing and the picked troops of the Romans began to give way. When Marcellus saw this, he brought the eighteenth legion into the front line. While some gave ground in alarm and others came up sluggishly, the whole line was thrown into disorder, then utterly routed, and fear, conquering shame, turned them to flight. In the battle and the rout there fell about two thousand seven hundred citizens and allies; among them four Roman centurions and two military tribunes, Marcus Licinius and Marcus Helvius. Four military standards were lost from the first wing that fled, two from the legion that had come up in place of the giving-way allies.

Marcellus, after the return to camp, held an assembly so savage and so bitter before his soldiers that the speech of their angry commander was harder for them to bear than a battle endured unsuccessfully through a whole day. "To the immortal gods," he said, "I give praise and thanks, as in such a case I may, that the victorious enemy did not fall upon your very camp when you tumbled in such panic against the rampart and the gates; you would surely have abandoned the camp in the same terror in which you forsook the battle. What panic, what terror was this, what forgetfulness, all at once, of who you were and with whom you fought, that seized your minds? Surely these are the same enemies in conquering whom, and in following them conquered, you spent the last summer; on whom in these days you have pressed day and night as they fled; whom you have worn down with light skirmishes; whom yesterday you suffered neither to march nor to pitch camp. I pass over the things you may boast of; I will recount that of which you ought to be ashamed and to repent: surely yesterday you broke off the battle with even hands. What has this night, what has this day brought? Are your forces lessened by it, or theirs increased? In truth I do not seem to be speaking with my own army, nor with Roman soldiers: the bodies only and the arms are the same. Had you the same spirits, would the enemy have seen your backs? Would he have taken the standards from any maniple or cohort? Hitherto he boasted of Roman legions cut to pieces; you this day have given him, for the first time, the glory of an army put to flight." Thereupon a shout arose that he should grant pardon for that day; thereafter, where he would, let him make trial of his soldiers’ spirit. "I will indeed make trial, soldiers," he said, "and tomorrow I will lead you into the line, that as victors rather than as vanquished you may obtain the pardon you ask." He ordered barley to be given to the cohorts that had lost their standards, and the centurions of the maniples whose standards had been lost he set apart, ungirt, with drawn swords; and he proclaimed that on the next day all, foot and horse, should be present under arms. So the assembly was dismissed, the men confessing that they had been reproached justly and deservedly, and that on that day there had been no man in the Roman line save the one commander, to whom satisfaction must be made either by death or by a signal victory.

The next day they were present, armed and equipped, at the order. The commander praised them, and proclaimed that those from whom the flight had arisen the day before, and the cohorts that had lost their standards, he would bring into the front line; and that he now gave notice to all that they must fight and conquer, and must each and all strive that the report of yesterday’s flight should not reach Rome before that of today’s victory. Then they were ordered to strengthen their bodies with food, so that, if the battle should be longer, they might hold out in strength. When all had been said and done by which the soldiers’ spirits might be stirred, they advanced into line. When this was reported to Hannibal, "I have to do, it seems," he said, "with an enemy who can bear neither good fortune nor bad. If he has conquered, he presses fiercely on the conquered; if he is conquered, he renews the struggle with the conquerors." Then he ordered the trumpets to sound and led out his forces. The fight on both sides was somewhat fiercer than the day before, the Carthaginians striving to keep yesterday’s glory, the Romans to wipe out their disgrace. On the Roman side the left wing and the cohorts that had lost their standards fought in the front line, and the eighteenth legion was drawn up on the right wing. The lieutenants Lucius Cornelius Lentulus and Gaius Claudius Nero commanded the wings; Marcellus, present as encourager and witness, steadied the center of the line. On Hannibal’s side the Spaniards held the front, and that was the flower of strength in the whole army. When the battle had long hung in doubt, Hannibal ordered the elephants to be brought into the front line, in case the thing might throw in some tumult and panic. And at first they did throw the standards and ranks into disorder, and, with some trampled down and others scattered in terror, they had laid bare the line on one side, and the rout would have spread more widely, had not Gaius Decimius Flavus, a military tribune, snatching up a standard, ordered the maniple of that standard, the first of the hastati, to follow him. He led them where the beasts, packed together, were making most of the tumult, and ordered javelins to be thrown at them. All the weapons stuck fast—it was no hard stroke at such bodies from close at hand, and in so crowded a press—but, as not all were wounded, so those in whose backs the javelins stood fixed, since the breed is treacherous, turned to flight and carried off even the unhurt. Then it was no longer one maniple, but every soldier for himself, so far as he could overtake the column of fleeing elephants, threw his javelins. The more did the beasts rush upon their own, and make a slaughter so much greater than they had made among the enemy as panic drives a maddened beast more fiercely than it is ruled by the command of the rider seated upon it. Into the line thrown into confusion by the beasts’ charging through it, the Roman foot bore their standards, and with no great struggle turned the scattered and panicking enemy to flight. Then Marcellus sent the cavalry in upon the fugitives, nor was there an end of the pursuit until they were driven, in their terror, into the camp. For, besides the other things that wrought terror and confusion, two elephants had fallen in the very gate, and the soldiers had been forced to rush into the camp over the ditch and rampart. There the greatest slaughter of the enemy was made; there were slain about eight thousand men and five elephants. Nor was the victory bloodless to the Romans: about one thousand seven hundred of the two legions, and of the allies more than one thousand three hundred, were killed; very many citizens and allies were wounded. Hannibal moved his camp the next night; Marcellus, who longed to follow, was prevented by the multitude of the wounded. Scouts sent to follow the column reported the next day that Hannibal was making for Bruttium.

In nearly the same days the Hirpini and the Lucani and the people of Volcei surrendered themselves to the consul Quintus Fulvius, handing over the garrisons of Hannibal which they had in their cities; and they were received kindly by the consul, with only a chiding in words for their past error. And a like hope of pardon was held out to the Bruttians, when the brothers Vibius and Paccius, by far the noblest of that people, came to them seeking the same terms of surrender that had been given to the Lucani. The consul Quintus Fabius took by storm the town of Manduria, in the territory of the Sallentini; there about three thousand men were taken, and a good deal of other plunder besides. Setting out from there for Tarentum, he pitched his camp at the very mouth of the harbor. The ships that Laevinus had kept for guarding the supply-convoys he loaded, part with engines and the apparatus for assaulting walls, part he fitted with artillery and stones and every kind of missile weapon—the merchant ships too, not only those driven by oars—so that some might bring engines and ladders up to the walls, others wound the defenders of the walls from a distance from the ships. These ships were equipped and made ready to attack the city from the open sea; and the sea was clear of the Carthaginian fleet, since Philip was preparing to attack the Aetolians, and it had crossed over to Corcyra. In Bruttium, meanwhile, the besiegers of Caulonia, at Hannibal’s approach, withdrew, that they might not be overwhelmed, onto a hill safe from immediate assault but in everything else ill-provided. As Fabius besieged Tarentum, a circumstance trifling to tell of helped him to the winning of a mighty thing. The Tarentines had a garrison of Bruttians, given them by Hannibal. The prefect of this garrison was desperately in love with a little woman whose brother was in the army of the consul Fabius. This man, made aware by a letter from his sister of her new intimacy with the wealthy stranger, so honored among his own people, and conceiving the hope that the lover could be driven whither one would through the sister, laid before the consul what he hoped. And as the scheme seemed by no means idle, he was ordered to cross over to Tarentum in the guise of a deserter; and, brought into acquaintance with the prefect through his sister, by first testing his temper secretly, then, his levity sufficiently proved, by a woman’s coaxing he won him over to betray the guard of the post to which he had been set. When both the manner of doing the thing and the time had been agreed, the soldier, sent out secretly from the city by night through the gaps between the outposts, reported to the consul what had been done and what had been agreed should be done.

Fabius, at the first watch, having given the signal to those who were in the citadel and those who held the guard of the harbor, himself went round the harbor and took up a hidden position on the side of the city that faces east. Then the trumpets sounded at once from the citadel, from the harbor, and from the ships that had been brought up from the open sea, and a shout was raised on every side, with vast uproar, deliberately, from the quarter where there was least danger. The consul meanwhile held his men in silence. And so Democrates, who had formerly been prefect of the fleet and happened to be set in charge of that place, when he saw all quiet about him, and the other quarters ringing with that uproar—so that now and then the shout of a captured city was raised—fearing that, while he lingered, the consul might make some assault and bring up his standards, led the garrison across to the citadel, from which the most terrible din was coming. Fabius, when both from the lapse of time and from the very silence—for, where a little before they had been clamoring, rousing and calling men to arms, from there no voice now came—perceived that the guards had been led off, ordered ladders to be brought to that part of the wall where the contriver of the betrayal had reported that the Bruttian cohort kept the guard. There first the wall was scaled, with the Bruttians helping and receiving them, and the crossing into the city was made; from there the nearest gate too was broken open, so that the standards might be brought in in close column. Then, a shout being raised, about the rising of daylight, with no armed man to meet them, they came into the forum, and drew upon themselves all who were fighting on every side at the citadel and the harbor. The battle at the entrance of the forum was joined with more dash than persistence. Not in spirit, not in arms, not in the art of war, not in vigor and bodily strength was the Tarentine a match for the Roman. And so, after merely hurling their javelins, almost before they came to hand-strokes, they turned their backs, and slipped away by the familiar streets of the city to their own homes and those of their friends. Two of their leaders, Nico and Democrates, fell fighting bravely; Philemenus, who had been the author of the betrayal to Hannibal, having ridden off from the battle at a gallop, his horse a little after was recognized wandering riderless through the city, but his body was nowhere found; the common belief was that he had pitched headlong from his horse into an open well. Carthalo, the prefect of the Punic garrison, as he came to the consul with a reminder of his father’s ties of hospitality, having laid down his arms, a soldier who met him cut down. Others slew others everywhere, without distinction, armed and unarmed, Carthaginians and Tarentines alike. The Bruttians too were killed in numbers here and there, whether by mistake, or out of old, ingrained hatred toward them, or to put out the report of betrayal, that Tarentum might rather be thought taken by force and arms. Then from slaughter they ran off to plunder the city. Thirty thousand slaves are said to have been taken, a vast quantity of wrought and coined silver, three thousand and eighty pounds of gold, statues and pictures—they almost rivaled the ornaments of Syracuse. But with a greater spirit than Marcellus, Fabius abstained from booty of that kind; and when his secretary asked what he wished done with the statues of huge size—they were gods, each fashioned in his own attitude, in the posture of fighting—he ordered the angry gods to be left to the Tarentines. Then the wall that divided the city from the citadel was pulled down and thrown apart. While this was being done, Hannibal—having accepted the surrender of those who were besieging Caulonia, and hearing of the assault on Tarentum, drove his column at speed day and night; and when, hastening to bring help, he heard that the city was taken, "The Romans too," he said, "have their Hannibal; by the same art with which we took it, we have lost Tarentum." Yet, that he might not seem to have wheeled his column about in the manner of a fugitive, he pitched his camp on the spot where he had halted, about five miles from the city. There, after lingering a few days, he withdrew to Metapontum. From there he sent two Metapontines, with letters from the leading men of that state, to Fabius at Tarentum, to receive a pledge from the consul that their earlier acts would go unpunished, if they betrayed Metapontum, with its Punic garrison, to him. Fabius, believing what they brought to be true, fixed the day on which he would come to Metapontum, and gave letters to the leading men, which were carried to Hannibal. Indeed, rejoicing at the success of the trick—if not even Fabius were to prove unconquered by guile—he set an ambush not far from Metapontum. To Fabius, taking the auspices before he set out from Tarentum, the birds, once and again, gave no favorable sign. A victim too being slain as he consulted the gods, the soothsayer warned him to beware of enemy fraud and of ambush. The Metapontines, when he did not come on the appointed day, were sent back to urge him on as he delayed, and, being suddenly seized, in fear of a harsher inquiry disclosed the ambush.

