ult turned out
altogether different: for never before in any other war did the Roman
soldiers enter the field with greater fury, so exasperated were they
by the taunts of the enemy on the one hand, and the dilatoriness of
the consuls on the other. Before the Etruscans had time to form their
ranks, their javelins having been rather thrown away at random, in
the first confusion, than aimed at the enemy, the battle had become
a hand-to-hand encounter, even with swords, in which the fury of
war rages most fiercely. Among the foremost the Fabian family was
distinguished for the sight it afforded and the example it presented
to its fellow-citizens; one of these, Quintus Fabius, who had been
consul two years before, as he advanced at the head of his men against
a dense body of Veientines, and incautiously engaged amid numerous
parties of the enemy, received a sword-thrust through the breast at
the hands of a Tuscan emboldened by his bodily strength and skill in
arms: on the weapon being extracted, Fabius fell forward on the
wound. Both armies felt the fall of this one man, and the Romans in
consequence were beginning to give way, when the consul Marcus Fabius
leaped over the body of his prostrate kinsman, and, holding his
buckler in front, cried out: "Is this what you swore, soldiers, that
you would return to the camp in flight? Are you so afraid of your
most cowardly foes, rather than of Jupiter and Mars, by whom you have
sworn? Well, then, I, who have taken no oath, will either return
victorious, or will fall fighting here beside thee, Quintus Fabius."
Then Caeso Fabius, the consul of the preceding year, addressed the
consul: "Brother, is it by these words you think you will prevail on
them to fight? The gods, by whom they have sworn, will bring it about.
Let us also, as becomes men of noble birth, as is worthy of the Fabian
name, kindle the courage of the soldiers by fighting rather than by
exhortation." Thus the two Fabii rushed forward to the front with
spears presented, and carried the whole line with them.

The battle being thus restored in one quarter, Gnaeus Manlius, the
consul, with no less ardour, encouraged the fight on the other wing,
where the course of the fortune of war was almost identical. For, as
the soldiers eagerly followed Quintus Fabius on the one wing, so did
they follow the consul Manlius on this, as he was driving the enemy
before him now nearly routed. When, having received a severe wound, he
retire