y. Hannibal had learned a great deal about
the country and he succeeded in misleading Flaminius as to his
movements, drawing him on into a deadly trap. Along the high hills
standing round the shores of Lake Trasimene he posted his men one night
on either side of the pass that closed the entrance. In the morning the
heavy mists concealed them absolutely. Flaminius marched his army right
in, unsuspecting. Hannibal's soldiers swept down the slopes and closed
the Romans in on every side. They were doomed. There was no escape: they
were entrapped between the marshes and the lake; only the vanguard cut
their way through, and they were surrounded later. Fifteen thousand men
perished, among them Flaminius himself, who died fighting. As many were
taken prisoners. Hannibal's losses were far less. Livy comments:

_After Trasimene_

Such was the famous battle of Trasimene, one of the most memorable
disasters of the Roman people. Fifteen thousand men were slain on
the field; ten thousand, scattered in flight all over Etruria,
made for Rome by different ways. Two thousand five hundred of the
enemy fell in the battle; many afterwards died of wounds. Hannibal
released without ransom the prisoners who belonged to the Latin
allies, and threw the Romans into chains. He separated the bodies
of his own men from the heaps of the enemy's dead and gave orders
for their burial. A long search was made for the body of
Flaminius, which he wished to honour with a funeral; but it could
not be found.

Livy, xxii. 7. 1-5.

After this disaster old Fabius was called to the helm and he carried out
his own totally different policy; a policy of endless waiting. During
the whole of the rest of the year Hannibal could not force Fabius to
give battle. Hannibal moved gradually south, along the western coast.
But the Italians did not rise in any great numbers. Hannibal believed
that a crushing defeat of Rome would make them do so, and prepared to
that end. This is Livy's account of Fabius's plan of campaign, and of
some of the difficulties he met with in carrying it out: difficulties
not only from Hannibal but from his own captains. Thus Varro, his master
of the horse, was constantly stirring up discontent.

_The Strategy of Fabius_

The dictator took over the consul's army from his deputy, Fulvius
Fleccus, and marching through the Sabine land came to Tibur on the
day which he had fixed for the gathering of the new