1At the time when these things were happening at Canusium, about four thousand five hundred infantry and cavalry, who had been scattered through the countryside in the flight, reached the consul at Venusia. 2The Venusians distributed them all among families to be kindly received and cared for, and gave each horseman a toga, a tunic and twenty-five quadrigati, and each foot soldier ten, and arms to those who lacked them, and every other hospitality was shown, publicly and privately, and they vied with one another so that the people of Venusia should not be outdone in kindness by a woman of Canusium. 4But the great number made the burden heavier for Busa.
4Indeed there were by now about ten thousand men; 4and Appius and Scipio, after learning that the other consul was safe, at once send a messenger to report how large a force of infantry and cavalry they had with them, and at the same time to ask whether he ordered the army to be brought to Venusia or to remain at Canusium. 6Varro himself brought his forces over to Canusium. 6And now there was some semblance of a consular army, and it seemed that they would at least defend themselves from the enemy with walls, if not with arms. 7To Rome word had been brought that not even these remnants of citizens and allies survived, but that the army had been wiped out to a man with its commanders and all the forces destroyed.
8Never, while the city remained safe, was there so much panic and confusion within the walls of Rome. 8I shall therefore give way under the burden and not attempt to narrate what I should only make smaller than the truth by describing it. 8A consul and his army having been lost at Trasimene the year before, it was not wound upon wound but a manifold disaster that was being announced: two consular armies lost together with two consuls, and no Roman camp, no general, no soldier any longer left; 10Apulia, Samnium and now almost the whole of Italy had become Hannibal's. 10Surely there is no other nation that would not have been overwhelmed by so vast a weight of disaster.
11Compare the disaster the Carthaginians suffered in the sea battle off the Aegates islands, broken by which they gave up Sicily and Sardinia and allowed themselves to become tributary and tax-paying, or the defeat in Africa to which this same Hannibal later succumbed: in no respect can they be compared, except that they were borne with less courage.