At the beginning of that summer in which these things were doing, Publius Scipio in Spain, when he had spent the whole winter in reconciling the spirits of the barbarians, partly by gifts, partly by the release of hostages and prisoners, was visited by Edesco, a man famous among the Spanish chieftains. His wife and children were in the hands of the Romans; but, besides that cause, even a kind of chance inclination of feeling, which had turned all Spain away from Carthaginian to Roman rule, drew him. The same was the cause for Indibilis and Mandonius, beyond doubt the chief men of all Spain, who, with all their countrymen’s force, left Hasdrubal and withdrew to the heights overhanging his camp, from which, by a continuous range of ridges, there was a safe retreat to the Romans. Hasdrubal, when he saw the enemy’s resources growing by such accessions, and his own diminished, and that, unless he stirred something by daring, things would slip away by the channel into which they had begun to run, resolved to fight as soon as he could. Scipio was even more eager for the battle, both from the hope that success was increasing, and because he preferred to fight with one general and one army before the enemies’ armies should be joined, rather than with all at once. Yet, even if he had to fight with several at once, he had increased his forces by a certain device. For, seeing there was no use for ships, since all the coast of Spain was clear of Carthaginian fleets, he beached the ships at Tarraco and added the marines to his land forces. And of arms there was abundance, both from those captured at New Carthage and from those he had made after its capture, so great a number of workmen being shut up there. With these forces Scipio, setting out from Tarraco at the beginning of spring—for now Laelius too had returned from Rome, without whom he wished nothing of greater moment set in motion—proceeded to lead against the enemy. As he went through all the pacified country, the allies escorting and receiving him as he crossed each people’s borders, Indibilis and Mandonius met him with their forces. Indibilis spoke for both, by no means stupidly or rashly, as a barbarian might, but rather with modesty and weight, and nearer to one excusing his crossing-over as necessary than to one boasting of it as a first occasion eagerly seized. For he knew, he said, that the name of deserter was abominable to old allies, and suspect to new; nor did he blame this habit of men, if only it was the twofold cause, and not the mere name, that bred the hatred. Then he recounted his own services to the Carthaginian commanders, and against them their greed and arrogance and every kind of wrong toward himself and his people. And so his body only, up to that time, had been with them; his mind had long been there where he believed right and divine law were honored. To the gods, too, men flee as suppliants who cannot endure the violence and wrongs of men; he begged this of Scipio, that his crossing-over should be to him neither a reproach nor a cause of honor. As he should find them by trial from this day forward, so let him reckon the worth of their service. The Roman answered that he would do precisely so, and would not hold for deserters men who had not counted an alliance binding where nothing of divine or human was held sacred. Then their wives and children were brought into their sight and given back to them as they wept for joy; and that day they were taken off to be his guests; the next day, their fidelity received in a treaty, they were dismissed to bring up their forces. Thereafter they encamped in the same camp, until, with these as guides, the enemy was reached.

The nearest of the Carthaginian armies, Hasdrubal’s, was near the city of Baecula. Before the camp they had cavalry pickets. Upon these the light-armed and the front-rank men and those who were the head of the column, arriving from the march, before they took ground for a camp, made an attack so contemptuous that it was easily plain what spirit was in either side. The cavalry were driven in headlong flight into the camp, and the Roman standards were carried almost up to the gates themselves. And that day, their spirits merely whetted for the contest, the Romans pitched camp. By night Hasdrubal withdrew his forces onto a hill, open at the top in a level space; a river behind, and before and around a kind of bank, sheer, girdled its whole edge. Below it lay another, lower plain, sunk in its slope; this too another rim, no easier of ascent, encircled. Into this lower plain the next day Hasdrubal, after he saw the enemy’s line standing before its camp, sent down the Numidian horsemen and the light-armed Balearics and Africans. Scipio, riding round the ranks and standards, kept pointing out the enemy: that, having despaired beforehand of fighting on level ground, and clutching at the hills, he stood in their sight by confidence in his position, not in valor or in arms; but New Carthage had had higher walls, which the Roman soldier had scaled; neither hills nor citadel, no, nor the sea itself, had withstood their arms. The heights they had seized would serve the enemy only for this, that, leaping down through precipices and crags, they might flee; that flight too he would close to them. And he ordered two cohorts, the one to hold the mouth of the valley through which the stream ran down, the other to occupy the road that led from the city, slanting across the hill, into the fields. He himself led the light troops who the day before had driven in the enemy’s pickets against the light-armed standing on the lowest brow. First they went through rough ground, hindered by nothing but the way; then, when they came within range, an immense shower of missiles of every kind was first poured upon them; they in turn hurled the stones which the place, strewn everywhere, supplies—almost all of them missiles—not the soldiers only but a crowd of camp-servants mingled with the armed. But although the ascent was difficult, and they were almost overwhelmed by weapons and stones, yet by their habit of mounting walls and by stubbornness of spirit the foremost climbed up. As soon as they gained any level ground where they could stand with firm foot, they drove from the position the light and skirmishing enemy—unstable, and safe at a distance when the fight is eluded by far-thrown missiles, but the same man unsteady at coming to hand-strokes—and with great slaughter drove him back upon the line standing on the higher hill. Then Scipio, having ordered the victors to climb against the center of the line, divided the rest of his forces with Laelius, and bade him go round the right side of the hill until he found a way of gentler ascent; he himself, by no great circuit, charged on the left into the enemy’s flank. From this the line was first thrown into disorder, while they tried to wheel their wings and turn their ranks toward the shout resounding on all sides. In this tumult Laelius too came up; and while they drew back, that they might not be wounded in the rear, the front line was loosened and room given to the center too to climb up, which through ground so unfavorable, while the ranks stood unbroken with the elephants posted before the standards, they could never have done. When slaughter was made on every side, Scipio, who had charged with the left wing upon the right, fought chiefly upon the bare flanks of the enemy; and now there was not even room for flight; for the Roman pickets on either hand had beset the roads, right and left, and the gate of the camp was closed by the flight of the general and the chief men, with the panic of the elephants added, which they feared no less than the enemy. So there were slain about eight thousand men.

Hasdrubal, having already, before he fought, snatched up his money and sent the elephants ahead, gathering as many as he could of the fugitives, made for the Pyrenees, along the river Tagus. Scipio, master of the enemy’s camp, when he had given over to the soldiers all the plunder save the free persons, found, in reviewing the prisoners, ten thousand foot and two thousand horse. Of these he sent all the Spaniards home without ransom, and ordered the quaestor to sell the Africans. Then the throng of Spaniards poured round him and with vast unanimity hailed him king. But Scipio, silence being made by the herald, said that the greatest name he had was that of commander, by which his own soldiers had hailed him; that the royal name, great elsewhere, was at Rome unbearable. Let them, if they counted that the most splendid thing in a man’s nature, silently judge his spirit royal; but from the use of the word let them abstain. Even the barbarians felt the greatness of the spirit which, from so lofty a height, spurned a name at whose marvel other mortals stand amazed. Then gifts were distributed to the petty kings and chiefs of the Spaniards, and out of the great store of captured horses he bade Indibilis choose three hundred such as he wished. While the quaestor, by the commander’s order, was selling the Africans, and had heard that among them was a grown boy of remarkable beauty, of royal stock, he sent him to Scipio. When Scipio asked him who and whence he was, and why at that age he had been in the camp, he said he was a Numidian, whom his people called Massiva; that, left fatherless, he had been brought up at the house of his maternal grandfather Gala, king of the Numidians; that he had crossed into Spain with his uncle Masinissa, who had lately come with cavalry to the aid of the Carthaginians; that, forbidden by Masinissa on account of his age, he had never before entered a battle, but that on the day on which it was fought with the Romans, unknown to his uncle, having secretly taken arms and a horse, he had gone out into the line; there, his horse falling, he had been thrown headlong and taken by the Romans. When Scipio had ordered the Numidian to be kept, he finished what had to be done before his tribunal; then, when he had withdrawn into the headquarters, he summoned him and asked whether he wished to return to Masinissa. When, with tears bursting from his eyes for joy, he said that he truly did wish it, Scipio gave the boy a gold ring, a tunic with a broad stripe and a Spanish cloak with a gold brooch, and a horse with trappings, and, ordering horsemen to escort him as far as he wished, dismissed him.

Then a council of war was held. And though some advised that he follow Hasdrubal at once, Scipio, thinking it a doubtful course—lest Mago and the other Hasdrubal join their forces with his—sent only a garrison to hold the Pyrenees, and himself spent the rest of the summer in receiving the peoples of Spain into allegiance. A few days after the battle was fought at Baecula, when Scipio, on his return, had now passed out of the Castulo pass toward Tarraco, Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, and Mago, the commanders, came from Farther Spain to Hasdrubal—a help too late after the failure, but not unseasonable for carrying out the rest of the war by counsel. There, as they compared what spirit there was among the Spaniards in the region of each one’s province, Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, alone judged that the farthest coast of Spain, which faces the Ocean and Gades, was still ignorant of the Romans and therefore faithful enough to the Carthaginians; between the other Hasdrubal and Mago it was agreed that the favors of Scipio had taken hold of all men’s hearts, in public and in private, and that there would be no end of desertions until all the Spanish soldiers were either removed to the farthest parts of Spain or led over into Gaul. And so, even if the senate of the Carthaginians had not so voted, Hasdrubal must nevertheless go into Italy, where lay the head of the war and the sum of things, and at the same time draw off all the Spaniards far from the name of Scipio out of Spain. His army, thinned both by desertions and by an adverse battle, was to be filled up with Spanish soldiers, and Mago, his army being handed over to Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, was himself to cross over with a large sum of money to the Balearic islands to hire auxiliaries for pay; Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, with his army, was to withdraw deep into Lusitania and not join battle with the Roman; of all the cavalry three thousand horse, what was strongest, were to be made up for Masinissa, who, ranging through Hither Spain, was to bring aid to the allies and to lay waste the towns and lands of the enemy. These things decreed, the generals parted to carry out what they had resolved. This was done in Spain that year.

