378 FABIUS.

Fabius to an engagement; like a cunning wrestler, watching every opportunity to get good hold and close with his adversary. He at one time attacked, and sought to distract his attention, tried to draw him off in various directions, endeavored in all ways to tempt him from his safe policy. All this artifice, though it had no effect upon the firm judgment and conviction of the dictator, yet upon the common soldier and even upon the general of the horse himself, it had too great an operation : Minu- cius, unseasonably eager for action, bold and confident, humored the soldiery, and himself contributed to fill them with wild eagerness and empty hopes, which they vented in reproaches upon Fabius, calling him Hannibal's pedagogue,* since he did nothing else but follow him up and down and wait upon him. At the same time, they cried up Minucius for the only captain worthy to com- mand the Romans ; whose vanity and presumption rose so high in consequence, that he insolently jested at Fabius's encampments upon the mountains, saying that he seated them there as on a theatre, to behold the flames and deso- lation of their country. And he would sometimes ask the friends of the general, whether it were not his meaning, by thus leading them from mountain to mountain, to carry them at last (having no hopes on earth) up into heaven, or to hide them in the clouds from Hannibal's army? When his friends reported these things to the dictator, persuading him that, to avoid the general oblo- quy, he should engage the enemy, his answer was, "I should be more fainthearted than they make me, if, through fear of idle reproaches, I should abandon my

• Hannibal's footman, might per- cially out of the house, upon the

hups give the jest more correctly, young boys of the family, and, in The paedagogus of the ancients particular, to take them to school was merely the slave appointed to and bring them home again,

be in constant attendance, espe-