After this speech silence ensued, partly because men had changed over to his opinion, partly because they shrank from offending him to no purpose in a matter which was in any case a lost opportunity and could not be brought back. Nor
even on that day did either the consul or the king
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care to fight, the king because he would have had to attack men no longer weary from travel as on the previous day, nor in turmoil as they marshalled their line of battle and hardly in formation, the consul because neither wood nor fodder had been collected in the new camp and a large number of soldiers had gone out of camp to seek them from the near-by countryside. Without either general wishing it, Fortune, which is stronger than human planning, brought on the battle. There was a stream of no great size nearer the camp of the enemy, from which both the Macedonians and the Romans were drawing water after posting guards on either bank in order to accomplish this mission safely. There were two cohorts on the Roman side, a Marrucinian and a Paelignian, and two troops of Samnite cavalry under the command of the staff-officer Marcus Sergius Silus; another fixed outpost was stationed before the camp under the staff-officer Gaius Cluvius, composed of three cohorts, from Firmum, the Vestini, and Cremona respectively, and two troops of cavalry from Placentia and Aesernia.
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