chief pontiff without having sat in the curule chair.  Though the consuls found great difficulty in completing the levy, for in consequence of the scarcity of young men, it was not easy to procure enough for the two purposes of forming the new city legions, and recruiting the old ones, the senate forbade them to desist from the attempt, and ordered two triumvirates to be appointed, one of which within, the other without the fiftieth mile from the city, might ascertain the utmost number of free-born men which were to be found in the villages, and market towns, and hamlets, and enlist whom they thought strong enough to bear arms, though they had not attained the military age.  That the tribunes of the people, if they thought proper, should propose to the people, that such as should take the military oath being under seventeen years, should be allowed to reckon their period of service in the same manner as if they had enlisted at seventeen or older.  The two triumvirates, created agreeably to this decree of the senate, enlisted free-born men throughout the country.  At the same time a letter from Marcellus from Sicily, respecting the petition of the troops who served with Publius Lentulus, was read in the senate.  These troops were the relics of the disaster at Cannae, and had been sent out of the way into Sicily, as has been mentioned before, on an understanding that they should not be brought home before the conclusion of the Carthaginian war.

6.  With the permission of Lentulus, these men sent the most distinguished of the cavalry and centurions, and a select body of the legionary infantry, as ambassadors to Marcellus, to his winter quarters.  Having obtained leave to speak, one of them thus addressed him:  “We should have approached you, Marcus Marcellus, when consul in Italy, as soon as that decree of the senate was passed respecting us, which, though not unjust, was certainly severe, had we not hoped, that being sent into a province which was in a state of disorder in consequence of the death of its kings, to carry on an arduous war against the Sicilians and Carthaginians together, we should make atonement to the state by our blood and wounds, in the same manner as, within the memory of our fathers, those who were taken prisoners by Pyrrhus at Heraclea, made atonement by fighting against the same Pyrrhus.  And yet, for what fault of ours, conscript fathers, did you then, or do you now, feel displeasure towards us; for when I look upon you, Marcus Marcellus, I seem to behold both the consuls and the whole body of the senate; and had you been our consul at Cannae, a better fate would have attended the state as well as ourselves.  Permit me, I entreat you, before I complain of the hardship of our situation, to clear ourselves of the guilt with which we are charged.  If it was neither by the anger of the gods, nor by fate, according to whose laws the course of human affairs is unalterably fixed, but by misconduct that we were undone at Cannae;