History of Rome

​Hannibal, when he was already not far from there, sent ahead the Gaetulians with a commander named Isalca, and ordered them, first, if an opportunity for a conference should be given, to entice them with mild words to open the gates and receive a garrison, but if they should persist in their obstinacy, to conduct operations by force and to try if they could invade the city in any part.

​When they approached the walls, because there was silence, it seemed deserted; and the barbarian, thinking that they had withdrawn out of fear, prepared to force the gates and break open the bars, ​when suddenly, the gates being thrown open, two cohorts, drawn up inside for this very purpose, burst out with a huge uproar and made a slaughter of the enemy.

​The first having been thus repulsed, Maharbal, sent with a larger force of men, did not himself withstand the onset of the cohorts.

​Finally, Hannibal, having pitched his camp before the very walls, prepared to assault the small city and the small garrison with the utmost force and with all his troops; and while he was pressing and harassing them, the walls being surrounded on all sides, he lost several soldiers and all the most active men, who were struck from the wall and the towers.

​Once, when they burst out of their own accord, he almost cut them off by opposing a line of elephants, and drove them terrified into the city, with a sufficiently large number slain, considering their great paucity. More would have fallen, had not night intervened in the battle.

​On the following day, the minds of all were inflamed for the assault, especially after a golden mural crown was proposed, and the general himself reproached the conquerors of Saguntum for their sluggish siege of a fort situated on level ground, reminding individuals and all together of Cannae, Trasumene, and Trebia.

​Thence, vineae also began to be pushed forward and tunnels to be dug. Nor, against the various attempts of the enemy, did any force or skill fail on the part of the allies of the Romans:

​they erected bulwarks against the vineae, intercepted the enemy’s tunnels with transverse tunnels, and opposed their undertakings both openly and secretly, until shame turned even Hannibal away from the attempt, and having fortified his camp and placed a moderate garrison, lest the enterprise should seem abandoned, he withdrew to Capua into winter quarters.

​There, for the greater part of the winter, he kept his army in sheltered quarters—an army often and long hardened against all human ills, but inexperienced in and unaccustomed to good things.

​Therefore, those whom no force of adversity had conquered, excessive luxury and immoderate pleasures ruined; and they did so the more intensely, the more greedily they had plunged into them from unfamiliarity.

​For sleep and wine and banquets and harlots and baths and idleness, growing daily more seductive through habit, so enervated their bodies and minds, that thereafter their past victories protected them more than their present strength. ​And this fault of the leader was held among those skilled in military arts to be greater than that he had not led his army directly from the field of Cannae to the city of Rome; for that delay could seem only to have postponed victory, but this error to have taken away the power to conquer. And so, by Hercules, just as if with another army ​he were marching out of Capua, he retained nothing anywhere of his former discipline.

​For most of them returned entangled with harlots, and, as soon as they began to be kept under skins and the march and other military labor took them up, they failed in body and mind like recruits. ​And thereafter, through the whole time of summer campaigns, a large part slipped away from their standards without leave, nor did the deserters have any other hiding place than Capua.