History of Rome

​But although the Mars of war was still common and fortune had not yet made a decision on which side she would give strength, the battle on the right and left wings was by no means similar.

​The Romans with Fabius were keeping off rather than making an attack, and the contest was prolonged into as late a part of the day as possible, ​because the general was so persuaded that both the Samnites and the Gauls were fierce at the first onset, whom it was enough to withstand; that with a longer contest the spirits of the Samnites gradually subsided, ​and indeed the bodies of the Gauls, most intolerant of labor and heat, melted away, and their first battles were more than those of men, their last less than those of women.

​Therefore, for that time at which the enemy was accustomed to be conquered, he preserved the strength of his soldiers as unimpaired as possible.

​Decius, more fierce both in age and in vigor of mind, poured forth whatever strength he had in the first contest. And because the infantry battle seemed too slow, ​he urged the cavalry into the battle, and himself, mingled with the bravest squadron of young men, entreated the chief of the youth to make an onset on the enemy with him, saying that their glory would be twofold if victory should begin from the left wing and from the cavalry.

​Twice they turned the Gallic cavalry; a second time, when they had ridden further and were already stirring up the battle in the midst of the infantry ranks, a new kind of combat terrified them:

​the armed enemy, standing upon chariots and wagons, came on with a huge noise of horses and wheels, and terrified the horses of the Romans with this unfamiliar tumult.

​Thus a kind of panic dread scattered the victorious cavalry;

​then their headlong flight laid low both horses and men, and from this even the standards of the legions were thrown into confusion, and many of the front-rank men were trodden down by the rush of horses and vehicles swept through the line; and the Gallic line, following closely as soon as it saw the enemy terrified, gave no space for breathing and recovering themselves.

​Decius cried out, whither they were fleeing or what hope they had in flight; he stood in the way of those yielding and recalled those who were scattered; then, when he could by no force withstand the panic-stricken, calling upon his father Publius Decius by name, ​he said, “Why do I delay any longer the fate of our family? It is given to our race that we should be victims to expiate public dangers; now I will give the legions of the enemy to be sacrificed, together with myself, to Earth and to the Manes.”

​Having said this, he ordered the pontiff Marcus Livius, whom when descending into the battle line he had forbidden to depart from him, to dictate the words in which he should devote himself and the legions of the enemy for the army of the Roman people, the Quirites.

​Then, devoted with the same prayer and in the same habit in which his father Publius Decius had ordered himself to be devoted at the Veseris in the Latin war, ​when he had added to the solemn prayers that he was driving before him dread and flight, slaughter and blood, and the wraths of the celestial and infernal gods;

​and that he would infect the standards, weapons, and arms of the enemy with funereal curses, and that the place of his own destruction would be the same as that of the Gauls and the Samnites —

, having uttered these curses against himself and the enemy, where he saw the Gallic line most dense, he spurred on his horse and, throwing himself upon the hostile weapons, was slain.