advanced without previously exploring his route, he fell suddenly into an ambuscade; and after much slaughter of his men, with difficulty made his way into the open plains.  Here a camp was fortified, and because confidence was wanting to the Gauls to attack it, the spirit of the soldiers revived, although it was sufficiently evident that their strength was much clipped.  The journey was then commenced anew; nor while the army was led in march through open tracts did the enemy appear:  but, when the woods were again entered, then attacking the rear, amid great confusion and alarm of all, they slew eight hundred soldiers, and took six standards.  There was an end to the Gauls of creating, and to the Romans of experiencing terror, when they escaped from the pathless and entangled thicket; then easily defending their march through the open ground, the Romans directed their course to Tanetum, a village near the Po; where, by a temporary fortification, and the supplies conveyed by the river, and also by the aid of the Brixian Gauls, they defended themselves against the daily increasing multitude of their enemies.

26.  When the account of this sudden disturbance was brought to Rome, and the senators heard that the Punic had also been increased by a Gallic war, they order Caius Atilius, the praetor, to carry assistance to Manlius with one Roman legion and five thousand of the allies, enrolled in the late levy by the consul:  who, without any contest, for the enemy had retired through fear, arrived at Tanetum.  At the same time Publius Cornelius, a new legion having been levied in the room of that which was sent with the praetor, setting out from the city with sixty ships of war, by the coast of Etruria and Liguria, and then the mountains of the Salyes, arrived at Marseilles, and pitched his camp at the nearest mouth of the Rhone, (for the stream flows down to the sea divided into several channels,) scarcely as yet well believing that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenaean mountains; whom when he ascertained to be also meditating the passage of the Rhone, uncertain in what place he might meet him, his soldiers not yet being sufficiently recovered from the tossing of the sea, he sends forward, in the mean time, three hundred chosen horses, with Massilian guides and Gallic auxiliaries, to explore all the country, and observe the enemy from a safe distance.  Hannibal, the other states being pacified by fear or bribes, had now come into the territory of the Volcae, a powerful nation.  They, indeed, dwell on both sides of the Rhone:  but doubting that the Carthaginian could be driven from the hither bank, in order that they might have the river as a defence, having transported almost all their effects across the Rhone, occupied in arms the farther bank of the river.  Hannibal, by means of presents, persuades the other inhabitants of the river-side, and some even of the Volcae themselves, whom their homes had detained, to collect from every quarter and build ships; and they at the same time themselves