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We must now pass over years of war, in which both Fabius and Papirius gained honor and fame, and come to an occasion in which the son of Fabius led a Roman army as consul, and met with a severe defeat by a Samnite army. He had been tricked by the Samnites, and great indignation was aroused against him in Rome.
After a long verbal dispute, his colleague giving up the point, Quintus Fabius Maximus, the consul, was chosen, by Sempronius, chief of the senate. Another senate was then chosen, and eight names were passed over; among which was that of Lucius Caecilius Metellus, disrespected as the adviser of the abandonment of Italy, after the defeat at Cannae.
But Rome was well defended by two legions, under Fabius, who refused to fight a pitched battle. Hannibal was, therefore, compelled to retreat in order to save Capua, which, however, in his absence, had surrendered to the Romans, after a two years’ siege, and was savagely punished for its defection from the Roman cause.
The Fabian name was odious to the commons on account of the last consul: the senate however succeeded in having Kæso Fabius elected consul with L. Æmilius. The commons, still further incensed at this, stirred up foreign war by exciting disturbance at home; civil dissensions were then interrupted by war.
As Scipio, although acquainted with the conduct of Flaminius, had nevertheless left him in command, his enemies attacked him on this and other grounds, and Fabius Maximus even proposed that he should be recalled. A commission was sent out to inquire into the state of affairs and to bring Scipio home, if the charges against him were found true.
He proceeded at once to Rome, and by adding his voice to that of Fabius in the Senate, in blame of Scipio's unspeakable waste of money, and his childish and unsoldierly love of the public games and the theatre, conduct more worthy of the president of a public festival than of the commander-in-chief of an army, prevailed upon the people to send tribunes to enquire into the charges against him, and if they proved true, to bring him back to Rome.
Here, although Fabius caught his enemy in a defile which he had entered by chance, yet he let him escape by night, and next day found his tardy movements outstripped, and himself defeated by the man whom he had just before so completely cut off.
The consul, therefore, on the senate voting him a triumph, replied, that "if the army could triumph without their general, he would readily accede to it in consideration of their distinguished behaviour in that war: that for his own part, his family being plunged in grief in consequence of the death of his brother Q. Fabius, and the commonwealth being in some degree bereaved by the loss of one of her consuls, he would not accept the laurel blasted by public and private grief."
When just now mention was made of Marcus Cato, you whose mind revolts at injustice were indignant at Cato's own age having so little understood him, at its having allotted a place below Vatinius to one who towered above both Cæsar and Pompey; it seemed shameful to you, that when he spoke against some law in the Forum his toga was torn from him, and that he was hustled through the hands of a mutinous mob from the Rostra as far as the arch of Fabius, enduring all the bad language, spitting, and other insults of the frantic rabble.
On the right wing of the enemy were the Gauls, and on the left the Samnites, Quintus Fabius being set to fight against these, and Decius Mus against the Gauls. At the first when the battle was begun the strength on either side was so equal that, if only the Etrurians or the men of Umbria had been there, the Romans had doubtless suffered some great loss either in the field or in the camp.
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