rising ground, and hearing only the shouting and clashing of arms, they could not know nor discern, by reason of the mist, what was the fortune of the battle.  At length, the affair being decided, when the mist, dispelled by the increasing heat of the sun, had cleared the atmosphere, then, in the clear light, the mountains and plains showed their ruin and the Roman army miserably destroyed; and thus, lest, being descried at a distance, the cavalry should be sent against them, hastily snatching up their standards, they hurried away with all possible expedition.  On the following day, when in addition to their extreme sufferings in other respects, famine also was at hand, Maharbal, who had followed them during the night with the whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them depart with single garments, if they would deliver up their arms, they surrendered themselves; which promise was kept by Hannibal with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains.

7.  This is the celebrated battle at the Trasimenus, and recorded among the few disasters of the Roman people.  Fifteen thousand Romans were slain in the battle.  Ten thousand, who had been scattered in the flight through all Etruria, returned to the city by different roads.  One thousand five hundred of the enemy perished in the battle; many on both sides died afterwards of their wounds.  The carnage on both sides is related, by some authors, to have been many times greater.  I, besides that I would relate nothing drawn from a worthless source, to which the minds of historians generally incline too much, have as my chief authority Fabius, who was contemporary with the events of this war.  Such of the captives as belonged to the Latin confederacy being dismissed without ransom, and the Romans thrown into chains, Hannibal ordered the bodies of his own men to be gathered from the heaps of the enemy, and buried:  the body of Flaminius too, which was searched for with great diligence for burial, he could not find.  On the first intelligence of this defeat at Rome, a concourse of the people, dismayed and terrified, took place in the forum.  The matrons, wandering through the streets, ask all they meet, what sudden disaster was reported? what was the fate of the army?  And when the multitude, like a full assembly, having directed their course to the comitium and senate-house, were calling upon the magistrates, at length, a little before sunset, Marcus Pomponius, the praetor, declares, “We have been defeated in a great battle;” and though nothing more definite was heard from him, yet, full of the rumours which they had caught one from another, they carry back to their homes intelligence, that the consul, with a great part of his troops, was slain; that a few only survived, and these either widely dispersed in flight through Etruria, or else captured by the enemy.  As many as had been the calamities of the vanquished army, into so many anxieties were the minds of those distracted whose relations