Roman History Books and More

a little music education

Today, I allowed myself a little education.

First, I sat in at a vocal master class conducted by Phyllis Curtin (interview 2002). Curtin, now age 84 and a  TMC alumna herself,  is a Tanglewood institution by now.  She is a marvellous teacher and does not seem to have slowed down.  It was fun listening in and observing.  The walls of the little wooden chamber music hall were plastered with her advice:

. . . words
            ahead
                  of the
                        tone . . .

. . . Tiger Teeth . . .

. . . Inner smile . . . 

Play your upside down cello.

Make room for your ELEPHANT.

I didn't have the nerve after the class to ask her whether I could take a photo of her...

The Chamber Music Hall where the master classes were held

Then, I went to a talk by Austrian guest conductor Hans Graf, currently music director of the Houston Symphony. He talked about conducting and guest conducting, and about his love for contemporary music.  “One can distinguish good contemporary music from bad by looking at the musicians' faces ... If the music is there, the orchestra is there”.

He also talked about his – obviously rewarding – 1975/76 stint as music director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, and how, for example, he had to write out the score for Webern's Opus 10 (Five Pieces for Orchestra) for the musicians himself.

 
The members' tent were the talk was held

a stravinsky performance and three composers

Tuesday was “Tanglewood on Parade”, a big day for the students at the Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI).  There are performances on the grounds all afternoon, and the entire bash ends with a joint performance by the BSO/TMC orchestras of the “1812 Overture”, live cannons, and fireworks over the lake.

The afternoon brought a TMC presentation of Stravinsky’s chamber music piece l’Histoire du soldat in the wonderful Ozawa  Hall.

…but with a twist: The narrator/performers were three American composers: (on the images from left to right) Milton Babbitt , age 90, “the devil”;  Elliott Carter, age 97, “the soldier”;  and John Harbison, a mere youngster at 68, “the narrator”.  The script had been “tweaked” by James Levine, Elliott Carter, John Harbison and a few others, and amounted to a hilarious leg-pull between the two nonagenarians.  The musical performance, conducted by Tomasz Golka (below at right), was a joy also.  The musicians were Hyunju Lee, violin;  Brandon McLean, double bass;  James Zimmermann, clarinet;  Brad Balliett, bassoon;  John Freeman, trumpet; and Kathryn Curran, trombone.

click on images to enlarge
© Irene B. Hahn, all rights reserved

There was no assigned seating, so I was able to secure a seat close up to take these truly historic photographs after the performance. 

As to Elliott Carter, there are already plans for the 2008 Carter Centenary  underway! Isn’t that tempting fate?

Postscript 7/27:  NYT: With a Nod to Stravinsky, Three Composers Become Stars of the Stage at Tanglewood (short-lived link unless you subscribe to TimesSelect). A quote from Milton Babbitt:

Mr. Babbitt said he had first encountered the piece in 1930. “This,” he said, “is the best performance I’ve ever heard.”

an orgy of mozart at tanglewood

Last weekend was all Mozart, all the time, with the BSO and James Levine here at Tanglewood.  Friday a regular concert, Saturday Don Giovanni – in a concert performance, and the Requiem on Sunday.  The Don Giovanni was marvelous, and acted very well by the singers too. This was – with one exception – a young  international cast, all connected to Levine and the Met in one way or another:

Mariusz Kwiecien  – Don Giovanni
Luca Pisaroni – Leporello (a last minute stand-in, he almost stole the show)
Tamar Iveri – Donna Anna (another stand-in, a wonderful voice!)
Matthew Polenzani – Don Ottavio (who got a lot of applause and press kudos, but I didn’t like the timbre of his voice very much)
Soile Isokoski – Donna Elvira (the above exception, and what a Donna Elvira she was!)
Heidi Grant Murphy – Zerlina
Patrick Carfizzi – Masetto
Morris D. Robinson – Commendatore

There was no director listed, so it is assumed that James Levine was in charge of the (minimal but effective) staging.  At one point he himself got into the act by handing a folio to Leporello, who was about to begin his “catalogue aria”.  “Don Giovanni” is a dramma giocoso, somewhere between opera seria and buffa, and in my opinion, the Don was bit too much buffo. Anyway, great fun was had by all!  Reviews by the NYT and the Boston Globe will probably be up for a minimum of time only.

