Ab urbe condita

The gold and silver were ordered to be brought to the consul; the rest of the spoil became the property of the soldiers. The killed and prisoners amounted to 6o,ooo. Some authors assert that this great battle was fought beyond the Cimiman forest, at Perusia, and that fears were felt in the City lest the army, cut off from all help by that terrible forest, should he overwhelmed by a united force of Tuscans and Umbrians.

But wherever it was fought, the Romans had the best of it As a result of this victory, Perusia, Cortona, and Arretium, which were at that time the three leading cantons of Etruria, sent to Rome for a treaty of peace. A thirty years' truce was granted them.

During[*](Operations against the Samnites.) these occurrences in Etruria the other consul, C. Marcius Rutilus, took Allifae from the Samnites. Many other fortified posts and hamlets were either destroyed or passed uninjured into the power of the Romans.

While this was going on, P. Cornelius, whom the senate had made maritime prefect, took the Roman fleet to Campania and brought up at Pompeii. Here the crews landed and proceeded to ravage the territory of Nuceria. After devastating the district near the coast, from which they could have easily reached their ships, they went further inland, attracted as usual by the desire for plunder, and here they roused the inhabitants against them.

As long as they were scattered through the fields they met nobody, though they might have been cut off to a man, but when they returned, thinking themselves perfectly safe, they were overtaken by the peasants and stripped of all their plunder. Some were killed; the survivors were driven helter-skelter to their ships.

However great the alarm created in Rome by Q. Fabius' expedition through the Ciminian forest, there was quite as much pleasure felt by the Samnites when they heard of it. They said that the Roman army was hemmed in; it was the Caudine disaster over again;

the old recklessness had again led a nation always greedy for further conquests into an impassable forest; they were beset by the difficulties of the ground quite as much as by hostile arms.

Their delight was, however, tinged with envy when they reflected that fortune had diverted the glory of finishing the war with Rome from the Samnites to the Etruscans.

So they concentrated their whole strength to crush C. Marcius or, if he did not give them a chance of fighting, to march through the country of the Marsi and Sabines into Etruria. The consul advanced against them, and a desperate battle was fought with no decisive result.