Sextus Iulius Frontinus, vir consularis de re militari

Coriolanus, when he was avenging the ignominy of his exile through war, held back from the pillaging of the patricians' fields while burning and laying waste to those of the plebeians, so that he might stir up discord by which the consensus of the Romans would be divided. Hannibal, in order to distinguish Fabius—to whom he was not equal in virtue or the art of war—by infamy, abstained from his fields while plundering the rest; in return, Fabius made it so that his faith would not be suspected by the citizens by demonstrating the magnitude of his spirit through the publication of his own possessions. Fabius Maximus, in his fifth consulship, when the armies of the Gauls, Umbrians, Etruscans, and Samnites had gathered against the Roman people—against whom he himself was preparing to fortify a camp across the Apennines—wrote to Fulvius and Postumius, who were in the city as a guard, to move their forces toward Samnium. Once they were affected by this, the Etruscans and Umbrians descended to defend their own affairs; Fabius and his colleague Decius attacked the remaining Samnites and Gauls and defeated them. Marcus Curius, against the Sabines who had enlisted a huge army and, having left their own borders, had occupied ours, sent a force by secret paths which burned their deserted fields and villages in various places. The Sabines retreated to avert the domestic devastation. It fell to Curius to keep the enemy's borders empty and to turn away the army without a battle, and to make it disperse and retreat. T. Didius, distrusting the fewness of his men when he had begun to draw out the war until the arrival of the legions he was expecting and the enemy had begun to approach them, called an assembly and ordered his soldiers to prepare for battle, and intentionally caused the captives to be guarded more negligently. A few of those who escaped reported to their own men that a battle was imminent. But they, lest they be led into an ambush by the suspicion of a battle, neglected to approach those they were lying in wait for. The legions reached Didius most safely, with no one intercepting them. During the Punic War, certain cities which had intended to defect from the Romans to the Carthaginians, when they had given hostages which they were eager to recover before they defected, feigned a sedition that had arisen among neighbors which the Roman legates ought to resolve; they held them as counter-pledges and did not return them until they had recovered their own. When the Roman legates had sent to King Antiochus regarding the fact that he was holding the defeated Hannibal and was organizing his counsel against the Romans, they caused him to be suspected by the king through frequent conversations with Hannibal, who was otherwise most pleasing to him and useful because of his cunning and skill in warfare.

Quintus Metellus, waging war against Jugurtha, corrupted the legates sent to him so that they might betray the king to him; when others came, he did the same. He used the same counsel against the Thracians. But the matter progressed little regarding the capture of Jugurtha; he did not want the man handed over to him, yet he achieved a great deal.