Such was the end of the battle of Cannæ,[85] in which both sides fought with the most conspicuous gallantry, the conquered no less than the conquerors. This is proved by the fact that, out of six thousand horse, only seventy escaped with Gaius Terentius to Venusia, and about three hundred of the allied cavalry to various towns in the neighborhood. Of the infantry ten thousand were taken prisoners in fair fight, but were not actually engaged in the battle: of those who were actually engaged only about three thousand perhaps escaped to the towns of the surrounding district; all the rest died nobly, to the number of seventy thousand, the Carthaginians being on this occasion, as on previous ones, mainly indebted for their victory to their superiority in cavalry: a lesson to posterity that in actual war it is better to have half the number of infantry, and the superiority in cavalry, than to engage your enemy with an equality in both. On the side of Hannibal there fell four thousand Celts, fifteen hundred Iberians and Libyans, and about two hundred horse....
The result of this battle, such as I have described it, had the consequences which both sides expected. For the Carthaginians by their victory were thenceforth masters of nearly the whole of the Italian coast which is called _Magna Græcia_. Thus the Tarentines immediately submitted; and the Arpani and some of the Campanian states invited Hannibal to come to them; and the rest were with one consent turning their eyes to the Carthaginians: who, accordingly, began now to have high hopes of being able to carry even Rome itself by assault.
[Footnote 79: Polybius, who, as will be noted, belongs to a period two and a half centuries later than the greatest Greek historians--Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon--is classed by Mahaffy as "the soberest and most valuable" of those who wrote with masters as their models. While he has suffered from the fate of all imitators, his work is "of the highest value to the historian, as a long series of approving critics has amply shown." He has never been read as a stylist, "nor could he be said to form a part of the classical literature of Greece."]
[Footnote 80: From Book IV of the "Histories." Translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. In this battle Hannibal had about 50,000 men, and the Romans about 80,000.]