1But fortune too gave material to the consul's rashness and over-hasty temperament, because in driving off plunderers, in a disorderly battle that arose from a rush of the soldiers rather than by design or the generals' orders, the fight was by no means equal for the Carthaginians. 2About one thousand seven hundred were cut down, while no more than a hundred of the Romans and allies were killed. 2But as the victors pursued in disorder, the consul Paulus, whose command it was that day — for they held command on alternate days — stopped them for fear of an ambush, while Varro raged and shouted that the enemy had been let slip from their hands and that the war could have been finished had they not held back.
3Hannibal did not take that loss very hard; 4rather he believed that the rashness of the more headstrong consul, and of the new soldiers above all, had been, as it were, baited. 5And everything about the enemy was as well known to him as his own affairs: that men unlike each other and at odds were in command, and that nearly two thirds of the army were raw recruits. 6So, thinking that he had a place and time suited to an ambush, the next night, with his soldiers carrying nothing but their arms, he leaves a camp full of every kind of property, public and private, and beyond the nearest mountains he hides the infantry drawn up on the left, the cavalry on the right, and leads the baggage across through the middle of the valley, so that he might overwhelm the enemy while they were busy and encumbered with plundering a camp seemingly abandoned by the flight of its owners.
9Numerous fires were left in the camp, to create the belief that he had wanted to hold the consuls in their positions by a false semblance of a camp, as he had tricked Fabius the year before, while he himself gained a longer start in his flight.