History of Rome

​But such a great desire to fight with Hannibal possessed the consul Marcellus that he never believed the camps were brought close enough to each other.

​On that occasion also, as he was going out from the rampart, he gave the signal for the soldiers to be ready at their posts, so that if the hill to which they were going to reconnoitre should please them, they might pack up their baggage and follow.

​There was a small space of plain before the camp; from there a road, open on all sides and visible, led to the hill. A scout, stationed not by any means in hope of so great a prize, but to see if they could capture any stragglers who had advanced too far from the camp for the purpose of foraging or woodcutting, gave the signal to the Numidians that they should all rise up together from their respective hiding places.

​Those who were to rise from the ridge itself to block them in front did not appear until those who were to cut off the road from behind had gone around.

​Then all rose up from every side and, raising a shout, made an attack. Although the consuls were in that valley, so that they could neither escape to the ridge occupied by the enemy nor, being surrounded, have a retreat from behind, yet the contest could have been prolonged for a longer time, had not the flight begun by the Etruscans struck terror into the rest.

​The Fregellans, though deserted by the Etruscans, did not however give up the fight, as long as the consuls, remaining unhurt, maintained the struggle by encouraging them and themselves fighting in part;

​but after they saw both consuls wounded, and Marcellus even pierced with a lance, falling dying from his horse, then they themselves also — and very few survived — fled with the consul Crispinus, who had been struck by two javelins, and the young Marcellus, who was himself wounded.

​Aulus Manlius, the military tribune, was killed, and of the two prefects of the allies, Manius Aulius was slain, Lucius Arrenius captured. Also five of the consuls’ lictores fell alive into the hands of the enemy; the rest were either killed or escaped with the consul. Forty-three ​horsemen fell either in battle or in flight, and eighteen were captured alive.

​There had been a tumult in the camp to go to the assistance of the consuls, when they saw the consul and the son of the other consul wounded, and the scanty remains of the ill-fated expedition, coming toward the camp.

​The death of Marcellus, while lamentable in other respects, was especially so because, neither in accordance with his age — for he was now over sixty years old — nor in keeping with the prudence of an experienced general, he had so heedlessly plunged himself, his colleague, and almost the entire commonwealth into ruin.

​I should make many digressions around a single subject if I wished to follow out all the details in which authors differ concerning the death of Marcellus.

​To pass over others, Coelius produces a threefold record of the event: one handed down by rumour, another written in the funeral oration of his son, who was present at the action, and a third which he himself brings forward as investigated and ascertained by him.

​However, the rumour varies to such an extent that nevertheless most authors record that he went out of the camp for the purpose of reconnoitring the place, and all hand down that he was surrounded by an ambush.