Such was the spectacle which met the eyes of the legionaries as they crowned the heights of Cynoscephalæ, but no thrill did it send to those stern hearts, but that of ardor and of emulation. Never was such a war-cry heard as burst that day over the rugged hills, for not only did the combatants on both sides, as they rushed to hand and hand encounter, shout with their hearts in their voices, but all who saw it from a distance swelled the tremendous diapason. The clang might have been heard at a mile’s distance, as the pike-points of the phalanx smote full upon the bosses of the long legionary shields, and bore back the loose lines by sheer force, orderly still and unbroken, while the Spanish broadswords of the Romans hewed desperately, but in vain, into the twilight forest of the impenetrable sarissæ. Stubbornly the Romans fought and long; and when at length broken, they were not beaten; when borne backward foot by foot they still disdained to fly; but fell where they stood, and died fighting. But Flamininus, who had the true eye, the true inspiration of a great general, ever the keenest and the clearest in the most direful turmoil of the headiest fight, had marked, like Wellington at Talavera, a gap in the enemy’s array. Leaving his broken right wing to its fate, he rushed, confident at one glance of victory, to the head of his centre, and charged, with his elephants in front, by a rapid oblique movement, full upon the left wing of the phalanx, as it mounted the heights in marching, rather than in fighting, order. Here, before it could form, almost before it could level its long pikes, it was pierced in a hundred places at once; and, in almost less time than is required to describe it, the fierce Spanish broadswords of the legionaries, fleshed in its vitals, had reduced it to a weltering mass of inextricable confusion and almost unheard of carnage. The Roman left, cheered by the triumph of their comrades, rallied upon themselves and returned to the charge; and simultaneously an unordered movement of a tribune of the soldiers, which should have rendered him immortal, although his name has not survived, decided the victory, as completely as did a like inspiration, on the part of the unrewarded Kellerman, decide that of Marengo. This nameless tribune—a shame that he should be nameless—when the enemy’s left and centre fled, wheeled with a mere handful of men round the rear of Philip’s right, and, gaining the very summit from which he had descended, at the moment when the Romans rallied in its face, fell like a thunderbolt on the unguarded rear of its yet unbroken masses. In any event, a rear or flank attack upon the phalanx, so ponderous a column that it could even when unassailed with difficulty form a new face, was perilous; here it was fatal.