legions, accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy from the want of precision in their mode of array and their ill-closed ranks, compelled—­while yet the entrenching was going forward on that side, and before even the general gave the signal—­ a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them against the enemy.  The right wing, in advance of the other divisions, frightened the line of elephants opposed to it—­this was the last great battle in which these animals were employed—­ by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round on their own ranks.  The covering force was cut down, the left wing of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown.  The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance; both were successively captured almost without resistance.  The mass of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter; but Caesar’s soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless at Pharsalus.  The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner on the battlefield of Thapsus.  If the hydra with which they fought always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought, and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar.  He had sworn to retrieve the general’s neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties of his disarmed fellow-citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar and the superior officers.  The fifty thousand corpses that covered the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier procures for himself repose.  The victorious army on the other hand numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).

Cato in Utica
His Death

There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus.  Cato as commandant of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood, and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether they would yield or defend themselves to the last man—­ only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself, but all in unison.  The more courageous view found several supporters; it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment on private property, and