“Not fire, not walls of iron can hinder fate,”

as Pindar says.  Marcellus rode forth with his colleague Crispinus and his son, who was military tribune, in all two hundred and twenty horsemen.  Of these none were Romans; they were Etruscans, with the exception of twenty men from Fregellae, who had given constant proofs of their courage and devotion to Marcellus.  On the overhanging crest of the woody hill, a man, unseen by the Romans, was watching their army.  He signalled to the men in ambush what was going on, so that they permitted Marcellus to ride close to them, and then suddenly burst out upon him, and surrounding his little force on all sides, struck and threw their darts, pursued such as ran away, and fought with those who stood their ground.  These were the twenty Fregellans.  The Etruscans at the outset ran away panic-stricken; but these men forming together defended the consuls until Crispinus, struck by two darts, galloped away, and Marcellus was pierced through the side with a lance.  Then even the few survivors of the Fregellans left him lying there, and snatching up his son, who was wounded, made their way back to the camp.  The loss amounted to little over forty killed, and five lictors and eighteen horsemen taken.  Crispinus, after a few days, died of his wounds.  Such a misfortune as this, losing both consuls in one battle, never before befel the Romans.

XXX.  Hannibal heard of the fate of all the rest with indifference, but when he was told that Marcellus had fallen he himself hastened to the place, and stood for a long time beside the corpse, admiring its strength and beauty.  He made no boastful speech, and showed no joy in his countenance, as a man who had slain a troublesome and dangerous enemy, but, wondering at the strangeness of his ending, he drew the ring from the dead man’s finger, and had the corpse decently attired and burned.  The relics he gathered into a silver urn, upon which he placed a golden crown, and sent it to Marcellus’s son.  But on the way some Numidians fell in with the party who were escorting the urn, and while they tried to take it away and the others struggled to retain it, the bones were scattered on the ground.  Hannibal, on hearing of this, said, “Nothing can be done against the will of heaven.”  He ordered the Numidians to be punished, but took no further thought about collecting or sending away the relics of Marcellus, concluding that some god had decreed the strange death and strange lack of burial which had befallen him.  This is the story related by Cornelius Nepos and Valerius Maximus, but Livy and Augustus Caesar declare that the urn was brought to his son, and that it was splendidly buried.  Besides his monuments at Rome there was a gymnasium at Katana in Sicily which bore his name, and statues and votive tablets from the plunder of Syracuse were set tip in Samothrace in the temple of the gods called Kabeiri, and in Lindus (in Rhodes) in the temple of Athena.