History of Rome

​And Marcus Atilius, the legate of the first princeps from the same legion, began to advance the standard against the cohort of the Spaniards; and those who were in command of the camp, Lucius Porcius Licinus and Titus Popilius, the legates, fought fiercely in front of the rampart and slew the elephants as they were crossing on the rampart itself.

​When the ditch had been filled with their bodies, it gave a passage to the enemy, as if a mound or a bridge had been thrown over it. There, over the heap of the fallen elephants, a dreadful slaughter was made.

​In the other part of the camp, the Campanians and the Carthaginian garrison had already been repulsed, and the fighting was going on right under the gate of Capua, which leads to the Volturnus;

​and the armed men did not so much resist the Romans as they broke in, as the gate, equipped with ballistas and scorpions, kept the enemy off at a distance with missiles.

​And the wounding of the general Appius Claudius checked the onset of the Romans, who, as he was encouraging his men before the foremost standards, was struck with a javelin under his left shoulder at the top of his breast. Nevertheless, a great number of the enemy was slain before the gate, and the rest were driven in panic into the city.

​And Hannibal, after he saw the slaughter of the cohort of the Spaniards and that the camp of the enemy was being defended with the utmost force, abandoned the assault and began to withdraw his standards and turn the column of infantry, placing the cavalry in the rear to prevent the enemy from pressing hard.

​The ardor of the legions to pursue the enemy was immense; but Flaccus ordered the retreat to be sounded, thinking that enough had been accomplished for both purposes, so that both the Campanians might perceive how little protection there was in Hannibal, and Hannibal himself might feel it.

​Those who are the authors of the account of this battle report that there were slain on that day eight thousand men of Hannibal’s army and three thousand of the Campanians, and that fifteen standards were taken from the Carthaginians and eighteen from the Campanians.

​Among other authors, I find that there was by no means so great a clash of battle, and that there was more panic than fighting, when the Numidians and Spaniards, with the elephants, had unexpectedly burst into the Roman camp, ​and the elephants, going through the middle of the camp, caused the destruction of the tents with a great noise and the flight of the beasts of burden breaking their tethers;

​and that a trick also was added to the confusion by those sent by Hannibal, who, in Italian garb and knowing the Latin tongue, ordered in the name of the consuls, since the camp was lost, that each of the soldiers should flee to the nearest mountains for himself;

​but that this trick was quickly discovered and suppressed with a great slaughter of the enemy, and the elephants were driven out of the camp with fire.

​This was the last battle—in whatever way it was begun and ended—before the surrender of Capua. The medix tuticus, who is the chief magistrate among the Campanians, was Seppius Loesius in that year, a man born of an obscure family and of slender fortune.

​They say that when his mother was once managing the household for him as a ward, upon a domestic prodigy, when the soothsayer had replied that the supreme power of Capua would come to that boy, ​she, recognizing nothing towards that hope, said: “Indeed, you speak of the ruined state of the Campanians, when the highest honor shall come to my son.”

​That mockery of the truth turned itself into truth; for when they were hard pressed by famine and the sword, and no hope remained that their state could be maintained, while those who had been born to the expectation of honors ​were refusing the offices, Loesius, by complaining that Capua was deserted and betrayed by its leading men, took the chief magistracy, the last of all the Campanians.