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On the other hand the Romans succeeded, by means of a weak corps which advanced along the Lucanian frontier and of the garrison of Venusia, in preventing the Lucanians and Samnites from uniting with Pyrrhus; while the main force four legions as it would appear, and so, with a corresponding number of allied troops, at least 50,000 strong marched against Pyrrhus, under the consul Publius Laevinus.
There are fragments left of several municipal fasti; the one which gives the longest unbroken list is that from Venusia, which gives the full list of the city officials of the years 34-29 B.C., and the aediles of 35, and both the duovirs and praetors of the first half of 28 B.C. In 29 B.C., L. Oppius and L. Livius were duoviri quinquennales.
The position in which matters stood is shown by the anxious carefulness, which during the ensuing Macedonian war the senate evinced in the watching of Italy, and by the reinforcements which were despatched from Rome to the most important colonies, to Venusia in 554, Narnia in 555, Cosa in 557, and Cales shortly before 570.
They had been spectators of the long struggle of the Samnites, and of the rapid extirpation of the Senones; they had acquiesced without remonstrance in the establishment of Venusia, Atria, and Sena, and in the occupation of Thurii and of Rhegium.
In Italy the great southern highway of presumably earlier origin, which as a prolongation of the Appian road ran from Rome by way of Capua, Beneventum, and Venusia to the ports of Tarentum and Brundisium, had attached to it a branch-road from Capua to the Sicilian straits, a work of Publius Popillius, consul in 622.
For my part, I envy not the good fortune or condition of any citizen or fellow-soldier, nor would I endeavour to raise myself by depressing another: but not even those men who, for the most part, leaving their arms, fled from the field, and stopped not till they arrived at Venusia or Canusium; not even those men, unless some reward is due to them on account of their swiftness of foot and running, would justly set themselves before us, or boast that there is more protection to the state in them than in us.
While this struggle and carnage were going on, the Numidian horse were pursuing the fugitives, most of whom they cut down or hurled from their horses; but some few escaped into Venusia, among whom was Gaius Terentius, the Consul, who thus sought a flight, as disgraceful to himself, as his conduct in office had been disastrous to his country.
The old soldier was not disturbed by the burden of his sixty years; sleeping and waking he was haunted by the one thought of defeating Hannibal and of liberating Italy. But fate reserved that wreath of victory for a younger brow. While engaged in an unimportant reconnaissance in the district of Venusia, both consuls were suddenly attacked by a division of African cavalry.
He had told of the youthful legate who had had a cow-herd of Venusia scourged to death, as an answer to the rustic's jesting query whether the bearers of the litter were carrying a corpse: and of the consul who had scourged the quaestor of Teanum Sidicinum, the man of noblest lineage in his state, because the men's baths, in which the consul's wife had elected to bathe, were not adequately prepared for her reception.
In central Italy both coasts were wholly in the Roman power, and the Abruzzi almost entirely; Apulia as far as Venusia, and Campania as far as Nola, were in the hands of the Romans; and by the occupation of the Hirpinian territory the communication was broken off between the only two regions still persevering in open resistance, the Samnite and the Lucano-Bruttian.
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