August 216 b.c.
Hannibal won his third great victory of the Second Punic War (see
Punic Wars) by encircling and annihilating an entire Roman army near the small village of Cannae in southern Italy. Hannibal himself met the initial murderous Roman charge head-on, his personal presence ensuring that the crescent of mercenary Spanish and Celtic infantry would bend but not break until his Africans at the flanks and rear could tie the knot. Cannae was thus a startling reversal of the usual Western military paradigm: Carthaginians, not Romans, were the invaders—outnumbered, relying largely on the skill of their general and the discipline of the troops, arrayed against a numerically superior but poorly led Western army.
Cannae itself was more than a tactical masterpiece; it was also a human story of abject carnage and mayhem. Nearly fifty thousand Romans were butchered in a single afternoon, a prodigious task of organized killing, where nearly six hundred legionaries were slaughtered each minute until darkness curtailed the bloodletting. The work continued on into the next morning, when thousands of parched Roman wounded, begging for a quick end to their misery, were systematically dispatched. Hannibal walked through the debris of the battlefield as Carthaginian looters collected gold senatorial rings by the bushel.
Hannibal has been faulted for not following up his great victory and marching on Rome. But his troops were exhausted, and Rome was a fortified city with plenty of resolute defenders. And although Cannae was proof of Hannibal's tactical genius, it was also a telling indication of the weakness of the entire Carthaginian strategic plan. Without steady reinforcement and logistical support, even spectacular victories like Trasimene, Trebia, and Cannae remained isolated phenomena, never integrated into a comprehensive design to occupy territory and detach Roman allies.
The idea that by sheer tactical brilliance an entire army could be encircled and annihilated has held an obvious fascination for subsequent Western strategists—
Frederick the Great,
Helmuth von Moltke, and
Alfred von Schlieffen come quickly to mind—who searched for their own Cannae to end the fighting in a single stroke, without serious loss to themselves.
Victor Davis Hanson