The Requiem was glorious, with another stellar cast: Soile Isokoski again, Susan Graham (who also sang an aria Friday night), Kenneth Tarver and John Relyea, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus under John Oliver, dependable as always.

Images below tweaked from very dark originals.  Click  to enlarge.

Before the concert: Tanglewood Festival Chorus

Requiem Cast

James Levine

Click on images for larger size

hamlet

Well, Hamlet at Shakespeare & Company was a dud, as far as I'm concerned.

The New York Times (An Active Hamlet subscription required) does not agree, Ben Brantley gives it a glowing review. The play did not move me one bit...

Not that much spectacle is required (or used) to command the attention here. As is almost always the case with productions from Shakespeare & Company, the first priority is to tell a cracking good story and to “speak the speech” so clearly and comprehendingly that even theatergoers new to Shakespeare grasp the plot and characters (and forgive some less-than-subtle performances along the way)

sounded more like often agitated declaming to me.  Our highschool theatre class could have done better.  This being a theatre-in-the-round, I sat right next to Hamlet (sitting in a clear plastic chair) when he made his famous speech, and he left me completely cold.  Here Mr. Brantley is a bit more on my side:

This Hamlet is never more intriguingly thoughtful than when surprised by his father’s living memory. Otherwise, Mr. Asprey’s Hamlet is too impatient to convince as a vacillating philosopher prince, whose resolution is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” He does the famous soliloquies with a throwaway grace that makes them less than a main event.

And here we are in unison:

More distracting are the hipster costumes (by Jessica Ford) , which suggest that the court of Elsinore routinely trawls the Top Shop stores for Gaultier and Galliano knockoffs. And while Kevin O’Donnell’s fired-up Laertes is a perfect dimmer mirror to Mr. Asprey’s Hamlet, Ms. Raetz’s Ophelia is too spunky and spiky to morph believably into a suicidal flower child.

I am a bit kinder on Ophelia, she seemed to totter towards suicide from the beginning.

Ah, well, maybe this is for a younger audience.   So much for my comprehension of the performing arts... <grin>.

shostakovich string quartets

Dmitri Shostakovich (wiki, handle with care) was born in 1906, thus, the 100^th anniversary of his death is celebrated this year.

Last night, I heard a performance of the last three string quartets by the Emerson String Quartet in the Chamber Music Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, the summer quarters of the Boston Symphony.

It was a revelation!

In 1937, after his partial “rehabilitation” by composing the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich felt he could seek an outlet in composing chamber music, a class of music frowned upon by the Soviet government as too elitist.  While not limiting himself to strings, he set out to compose 24 string quartets – one in each key, but managed to write only 15, the last one in 1974, the year before his death.  All were written for the Beethoven Quartet, the Betkhoventsy, and only the last one, the 15^th, was premiered by the Taneyev Quartet because the Betkhoventsy’s cellist passed away during rehearsals.

What is interesting, and I believe unusual, or at least a novelty at the time, is that Shostakovich composed fairly lengthy solo parts for the players.

The 13^th is written in one long movement of three parts;  the 14^th, composed when Shostakovich visited Benjamin Britten, and a happier one, in a three movement format;  but the 15^th has six slow adagio movements, short and musically interrelated, to the extent that I mistook an earlier movement for the one titled “Funeral March.”  In the 13^th, the players are sometimes required to strike the deck of the instrument with the wood of the bow.  Shostakovich has given no explanation for this, but it is striking in it's effect.

The Emerson Quartet, who played with verve and concentration – and standing except for the cellist who sat on a podium – is performing all fifteen quartets during this anniversary year, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the inevitable CD! This was a fairly brief concert for the Emerson:  I remember a performance some 15 years ago at the same place, when they played all six string quartets of Bartok.  Most of the audience left after the fourth, I made it through the fifth, but by then I was mentally exhausted…

BTW, another composer’s anniversary is observed this year: the 250^th year of Mozart’s birth. On Saturday night, there will be a concert performance of “Don Giovianni,” conducted by that opera specialist James Levine, the BSO’s new music director.  Stay tuned!

