ards taken.

15. The Apulians would have joined their forces to the Samnites before
this battle, had not the consul, Publius Decius, encamped in their
neighbourhood at Maleventum; and, finding means to bring them to an
engagement, put them to the rout. Here, likewise, there was more of
flight than of bloodshed. Two thousand of the Apulians were slain; but
Decius, despising such an enemy, led his legions into Samnium. There
the two consular armies, overrunning every part of the country during
the space of five months, laid it entirely waste. There were in
Samnium forty-five places where Decius, and eighty-six where the other
consul, encamped. Nor did they leave traces only of having been there,
as ramparts and trenches, but other dreadful mementos of it--general
desolation and regions depopulated. Fabius also took the city of
Cimetra, where he made prisoners two thousand four hundred soldiers;
and there were slain in the assault about four hundred and thirty.
Going thence to Rome to preside at the elections, he used all
expedition in despatching that business. All the first-called
centuries voted Quintus Fabius consul. Appius Claudius was a
candidate, a man of consular rank, daring and ambitious; and as he
wished not more ardently for the attainment of that honour for
himself, than he did that the patricians might recover the possession
of both places in the consulship, he laboured, with all his own power,
supported by that of the whole body of the nobility, to prevail on
them to appoint him consul along with Quintus Fabius. To this Fabius
objected, giving, at first, the same reasons which he had advanced the
year before. The nobles then all gathered round his seat, and besought
him to raise up the consulship out of the plebeian mire, and to
restore both to the office itself, and to the patrician rank, their
original dignity. Fabius then, procuring silence, allayed their warmth
by a qualifying speech, declaring, that "he would have so managed, as
to have received the names of two patricians, if he had seen an
intention of appointing any other than himself to the consulship. As
things now stood, he would not set so bad a precedent as to admit his
own name among the candidates; such a proceeding being contrary to the
laws." Whereupon Appius Claudius, and Lucius Volumnius, a plebeian,
who had likewise been colleagues in that office before, were elected
consuls. The nobility reproached Fabius for declining to act in
conjunc