At Rome the fame of Scipio grew from day to day; to Fabius the capture of Tarentum, though by cunning more than by valor, was nevertheless a glory; Fulvius’s fame was waning; Marcellus was even in adverse repute, both because he had fought ill at first, and because, while Hannibal ranged over Italy, he had in midsummer drawn his soldiers off into quarters at Venusia. His enemy was Gaius Publicius Bibulus, a tribune of the plebs. He, ever since the first battle, which had gone ill, had by continual harangues made Claudius infamous and hateful to the plebs, and was now moving for the abrogation of his command, when nevertheless the kinsmen of Claudius prevailed that Marcellus, leaving a lieutenant at Venusia, should come to Rome to clear himself of what his enemies laid against him, and that nothing about abrogating his command should be done in his absence. It chanced that at about the same time both Marcellus came to deprecate the disgrace, and the consul Quintus Fulvius came for the sake of the elections. The matter of Marcellus’s command was debated in the Circus Flaminius, with a vast concourse of the plebs and of all orders; and the tribune of the plebs accused not Marcellus only but the whole nobility: that by their fraud and delay it came about that Hannibal now held Italy as his province for the tenth year, and had lived there longer than at Carthage. The Roman people had the fruit of the command prolonged to Marcellus: his army, twice cut to pieces, was passing the summer under quarters at Venusia. This speech of the tribune Marcellus so overwhelmed by the recital of his own exploits that not only was the bill for abrogating his command rejected, but on the next day all the centuries, with vast unanimity, made him consul. There was added as colleague Titus Quinctius Crispinus, who was then praetor. The next day praetors were chosen: Publius Licinius Crassus Dives the pontifex maximus, Publius Licinius Varus, Sextus Julius Caesar, Quintus Claudius.

On the very days of the elections the state was anxious about the defection of Etruria. Gaius Calpurnius, who held that province as propraetor, had written that the beginning of the matter came from the people of Arretium. And so Marcellus, the consul-designate, was sent there at once to look into the affair and, if it seemed serious, to summon the army and transfer the war from Apulia into Etruria. By that fear the Etruscans were checked and kept quiet. To the envoys of the Tarentines, seeking peace with their liberty and their own laws, it was answered by the senate that they should return when the consul Fabius had come to Rome. Both the Roman and the plebeian games were that year repeated, each for one day. The curule aediles were Lucius Cornelius Caudinus and Servius Sulpicius Galba, the plebeian Gaius Servilius and Quintus Caecilius Metellus. Men denied that Servilius had lawfully been tribune of the plebs or was lawfully aedile, because it was sufficiently established that his father—who for nine years had been thought, as a member of the agrarian board of three, to have been killed by the Boii near Mutina—was alive and in the power of the enemy.

In the eleventh year of the Punic War, Marcus Marcellus for the fifth time—reckoning the consulship which, chosen with a flaw in the auspices, he did not hold—and Titus Quinctius Crispinus entered upon the consulship. To both consuls Italy was decreed as their province, and the two armies of the previous year’s consuls—the third was then at Venusia, which Marcellus had commanded—so that of the three they might choose the two they wished, and the third be handed over to him whose province should be Tarentum and the Sallentini. The other provinces were thus divided: to the praetors, to Publius Licinius Varus the city jurisdiction, to Publius Licinius Crassus the pontifex maximus the foreign jurisdiction and wherever the senate should determine, to Sextus Julius Caesar Sicily, to Quintus Claudius Tarentum. The command was prolonged for a year to Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, that he should hold the province of Capua, which had been the praetor Titus Quinctius’s, with one legion. It was prolonged too for Gaius Hostilius Tubulus, that as propraetor he should succeed Gaius Calpurnius in Etruria with two legions. It was prolonged too for Lucius Veturius Philo, that as propraetor he should hold the same province of Gaul with the same two legions with which he had held it as praetor. What was decreed in the case of Lucius Veturius, the same the senate decreed in the case of Gaius Aurunculeius, and a bill was brought before the people for prolonging the command of the man who as praetor had held the province of Sardinia with two legions. There were added to him, for the defense of the province, fifty warships which Publius Scipio had sent from Spain. To Publius Scipio too and to Marcus Silanus their own Spain and their own armies were decreed for the year. Scipio was ordered to send across into Sardinia fifty ships, out of the eighty which he had either brought with him from Italy or captured at New Carthage, because there was a report that there was a great naval armament that year at Carthage, with which they would fill the whole coast of Italy and Sicily and Sardinia with two hundred ships. And in Sicily the matter was thus arranged: to Sextus Caesar was given the army of Cannae; Marcus Valerius Laevinus—for to him too the command was prolonged—was to hold the fleet at Sicily, of seventy ships; he should add to it the thirty ships that had been at Tarentum the year before; with that fleet of a hundred ships he might, if he saw fit, cross to plunder Africa. And to Publius Sulpicius, that he should hold the province of Macedonia and Greece with the same fleet, the command was prolonged for a year. Concerning the two legions that had been at the city of Rome nothing was changed. The consuls were permitted to enroll a supplement where there was need. With twenty-one legions the Roman empire was defended that year. And to the city praetor Publius Licinius Varus the task was given of refitting thirty old warships that were at Ostia and of manning twenty new ships with marines, so that with a fleet of fifty ships he might guard the seacoast near the city of Rome. Gaius Calpurnius was forbidden to move his army from Arretium except when a successor had come; the same was enjoined on Tubulus, that he should especially take care, from there, that no fresh designs should arise. The praetors set out for their provinces; the consuls were held back by religious scruple, because, several prodigies being reported, they did not easily obtain favorable omens. From Campania too things had been reported: that at Capua two temples, of Fortune and of Mars, and several tombs had been struck from heaven; at Cumae—so does perverse superstition thrust the gods into the very smallest things—that mice had gnawed the gold in the temple of Jupiter; at Casinum that a huge swarm of bees had settled in the forum; at Ostia that the wall and a gate had been struck from heaven; at Caere that a vulture had flown into the temple of Jupiter; at Volsinii that a lake had run with blood. On account of these prodigies there was a supplication for one day. For several days full-grown victims were slain without favorable omen, and for a long time the peace of the gods was not obtained. Upon the heads of the consuls, the commonwealth being left unharmed, the deadly issue of the prodigies turned. The Apollinarian games had first been held in the consulship of Quintus Fulvius and Appius Claudius by Publius Cornelius Sulla, the city praetor; thereafter all the city praetors in succession had held them; but they vowed them for a single year and held them on no fixed day. That year a heavy pestilence fell upon the city and the country, which, however, ran rather into long illnesses than into deadly ones. On account of that pestilence both supplication was made through all the crossroads of the whole city, and the city praetor Publius Licinius Varus was ordered to bring a law before the people that these games should be vowed in perpetuity on a fixed day. He himself was the first to vow them so, and held them on the third day before the Nones of Quintilis. That day was thereafter kept as a solemn one.

Concerning the people of Arretium both the report grew graver day by day and the fathers’ anxiety increased. And so it was written to Gaius Hostilius not to put off taking hostages from the Arretines; and Gaius Terentius Varro was sent with authority to whom he should hand them over to be led to Rome. As soon as he came, Hostilius ordered one legion, which had its camp before the city, to bring its standards into the city, and posted garrisons in suitable places; then, the senators being summoned into the forum, he demanded hostages. When the senate asked for two days to consider, he ordered them either to give them at once, or that he would the next day take all the children of the senators. Then the military tribunes and the prefects of the allies and the centurions were ordered to watch the gates, that no one should go out of the city by night. This was done too slackly and carelessly: seven leading men of the senate, before guards were set at the gates, escaped before night with their children. At first light the next day, when the senate began to be summoned into the forum, they were missed, and their goods were sold. From the rest of the senators a hundred and twenty hostages, their own children, were received and handed over to Gaius Terentius to be led to Rome. He made everything more suspect in the senate than it had been before. And so, as though an Etruscan rising were impending, Gaius Terentius himself was ordered to lead one legion, the other of the city legions, to Arretium and to keep it in garrison of the city; Gaius Hostilius, with the rest of the army, it was resolved, should range through the whole province and take care that no occasion should be given to those eager for revolution. When Gaius Terentius came to Arretium with the legion, and had demanded of the magistrates the keys of the gates, and they said they were not to be found, thinking them removed by fraud rather than lost through negligence, he himself put other keys to all the gates, and took care with diligence that all should be in his own power; and he warned Hostilius the more earnestly to set no hope on the Etruscans’ moving anything, if he had taken care beforehand that they could move nothing.

Then about the Tarentines the matter was handled with great contention in the senate, in Fabius’s presence, he himself defending those whom he had captured by arms, while others were hostile, and most put them on a level with the Campanians in guilt and in punishment. A decree of the senate was made, on the motion of Manius Acilius, that the town should be kept by a garrison, and all the Tarentines confined within the walls, and the whole question referred again later, when the state of Italy should be calmer. And about Marcus Livius, the prefect of the citadel of Tarentum, the matter was handled with no less contention, some by a decree of the senate censuring the prefect, because by his slackness Tarentum had been betrayed to the enemy, others decreeing rewards, because for five years he had guarded the citadel, and chiefly by his single effort Tarentum had been recovered; the middle party saying that the cognizance of him belonged to the censors, not to the senate; and of this opinion was Fabius too. He added, however, that he confessed Tarentum had been recovered by Livius’s effort—as his friends commonly boasted in the senate—for it could not have been recovered, had it not been lost. One of the consuls, Titus Quinctius Crispinus, set out into Lucania, to the army that Quintus Fulvius Flaccus had had, with a supplement. Marcellus was held back by one religious scruple after another cast in his way; among them this, that, having in the Gallic war vowed at Clastidium a temple to Honor and Valor, its dedication was hindered by the pontiffs, who denied that one shrine could rightly be dedicated to more than one god, because, if it were struck from heaven or some prodigy happened in it, the expiation would be difficult, since it could not be known to which god the sacred rite should be made; for it was not lawful that one victim be offered to two gods, unless to certain ones. So a temple of Valor was added with hastened work; yet not even by Marcellus himself were these temples dedicated. Then at last he set out, with a supplement, to the army that he had left the year before at Venusia. Crispinus attempted to assault Locri in Bruttium, because he thought Tarentum had brought Fabius great fame, and had sent for every kind of artillery and engines from Sicily; and ships were summoned from the same place to attack the part of the city that sloped toward the sea. That assault was given up, because Hannibal had brought up his forces to Lacinium, and there was a report that his colleague had now led his army out from Venusia, with whom he wished to join. And so the return was made from Bruttium into Apulia, and between Venusia and Bantia, at an interval of less than three miles, the consuls encamped in two camps. Into the same region Hannibal too returned, the war being turned away from Locri. There both the consuls, fierce in temper, went out into line almost daily, in no doubtful hope that, if the enemy joined battle with the two consular armies united, the war could be finished.

