appear from the time when both consuls set out for the campaign. Now,
before the consuls arrived in Etruria, the Senonian Gauls came in a
vast body to Clusium, to attack the Roman legion and the camp. Scipio,
who commanded the camp, wishing to remedy the deficiency of his
numbers by an advantage in the ground, led his men up a hill, which
stood between the camp and the city but having, in his haste,
neglected to examine the place, he reached near the summit, which he
found already possessed by the enemy, who had ascended on the other
side. The legion was consequently attacked on the rear, and surrounded
in the middle, when the enemy pressed it on all sides. Some writers
say, that the whole were cut off, so that not one survived to give an
account of it, and that no information of the misfortune reached the
consuls, who were, at the time, not far from Clusium, until the Gallic
horsemen came within sight, carrying the heads of the slain, some
hanging before their horses' breasts, others on the points of their
spears, and expressing their triumph in songs according to their
custom. Others affirm, that the defeat was by Umbrians, not Gauls, and
that the loss sustained was not so great. That a party of foragers,
under Lucius Manlius Torquatus, lieutenant-general, being surrounded,
Scipio, the propraetor, brought up relief from the camp, and the
battle being renewed, that the Umbrians, lately victorious, were
defeated, and the prisoners and spoil retaken. But it is more probable
that this blow was suffered from a Gallic than an Umbrian enemy,
because during that year, as was often the case at other times, the
danger principally apprehended by the public, was that of a Gallic
tumult, for which reason, notwithstanding that both the consuls had
marched against the enemy, with four legions, and a large body of
Roman cavalry, joined by a thousand chosen horsemen of Campania,
supplied on the occasion, and a body of the allies and Latin
confederates, superior in number to the Romans, two other armies were
posted near the city, on the side facing Etruria, one in the
Faliscian, the other in the Vatican territory. Cneius Fulvius and
Lucius Postumius Megellus, both propraetors, were ordered to keep the
troops stationed in those places.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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