Finally, the enemy was now routed everywhere. The open field was a ghastly spectacle: pursuit, flight; death, capture; horses and men suffering; and many, who could neither flee because of their wounds nor endure to be still, now struggled to rise and immediately collapsed. In the end, everything, everywhere you looked, was strewn with weapons, armour, corpses, and between them the ground drenched in blood.*
drenched in blood: ancient sources report that Jugurtha and Bocchus lost 90,000 men in the second of two battles with Marius (Orosius 5.15.8) and speak of the death of many tens of thousands of Libyans (Diodorus 36.1).
denique hostes iam undique fusi. tum spectaculum horribile in campis patentibus: sequi fugere, occidi capi; equi atque viri afflicti, ac multi vulneribus acceptis neque fugere posse neque quietem pati, niti modo ac statim concidere; postremo omnia qua visus erat constrata telis armis cadaveribus, et inter ea humus infecta sanguine.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, July 20, 2024
Rout
Sallust, The War Against Jugurtha 101.11 (tr. William W. Batstone, with his note):