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Hannibal led his troops out of their winter quarters in Bruttium, and marched northward as far as Canusium. Nero had his head- quarters near Venusia, with an army which he had increased to forty thousand foot and two thousand five hundred horse, by incorporating under his own command some of the legions which had been intended to set under other generals in the south.
In a political point of view, the insurrection had gained ground on all sides during this first year of the war; the secession of Nola, the rapid capitulation of the strong and large Latin colony of Venusia, and the Umbro-Etruscan revolt were suspicious signs that the Roman symmachy was tottering to its very base and was not in a position to hold out against this last trial.
At about the age of twelve, after having attended the local school at Venusia, to which the children of the rural aristocracy resorted, he was taken to Rome, where he enjoyed the advantages of the best means of education. He studied Livius Andronicus, and Homer, and was flogged with care by at least one of his masters.
The Sabellians and Greeks thus passed over to Pyrrhus; but the victory produced no further effect. The Latins showed no inclination to get quit of the Roman rule, burdensome as it might be, by the help of a foreign dynast. Venusia, although now wholly surrounded by enemies, adhered with unshaken steadfastness to Rome.
This anecdote is found in those writers who have described the incidents of the battle in detail. Of the consuls, Varro escaped with a few followers to Venusia. Paulus, in the whirling eddies of the rout, covered with darts which still stuck in his wounds, and overwhelmed with sorrow at the defeat, sat down on a stone to await his death at the hands of the enemy.
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.
That the Roman people were enjoying the fruits of the prolonged command of Marcellus; that his army, after having been twice defeated, was now spending the summer at Venusia lodged in houses."
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.
Accordingly another temple to Virtue was erected with all speed. Nevertheless, these temples were not dedicated by Marcellus himself. Then at length he set out, with the troops raised to fill up the numbers, to the army he had left the preceding year at Venusia.
The Romans again advanced as far as Venusia and Rubi, and became masters of all Apulia.
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