Hannibal, because in the previous year he had twice engaged with Marcellus, conquering and conquered, so that, if he must fight with the same man, he had neither hope nor fear from any empty source, believed that against two consuls he would by no means be a match. And so, turned wholly to his own arts, he sought a place for ambush. Yet light skirmishes, with varying outcome, went on between the two camps; and, since the consuls believed the summer could be drawn out by these, and thought none the less that Locri could be assaulted, they wrote to Lucius Cincius to cross over from Sicily to Locri with the fleet; and that the walls might be attacked from the land side too, they ordered part of the army that was in garrison at Tarentum to be led there. But when these designs had been learned by Hannibal through certain men of Thurii, he sent men to beset the road from Tarentum. There, beneath the hill of Petelia, three thousand horse and two thousand foot were placed in hiding; and when the Romans, going on without reconnoitering, had fallen in with them, about two thousand armed men were killed, about one thousand five hundred taken alive, the rest, scattered in flight through fields and woodland, returned to Tarentum. There was a wooded hill between the Punic and the Roman camps, occupied at first by neither, because the Romans did not know what the side of it was that sloped toward the enemy’s camp, and Hannibal had thought it fitter for an ambush than for a camp. And so by night he had hidden in the middle of the wood several troops of Numidians sent for that purpose, of whom by day not one stirred from his post, lest either their arms or themselves should be seen from afar. In the Roman camp it was commonly murmured that the hill must be seized and secured with a fort, lest, if it were seized by Hannibal, they should have the enemy, as it were, on their necks. This moved Marcellus, and he said to his colleague, "Why do we not ourselves go with a few horsemen to reconnoiter? The matter set before our eyes will give surer counsel." Crispinus assenting, they set out with two hundred and twenty horsemen, of whom forty were from Fregellae, the rest Etruscans; there followed the military tribunes Marcus Marcellus, the consul’s son, and Aulus Manlius, and at the same time two prefects of the allies, Lucius Arrenius and Manius Aulius. Some have recorded that on that day the consul Marcellus had sacrificed, and that, the first victim slain, the liver was found without a head; in the second all appeared that is wont, and the head even seemed augmented; nor indeed did it please the soothsayer that, after the maimed and ugly entrails, the too favorable ones had appeared. But so great a desire of fighting with Hannibal held the consul Marcellus that he never said the camps were close enough joined. Then too, as he went out of the rampart, he gave the signal that the soldiers should be ready at their place, so that, if the hill they were going to reconnoiter pleased him, they should pack up and follow. There was a little plain before the camp; from it a road, open and exposed on every side, led to the hill. To the Numidians a scout, posted by no means in hope of so great a thing, but to see whether they could cut off any stragglers gone too far from the camp for fodder or wood, gave the signal that each should rise at once from his own hiding-place. Those who had to rise full in their faces, from the very ridge, did not appear before those who were to cut off the road from the rear had gone round. Then all rose on every side, and with a shout raised made their charge. Since the consuls were in such a valley that they could neither escape onto the ridge held by the enemy, nor, surrounded, had a retreat in the rear, the contest might yet have been drawn out longer, had not a flight begun by the Etruscans cast panic into the rest. Yet, deserted by the Etruscans, the Fregellans did not give up the fight, so long as the consuls, unhurt, sustained the affair by exhorting and in part fighting themselves; but after they saw both consuls wounded, Marcellus even run through with a lance and falling dying from his horse, then they too—and very few survived—with the consul Crispinus, struck by two javelins, and the young Marcellus, himself wounded, fled. Aulus Manlius, the military tribune, was killed, and of the two prefects of the allies Manius Aulius was slain, Lucius Arrenius taken; and five lictors of the consuls came alive into the power of the enemy, the rest were either killed or escaped with the consul. Of the cavalry forty-three fell either in the battle or in the flight, eighteen were taken alive. There had been a tumult in the camp, that they should go to the consuls’ aid, when they saw the consul, and the son of the other consul, wounded, and the scanty remnants of the ill-starred expedition coming to the camp. The death of Marcellus, miserable in other respects, was so chiefly because, neither in keeping with his age—for he was now more than sixty years old—nor with the foresight of a veteran commander, he had so improvidently flung himself and his colleague, and almost the whole commonwealth, into headlong ruin.

I should make many circuits about one matter, if I wished to follow out all that the authorities vary concerning the death of Marcellus. To omit others, Coelius gives a threefold account of the thing in order: one handed down by report, a second written in the funeral eulogy by his son, who took part in the action, a third which he himself offers as inquired into and ascertained by himself. But thus much the report varies, that yet most relate that he went out of the camp to reconnoiter, all that he was surrounded by an ambush. Hannibal, thinking that great terror had been thrown upon the enemy by the death of one consul and the wounding of the other, that he might fail no opportunity, at once shifted his camp to the hill on which the fight had been. There he found and buried the body of Marcellus. Crispinus, terrified both by his colleague’s death and by his own wound, set out in the silence of the following night, and on the nearest mountains he could find pitched his camp in a place high and safe on every side. There the two commanders matched their wits, the one to work, the other to guard against, a fraud. Hannibal had got possession of Marcellus’s ring along with his body. Crispinus, fearing lest by the misuse of that signet some trick should be woven by the Carthaginian, had sent messengers round the neighboring states that his colleague was slain and the enemy was in possession of his ring: let them believe no letters forged in the name of Marcellus. A little before this message of the consul had come to Salapia, a letter was brought from Hannibal, forged in the name of Marcellus, saying that he would come to Salapia on the night that should follow that day: let the soldiers who were in garrison be ready, if there should be need of their service. The men of Salapia perceived the fraud, and, judging that, out of anger not only at their revolt but also at their slaughtered cavalry, an occasion for punishment was being sought, sent the messenger back—he was a Roman deserter—that the soldiers might do as they wished without a witness, and posted the townsmen on the walls and at the suitable places of the city in pickets; the watches and guards for that night they set with more than usual care; around the gate by which they thought the enemy would come they posted what was strongest in the garrison. Hannibal approached the city at about the fourth watch. At the head of the column were Roman deserters, carrying Roman arms. These, when they came to the gate, all speaking Latin, roused the watch and bade them open the gate: the consul was at hand. The watch, as though roused at their voice, began to bustle, to hasten, to heave at the gate. A portcullis had closed it; this they partly raised with levers, partly drew up with ropes, to such a height that men could pass under upright. Scarcely was the way open enough when the deserters rushed eagerly through the gate; and when about six hundred had entered, the rope by which the portcullis hung being let go, it fell with a great crash. The Salapians fell upon the deserters, some carrying their arms carelessly on their shoulders after the march, as among friends; others from the towers of the gate and the walls drove off the enemy with stones, stakes, and javelins. So from there Hannibal, caught by his own fraud, went off, and set out to raise the siege of Locri, which Lucius Cincius was assaulting with the utmost force, with works and every kind of artillery brought over from Sicily. To Mago, now nearly past trusting that he could hold and defend the city, the first hope shone at the news of Marcellus’s death. There followed a messenger that Hannibal, the Numidian cavalry sent ahead, was himself following, with all the speed he could, with a column of foot. And so, as soon as he perceived from the signal raised from the watchtowers that the Numidians were approaching, he himself too, the gate suddenly thrown open, burst out fiercely upon the enemy. And at first, more because he had done it unawares than because he was equal in strength, the contest was doubtful; then, when the Numidians came up, so great a panic was thrown into the Romans that they fled in all directions to the sea and the ships, leaving the works and the engines with which they shook the walls. So by Hannibal’s coming the siege of Locri was raised.

Crispinus, after he perceived that Hannibal had set out into Bruttium, ordered Marcus Marcellus, a military tribune, to lead off to Venusia the army that his colleague had commanded; he himself, setting out for Capua with his own legions, scarcely enduring the jolting of the litter for the heaviness of his wounds, wrote to Rome about his colleague’s death and in how great peril he himself was: that he could not come to Rome for the elections, both because he seemed unlikely to bear the toil of the journey, and because he was anxious about Tarentum, lest Hannibal turn his column thither from Bruttium; that there was need for envoys to be sent to him, prudent men, with whom he might speak of what he wished concerning the commonwealth. This letter, when read, made both great grief at the death of the one consul and fear about the other. And so they both sent Quintus Fabius the son to the army at Venusia, and to the consul they sent three envoys, Sextus Julius Caesar, Lucius Licinius Pollio, and Lucius Cincius Alimentus, who had returned from Sicily a few days before. These were bidden to announce to the consul that, if he himself could not come to Rome for the elections, he should name a dictator in Roman territory for the elections’ sake; if the consul had set out for Tarentum, that it was their pleasure that the praetor Quintus Claudius should withdraw the legions thence into that region in which he could protect the most cities of the allies.

That same summer Marcus Valerius crossed over with a fleet of a hundred ships from Sicily into Africa, and, a landing being made at the city of Clupea, laid waste the country far and wide, with scarcely an armed man to meet him. From there the plunderers were hastily taken back to the ships, because suddenly a report came that a Punic fleet was approaching. There were eighty-three ships. With these, not far from Clupea, the Roman fought successfully. Eighteen ships being captured, the rest put to flight, he returned to Lilybaeum with great plunder by land and sea. That same summer Philip too brought aid to the Achaeans, who implored it, whom both Machanidas, tyrant of the Lacedaemonians, was harrying with war on their border, and the Aetolians, having crossed an army by ship over the strait that flows between Naupactus and Patrae—the inhabitants call it Rhion—had laid waste. There was a report too that Attalus, king of Asia, because the Aetolians had at their last council conferred on him the supreme magistracy of their nation, was about to cross into Europe. For these reasons, as Philip came down into Greece, the Aetolians met him at the city of Lamia, under the lead of Pyrrhias, who had been chosen praetor for that year along with the absent Attalus. They had with them both auxiliaries from Attalus and about a thousand men sent from the Roman fleet by Publius Sulpicius. Against this leader and these forces Philip fought twice with success; he slew about a thousand of the enemy in each battle. Then, when the Aetolians, driven by fear, kept themselves within the walls of the city of Lamia, Philip led his army back to Phalara. That place is on the Maliac gulf, once thickly inhabited, on account of its excellent harbor and the safe anchorages around it and other advantages of sea and land. Thither came envoys from Ptolemy, king of Egypt, and from the Rhodians and the Athenians and the Chians, to compose the war between Philip and the Aetolians. There was added too, as peacemaker from among the neighbors, Amynander, king of the Athamanes. But the care of all of them was not so much for the Aetolians—a nation fiercer than suits the temper of the Greeks—as that Philip and his kingdom should not mix themselves in the affairs of Greece, a thing that would weigh heavy on its liberty. The deliberation about peace was put off to the council of the Achaeans, and for that council both a place and a fixed day were appointed; meanwhile a truce of thirty days was obtained. Setting out from there, the king came through Thessaly and Boeotia to Chalcis in Euboea, that he might keep Attalus—who he had heard would make for Euboea with his fleet—off from the harbors and the landing of the shores. Then, leaving a garrison there against Attalus, in case he should meanwhile cross, he himself set out with a few horsemen and light-armed and came to Argos. There, the management of the Heraea and the Nemea being conferred on him by the votes of the people—because the kings of the Macedonians trace their origin from that state—the Heraea being finished, he set out at once from the games themselves to Aegium, to the council of the allies proclaimed long before. There the ending of the Aetolian war was debated, that there might be no cause for either the Romans or Attalus to enter Greece. But all this the Aetolians, the time of the truce scarcely run out, threw into confusion, after they heard both that Attalus had come to Aegina and that the Roman fleet lay at Naupactus. For, summoned into the council of the Achaeans, in which were also those embassies that had treated of peace at Phalara, they first complained of certain small things done against the terms of the agreement during the time of the truce; at last they declared that the war could not be ended unless the Achaeans gave back Pylos to the Messenians, Atintania were restored to the Romans, and the Ardiaei to Scerdilaedus and Pleuratus. Indeed Philip, thinking it unworthy that the conquered should of their own accord bring terms to him, the conqueror, said that not even before had he listened to talk of peace, or struck a truce, with any hope that the Aetolians would keep quiet, but that he might have all the allies as witnesses that he had sought the cause of peace, they of war. So, peace unmade, he dismissed the council, leaving four thousand armed men for the protection of the Achaeans and receiving five long ships, which, if he had added them to the Carthaginian fleet lately sent to him, and to ships coming from Bithynia from king Prusias, he had resolved to use to challenge to a naval battle the Romans, long now masters of the sea in that region. He himself returned from that council to Argos; for now the time of the Nemea was drawing near, which he wished to be celebrated by his presence.

