23.
The gates being now open, before the victors could break in, the Gauls began to flee from the camp in all directions. They rushed blindly along the roads and where there were no roads; no steep rocks, no cliffs, held them back; they feared nothing but the enemy; accordingly many were killed, falling headlong or slipping in weariness over tremendous precipices.
[2]
The consul, having taken the camp, kept his soldiers from spoil and pillage; he ordered them each to follow as best he could, press the pursuit and increase the panic of the fugitives.
[3]
The second column, under Lucius Manlius, also came up; he did not permit his men to enter the camp, but sent them at once to pursue the enemy, and he himself followed a little later, having entrusted the guarding of the prisoners to the tribunes of the soldiers, being convinced that the war was over if the largest possible number was killed or captured in that rout.
[4]
When the consul had gone, Gaius Helvius arrived with the third column and was unable to prevent his men from plundering the camp, and the booty, by a most unjust decree of fate, fell into the hands of men who had had no part in the battle.
[5]
The cavalry, knowing nothing for a long time of either the battle or the victory of their comrades, remained stationary; later they too, with all the speed of which their horses were capable, pursuing the Gauls as they scattered in flight around the [p. 81]base of the mountain, killed and captured them.
[6]
The1 number of casualties could not easily be calculated because the flight and slaughter went on far and wide over all
[7??]
the outlying parts of the mountains, and a great number fell from the pathless cliffs into valleys of enormous depth, and some were killed in the forests and thickets.
[8]
Claudius, who writes that there were two battles on the Olympus mountain, asserts that about forty thousand men were slain;2 Valerius Antias, who is usually more unrestrained in exaggerating numbers, says that not more than ten thousand fell.
[9]
The number of prisoners without doubt brought the total up to forty thousand, because they had brought with them their whole population of every class and age, like a people in migration rather than setting out to war.
[10]
The consul, having burned all the weapons of the enemy in one pile, ordered all his troops to bring in the rest of the booty and either sold that part of the booty which it was his duty to convert to public use or carefully distributed it to the soldiers so as to secure the greatest possible measure of equity.
[11]
Also before an assembly he praised everyone according to his merits, and Attalus before all, with the complete approval of the rest; for the young man had displayed not only remarkable courage and diligence amid all the toils and dangers, but also modesty of behaviour.3 [p. 83]
1 B.C. 189
2 Manlius himself (xlvii. 6 below) says that he captured and killed more than forty thousand of the enemy, and Orosius (IV. xx; he credits the victory to the other consul Fulvius) says that forty thousand were killed. Appian, however (Syr. xlii), asserts that there were forty thousand prisoners and that the slain could not be counted. Perhaps the official report of Manlius was used by Claudius.
3 The vividness of the preceding narrative gives rise to a question as to its sources. Valerius Antias and Claudius are quoted, and in the preceding note I suggest that the latter may have used the official report of Manlius. For some reason or other the Galatian campaign attracted an unusual amount of attention: Hannibal is said to have written an account of it (Nepos, Hann. xiii. 2), but there is no trace of this. In the note to xv. 5 above I mentioned the generally accepted assumption that Livy had access to a diary of some participant in the campaign: Mommsen once suggested (Röm. Forsch. II. 538 ff.) that he was Polybius, but this has not been taken seriously. Whether the sanguinophile source of chap. xxi (see the note to xxi. 12 above) was one of those already mentioned cannot be determined.
Livy. Books XXXVIII-XXXIX with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1936: published without copyright notice.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.