be two consuls, and felt the most painful anxiety as to the manner
in which the other had got away from Hannibal. Least of all could he
suspect, what was really the case, that he had got away from Hannibal
by deceiving him to such an extent, as that he knew not where the
general was, and where the army whose camp stood opposite to his own.
Surely, he concluded, deterred by a defeat of no ordinary kind, he has
not dared to pursue him; and he began to entertain the most serious
fears that he had himself come too late with assistance, now that
affairs were desperate, and lest the same good fortune attended the
Roman arms in Italy which they had experienced in Spain. Sometimes
he imagined that his letter could not have reached him, and that, it
having been intercepted, the consul had hastened to overpower him.
Thus anxious and perplexed, having put out the fires, he issued a
signal at the first watch to collect the baggage in silence, and gave
orders to march. In the hurry and confusion occasioned by a march
by night, their guides were not watched with sufficient care and
attention. One of them stopped in a place of concealment which he had
beforehand fixed upon in his mind, the other swam across the river
Metaurus, at a ford with which he was acquainted. The troops, thus
deserted by their guides, at first wandered up and down through the
fields; and some of them, overpowered with sleep, and fatigued with,
watching, stretched themselves on the ground here and there, leaving
their standards thinly attended. Hasdrubal gave orders to march along
the bank of the river until the light should discover the road; but,
pursuing a circuitous and uncertain course along the turnings and
windings of that tortuous river, with the intention of crossing it
as soon as the first light should discover a place convenient for
the purpose he made but little progress; but wasting the day in a
fruitless attempt to discover a ford, for the further he went from the
sea the higher he found the banks which kept the river in its course,