While the king was busy with the preparation of the games and, through the festal days, was relaxing his mind more freely than suited a time of war, Publius Sulpicius, setting out from Naupactus, brought his fleet to land between Sicyon and Corinth, and laid waste, far and wide, a country of the most famous fertility. The report of this called Philip away from the games; and, setting out in haste with his cavalry, the foot being ordered to follow, he fell upon the Romans, scattered here and there through the fields and laden with plunder, since they feared nothing of the kind, and drove them to their ships. The Roman fleet, by no means glad of its booty, returned to Naupactus. The fame of a victory won—such as it was, yet over the Romans—had increased for Philip the celebrity of the rest of the games; and the festal days were kept with great rejoicing, all the more because, in a popular fashion, laying aside the badge of his head and his purple and the rest of his royal garb, he had made himself in appearance equal to the others—than which nothing is more pleasing to free states; and he would have given, by that act, an undoubted hope of liberty, had he not made all things foul and shameful by intolerable lust. For he roamed, with one companion or two, through the houses of married folk day and night, and, by lowering himself to a private man’s level, the less conspicuous he was, the more unrestrained he was, and the liberty which he had shown to others as a vain thing he had turned wholly into license for himself. For he did not buy or coax everything, but added violence too to his outrages, and it was perilous both for husbands and for parents to have set, by an inconvenient strictness, a check upon the royal lust. From one even of the chief men of the Achaeans, Aratus, his wife, by name Polycratia, was taken away and, in hope of a royal marriage, carried off into Macedonia.

Amid these outrages, the solemnity of the Nemea finished and a few days added, he set out for Dymae, to drive out a garrison of the Aetolians which had been summoned by the Eleans and received into the city. Cycliadas—in whose hands was the chief command—and the Achaeans met the king at Dymae, both fired with hatred of the Eleans, because they dissented from the rest of the Achaeans, and hostile to the Aetolians, whom they believed to have stirred up the Roman war too against themselves. Setting out from Dymae with their army joined, they crossed the river Larisus, which divides the Elean territory from the Dymaean. The first day, on which they entered the enemy’s borders, they spent in plundering; the next day, their line drawn up, they approached the city, the cavalry being sent ahead to provoke, by riding up to the gates, the Aetolians, a breed ready for sallies. They did not know that Sulpicius, with fifteen ships, had crossed from Naupactus to Cyllene, and, four thousand armed men being landed, had entered Elis in the silence of the night, so that the column could not be seen. And so the unforeseen thing threw in vast terror, when among the Aetolians and Eleans they recognized Roman standards and arms. At first the king had wished to withdraw his men; then, a contest having already begun between the Aetolians and the Tralles—that is a tribe of the Illyrians—when he saw his men hard pressed, the king himself too charged with his cavalry into the Roman cohort. There his horse, run through with a javelin, having thrown the king headlong over its head, a fierce fight was kindled on both sides, both with a charge being made by the Romans upon the king, and with the king’s men protecting him. The fighting of the king himself, too, was notable, since, forced to fight on foot among horsemen, he had entered the battle. Then, when the contest was now unequal, and many were falling about him and being wounded, he was snatched up by his men and, set upon another horse, fled. That day he pitched his camp five miles from the city of the Eleans. The next day he led out all his forces to a neighboring fort of the Eleans—they call it Pyrgus—to which he had heard a multitude of country-folk had been driven, with their cattle, for fear of plunderings. That undisciplined and unarmed multitude he took at once, on his very arrival, by the first terror; and by this booty he had made up for the disgrace received at Elis. As he was dividing the plunder and the captives—and they were four thousand men, and of cattle of every kind about twenty thousand—a messenger came from Macedonia that a certain Aëropus, the prefect of the citadel and garrison being corrupted, had taken Lychnidus, and held also some villages of the Dassaretii and was even stirring up the Dardani. And so, giving up the Achaean and Aetolian war, yet leaving two thousand five hundred armed men of every kind, with Menippus and Polyphantas as leaders, for the protection of the allies, he set out from Dymae, through Achaea and Boeotia and Euboea, and on the tenth day’s march reached Demetrias in Thessaly. There other messengers met him, bringing a greater alarm: that the Dardani, pouring into Macedonia, already held Orestis and had come down into the Argestaean plain, and that a report was current among the barbarians that Philip was slain. On that expedition in which he fought with the plunderers of the country near Sicyon, having been carried by the rush of his horse against a tree, he had broken off one of the two horns of his helmet against a projecting branch; this, found by a certain Aetolian and carried into Aetolia to Scerdilaedus, to whom the badge of the helmet was known, had spread abroad the report of the king’s death. After the king’s departure from Achaea, Sulpicius, having set out by fleet for Aegina, joined himself to Attalus. The Achaeans fought a successful battle with the Aetolians and Eleans not far from Messene. King Attalus and Publius Sulpicius wintered at Aegina.

At the end of this year the consul Titus Quinctius, having named Titus Manlius Torquatus dictator for the sake of holding the elections and the games, died of his wound; some relate that he died at Tarentum, some in Campania. So, what had happened in no earlier war, two consuls, killed without a memorable battle, had left the commonwealth as it were orphaned. The dictator Manlius named Gaius Servilius—he was then curule aedile—master of the horse. The senate, on the first day it met, ordered the dictator to hold the Great Games, which Marcus Aemilius, the city praetor, had held in the consulship of Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius, and had vowed for a five-year period. Then the dictator both held the games and vowed them for the next lustrum. But since two consular armies were so near the enemy without their commanders, all else being set aside, one care above all seized fathers and people: to create consuls as soon as possible, and to create above all those whose valor was safe enough against Punic fraud. For throughout that whole war the damaging fault of the commanders had been their over-hasty and fiery spirits; and in that very year the consuls, through too great a desire of joining hand with the enemy, had slipped into an unforeseen trap; yet the immortal gods, in pity for the Roman name, had spared the guiltless armies and had visited the rashness of the consuls upon their own heads.

When the fathers looked about to see whom they should make consuls, far before the rest stood out Gaius Claudius Nero. A colleague was being sought for him; and they reckoned him indeed an excellent man, but readier and keener than the times of war, or the enemy Hannibal, demanded; his keen temper, they judged, must be tempered by joining to him a moderate and prudent colleague. There was Marcus Livius, many years before condemned by the people’s judgment on leaving his consulship, which disgrace he had borne so ill that he had moved to the country and for many years kept away from the city and from all gathering of men. About the eighth year after his condemnation, Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Marcus Valerius Laevinus, as consuls, had brought him back to the city; but he was in shabby dress, with hair and beard let grow long, bearing in his face and habit a marked memory of the disgrace received. The censors Lucius Veturius and Publius Licinius compelled him to be shorn, to lay aside his squalor, and to come into the senate and perform the other public duties. But even then he either assented with a word or went over on foot to another’s vote, until the cause of a kinsman, Marcus Livius Macatus, when his reputation was at stake, forced him, standing, to deliver his opinion in the senate. Then, heard after so long an interval, he turned men’s faces upon himself, and gave occasion for talk that the people had done him an unworthy wrong, and that it had been a great loss that in so heavy a war the commonwealth had not used the service and counsel of such a man: to Gaius Nero neither Quintus Fabius nor Marcus Valerius Laevinus could be given as colleague, because two patricians could not be created; the same cause stood in the way of Titus Manlius, besides that he had refused the consulship offered him and would refuse it again; an excellent pair of consuls there would be, if they joined Marcus Livius as colleague to Gaius Claudius. Nor did the people spurn the mention of the matter, arisen from the fathers. The one man in the state who refused it was he on whom the honor was being conferred, accusing the fickleness of the state: they had not pitied him in his squalor as a defendant, yet were offering him, against his will, the white toga; on the same man honors and punishments were heaped. If they thought him a good man, why had they condemned him as a bad and guilty one? if they had found him guilty, why, his first consulship having been ill entrusted to him, did they entrust a second? Reproaching and complaining with these and like words, the fathers chid him, and, recalling that Marcus Furius, summoned back from exile, had restored his country, driven from its seat—even as a parent’s harshness, so a country’s must be softened by enduring and bearing—all striving together, they made Marcus Livius consul with Gaius Claudius. On the third day after that day the elections of praetors were held. Praetors created were Lucius Porcius Licinus, Gaius Mamilius, and Gaius and Aulus Hostilius Cato. The elections finished and the games held, the dictator and the master of the horse went out of office. Gaius Terentius Varro was sent into Etruria as propraetor, so that from that province Gaius Hostilius might go to Tarentum, to the army that the consul Titus Quinctius had had; and that Lucius Manlius should go across the sea as envoy and see how things were being managed there; and at the same time, because the Olympic games were to be held that summer, which were celebrated with the greatest gathering of Greece, that, if he could do it safely past the enemy, he should attend that assembly, so that any Sicilians who were there as refugees of the war, or Tarentine citizens banished by Hannibal, might return to their homes and know that the Roman people was restoring to them all that they had possessed before the war.

Because a most perilous year seemed to be impending, and there were no consuls in office, all turned to the consuls-designate, wishing that they should as soon as possible draw their provinces by lot and learn beforehand which province, and which enemy, each of them would have. The matter of reconciling their goodwill, too, was handled in the senate, a beginning being made by Quintus Fabius Maximus. But there were notable enmities between them, and Livius’s calamity had made them sharper and more bitter to him, because he believed he had been scorned in that misfortune. And so he was the more implacable, and said there was no need of reconciliation: they would conduct everything more keenly and more attentively, each fearing lest the other, his enemy, gain the power of growing great at his expense. Yet the authority of the senate prevailed, that, their quarrels laid aside, they should administer the commonwealth with a common spirit and counsel. The provinces decreed to them were not intermingled by regions, as in former years, but apart, at the farthest borders of Italy: to the one, against Hannibal, Bruttium and Lucania; to the other, Gaul against Hasdrubal, who was reported now to be drawing near the Alps. The one who had drawn Gaul should choose which he preferred of the two armies that were in Gaul and in Etruria, with the city army added; to whomsoever Bruttium had fallen as his province, new city legions being enrolled, should take which he preferred of the previous year’s consular armies; the army left by the consul, Quintus Fulvius the proconsul should receive, and for him the command should be for a year. And to Gaius Hostilius, for whom they had changed his province from Etruria to Tarentum, they changed Tarentum for Capua; one legion was given him, which Fulvius the year before had commanded.

