the fields, and others hooks and ladders.  Then holding their shields above their heads in close ‘tortoise’ formation,[77] they advanced under the rampart.  Both sides employed Roman tactics.  The Vitellians rolled down huge masses of stones, and, as the sheltering cover of shields parted and wavered, they thrust at it with lances and poles, until at last the whole structure was broken up and they mowed down the torn and bleeding soldiers beneath with terrible slaughter.

The men would certainly have hesitated, had not the generals, realizing that they were really too tired to respond to any other form of encouragement, pointed significantly to Cremona.  Whether this 28 was Hormus’s idea, as Messala[78] records, or whether we should rather follow Caius Pliny, who accuses Antonius, it is not easy to determine.  This one may say, that, however abominable the crime, yet in committing it neither Antonius nor Hormus belied the reputation of their lives.  After this neither wounds nor bloodshed could stay the Flavian troops.  They demolished the rampart, shook the gates, climbed up on each other’s shoulders, or over the re-formed ‘tortoise’, and snatched away the enemy’s weapons or caught hold of them by the arms.  Thus the wounded and unwounded, the half-dead and the dying, all came rolling down and perished together by every imaginable kind of death.

The fight raged thickest round the Third and Seventh legions, and 29 the general, Antonius, came up with a picked band of auxiliaries to support their assault.  The Vitellians, finding themselves unable to resist the attack of troops thus stubbornly vying with each other, and seeing their missiles all glide off the shelter of shields, at last sent their engine of war crashing down upon their heads.  For the moment it scattered and crushed beneath it the men on whom it fell, but it dragged with it some of the battlements and the top of the rampart.  At the same moment one of the towers on the rampart gave way under a shower of stones.  While the men of the Seventh struggled up to the breach in close column,[79] the Third hewed down the gate with hatchets and swords.  All the authorities[80] agree that Caius Volusius of the Third legion was the first man in.  Emerging on the top of the rampart, he hurled down those who barred his path, and from this conspicuous position waved his hand and shouted that the camp was taken.  The others poured through, while the Vitellians in panic flung themselves down from the rampart, and the whole space between the camp and the walls became a seething scene of carnage.