enemies.  Both armies halted, and were preparing themselves for battle.  Scipio places his spearmen and Gallic cavalry in front; the Romans and what force of allies he had with him, in reserve.  Hannibal receives the horsemen who rode with the rein in the centre, and strengthens his wings with Numidians.  When the shout was scarcely raised, the spearmen fled among the reserve to the second line:  there was then a contest of the cavalry, for some time doubtful; but afterwards, on account of the foot soldiers, who were intermingled, causing confusion among the horses, many of the riders falling off from their horses, or leaping down where they saw their friends surrounded and hard pressed, the battle for the most part came to be fought on foot; until the Numidians, who were in the wings, having made a small circuit, showed themselves on the rear.  That alarm dismayed the Romans, and the wound of the consul, and the danger to his life, warded off by the interposition of his son, then just arriving at the age of puberty, augmented their fears.  This youth will be found to be the same to whom the glory of finishing this war belongs, and to whom the name of Africanus was given, on account of his splendid victory over Hannibal and the Carthaginians.  The flight, however, of the spearmen, whom the Numidians attacked first, was the most disorderly.  The rest of the cavalry, in a close body, protecting, not only with their arms, but also with their bodies, the consul, whom they had received into the midst of them, brought him back to the camp without any where giving way in disorder or precipitation.  Coelius attributes the honour of saving the consul to a slave, by nation a Ligurian.  I indeed should rather wish that the account about the son was true, which also most authors have transmitted, and the report of which has generally obtained credit.

47.  This was the first battle with Hannibal; from which it clearly appeared that the Carthaginian was superior in cavalry; and on that account, that open plains, such as lie between the Po and the Alps, were not suited to the Romans for carrying on the war.  On the following night, therefore, the soldiers being ordered to prepare their baggage in silence, the camp broke up from the Ticinus, and they hastened to the Po, in order that the rafts by which the consul had formed a bridge over the river, being not yet loosened, he might lead his forces across without disturbance or pursuit of the enemy.  They arrived at Placentia before Hannibal had ascertained that they had set out from the Ticinus.  He took, however, six hundred of those who loitered on the farther bank, who were slowly unfastening the raft; but he was not able to pass the bridge, as the whole raft floated down the stream as soon as the ends were unfastened.  Coelius relates that Mago, with the cavalry and Spanish infantry, immediately swam the river; and that Hannibal himself led the army across by fords higher up the Po, the elephants being opposed to the stream in a line to