Concerning Hasdrubal’s coming into Italy the anxiety grew day by day. First the envoys of the Massilians had reported that he had crossed into Gaul, and that the spirits of the Gauls were roused at his coming, because he was said to have brought a great weight of gold to hire auxiliaries for pay. Then envoys sent from Rome with them, Sextus Antistius and Marcus Raecius, to look into the matter, had reported that they had sent men with Massilian guides who, through the Massilians’ guest-friends among the chief men of the Gauls, should bring back all things explored; that they held it for certain that Hasdrubal, an immense army now gathered, would cross the Alps the next spring, and that nothing then delayed him but that the Alps were closed by winter. In the place of Marcus Marcellus, Publius Aelius Paetus was created and inaugurated augur; and Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella was inaugurated rex sacrorum in the place of Marcus Marcius, who had died two years before. This same year too the lustrum was closed by the censors Publius Sempronius Tuditanus and Marcus Cornelius Cethegus. The number of citizens registered was a hundred and thirty-seven thousand one hundred and eight, a number somewhat smaller than there had been before the war. That year, for the first time since Hannibal had come into Italy, it is recorded that the Comitium was roofed over, and that the Roman games were once repeated by the curule aediles Quintus Metellus and Gaius Servilius. And at the plebeian games two days were repeated by the plebeian aediles Gaius Mamilius and Marcus Caecilius Metellus; and the same men gave three statues at the temple of Ceres; and there was a banquet of Jupiter on account of the games.

Then Gaius Claudius Nero and Marcus Livius, for the second time, entered upon the consulship; who, because they had already as consuls-designate drawn their provinces, bade the praetors draw lots. To Gaius Hostilius fell the city jurisdiction; the foreign was added too, so that three might go out to provinces; to Aulus Hostilius fell Sardinia, to Gaius Mamilius Sicily, to Lucius Porcius Gaul. The total of three-and-twenty legions was thus divided among the provinces: two should be the consuls’, four Spain should have, the three praetors two apiece, in Sicily and Sardinia and Gaul, two Gaius Terentius in Etruria, two Quintus Fulvius in Bruttium, two Quintus Claudius around Tarentum and the Sallentini, one Gaius Hostilius Tubulus at Capua; and two city legions were to be enrolled. For the first four legions the people created the tribunes; for the rest the consuls sent them.

Before the consuls set out, there was a nine-day sacrifice, because at Veii it had rained stones from heaven. Upon the mention of one prodigy, as is wont, others too were reported: at Minturnae the temple of Jupiter and the grove of Marica, and likewise at Atella the wall and a gate, had been struck from heaven; the people of Minturnae, more terribly, added that a stream of blood had flowed in the gate; and at Capua a wolf, entering the gate by night, had mangled a watchman. These prodigies were expiated with full-grown victims, and there was a supplication for one day by decree of the pontiffs. Then again the nine-day sacrifice was renewed, because in the Armilustrum it had seemed to rain stones. Their minds freed from religious scruple, they were troubled again by a report from Frusino that a child had been born as big as a four-year-old, and not so wonderful for its size as because, like the one at Sinuessa two years before, it had been born of doubtful sex, male or female. Indeed the soothsayers, summoned from Etruria, said it was a foul and shameful prodigy: it must be carried out of Roman territory, far from contact with the earth, and drowned in the deep. They shut it up alive in a chest, and, carrying it out to sea, threw it in. The pontiffs likewise decreed that thrice nine maidens, going through the city, should sing a hymn. While they were learning that hymn, composed by the poet Livius, in the temple of Jupiter Stator, the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine was struck from heaven; and when the soothsayers had answered that this prodigy concerned the matrons, and that the goddess must be appeased with a gift, those who had their dwellings in the city of Rome and within the tenth milestone from the city were summoned to the Capitol by an edict of the curule aediles, and themselves chose from among them twenty-five, to whom they should bring a contribution out of their dowries. From this a gift, a golden basin, was made and carried to the Aventine, and sacrifice was made by the matrons purely and chastely. At once a day was appointed by the decemvirs for another sacrifice to the same goddess, the order of which was as follows: from the temple of Apollo two white cows were led into the city by the Carmental gate; behind them were carried two images of Juno Regina, of cypress wood; then went twenty-seven maidens, clad in long robes, singing a hymn to Juno Regina—perhaps in that age praiseworthy to untrained minds, but now, if it were repeated, harsh and uncouth. Behind the line of maidens followed the decemvirs, crowned with laurel and wearing the bordered toga. From the gate they came by the Jugarian street into the forum. In the forum the procession halted, and, a rope being passed through their hands, the maidens advanced, marking the sound of their voices by the beating of their feet. Then by the Tuscan street and the Velabrum, through the Cattle-market, they went on to the Publician rise and the temple of Juno Regina. There two victims were sacrificed by the decemvirs, and the images of cypress wood were carried into the temple.

The gods duly appeased, the consuls held a levy more sharply and more intently than anyone remembered being held in former years; for both the terror of war was doubled by the coming of a new enemy into Italy, and there was less youth from which to enroll soldiers. And so they compelled even the colonists of the sea-coast, who were said to have a sacrosanct exemption, to give soldiers. When these refused, they proclaimed a fixed day on which each should lay before the senate by what right he held his exemption. On that day these peoples came before the senate: the men of Ostia, Alsium, Antium, Anxur, Minturnae, Sinuessa, and, from the upper sea, of Sena. When each people recited its exemptions, that of none—since the enemy was in Italy—was allowed, save that of Antium and Ostia; and the younger men of those colonies were bound by an oath not to lodge above thirty days outside the walls of their colony, so long as the enemy was in Italy. When all judged that the consuls should go to the war at the earliest moment—for both Hasdrubal must be met as he came down from the Alps, lest he stir up the Cisalpine Gauls, or Etruria, raised in hope of revolution, and Hannibal must be kept busy with a war of his own, lest he break out of Bruttium and go to meet his brother—Livius hung back, putting little trust in the armies of his provinces; his colleague, he said, had the choice of two excellent consular armies and a third, which Quintus Claudius commanded at Tarentum; and he had brought in the mention of recalling the volones, the slave-volunteers, to the standards. The senate gave the consuls free power both of filling up from where they wished and of choosing, out of all the armies, whom they wished, and of exchanging and of transferring from the provinces whichever they judged for the public good. All this was done with the utmost concord of the consuls. The volones were enrolled in the nineteenth and twentieth legions. Some authorities relate that powerful auxiliaries too were sent from Spain to that war by Publius Scipio to Marcus Livius—eight thousand Spaniards and Gauls and two thousand soldiers of the legion, and eighteen hundred horse, mixed Numidians and Spaniards; that Marcus Lucretius brought these forces by ship; and that Gaius Mamilius sent from Sicily about three thousand archers and slingers.

The tumult at Rome was increased by a letter brought from Gaul by the praetor Lucius Porcius: that Hasdrubal had moved from his winter quarters and was now crossing the Alps; that eight thousand Ligurians, enrolled and armed, would join him when he had crossed into Italy, unless someone were sent into Liguria to keep them busy with war; that he himself, with a weak army, would advance as far as he thought safe. This letter forced the consuls, the levy being hastily finished, to go out into their provinces earlier than they had purposed, with the intention that each should hold the enemy in his own province and not suffer them to be joined or their forces brought into one. Helping greatly to this was Hannibal’s opinion: that, although he had believed his brother would cross into Italy that summer, yet, recalling what he himself had endured in the crossing, now of the Rhone, now of the Alps, fighting with men and places for five months, he by no means expected so easy and swift a crossing; this was the reason for his moving more slowly from his winter quarters. But for Hasdrubal everything was quicker and easier than his own hope or that of others. For the Arverni not only received him, and after them the other Gallic and Alpine tribes, but even followed him to war. And both because he was leading through most places made passable by his brother’s crossing, which before had been trackless, and because, the Alps being made traversable by twelve years’ habituation, he passed now among gentler tempers of men. For before, unvisited by foreigners, and themselves unused to seeing a stranger in their land, they had been unsociable to all the human race; and at first, ignorant whither the Carthaginian was making, they had believed that their own rocks and their own forts and the booty of cattle and men were sought; then the fame of the Punic war, with which Italy had blazed for twelve years now, had taught them well enough that the Alps were only a road, that two most powerful cities, parted by a great space of sea and lands, were contending for empire and wealth. These causes had opened the Alps to Hasdrubal. But what had been gained by the speed of his march, he spoiled by his delay at Placentia, while he besieged it—rather than assaulted it—in vain. He had believed the storming of a town on the plain an easy thing, and the nobility of the colony had drawn him on, thinking that he would throw great terror into the rest by the destruction of that city. Not only did he hinder himself by that siege, but he had held back Hannibal too—now, after the report of his crossing, moving from his winter quarters far quicker than his own hope—as he reflected not only how slow the siege of a city is, but also how he himself had in vain attempted that same colony, returning a victor from the Trebia.

The consuls, setting out from the city by different roads, had stretched men’s cares, as it were, equally between two wars at once, both as they recalled what disasters the first coming of Hannibal had brought upon Italy, and as this anxiety wrung them: what gods so propitious to the city and the empire could there be, that the commonwealth should be managed successfully in both places at the same time? Hitherto, by balancing adverse fortune with prosperous, the affair had been drawn out to this time. When in Italy, at Trasimene and Cannae, the Roman state had fallen headlong, prosperous wars in Spain had raised it as it slipped; afterward, when in Spain disaster upon disaster, two excellent commanders lost, had in part destroyed two armies, many successes in Italy and Sicily had upheld the shaken commonwealth; and the very interval of distance, that one of the wars was waged in the farthest regions of the earth, had given space for breathing. Now two wars had been received into Italy, two commanders of most famous name beset the city of Rome, and the whole mass of peril, the whole burden, had settled upon one spot. Whichever of them should first conquer would within a few days join his camp with the other. The previous year too, mournful with the funerals of two consuls, terrified them. With these cares, anxious, men escorted the consuls as they parted into their provinces. It is recorded that Marcus Livius, still full of anger against the citizens, as he set out to the war, when Quintus Fabius warned him not to join battle rashly before he had learned the nature of the enemy, answered that, as soon as he caught sight of the enemy’s column, he would fight. When it was asked what was the cause of his haste, "Either," he said, "I shall win signal glory from the enemy, or a joy—deserved at least, if not honorable—from the defeat of my fellow-citizens."

