1Publius Furius Philus and Marcus Pomponius, the praetors, summoned the senate to the Curia Hostilia to deliberate on the defence of the city; 2for they did not doubt that, with the armies destroyed, the enemy would come to attack Rome, the one task of the war that remained. 3When, amid evils as unfamiliar as they were vast, they could not even settle on a plan, and the cries of wailing women drowned out their voices, and, since nothing had yet been made public, the living and the dead were mourned indiscriminately in almost every house, then Quintus Fabius Maximus proposed that light horsemen should be sent along both the Appian and the Latin Way, to question those they met (there would surely be some scattered everywhere from the flight) and report back what was the fortune of the consuls and the armies, and, if the immortal gods, pitying the empire, had left anything of the Roman name, where those forces were; 5where Hannibal had gone after the battle, what he was preparing, what he was doing and was going to do.
6These things should be searched out and learned through energetic young men; 6this the senators themselves must undertake, since there were too few magistrates, to put an end to the uproar and alarm in the city: they should keep the matrons out of public places and compel each to stay within her own threshold, restrain the lamentations of households, establish silence throughout the city, see that bearers of all news were brought to the praetors (each person should wait at home for word of his own fortune), and also post guards at the gates to prevent anyone leaving the city, and make people hope for no safety except with the city and its walls preserved.
8When the uproar had died down, then the senators should be recalled to the Curia and the defence of the city discussed.