Livy, a Roman historian of the late first century BC, wrote this History of Rome. Book 27 is the next stretch of the Second Punic War, Rome’s long fight with Carthage. In the last book, Scipio seized New Carthage in Spain in a day, Hannibal marched on Rome to lift the siege of Capua but did not take the city, and Capua fell and was punished while Hannibal stayed unbeaten in the open field.

Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, comes over the Alps with a second Carthaginian army, hoping to join him. At the Metaurus, a river in eastern Italy, the consuls Gaius Claudius Nero and Marcus Livius — two officials elected to run Rome for a year — crush that force. Hasdrubal’s head is thrown into Hannibal’s camp. Marcellus, Rome’s boldest general, dies in an ambush in Lucania, in the south of Italy. Spain still has to be cleared, and Macedon, in northern Greece, still nips at the map’s edge. After the Metaurus, an African invasion stops being a dream and becomes the next argument in the Senate.