g seen the enemy,
returned about sunset; when the consul went so far in reprimanding him
as to assert, that he had been the only obstacle to their retorting on
the enemy the disaster sustained at Cannae. The following day the
Roman came into the field, but the Carthaginian, beaten even by his
own tacit confession, kept within his camp. Giving up all hope of
getting possession of Nola, a thing never attempted without loss,
during the silence of the night of the third day he set out for
Tarentum, which he had better hopes of having betrayed to him.

18. Nor were the Roman affairs administered with less spirit at home
than in the field. The censors being freed from the care of letting
out the erection of public works, from the low state of the treasury,
turned their attention to the regulation of men's morals, and the
chastisement of vices which sprung up during the war, in the same
manner as constitutions broken down by protracted disease, generate
other maladies. In the first place, they cited those persons who,
after the battle of Cannae, were said to have formed a design of
abandoning the commonwealth, and leaving Italy. The chief of these was
Lucius Caecilius Metellus, who happened to be then quaestor. In the
next place, as neither he nor the other persons concerned were able to
exculpate themselves on being ordered to make their defence, they
pronounced them guilty of having used words and discourse prejudicial
to the state, that a conspiracy might be formed for the abandonment of
Italy. After them were cited those persons who showed too much
ingenuity in inventing a method of discharging the obligation of their
oath, namely, such of the prisoners as concluded that the oath which
they had sworn to return, would be fulfilled by their going back
privately to Hannibal's camp, after setting out on their journey. Such
of these and of the above-mentioned as had horses at the public
expense were deprived of them, and all were degraded from their tribes
and disfranchised. Nor was the attention of the censors confined to
the regulation of the senate and the equestrian order. They erased
from the lists of the junior centuries the names of all who had not
served during the last four years, unless they were regularly
exempted, or were prevented by sickness. Those too, amounting to more
than two thousand names, were numbered among the disfranchised, and
were all degraded. To this more gentle stigma affixed by the censors,
a seve