underbolt long
before intended for the Romans, it immediately burst, as if hurried
along by resistless violence, through the middle of the Alps, and
descended, from those snows of incredible altitude, on the plains of
Italy, as if it had been hurled from the skies. The violence of its
first assault burst, with a mighty sound, between the Po and the
Ticinus. There the army under Scipio was routed; and the general
himself, being wounded, would have fallen into the hands of the enemy,
had not his son, then quite a boy, covered his father with his shield,
and rescued him from death. This was the Scipio who grew up for the
conquest of Africa, and who was to receive a name from its ill-fortune.

To Ticinus succeeded Trebia, where, in the consulship of Sempronius, the
second outburst of the Punic War was spent. On that occasion, the crafty
enemy, having chosen a cold and snowy day, and having first warmed
themselves at their fires, and anointed their bodies with oil, conquered
us, though they were men that came from the south and a warm sun, by the
aid (strange to say!) of our own winter.

The third thunderbolt of Hannibal fell at the Trasimene lake, when
Flaminius was commander. There also was employed a new stratagem of
Carthaginian subtlety; for a body of cavalry, being concealed by a mist
rising from the lake, and by the osiers growing in the fens, fell upon
the rear of the Romans as they were fighting. Nor can we complain of the
gods; for swarms of bees settling upon the standards, the reluctance of
the eagles to move forward, and a great earthquake that happened at the
commencement of the battle--unless, indeed, it was the tramping of horse
and foot, and the violent concussion of arms, that produced this
trembling of the ground--had forewarned the rash leader of approaching
defeat.

The fourth and almost mortal wound of the Roman Empire was at Cannae, an
obscure village of Apulia; which, however, became famous by the
greatness of the defeat, its celebrity being acquired by the slaughter
of forty thousand men. Here the general, the ground, the face of heaven,
the day, indeed, all nature conspired together for the destruction of
the unfortunate army. For Hannibal, the most artful of generals, not
content with sending pretended deserters among the Romans, who fell upon
their rear as they were fighting, but having also noted the nature of
the ground in those open plains, where the heat of the sun is extremely
violent, the