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Updated: May 23, 2025
He alone perceived Fabius's true generalship and thorough comprehension of the war, and saw that either he must by some means be brought to fight a battle, or else the Carthaginians were lost, if they could not make use of their superiority in arms, but were to be worn away and reduced in number and resources, in which they were already deficient.
He had got drawn, by Fabius's good management, into a place where he was surrounded by mountains, upon which Fabius had posted his troops, and there was only one defile which offered any egress, and this, too, Fabius had strongly guarded. Hannibal resorted to his usual resource, cunning and stratagem, for means of escape. He collected a herd of oxen.
Fixing, therefore, their thoughts upon Marcellus, and hoping to combine his boldness, confidence, and promptitude with Fabius's caution and prudence, and to temper the one by the other, they sent, sometimes both with consular command, sometimes one as consul, the other as proconsul, against the enemy. Posidonius writes, that Fabius was called the buckler, Marcellus the sword of Rome.
In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative.
Fabius's tactics not policy had in view not to expose young, disheartened levies against Hannibal's unconquered veterans, but further to give time to Rome to restore her exhausted means, to recover political influences with other Italian independent communities, to re-conclude broken alliances with the cities, etc. But is this the condition of the Union?
When two of Fabius's legions had, as was their constant practice, gone forth as the usual protection to the foragers, and had crossed the river, and the baggage, and all the horse were following them, on a sudden, from the weight of the cattle, and the mass of water, the bridge fell, and all the horse were cut off from the main army, which being known to Petreius and Afranius, from the timber and hurdles that were carried down the river, Afranius immediately crossed his own bridge, which communicated between his camp and the town, with four legions and all the cavalry, and marched against Fabius's two legions.
And Hannibal himself, wishing to increase the dislike which the Romans felt for him, though he burned and ravaged every other part of Italy, forbade his men to touch Fabius's own estates, and even placed a guard to see that no damage was done to them.
At the same time, they cried up Minucius for the only captain worthy to command the Romans; whose vanity and presumption rose so high in consequence, that he insolently jested at Fabius's encampments upon the mountains, saying that he seated them there as on a theater, to behold the flames and desolation of their country.
That which before this battle was called Fabius's cowardice and remissness, was now regarded as more than human sagacity, and a foresight so wonderful as to be beyond belief.
Now Fabius's unpopularity reached its highest pitch, and he was regarded with scorn and contempt. He had, they said, determined to refrain from a pitched battle, meaning to overcome Hannibal by superior generalship, and he had been defeated in that too.
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