Before the consul Claudius reached his province, Gaius Hostilius Tubulus, attacking with light cohorts Hannibal—who was leading his army through the farthest border of the territory into the Sallentine country—threw a terrible confusion into the unordered column; he killed about four thousand men and took nine military standards. Quintus Claudius, who had his camps disposed through the cities of the Sallentine territory, had moved from his winter quarters at the report of the enemy. And so, that he might not at the same time engage two armies, Hannibal moved his camp by night from the Tarentine territory and withdrew into Bruttium. Claudius turned his column into the Sallentine country; Hostilius, making for Capua, met the consul Claudius at Venusia. There, from each army, forty thousand foot and two thousand five hundred horse were chosen, with which the consul should conduct the war against Hannibal; the rest of the forces Hostilius was ordered to lead to Capua, to hand over to Quintus Fulvius the proconsul. Hannibal, his army gathered from every side, which he had had in winter quarters or in the garrisons of the Bruttian territory, came into Lucania, to Grumentum, in hope of recovering the towns which through fear had revolted to the Romans. Thither the Roman consul, from Venusia, his routes explored, made his way, and pitched his camp about fifteen hundred paces from the enemy. To the walls of Grumentum the rampart of the Carthaginians seemed almost joined; five hundred paces lay between. The Punic and the Roman camps had a plain lying between them; bare hills overhung the left flank of the Carthaginians, the right of the Romans, suspected by neither side, because they had nothing of woodland nor of coverts for ambush. In the middle plain, those running out from the outposts sowed contests not worth telling of. It was plain that the Roman sought only this, not to let the enemy go; Hannibal, longing to get away thence, came down into line with all his forces. Then the consul, using the enemy’s own device—since in such open hills an ambush could the less be feared—ordered five cohorts, with five maniples added, to cross the ridge by night and settle on the reverse slopes of the hills. The time for rising from ambush and attacking the enemy he taught to Tiberius Claudius Asellus, a military tribune, and Publius Claudius, a prefect of the allies, whom he was sending with them. He himself, at first light, led out all his forces, foot and horse, into line. A little after, by Hannibal too the signal for battle was displayed, and a shout was raised in the camp of men running to arms. Then horse and foot vied in rushing from the gates, and, scattered over the plain, hurried toward the enemy. When the consul saw them poured out, he ordered Gaius Aurunculeius, a military tribune of the third legion, to send the cavalry of the legion against the enemy with all the force he could: they had spread themselves over the whole plain on every side, unordered like cattle, so that they could be cut down and trodden under before they were drawn up.

Hannibal had not yet come out of the camp when he heard the shout of the fighters. And so, roused by the tumult, he hurriedly led his forces against the enemy. Already the cavalry terror had seized the foremost; the first legion too and the right wing of the foot were entering the battle. The enemy, in no order, as chance offered each to a footman or a horseman, joined hands. The fight grew with reinforcements and was increased by the number of those running up to the contest; and Hannibal would have drawn up his men—a thing not easy save in a veteran army and for a veteran leader—amid the tumult and terror, had not the shout of the cohorts and maniples running down the hills, heard in the rear, thrown in the fear of being cut off from the camp. From this panic was struck in, and flight began here and there. And the slaughter was less, because the nearness of the camp made the flight shorter for the routed. For the cavalry clung to their rear; on their flanks the cohorts had charged, running down the bare and easy road by the favorable slopes of the hills. Yet above eight thousand men were killed, above seven hundred taken; nine military standards were taken; the elephants too—of which there had been no use in a sudden and disorderly battle—four were killed, two taken. About five hundred of the Romans and allies, the victors, fell. The next day the Carthaginian kept quiet; the Roman, his forces led out into line, when he saw no one bring out standards against him, ordered the spoils of the slain enemy to be gathered, and his own dead, brought together into one place, to be buried. Then, on several successive days following, he pressed so close upon the gates that he seemed almost to bring his standards in, until Hannibal, at the third watch, leaving many fires and tents in the part of the camp that faced the enemy, and a few Numidians to show themselves on the rampart and at the gates, set out and made for Apulia. When it grew light, the Roman line came up to the rampart, and the Numidians, by arrangement, showed themselves for a while at the gates and on the rampart, and, having baffled the enemy a while, galloped off to overtake the column of their own men. When the consul saw silence in the camp, and not even the few who at first light had walked about visible in any quarter, he sent two horsemen ahead to spy into the camp, and, when it was explored that all was safe enough, ordered the standards to be brought in; and, having stayed there only so long as the soldiers ran off to plunder, he then sounded the recall and led his forces back long before night. The next day, at first light, setting out and following by forced marches the report and the tracks of the column, he overtook the enemy not far from Venusia. There too the battle was tumultuous; above two thousand Carthaginians were killed. Then by night, by mountain roads, the Carthaginian, that he might give no place for fighting, made for Metapontum. Hanno from there—for he had been in charge of the garrison of that place—was sent into Bruttium with a few men to raise a new army; Hannibal, his forces added to his own, returned by the roads by which he had come to Venusia, and from there went on to Canusium. Never had Nero left off from the enemy’s tracks, and, when he himself set out for Metapontum, he had summoned Quintus Fulvius into Lucania, that that region might not be without a garrison.

Meanwhile, from Hasdrubal, after he had withdrawn from the siege of Placentia, four Gallic horsemen and two Numidians, sent with a letter to Hannibal, when they had traversed almost the whole length of Italy through the midst of the enemy, while they followed Hannibal as he withdrew to Metapontum, being carried by uncertain roads to Tarentum, were brought by Roman foragers, ranging through the fields, to the propraetor Quintus Claudius. At first entangling him with doubtful answers, when the fear of torture, applied, forced them to confess the truth, they made it known that they were carrying a letter from Hasdrubal to Hannibal. With that letter, sealed just as it was, they were handed over to Lucius Verginius, a military tribune, to be led to the consul Claudius; two squadrons of Samnites were sent at the same time for a guard. When they came to the consul, and the letter was read by an interpreter, and inquiry made from the prisoners, then Claudius, thinking that this was not a time for the commonwealth in which each should wage war by ordinary counsels, within the borders of his own province, with his own armies, against the enemy appointed him by the senate—that something must be dared and ventured, unforeseen, unexpected, which, begun, would cause no less terror among the citizens than among the enemy, but, achieved, would turn great fear into great joy—the letter of Hasdrubal being sent to Rome to the senate, at the same time himself informs the fathers what he was preparing: that, since Hasdrubal wrote that he would meet his brother in Umbria, they should summon the legion from Capua to Rome, hold a levy at Rome, and oppose the city army to the enemy at Narnia. This he wrote to the senate. He sent men ahead, too, through the Larinate, Marrucine, Frentane, and Praetutian territory, by which he was to lead his army, that all should bring down from the fields and the cities, onto the road, provisions ready for the soldier to eat, and bring out horses and other beasts, so that there might be plenty of vehicles for the weary. He himself, out of his whole army of citizens and allies, chose what was strongest—six thousand foot, a thousand horse—and gave out that he meant to seize the nearest city in Lucania and the Punic garrison in it: let all be ready for a march. Setting out by night, he turned aside into Picenum. And the consul, indeed, led toward his colleague by the greatest marches he could, leaving Quintus Catius, a lieutenant, to command the camp. At Rome there was no less terror and tumult than there had been four years before, when the Punic camp had been set against the walls and gates of Rome. Nor was it well enough agreed in men’s minds whether they should praise or blame so daring a march of the consul; it was plain that—than which nothing is more unjust—his fame would be reckoned from the event: that a camp had been left near Hannibal, the enemy, without a commander, with an army from which had been drawn off all the strength, all the flower; and that the consul had shown his march into Lucania, when he was making for Picenum and Gaul, leaving a camp safe by nothing else than the enemy’s error, who knew not that the commander and part of the army were away. What would happen, if this became known, and Hannibal should choose either to pursue Nero, who had set out with six thousand armed men, with his whole army, or to fall upon the camp left as a prey, without forces, without command, without auspices? The old disasters of that war, the two consuls killed the year before, terrified them; and all those things had befallen when there was one commander, one army of the enemy in Italy; now two Punic wars had been made, two huge armies, almost two Hannibals were in Italy. For Hasdrubal too was sprung from the same father, Hamilcar, an equally tireless commander, trained through so many years in Spain by Roman war, distinguished by a double victory, two armies with most renowned commanders destroyed. For in the speed of his march from Spain, and in the Gallic peoples stirred to arms, he could boast far more than Hannibal himself; since in those very places he had gathered an army in which the other had lost the greater part of his soldiers by hunger and cold, the most wretched kinds of death. Those skilled in the affairs of Spain added too that he would meet, in Gaius Nero, no unknown commander, but the very man whom, caught by chance in a difficult pass, he had baffled, like a boy, with the deceptive terms of a feigned peace. They reckoned all the enemy’s resources greater than the truth, their own less, fear, the interpreter, ever inclining to the worse.

Nero, after he had now made so great an interval from the enemy that the plan could safely be disclosed, addressed his soldiers in a few words. He said that no commander’s plan was, in appearance, more daring, in fact more safe, than his own: he was leading them to a certain victory. For to that war his colleague had not set out until the forces given him by the senate, of foot and horse, were to his own full content, greater and better appointed than if he were going against Hannibal himself; if they added to him whatever weight of strength, however small, they would turn the whole scale. The mere hearing in the battle-line—for he would take care that it was not heard before—that the other consul and the other army had come would make the victory beyond doubt. It was fame that finished a war, and small weights that drove men’s minds into hope or fear; of the glory won from a thing well done they themselves would carry off well-nigh the whole fruit; the latest addition always seemed to have drawn the whole matter to itself. They saw themselves with what a concourse, with what admiration, with what favor of men their march was thronged. And, by Hercules, through all the ranks of men and women poured out from the fields on every side, amid vows and prayers and praises they went. They called them the bulwarks of the commonwealth, the avengers of the city of Rome and of the empire; in their arms and right hands, they said, lay the safety and liberty of themselves and of their children. They prayed to all the gods and goddesses that their march be propitious, their battle fortunate, their victory over the enemy swift, and that they themselves might be bound to pay the vows they had taken on their behalf, that, as they now anxiously escorted them, so, a few days hence, they might go joyfully to meet them as they rejoiced in victory. Each for himself invited them and offered, and wearied them with entreaties, that whatever should be of use to themselves and their beasts they should take from him rather than from another; kindly they gave all things heaped up. The soldiers vied in self-restraint, that they should take nothing beyond their necessary use; they delayed for nothing, nor left the standards nor halted save while taking food; they went day and night; scarcely did they give to rest what was enough for the natural need of the body. And men had been sent ahead to the colleague to announce their coming, and to ask whether he wished them to come secretly or openly, by day or by night, to settle in the same or in another camp. It seemed best to enter by night, secretly.

The watchword had been given through the camp by the consul Livius, that a tribune should receive a tribune, a centurion a centurion, a horseman a horseman, a footman a footman: for the camp must not be enlarged, lest the enemy perceive the coming of the other consul; and the crowding of more men in a narrow space of tents would be easier, because the army of Claudius had brought with it on the expedition almost nothing but its arms. But on the very march the column had been increased by volunteers, both old soldiers, now done with service, offering themselves of their own accord, and young men, whom, as they vied in giving in their names, if the look and vigor of their bodies seemed fit for service, he had enrolled. At Sena was the camp of the other consul, and about five hundred paces from it was Hasdrubal. And so, when he was now drawing near, Nero, hidden by the hills, halted, that he might not enter the camp before night. Entering in silence, they were taken off, each by men of his own rank, to the tents, and received with hospitality, amid the great joy of all. The next day a council was held, at which Lucius Porcius Licinus, the praetor, too was present. He held his camp joined to the consuls’ camps, and, before their coming, by leading his army through high ground—now beset narrow passes to close the way, now harassed the column on flank or rear—had baffled the enemy with all the arts of war; he was then present in the council. The opinions of many inclined to this, that, while Nero refreshed his soldiers, weary with the road and the night-watches, and took a few days besides to learn the enemy, the time of battle should be put off. Nero not only urged, but with the utmost effort begged, that they should not by delay make rash the plan which speed had made safe; that, by an error which would not last long, Hannibal, as though benumbed, was neither attacking his camp, left without a commander, nor bending his march to follow him; that, before he stirred, the army of Hasdrubal could be destroyed and a return made into Apulia. Whoever, by putting it off, gave the enemy room, would both betray that camp to Hannibal and open his way into Gaul, that at leisure, where he would, he might join Hasdrubal. At once the signal must be given and they must go out into line, and they must make use of the error of the enemy, absent and present, while neither they knew that they had to do with fewer, nor these that they had to do with more, and stronger, men. The council being dismissed, the signal for battle was set up, and at once they advanced into line.

