But Flamininus, who had the true eye, the true inspiration of a great general, ever the keenest and the clearest in the most direful turmoil of the headiest fight, had marked, like Wellington at Talavera, a gap in the enemy’s array.
Leaving his broken right wing to its fate, he rushed, confident at one glance of victory, to the head of his centre, and charged, with his elephants in front, by a rapid oblique movement, full upon the left wing of the phalanx, as it mounted the heights in marching, rather than in fighting, order. Here, before it could form, almost before it could level its long pikes, it was pierced in a hundred places at once; and, in almost less time than is required to describe it, the fierce Spanish broadswords of the legionaries, fleshed in its vitals, had reduced it to a weltering mass of inextricable confusion and almost unheard of carnage.
The Roman left, cheered by the triumph of their comrades, rallied upon themselves and returned to the charge; and simultaneously an unordered movement of a tribune of the soldiers, which should have rendered him immortal, although his name has not survived, decided the victory, as completely as did a like inspiration, on the part of the unrewarded Kellerman, decide that of Marengo.
This nameless tribune—a shame that he should be nameless—when the enemy’s left and centre fled, wheeled with a mere handful of men round the rear of Philip’s right, and, gaining the very summit from which he had descended, at the moment when the Romans rallied in its face, fell like a thunderbolt on the unguarded rear of its yet unbroken masses.
In any event, a rear or flank attack upon the phalanx, so ponderous a column that it could even when unassailed with difficulty form a new face, was perilous; here it was fatal.
The battle was ended as by a thunder-clap. Of the Macedonians eight thousand fell in the field, five thousand laid down their arms; their camp was taken, but before the victors entered it, it had been sacked by the Ætolians; their king, not tarrying to burn his papers at Larissa, fled without drawing bridle through Tempe into Macedonia.
Of the Romans seven hundred lay dead in their ranks on the field; so true is Sallust’s apophthegm, that audacity is as a rampart to the soldier, and flight more perilous than battle.
It was not a battle only that was won, but a war that was ended.
Yet never was a battle won which was so nearly lost, except Marengo; which it in several points resembles.
In the first place, like Marengo, it was in fact not one, but two battles, in which the victors of the first were the vanquished of the second.