Book 29
5.22
When this had been done according to order, at daybreak he himself came out, and finding the rebels surrounded by his army, he said: What think you, my devoted comrades, ought to be done with these abominable traitors? And acceding to the acclamation of those who asked that they should pay for it with their blood, he turned over those who served among the Constantiani to the soldiers, to be slain in the oldfashioned way.Something like running the gauntlet; cf. Tac., Ann. i. 44; Polyb. vi. 37, 3 ff.; Lamprid. Commodus, 6, 2, hostis appellatus lacerandusque militibus est deditus. But he had the hands of the leaders of the archers cut off and punished the rest with death, following the example of that strictest of leaders Curio,He was proconsul in Thrace; see Livy, Epit. xcv.; Flor. i. 39, 6; Front., Strateg. iv. 1, 43. who put an end by a punishment of that kind to the wildness of the Dardani, when, like the Lernaean hydra, they constantly gained new life.
5.23
But malevolent detractors, while praising that act of the olden time, find fault with this one as cruel and inhuman, declaring that the Dardani were murderous enemies and justly suffered the punishment which befell them, while these, on the contrary, were soldiers under the flag who had allowed themselves to commit a single fault and deserved to have been punished more leniently. But such folk we remind of what they perhaps do not know, that this cohort was harmful, not only in its action, but also in the example which it set.
