Just as Shakspeare connects awful natural phenomena with frightful moral ones, and as Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war always mentions such phenomena, thus also during the war of Hannibal the earth was convulsed with throes. The year of the battle at the Trasimenus was, as Pliny says, richer in earthquakes than had ever been known in the memory of man: fifty-seven of them were observed. We shall not discuss whether these were all on different days, or whether it was always the same one on different points. Many places lay in ruins, as Cannæ in Apulia; others lost their walls. But we cannot believe what Livy relates, that during the battle such a dreadful earthquake had happened, that the walls of many Italian towns fell down, and yet that the contending armies were not aware of it. It is possible that the thick fog was connected with this earthquake. Fogs are, however, very frequent there at that time of the year: I have myself seen a very thick one in the same neighbourhood, which very strongly reminded me of the battle at the Trasimene lake. Flaminius himself fell bravely fighting. Although his guilt is infinitely small when compared with the charges which have been laid upon him, yet, according to my views of the battle, he is not quite to be acquitted of carelessness; but in great events which are to change the destinies of the world, a fatality rules, which blinds the eyes even of the very shrewdest. After this battle, Hannibal exchanged, even as he had already begun to do so after that of the Trebia, the arms of his Libyans for those of the Romans, a proof how, even in the midst of war, he still trained his troops. The practice of the _pilum_ was not so easy to learn: in fact, to use the Roman arms with success, he was obliged to adopt their drill in all its parts. To the Spaniards he left their original mode of fighting. As early as after the battle of the Trebia, he had made a difference between his prisoners. He had treated the Italians with kindness, having often given them presents, taken care of their wounded, and then sent them home, probably under a promise of serving no longer against him; he now did the same on a larger scale, and announced himself to the inhabitants of Italy as their deliverer from the Roman yoke. A man like Hannibal was far from intending, with the troops which he had brought with him, and the Cisalpine Gauls who had joined him, to sweep down like a torrent upon Italy, and without fresh forces to scale the walls of Rome: he must have founded all his hopes on rousing the south of Italy, by the remembrance of the old struggles with Rome, to cast off the Roman rule, and unite with him, and thus to shake down Rome in the course of a few years. Pyrrhus had the power, to run down Rome; Hannibal had first to create one for himself. He must have started immediately after the battle, as in Umbria he fell in with a reinforcement of four thousand men, which the consul Servilius sent