For tonight, I happened on a free ticket for Shakespeare’s Hamlet…cultura all the way…

gone fishing, sort of

I will be away on vacation for a while, but will blog sporadically to keep the Marius thing going, maybe write on some concert performances, and post some pics if I find the time to install PhotoShop on my laptop before I leave.  It all depends on how good or bad (i.e. , hot and keeping us indoors) the weather is . . .

caius marius and the military

Marius' early military career – as well as that of Publius Rutilius Rufus – was in Spain under Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus (or Africanus Minor), the final victor of Carthage who later fought the Celtiberians and defeated them definitively at Numantia in 133 BCE.  Appian discusses that war. 

Marius then went on to a political career and got as far as praetor, after which it stalled.  It was revived after he served, together with Rutilius Rufus, as senior legate under Quintus Caecilius Metellus (later named “Numidicus”) in the war against Jugurtha in 109 BCE.  In 108, Marius became consul himself and continued the war against Jugurtha.  It was then that he had to go the capitecensi for recruiting, the Roman headcount, in order to get an army together – due to the exhaustion of soldier material, especially after two devastating defeats by the Germans.  (The worst defeat, at Aurasio, was still to come.) At the same time, he began the reform and restructure the army itself, while Rutilius Rufus wrote an army drill manual.

aspects of friendship in the graeco-roman world

amīcitia ae, f [amicus] , friendship: Per nostram amicitiam, T.: inter aliquos: esse in amicitiā cum aliquo, N.: iungere: parere, N.: dedere se amicitiae alicuius, Cs.: intima alicuius, N.: iura amicitiae: deficere ab amicitiā alicuius, N. -- A league, alliance: qui amicitiam fecerant, Cs.: populi R., S.: vetustior amicitia ac societas, L.-- Friends, a circle of friends: adflicta: ex intimā eius amicitiā, Ta.: parcet amicitiis.
phi^li-a , Ion. -iê, hê, ( [phileô] ) A. affectionate regard, friendship (not in A. or S.), usu. betw. Equals…  (Dictionaries at Perseus)

Commenting on Adrian Murdoch's Bread and circuses entry Roman loan agreements, or more precisely, on the offered German links about the planned gold mining at Romanian Alburnus Major, I mistook Géza Alföldi for the eminent but long deceased Andreas (András) Alföldi.

However, on googling Géza Alföldi, I found this interesting BMCR review:

Michael Peachin (ed.), Aspects of Friendship in the Graeco-Roman World (JRA Supplementary Series 43).  Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001.  Pp. 160.  ISBN 1-887829-43-1.

This fine collection of essays on friendship in classical antiquity emerged from a conference celebrating the sixty-fifth birthday of Géza Alföldi, held on 10-11 June 2000 at the Seminar für Alte Geschichte in Heidelberg. Of course, I have a personal interest in the subject, as the editor, Michael Peachin, notes in the introduction to the volume:  “D. Konstan has recently argued against the majority opinion and has tried to inject more (modern-style?) emotion into ancient amicitia. Various articles presented below, on the other hand, point us back to a heavily formalized, even legalized, bond between friends” (7).  Peachin adds, however, that “it is difficult to imagine a world utterly devoid of what we would call truly friendly relationships,” and reasonably supposes that there were, among the Greeks and Romans, both bonds such as “we would readily recognize as proper friendships” and also ties that, although they are labelled amicitia or philia, would not seem “particularly friendly” to us (10).  Read on

On the Journal of Roman Archaeology website I found this:  43. ASPECTS OF FRIENDSHIP IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD, edited by M. Peachin. Cloth, 8 and half x 11 inches, 160 pages, 7 illustrations. Date of publication: end of November 2001. List price $69.50. Web price to individuals $49.50

I looked for that text in vain at JSTOR.

book review - getorix: the eagle and the bull

Judith Geary, known to our book chatterers, has just published her first novel.

Getorix: The Eagle and The Bull: A Celtic Adventure in Ancient Rome  is a Young Adult book.

The year is 101 BCE, Gaius Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus, having defeated the Cimbri at Vercellae – and Marius the Teutoni at Aquae Sextiae – are celebrating their joint triumph.  Custom has it that defeated adversaries are to be executed at the end of the triumphal procession, and among these are the Cimbrian king Claodicos and his young son Getorix.  However, on a whim, Catulus' son Lucius (a fictional Catulus as explained in the Author's Notes) requests Getorix as his slave from his father.

