fire the whole country around it.  Aemilius Paulus and Terentius Varro are routed at Cannae, and forty thousand men slain, among whom were Paulus the consul, eighty senators, and thirty who had served the office of consul, praetor, or edile.  A design projected by some noble youths of quitting Italy in despair after this calamity, is intrepidly quashed by Publius Cornelius Scipio, a military tribune, afterwards surnamed Africanus.  Successes in Spain, eight thousand slaves are enlisted by the Romans, they refuse to ransom the captives, they go out in a body to meet Varro, and thank him for not having despaired of the commonwealth.

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1.  Spring was now at hand, when Hannibal quitted his winter quarters, having both attempted in vain to cross the Apennines, from the intolerable cold, and having remained with great danger and alarm.  The Gauls, whom the hope of plunder and spoil had collected, when, instead of being themselves engaged in carrying and driving away booty from the lands of others, they saw their own lands made the seat of war and burdened by the wintering of the armies of both forces, turned their hatred back again from the Romans to Hannibal; and though plots were frequently concerted against him by their chieftains, he was preserved by the treachery they manifested towards each other; disclosing their conspiracy with the same inconstancy with which they had conspired; and by changing sometimes his dress, at other times the fashion of his hair, he protected himself from treachery by deception.  However, this fear was the cause of his more speedily quitting his winter quarters.  Meanwhile Cneius Servilius, the consul, entered upon his office at Rome, on the ides of March.  There, when he had consulted the senate on the state of the republic in general, the indignation against Flaminius was rekindled.  They said “that they had created indeed two consuls, that they had but one; for what regular authority had the other, or what auspices?  That their magistrates took these with them from home, from the tutelar deities of themselves and the state, after the celebration of the Latin holidays; the sacrifice upon the mountain being completed, and the vows duly offered up in the Capitol:  that neither could an unofficial individual take the auspices, nor could one who had gone from home without them, take them new, and for the first time, in a foreign soil.”  Prodigies announced from many places at the same time, augmented the terror:  in Sicily, that several darts belonging to the soldiers had taken fire; and in Sardinia, that the staff of a horseman, who was going his rounds upon a wall, took fire as he held it in his hand; that the shores had blazed with frequent fires; that two shields had sweated blood at Praeneste; that redhot stones had fallen from the heavens at Arpi; that shields were seen in the heavens, and the sun fighting with the moon, at Capena; that two moons rose in the day-time; that the waters of Caere had