occupations; yet, notwithstanding the decline of his bodily strength,
his mind retained its full vigour. When he heard that the Roman armies
were shut up at the Caudine forks between the two glens, being
consulted by his son's messenger, he gave his opinion, that they
should all be immediately dismissed from thence unhurt. On this
counsel being rejected, and the same messenger returning a second
time, he recommended that they should all, to a man, be put to death.
When these answers, so opposite to each other, like those of an
ambiguous oracle, were given, although his son in particular
considered that the powers of his father's mind, together with those
of his body, had been impaired by age, was yet prevailed on, by the
general desire of all, to send for him to consult him. The old man, we
are told, complied without reluctance, and was carried in a waggon to
the camp, where, when summoned to give his advice, he spoke in such
way as to make no alteration in his opinions; he only added the
reasons for them. That "by his first plan, which he esteemed the best,
he meant, by an act of extraordinary kindness, to establish perpetual
peace and friendship with a most powerful nation: by the other, to put
off the return of war to the distance of many ages, during which the
Roman state, after the loss of those two armies, could not easily
recover its strength." A third plan there was not. When his son, and
the other chiefs, went on to ask him if "a plan of a middle kind might
not be adopted; that they both should be dismissed unhurt, and, at the
same time, by the right of war, terms imposed on them as vanquished?"
"That, indeed," said he, "is a plan of such a nature, as neither
procures friends or removes enemies. Only preserve those whom ye would
irritate by ignominious treatment. The Romans are a race who know not
how to sit down quiet under defeat; whatever that is which the present
necessity shall brand will rankle in their breasts for ever, and will
not suffer them to rest, until they have wreaked manifold vengeance on