The book presents a coming of age story of two boys, of Getorix, whom fate has thrown into a hostile and utterly bewildering environment – he mistakes the wax masks of the Lutatius ancestors for the heads of slain enemies – and of Lucius, the sickly, spoiled baby of the Lutatius family, an involuntary loner who desperately wants to have a friend.  And it's a whopping adventure tale besides.

This is a well researched and well-crafted first novel by an author who understands her audience. Basically geared towards 12-15 year olds, Ms. Geary does not insult their intelligence:  battle scenes, death and dying are openly and honestly dealt with, as are punishments of slaves, and other unpleasant or adult aspects of life.  The book is lavishly illustrated, has a wide-ranging “Author's Notes” section and an extensive glossary.  Associated curricula are planned, and a sequel, “Getorix II: Games of the Underworld,” is in the works, with a teaser added to the current book.  There is a website with sample chapters, historic background essays, and future curriculum information.

My full review

gibbon on his 'vindication' (gibbon & christianity cont'd)

The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, continued

From Memoir E,  completed March 1791  My Own Life  (as titled in the print edition, 'typos' and spelling as in the original)  E-text from Gutenberg.  

1779. Feb.8.  [see also Bingley's  Gibbon and christianity below]

Had I believed that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity; had I foreseen that the pious, the timid, and the prudent, would feel, or affect to feel, with such exquisite sensibility; I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends. But the shaft was shot, the alarm was sounded, and I could only rejoice,  that if the voice of our priests was clamorous and bitter, their hands were disarmed from the powers of persecution.  I adhered to the wise resolution of trusting myself and my writings to the  candour of the public, till Mr. Davies of Oxford presumed to attack, not the faith, but the fidelity, of the historian.  My Vindication, expressive of less anger than contempt, amused for a moment  the busy and idle metropolis; and the most rational part of the laity, and even of the clergy, appear to have been satisfied of my innocence and accuracy. I would not print this Vindication in quarto, lest it should be bound and preserved with the history itself.  At the distance of twelve  years, I calmly affirm my judgment of Davies, Chelsum, &c.  A victory over such antagonists was a sufficient humiliation. They, however, were rewarded in this world.  Poor Chelsum was indeed neglected; and I dare not boast the making Dr. Watson a bishop; he is a prelate of a large mind and liberal spirit: but I enjoyed the pleasure of giving a Royal pension to Mr. Davies, and of collating Dr. Apthorpe to an archiepiscopal living. Their success encouraged the zeal of Taylor the Arian, [Note: The stupendous title, Thoughts on the Causes of the grand Apostacy, at first agitated my nerves, till I discovered that it was the apostacy of the whole church, since the Council of Nice, from Mr. Taylor's private religion. His book is a thorough mixture of high enthusiasm and low buffoonery, and the Millennium is a fundamental article of his creed.] and Milner the Methodist, [Note: From his grammar-school at Kingston upon Hull, Mr. Joseph Milner pronounces an anathema against all rational religion. His faith is a divine taste, a spiritual inspiration; his church is a mystic and invisible body: the natural Christians, such as Mr. Locke, who believe and interpret the Scriptures, are, in his judgment, no better than profane infidels.] with many others, whom it would be difficult to remember, and tedious to rehearse. The list of my adversaries, however, was graced with the more respectable names of Dr. Priestley, Sir David Dalrymple, and Dr. White; and every polemic, of either university, discharged his sermon or pamphlet against the impenetrable silence of the Roman historian.  In his History of the Corruptions of Christianity, Dr. Priestley threw down his two gauntlets to Bishop Hurd and Mr. Gibbon.   I declined the challenge in a letter, exhorting my opponent to enlighten the world by his philosophical discoveries, and to remember that the merit of his predecessor Servetus is now reduced to a single passage, which indicates the smaller circulation of the blood through the lungs, from and to the heart.  Instead of listening to this friendly advice, the dauntless philosopher of Birmingham continued to fire away his double battery against those who believed  too little, and those who believed too much. From my replies he has nothing to hope or fear: but his Socinian shield has repeatedly been pierced by the spear of Horsley, and his trumpet of sedition may at length awaken the magistrates of a free country.  The profession and rank of Sir David Dalrymple (now a Lord of Session) has given a more decent colour to his style.  But he scrutinized each separate passage of the two chapters with the dry minuteness of a special pleader; and as he was always solicitous to make, he may have succeeded sometimes in finding, a flaw. In his Annals of Scotland, he has shewn himself a diligent collector and an accurate critic. I have praised, and I still praise, the eloquent sermons which were preached in St. Mary's pulpit at Oxford by Dr. White.  If he assaulted me with some degree of illiberal acrimony, in such a place, and before such an audience, he was obliged to speak the language of the country.  I smiled at a passage in one of his private letters to Mr. Badcock;  "The part where we encounter Gibbon must be brilliant and striking." I n a sermon preached before the university of Cambridge, Dr. Edwards complimented a work, "which can only perish with the language itself;"  and esteems the author a formidable enemy.  He is, indeed, astonished that more learning and ingenuity has not been shewn in the defence of Israel; that the prelates and dignitaries of the church (alas, good man!) did not vie with each other, whose stone should sink the deepest in the forehead of this Goliath.