Already the enemy stood drawn up before their camp. A delay to the battle was caused by this, that Hasdrubal, riding out before the standards with a few horsemen, marked old shields of the enemy, which he had not seen before, and leaner horses; the number too seemed greater than usual. For, suspecting what was the truth, he hastily sounded the recall, and sent men to the river from which they drew water, where some might be caught and marked by the eye, if any chanced to be of a more sunburnt color, as from a recent march; at the same time he ordered the camp to be ridden round at a distance and spied out, whether the rampart had been enlarged in any part, and that they should mark whether the signal sounded once or twice in the camp. When all this was reported in order, the camp, in no way enlarged, made him err; there were two, just as there had been before the coming of the other consul, one of Marcus Livius, the other of Lucius Porcius; in neither had anything been added to the works for a wider extension. But this moved the old commander, used to a Roman enemy, that they reported the signal had sounded once in the praetor’s camp, twice in the consul’s. There were assuredly two consuls; and his anxiety wrung him as to how the one had got away from Hannibal. Least of all could he suspect what was the truth, that Hannibal had been so baffled in so great a matter that he knew not where the leader, where the army, was, with whom he had his camp joined. Surely, deterred by no slight disaster, he had not dared to follow; greatly Hasdrubal feared lest, the affair being now desperate, he had himself come too late with his aid, and that the Romans had now in Italy the same fortune they had in Spain. Sometimes he believed that his letter had not reached his brother, and that the consul, having intercepted it, had hastened to crush him. Anxious with these cares, the fires being put out, at the first watch, a signal given that they should silently pack up their baggage, he ordered the standards to be borne forth. In the haste and the nocturnal tumult the guides were too carelessly watched: one settled in a hiding-place already before marked out in his mind, the other swam across the river Metaurus by a known ford. So the column, deserted by its guides, at first wandered through the fields, and several, worn with sleep and watching, laid their bodies here and there and left the standards thinly attended. Hasdrubal, that the light might show the way, ordered the standards to be borne along the bank of the river, and, winding through the curves and bends of the tortuous stream, having advanced not far, halted, meaning, when first light should show a fit crossing, to cross. But, since the farther he went from the sea the higher the banks that hemmed the river, he found no ford, and by wearing away the day gave the enemy space to overtake him.

Nero came up first with all the cavalry, then Porcius followed with the light-armed. While these harried the weary column from every side and charged it, and the Carthaginian—now giving up the march, which was like a flight—wished to measure out a camp on a hill above the river-bank, Livius came up with all the forces of the foot, not arranged for a march only, but armed and arrayed to join battle at once. But when they had united all their forces, and the line was formed, Claudius arranged the fight on the right wing, Livius on the left; the center of the line was given to the praetor to guard. Hasdrubal, the fortifying of the camp given up, when he saw that he must fight, set the elephants in the front line before the standards; around them, on the left wing, against Claudius, he posted the Gauls, trusting them not so much as he believed them to be feared by the enemy; he himself took the right wing, against Marcus Livius, for himself and the Spaniards—and there, chiefly, in the veteran soldier, he had his hope; the Ligurians were placed in the center, behind the elephants. But the line was longer than it was broad; a projecting hill covered the Gauls. That front which the Spaniards held clashed with the left wing of the Romans; the whole right wing, projecting beyond the battle, stood idle; the hill set opposite kept them off from being attacked either in front or on the flank. Between Livius and Hasdrubal a huge struggle was joined, and a fierce slaughter was made on both sides. There were both the commanders, there the greater part of the Roman foot and horse, there the Spaniards, veteran soldiers skilled in Roman fighting, and the Ligurians, a hard breed in arms. Thither too were turned the elephants, which at the first charge had thrown the front-rank men into disorder and now had moved the standards from their place; then, the contest and the shout growing, they could no longer be ruled, and wandered between the two lines, as if uncertain whose they were, not unlike ships drifting without a rudder. Claudius—crying to his soldiers, "Why then have we measured out so long a march in headlong haste?"—when he had tried in vain to lead his standards up the hill set against him, after he saw that by that quarter the enemy could not be reached, drew off some cohorts from the right wing, where he saw the fight would be sluggish rather than active, led them round behind the line, and, to the surprise not only of the enemy but even of his own men, charged upon the enemy’s right flank; and so great was the swiftness that, when they had shown themselves on the flank, they were soon fighting on the rear. So from every side, in front, on flank, in rear, the Spaniards and Ligurians were cut to pieces, and the slaughter had now reached the Gauls. There the least of the fighting was; for both a great part were away from the standards, having slipped off by night and laid themselves down to sleep here and there through the fields, and those who were present, worn with the march and the watches—bodies most impatient of toil—could scarce bear their arms on their shoulders; and it was now midday, and thirst and heat gave them, gaping, to be cut down and taken in plenty.

More elephants were killed by their own drivers than by the enemy. They carried a workman’s chisel with a mallet; when the beasts began to rage and to rush upon their own, the keeper, setting it between the ears, at the very joint where the neck is joined to the head, drove it in with the greatest blow he could. That had been found the quickest way of death for a beast of so great a bulk, when they had given up the hope of ruling it; and Hasdrubal had first instituted it, a commander often memorable on other occasions, but in that battle above all. He upheld the fighters by exhorting and by sharing their dangers alike; he kindled the weary and the failing, worn with toil, now by entreaty, now by chiding; he called back the fugitives and restored the battle, given up in several places; at the last, when fortune was beyond doubt the enemy’s, that he might not survive the great army that had followed his name, putting spurs to his horse, he flung himself into a Roman cohort. There, as was worthy of the son of Hamilcar and the brother of Hannibal, fighting he fell.

Never in that war were so many of the enemy killed in a single line of battle, and the disaster seemed repaid, even against that of Cannae, by the death either of the commander or of the army. Fifty-six thousand of the enemy were slain, five thousand four hundred taken; there was much other plunder of every kind, and of gold and silver besides. Of Roman citizens too who were prisoners among the enemy more than four thousand persons were recovered. That was a solace for the soldiers lost in that battle. For the victory was by no means bloodless: about eight thousand Romans and allies were killed; and so far had even the victors been filled with a glut of blood and slaughter that, when it was reported the next day to the consul Livius that the Cisalpine Gauls and the Ligurians, who had either not been in the battle or had escaped amid the carnage, were going off in one body, without a sure leader, without standards, without any order or command—that, if one squadron of horse were sent, all could be destroyed—he said, "Let some survive to be messengers both of the enemy’s disaster and of our valor."

Nero, setting out on the night that followed the battle, with a column swifter than that with which he had come thither, on the sixth day reached his standing camp and the enemy. His march, with a smaller throng, because no messenger had gone ahead, yet with so great a joy that they were scarcely masters of their minds for gladness, was thronged. For at Rome neither state of mind can be sufficiently told and unfolded—neither that in which the city had been, in uncertain expectation of the issue, nor that in which it received the report of victory. Never, through all the days, from the time when the report announced that the consul Claudius had set out, from sunrise to sunset, did either any senator leave the senate-house and the magistrates, or the people the forum. The matrons, because there was no help in themselves, turned to prayers and entreaties, and, wandering through all the shrines, wearied the gods with supplications and vows. To the city, so anxious and in suspense, came first an uncertain report that two horsemen of Narnia had come to the camp that was set in the jaws of Umbria, announcing from the battle that the enemy were cut to pieces. And at first it had been taken in with the ears rather than with the mind, as too great and too glad a thing to be grasped by the mind or fully believed; and the very swiftness hindered belief, because the battle was said to have been fought two days before. Then a letter sent from the camp by Lucius Manlius Acidinus was brought, about the coming of the Narnian horsemen. This letter, carried through the forum to the praetor’s tribunal, drew the senate out of the senate-house; and with so great a striving and tumult did the people run together to the doors of the senate-house that the messenger could not approach, but was dragged about by men asking and shouting that the letter be read out on the Rostra before it was read in the senate. At last they were moved off and held back by the magistrates, and the joy could be dealt out among minds that had no mastery of it. The letter was read out, first in the senate, then in the assembly; and, according to each man’s temper, to some there was now sure joy, to others there would be no belief until they had heard the envoys or the consuls’ letter.

Then it was brought word that the envoys themselves were drawing near. Then indeed every age ran to meet them, each man longing to be the first to drink in so great a joy with eyes and ears. The continuous throng reached as far as the Mulvian bridge. The envoys—they were Lucius Veturius Philo, Publius Licinius Varus, Quintus Caecilius Metellus—came into the forum, surrounded by a crowd of men of every sort, some asking the envoys themselves, others their companions, what had been done. And as each had heard that the enemy’s army and commander were slain, the Roman legions safe, the consuls unhurt, at once they passed on their joy to others. When they had with difficulty reached the senate-house, and with much more difficulty the crowd had been moved off, that it might not be mingled with the fathers, the letter was read out in the senate. Then the envoys were brought across into the assembly. Lucius Veturius, the letter being read, himself set forth more plainly all that had been done, with great applause, and at last even with a shout of the whole assembly, since they could scarce contain their joy in their minds. Then some ran off about the temples of the gods, to give thanks, others home, to share with their wives and children so glad a message. The senate, because Marcus Livius and Gaius Claudius, the consuls, with their army safe, had slain the enemy’s leader and his legions, decreed a supplication for three days. That supplication the praetor Gaius Hostilius proclaimed before the assembly, and it was kept by men and women. Through the whole three days all the temples had an equal throng, since the matrons, in their richest robes, with their children, just as if the war were finished, freed from all fear, gave thanks to the immortal gods. That victory moved the state’s condition too, so that now men dared to transact business among themselves, no otherwise than in peace—in selling, buying, lending money, and paying debts. The consul Gaius Claudius, when he had returned to his camp, ordered the head of Hasdrubal, which he had brought back, kept with care, to be thrown down before the enemy’s outposts, and the African prisoners, bound as they were, to be shown, and even two of them, loosed, to go to Hannibal and set forth what had been done. Hannibal, stricken at once by so great a grief, public and private, is said to have declared that he recognized the fortune of Carthage; and, moving his camp from there, that he might draw together into the farthest corner of Italy, Bruttium, all the auxiliaries which, scattered more widely, he could not protect, he removed both the Metapontines, the whole community, roused from their seats, and those of the Lucanians who were under his sway, into the Bruttian territory.