they might get out to the assistance of their allies.  But his Punic accent, ill adapted to the pronunciation of Latin names, caused the guide to understand Casilinum, instead of Casinum; and leaving his former course, he descends through the territory of Allifae, Calatia, and Cales, into the plain of Stella, where, seeing the country enclosed on all sides by mountains and rivers, he calls the guide to him, and asks him where in the world he was? when he replied, that on that day he would lodge at Casilinum:  then at length the error was discovered, and that Casinum lay at a great distance in another direction.  Having scourged the guide with rods and crucified him, in order to strike terror into all others, he fortified a camp, and sent Maharbal with the cavalry into the Falernian territory to pillage.  This depredation reached as far as the waters of Sinuessa; the Numidians caused destruction to a vast extent, but flight and consternation through a still wider space.  Yet not even the terror of these things, when all around was consuming in the flames of war, could shake the fidelity of the allies; for this manifest reason, because they lived under a temperate and mild government:  nor were they unwilling to submit to those who were superior to them, which is the only bond of fidelity.

14.  But when the enemy’s camp was pitched on the Vulturnus, and the most delightful country in Italy was being consumed by fire, and the farm-houses, on all hands, were smoking from the flames, whilst Fabius led his troops along the heights of Mount Massicus, then the strife had nearly been kindled anew, for they had been quiet for a few days, because, as the army had marched quicker than usual, they had supposed that the object of this haste was to save Campania from devastation; but when they arrived at the extreme ridge of Mount Massicus, and the enemy appeared under their eyes, burning the houses of the Falernian territory, and of the settlers of Sinuessa, and no mention made of battle, Minucius exclaims, “Are we come here to see our allies butchered, and their property burned, as a spectacle to be enjoyed? and if we are not moved with shame on account of any others, are we not on account of these citizens, whom our fathers sent as settlers to Sinuessa, that this frontier might be protected from the Samnite foe:  which now not the neighbouring Samnite wastes with fire, but a Carthaginian foreigner, who has advanced even thus far from the remotest limits of the world, through our dilatoriness and inactivity?  What! are we so degenerate from our ancestors as tamely to see that coast filled with Numidian and Moorish foes, along which our fathers considered it a disgrace to their government that the Carthaginian fleets should cruise?  We, who erewhile, indignant at the storming of Saguntum, appealed not to men only, but to treaties and to gods, behold Hannibal scaling the walls of a Roman colony unmoved.  The smoke from the flames of our farm-houses and lands