CHAPTER IV.
THE BATTLE OF THE METAURUS, B.C. 207.
Quid debeas, O Roma, Neronibus,
Testis Metaurum flumen, et Hasdrubal
Devictus, et pulcher fugatis
Ille dies Latio tenebris, &c.
The consul Nero, who made the unequaled march which deceived Hannibal and defeated Hasdrubal, thereby accomplishing an achievement almost unrivaled in military annals. The first intelligence of his return, to Hannibal, was the sight of Hasdrubal's head thrown into his camp. When Hannibal saw this, he exclaimed, with a sigh, that "Rome would now be the mistress of the world." To this victory of Nero's it might be owing that his imperial namesake reigned at all. But the infamy of the one has eclipsed the glory of the other. When the name of Nero is heard, who thinks of the consul? But such are human things.—Byron.
About midway between Rimini and Ancona a little river falls into the Adriatic, after traversing one of those districts of Italy in which a vain attempt has lately been made to revive, after long centuries of servitude and shame, the spirit of Italian nationality and the energy of free institutions. That stream is still called the Metauro, and wakens by its name the recollections of the resolute daring of ancient Rome, and of the slaughter that stained its current two thousand and sixty-three years ago, when the combined consular armies of Livius and Nero encountered and crushed near its banks the varied hosts which Hannibal's brother was leading from the Pyrenees, the Rhone, the Alps, and the Po, to aid the great Carthaginian in his stern struggle to annihilate the growing might of the Roman republic, and make the Punic power supreme over all the nations of the world.
The Roman historian, who termed that struggle the most memorable of all wars that ever were carried on,[1] wrote in no spirit of exaggeration; for it is not in ancient, but in modern history, that parallels for its incidents and its heroes are to be
- ↑ Livy, lib. xxi., sec. 1.