"But the force of truth will oblige us to confess, that in the attacks which have been levelled against our sceptical historian, we can discover but slender traces of profound and exquisite erudition, of solid criticism and accurate investigation; but we are too frequently disgusted by vague and inconclusive reasoning; by unseasonable banter and senseless witticisms; by imbittered bigotry and enthusiastic jargon; by futile cavils and illiberal invectives. Proud and elated by the weakness of his antagonists, he condescends not to handle the sword of controversy."--Monthly Review, Oct. 1790.

 Let me frankly own that I was startled at the first discharge of ecclesiastical ordnance; but as soon as I found that this empty noise was mischievous only in the intention, my fear was converted into indignation; and every feeling of indignation or curiosity has long since subsided in  pure and placid indifference.

english translations of horace and vergil

Today, I seek my readers' advice!

In his excellent book, Caesar's Legacy : Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire, Josiah Osgood makes extensive use of Horace's Satires and Epodes and Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics.  This makes me want to explore them in more detail.

I wonder whether any of you can direct me to good print translations.

Thank you!

marius' surgery

by Bingley

The Dryden translation of paragraph 6 of Plutarch's Life of Marius reads:

Marius is praised for both temperance and endurance, of which latter he gave a decided instance in an operation of surgery. For having, as it seems, both his legs full of great tumors, and disliking the deformity, he determined to put himself into the hands of an operator; when, without being tied, he stretched out one of his legs, and silently, without changing countenance, endured most excessive torments in the cutting, never either flinching or complaining; but when the surgeon went to the other, he declined to have it done, saying, "I see the cure is not worth the pain."

According to the Perrin translation on LacusCurtius and Robin Waterfield's translation in Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Lives  (Oxford World's Classics) (page 127), however, what Marius was actually suffering from were varicose veins.

LacusCurtius refers us to a description of the operation by Celsus, an encyclopedic writer from the first century AD, of whom we do not know much. His only surviving work is De Medicina. More on Aulus (Aurelius?) Cornelius Celsus at LacusCurtius, and a wiki stub.

Pictures of surgical instruments can be seen here (scroll down to "Tile Cautery").

Postscript from Irene:  Here is another source and related image of a ferrum candens.

The above mentioned volume on Plutarch contains the biographies of Cato the Elder, Aemilius Paullus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and Antony.

sextus julius frontinus: the strategemata

Sextus Julius Frontinus (Wikipedia, handle with care), c. 40–130 CE, is probably best known for his de aquis urbis Romae, On the Water Supply of Rome.

However, he also wrote the strategemata, 'a collection of over 500 examples [in four books] of devices, ruses, ploys, creative ideas from history, intended as a sort of checklist for the military commander, an appendix to his work on The Art of War, which has not survived; ...' (Lacus Curtius).

For mystery lovers: Frontinus appears in Lindsey Davis' Marcus Didius Falco novels Three Hands in the Fountain and The Jupiter Myth.

