milius Paulus and Terentius Varro are routed at Cannae,
and forty thousand men slain, among whom were Paulus the consul,
eighty senators, and thirty who had served the office of consul,
praetor, or edile. A design projected by some noble youths of quitting
Italy in despair after this calamity, is intrepidly quashed by Publius
Cornelius Scipio, a military tribune, afterwards surnamed Africanus.
Successes in Spain, eight thousand slaves are enlisted by the Romans,
they refuse to ransom the captives, they go out in a body to meet
Varro, and thank him for not having despaired of the commonwealth._

* * * * *

1. Spring was now at hand, when Hannibal quitted his winter quarters,
having both attempted in vain to cross the Apennines, from the
intolerable cold, and having remained with great danger and alarm. The
Gauls, whom the hope of plunder and spoil had collected, when, instead
of being themselves engaged in carrying and driving away booty from
the lands of others, they saw their own lands made the seat of war and
burdened by the wintering of the armies of both forces, turned their
hatred back again from the Romans to Hannibal; and though plots were
frequently concerted against him by their chieftains, he was preserved
by the treachery they manifested towards each other; disclosing their
conspiracy with the same inconstancy with which they had conspired;
and by changing sometimes his dress, at other times the fashion of his
hair, he protected himself from treachery by deception. However, this
fear was the cause of his more speedily quitting his winter quarters.
Meanwhile Cneius Servilius, the consul, entered upon his office at
Rome, on the ides of March. There, when he had consulted the senate on
the state of the republic in general, the indignation against
Flaminius was rekindled. They said "that they had created indeed two
consuls, that they had but one; for what regular authority had the
other, or what auspices? That their magistrates took these with them
from home, from the tutelar deities of themselves and the state, after
the celebration of the Latin holidays; the sacrifice upon the mountain
being completed, and the vows duly offered up in the Capitol: that
neither could an unofficial individual take the auspices, nor could
one who had gone from home without them, take them new, and for the
first time, in a foreign soil." Prodigies announced from many places
at the same time, augme