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Updated: June 3, 2025
An annoyed look drove the smile from her lips, and, with an almost imperceptible side motion of her small head, she went on: "Surely Lucius Sergius Fidenas has not allowed my father to go to the Senate House with only Caius to attend him! Lucius respects my father too much for that and too disinterestedly. It is an even more serious omission than his failure to attend the consul at Trasimenus "
But I fear your youth and uninterrupted good fortune, both of which are apt to inspire a degree of confidence ill comporting with pacific counsels. Rarely does that man consider the uncertainty of events whom fortune hath never deceived. What I was at Trasimenus and at Cannæ that you are this day.
Beyond them, thrown back in echelon, marched Africans in little squares of sixteen front. These had substituted for their own equipment the Roman spoils of Trasimenus and Trebia.
With regard to the Roman war, if the battle of Trasimenus was more glorious than that at Trebia, and the battle of Cannae than that of Trasimenus, that he would eclipse the fame of the battle of Cannae by a greater and more brilliant victory." With this answer, and with munificent presents, he dismissed the ambassadors.
The consul and his army having been lost at the Trasimenus the year before, it was not one wound upon another which was announced, but a multiplied disaster, the loss of two consular armies, together with the two consuls: and that now there was neither any Roman camp, nor general nor soldiery: that Apulia and Samnium, and now almost the whole of Italy, were in the possession of Hannibal.
But be assured, if this man, as he protests he will, shall immediately engage the enemy either I am unacquainted with military affairs, with this kind of war, and the character of the enemy, or another place will become more celebrated than the Trasimenus by our disaster.
For, "in the consulate of Cneius Servilius, when the other consul, Caius Flaminius, had fallen at Trasimenus, it was proposed to the people on the authority of the fathers, and the people had ordered, that as long as the war continued in Italy, it should be lawful for the people to elect to the consulship whomsoever they pleased, out of those persons who had been consuls, and as often as they pleased.
Cato was of the age for military service about the time of the battle of Lake Trasimenus, and entered the army then as a common soldier. The first expedition in which he is definitely said to have taken part is that of Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator against Hannibal in Campania, in 214. This Roman commander was a man entirely after Cato's heart, and became one of his models in public life.
So all the armies of the Republic went to the pro-dictator, together with authority to raise such more as he should consider needful; two new legions in the place of those dead on the shores of Trasimenus, and some thousands of poorer citizens from the tribes, to man the quinqueremes of Servilius and the walls of Rome.
When the letters were read, all to a man admitted that the statement was correct, and the request reasonable, but it occurred to their minds, what great forces they were maintaining by land and sea, and how large a fleet must soon be equipped if a war with Macedon should break out, that Sicily and Sardinia, which before the war had wielded a revenue, were scarcely able to maintain the troops which protected those provinces, that the expenses were supplied by a tax, that both the number of the persons who contributed this tax was diminished by the great havoc made in their armies at the Trasimenus and Cannae, and the few who survived, if they were oppressed with multiplied impositions, would perish by a calamity of a different kind.
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