10.15
Before
this battle took place the Samnites would have been joined by the Apulians
had not the consul Decius anticipated their action by fixing his camp at
Maleventum. He drew them into an engagement and routed them, and in this
battle also there were more who escaped by flight than were slain; these
amounted to 2000. Without troubling himself further about the Apulians,
Decius led his army into Samnium. There the two consular armies spent five
months in ravaging and desolating the country. There were forty-five
different places in Samnium where Decius at one time or another had fixed
his camp; in the case of the other consul there were eighty-six. Nor were the
only traces left those of ramparts and fosses, more conspicuous still were
those which attested the devastation and depopulation of all the country
round. Fabius also captured the city of Cimetra, where 2900 became
prisoners of war, 830 having been killed during the assault. After this he
returned to Rome for the elections and arranged for them to be held at an
early date. The centuries who voted first declared without exception for
Fabius. Amongst the candidates was the energetic and ambitious Appius
Claudius. Anxious to secure the honour for himself, he was quite as anxious
that both posts should be held by patricians, and he brought his utmost
influence, supported by the whole of the nobility, to bear upon the electors
so that they might return him together with Fabius. At the outset Fabius
refused, and alleged the same grounds for his refusal as he had alleged the
year before. Then all the nobles crowded round his chair and begged him to
extricate the consulship from the plebeian mire and restore both to the office
itself and to the patrician houses the august dignity which they possessed of
old. As soon as he could obtain silence he addressed them in terms which
calmed their excitement. He would, he said, have arranged to admit votes for
two patricians if he saw that any one else than himself was being elected, but
as matters were he would not allow his name to stand, since it would be
against the law and form a most dangerous precedent. So L. Volumnius, a
plebeian, was elected together with Appius Claudius; they had already been
associated in a previous consulship. The nobles taunted Fabius and said that
he refused to have Appius Claudius as a colleague because he was
unquestionably his inferior in eloquence and state-craft.