Result of the battle
Such was the famous Battle of Trasimene, and one of the few memorable defeats of the Roman people. Fifteen thousand Romans were killed in the fight; ten thousand, dispersed by flight through all Etruria, reached Rome by the most diverse routes; two thousand five hundred enemy perished in the battle, many later from their wounds. There was great carnage on both sides, as some report; for me, in addition to my desire not to magnify anything without reason, a fault to which historians are generally inclined only too much, I considered that it was in Fabius, a contemporary of this war, that I should preferably trust . Hannibal, after having sent back without ransom the prisoners of Latin name, and having the Romans chained, having ordered to separate, from the heaps of piled up enemy corpses, the bodies of his own, and to bury them, also made search with the greatest care, to honor it with a funeral, the body of Flaminius, but without finding it.
In Rome, at the first news of this disaster, with enormous terror and tumult the people hastened to the forum. The matrons, wandering the streets, ask those they meet what is this sudden defeat, and the fate of the army. As a crowd like that of a large public meeting, facing the Comitium and the Curia, clamored for the magistrates, at last, shortly before sunset, the Praetor Marcus Pomponius declared:"In a great battle we have been defeated." Without having heard him say anything more specific, the people, filling one another with the rumors that are going around, report to their homes that the consul and a large part of his troops have been killed, and that a short time ago of survivors, or dispersed by flight, here and there, in Etruria, or prisoners of the enemy. All the misfortunes that might have struck a defeated army were so many subjects of anxiety tearing the souls of people whose relatives served under the orders of the consul Caius Flaminius, and who did not know the fate of each of their own; none know exactly what to hope for or fear.
The next day, and during the next few days, at the gates of Rome, a crowd, where there were almost more women than men, stood waiting either for someone of their own, or for news about them; she surrounded newcomers to question them, and could not detach herself from them, especially if they were known personages, without having informed herself of all the details, in order. One could then notice the various faces of the people who left the messengers, according to whether each had received good or bad news, and the congratulations, or the consolations of the people around them, as they returned home. The women especially let their joy or their pain burst forth. One of them, at the very door, suddenly finding herself face to face with her saved son, died, it is said, in his arms; another, to whom the death of her son had been announced by mistake, and who sat sadly at home, in her first emotion, on seeing her son return, died of an excess of happiness. As for the senate, the praetors, for a few days, kept it in the Curia from sunrise to sunset, to deliberate on the general or the troops which would make it possible to resist the victorious Carthaginians.