   

the origins of caius marius

Plutarch, in Caius Marius, writes:

He was born of parents altogether obscure and indigent, who supported themselves by their daily labor; his father of the same name with himself, his mother called Fulcinia. He had spent a considerable part of his life before he saw and tasted the pleasures of the city; having passed previously in Cirrhaeaton, a village of the territory of Arpinum, a life, compared with city delicacies, rude and unrefined, yet temperate, and conformable to the ancient Roman severity.

However, this tale about Marius' parents and his upbringing is highly unlikely. Adrian Goldworthy, in his book In the Name of Rome : The Men Who Won the Roman Empire, writes that "tales of poverty of 'new men' …must be taken with a pinch of salt." One had to be at least an equestrian to aspire to magistracies in republican Rome, with significant capital at hand. Thus, his family must have been part of the local aristocracy of Arpinum, and influential and powerful no doubt.

Plutarch also says:

"He is said never to have either studied Greek, or to have made use of that language in any matter of consequence; thinking it ridiculous to bestow time in that learning, the teachers of which were little better than slaves."

Goldsworthy's comment on this is that "his education may have been a bit conservative by the standards of the day…"

In other words, Marius was a typical New Man, despised by the Roman aristocracy.

gibbon on his work and the reception of same

The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, continued

From Memoir C, written about 1789,  Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon (as titled in the print edition, 'typos' and spelling as in the original)*  E-text from Gutenberg. 

on his work

No sooner was I settled in my house and library, than I undertook the composition of the first volume of my History.  At the outset all was dark and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true aera of the Decline and Fall of the Empire, the limits of the introduction, the division of the chapters, and the order of the narrative; and I was often tempted to cast away the labour of seven years.  The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.  Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation: three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect.  In the remainder of the way I advanced with a more equal and easy pace; but the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters have been reduced by three successive revisals, from a large volume to their present size; and they might still be compressed, without any loss of facts or sentiments.  An opposite fault may be imputed to the concise and superficial narrative of the first reigns from Commodus to Alexander; a fault of which I have never heard, except from Mr. Hume in his last journey to London.  Such an oracle might have been consulted and obeyed with rational devotion; but I was soon disgusted with the modest practice of reading the manuscript to my friends.  Of such friends some will praise from politeness, and some will criticise from vanity.  The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; no one has so deeply meditated on the subject; no one is so sincerely interested in the event.

Final thoughts for 'pride of carthage' chat

Our final chat on Pride of Carthage, A Novel of Hannibal by David Anthony Durham is on July 5.

Last time, we ended with the battle of Cannae.

However, we have not spend much time so far on the secondary characters, such as the Barca brood and their mother, or on Imco, Aradna, and so on.

This second section also introduces the story of Sophonisba and Massinissa.

Another point of discussion might be the ending of the book, that is, why does the story end with the defeated Hannibal's return to Carthage? Why is the epilogue about Aradna and not about Hannibal's later life, or his death?

And finally: Does the title truly represent the story?

next book: 'the first man in rome' by colleen mccullough

Our next book will be that old stand-by and favorite of many readers, The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough, the first volume in her Masters of Rome series.

We'll start July 19, then go into August recess and will continue September 6 & 20.

Details   Complete 2006 Reading List  PDF

Enjoy!

the battle of zama

The Battle of Zama, 202 BC, where Scipio Africanus and Hannibal met, decided the Second Punic War with the decisive defeat of Hannibal. Scipio, who may have had less infantry but considerably more cavalry, turned the tables, as it were, by his tactics, such as neutralizing the elephants used by Hannibal and supposed to have numbered eighty, but at a later moment, the battle was again in balance, until two cavalries under Laelius and Massinissa returned to the field from the pursuit of Hannibal's cavalry earlier and attacked Hannibal from two sides. The battle ended in a slaughter of the Carthaginians.

Polybius, in The Histories, fragments of Book XV, gives a dramatic description, beginning with the meeting between the two generals before the battle. Livy, in Book XXVIII.29ff, is no less dramatic, and admiring:

"…Their armed attendants having retired to an equal distance, they met, each attended by one interpreter, being the greatest generals not only of their own times, but of any to be found in the records of the times preceding them, and equal to any of the kings or generals of any nation whatever. When they came within sight of each other they remained silent for a short time, thunderstruck, as it were, with mutual admiration."