According to Appian, he met the consul at Canusium, on
the Aufidus. [Sidenote: Battle of Mount Tifata. Defeat of Norbanus.]
But it is probable that this is a mistake, and that the first battle
was fought at Mount Tifata, a spur of the Apennines, near Capua.
Norbanus had seized Sulla's envoys, and this so enraged the soldiers
of the latter that they charged down the hill with irresistible
impetuosity, and killed 6000 of the foe. Norbanus fled to Capua. Only
seventy of the Sullans were killed. Sulla now crossed the Volturnus,
and marching along the Appian Road met the other consul, Scipio, at
Teanum, with whom he opened negotiations. Scipio sent Sertorius to
Norbanus, who was blockaded in Capua, to consult him on the terms
proposed. Sertorius, who had guessed what was coming and hoped to
prevent it by something more efficacious than the advice of Norbanus,
went out of his way and seized Suessa. This would interrupt Sulla's
immediate communications with the sea, of which he was master. Sulla
complained; but all the while he was, as Sertorius had warned Scipio,
corrupting the Consul's troops. [Sidenote: Scipio's troops desert to
Sulla.] They murmured when Scipio returned the hostages which Sulla
had given; and, when the latter on their invitation approached their
lines they went over to him in a body. On hearing of this Carbo said,
that in contending with Sulla he had to contend with a lion and a fox,
and that the fox gave him most trouble.

It may be noted here that Sulla, whose calculated moderation was
paying him well--the more pleasantly because he knew that he could
wreak his revenge afterwards at his leisure--never scrupled to employ
every kind of subterfuge and lie. [Sidenote: Sulla's mendacity.] He
tricked and lied on his march to Rome in 88. He lied foully to the
Samnites after the battle of the Colline Gate. And he lied in his
Memoirs, when he said that he only lost four at Chaeroneia, and
twenty-three at Sacriportus, where he also said that he killed 20,000
of the foe. Absurd assertions like these may have been dictated as a
sort of lavish acknowledgment paid to fortune, of whom he liked to be
thought the favourite--lies that no one believed or was expected to
believe, but keeping up a fiction of which it was his foible to be
proud. [Sidenote: His success due greatly to desertions.] Another
thing we may note is, that this was only the first of a long series
of treasons to which, as much almost as to his own gener