ediately given for setting fire to their horns and driving them
violently up the mountains before them. The mere terror excited by the
flame, which cast a glare from their heads, and the heat now
approaching the quick and the roots of their horns, drove on the oxen
as if goaded by madness. By which dispersion, on a sudden all the
surrounding shrubs were in a blaze, as if the mountains and woods had
been on fire; and the unavailing tossing of their heads quickening the
flame, exhibited an appearance as of men running to and fro on every
side. Those who had been placed to guard the passage of the wood, when
they saw fires on the tops of the mountains, and some over their own
heads, concluding that they were surrounded, abandoned their post;
making for the tops of the mountains in the direction in which the
fewest fires blazed, as being the safest course; however they fell in
with some oxen which had strayed from their herds. At first, when they
beheld them at a distance, they stood fixed in amazement at the
miracle, as it appeared to them, of creatures breathing fire;
afterwards, when it showed itself to be a human stratagem, then,
forsooth, concluding that there was an ambuscade, as they are hurrying
away in flight, with increased alarm, they fall in also with the
light-armed troops of the enemy. But the night, when the fear was
equally shared, kept them from commencing the battle till morning.
Meanwhile Hannibal, having marched his whole army through the pass,
and having cut off some of the enemy in the very defile, pitches his
camp in the country of Allifae.

18. Fabius perceived this tumult, but concluding that it was a snare,
and being disinclined for a battle, particularly by night, kept his
troops within the works. At break of day a battle took place under the
summit of the mountain, in which the Romans, who were considerably
superior in numbers, would have easily overpowered the light-armed of
the enemy, cut off as they were from their party, had not a cohort of
Spaniards, sent back by Hannibal for that very purpose, reached the
spot. That body being more accustomed to mountains, and being more
adapted, both from the agility of their limbs and also from the
character of their arms, to skirmishing amid rocks and crags, easily
foiled, by their manner of fighting, an enemy loaded with arms,
accustomed to level ground and the steady kind of fighting. Separating
from a contest thus by no means equal, they proceeded to