een disastrous to his country.

Such was the end of the battle of Cannae,[85] in which both sides
fought with the most conspicuous gallantry, the conquered no less than
the conquerors. This is proved by the fact that, out of six thousand
horse, only seventy escaped with Gaius Terentius to Venusia, and about
three hundred of the allied cavalry to various towns in the
neighborhood. Of the infantry ten thousand were taken prisoners in
fair fight, but were not actually engaged in the battle: of those who
were actually engaged only about three thousand perhaps escaped to the
towns of the surrounding district; all the rest died nobly, to the
number of seventy thousand, the Carthaginians being on this occasion,
as on previous ones, mainly indebted for their victory to their
superiority in cavalry: a lesson to posterity that in actual war it is
better to have half the number of infantry, and the superiority in
cavalry, than to engage your enemy with an equality in both. On the
side of Hannibal there fell four thousand Celts, fifteen hundred
Iberians and Libyans, and about two hundred horse....

The result of this battle, such as I have described it, had the
consequences which both sides expected. For the Carthaginians by their
victory were thenceforth masters of nearly the whole of the Italian
coast which is called _Magna Graecia_. Thus the Tarentines immediately
submitted; and the Arpani and some of the Campanian states invited
Hannibal to come to them; and the rest were with one consent turning
their eyes to the Carthaginians: who, accordingly, began now to have
high hopes of being able to carry even Rome itself by assault.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 79: Polybius, who, as will be noted, belongs to a period two and
a half centuries later than the greatest Greek historians--Herodotus,
Thucydides and Xenophon--is classed by Mahaffy as "the soberest and most
valuable" of those who wrote with masters as their models. While he has
suffered from the fate of all imitators, his work is "of the highest value
to the historian, as a long series of approving critics has amply shown."
He has never been read as a stylist, "nor could he be said to form a part
of the classical literature of Greece."]

[Footnote 80: From Book IV of the "Histories." Translated by Evelyn S.
Shuckburgh. In this battle Hannibal had about 50,000 men, and the
Romans about 80,000.]

[Footnote 81: Gaius Terentius Varro, who was then Consul and died
later than 200 B