dictator, to
the effect, that if he thought it for the interest of the state, he
should come, together with the master of the horse and the praetor,
Marcus Marcellus, to hold the election for the succeeding consuls, in
order that the fathers might learn from them in person in what
condition the state was, and take measures according to circumstances.
All who were summoned came, leaving lieutenant-generals to hold
command of the legions. The dictator, speaking briefly and modestly of
himself, attributed much of the glory Of the campaign to the master of
the horse, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. He then gave out the day for
the comitia, at which the consuls created were Lucius Posthumius in
his absence, being then employed in the government of the province of
Gaul, for the third time, and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who was
then master of the horse and curule aedile. Marcus Valerius Laevinus,
Appius Claudius Pulcher, Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, and Quintus Mucius
Scaevola, were then created praetors. After the election of the
magistrates, the dictator returned to his army, which was in winter
quarters at Teanum, leaving his master of the horse at Rome, to take
the sense of the fathers relative to the armies to be enlisted and
embodied for the service of the year, as he was about to enter upon
the magistracy after a few days. While busily occupied with these
matters, intelligence arrived of a fresh disaster--fortune crowding
into this year one calamity after another--that Lucius Posthumius,
consul elect, himself with all his army was destroyed in Gaul. He was
to march his troops through a vast wood, which the Gauls called
Litana. On the right and left of his route, the natives had sawed the
trees in such a manner that they continued standing upright, but would
fall when impelled by a slight force. Posthumius had with him two
Roman legions, and besides had levied so great a number of allies
along the Adriatic Sea, that he led into the enemy's country
twenty-five thousand men. As soon as this army entered the wood, the
Gauls, who were posted around its extreme skirts, pushed down the
outermost of the sawn trees, which falling on those next them, and
these again on others which of themselves stood tottering and scarcely
maintained their position, crushed arms, men, and horses in an
indiscriminate manner, so that scarcely ten men escaped. For, most of
them being killed by the trunks and broken boughs of trees, the Gauls,
who bes