Cannae

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  The war in Italy changed after Cannae, for from then on Hannibal had bases to act from, but also allies to protect. There was little or no unity amongst his new-found allies, who had little in common with each other apart from their former link with Rome. Few were willing to commit significant numbers of men to fight outside their own lands, and all were firm in their belief that Hannibal was obliged to protect them from Roman depredations. The Romans sometimes had as many, or even more, troops in the field in Italy after Cannae, but never again were so many concentrated in a single field army. Instead between four and six independent armies were usually operating, occasionally moving together to support each other. They tried to avoid pitched battle with Hannibal’s main army, save in the most favourable of circumstances, but everywhere raided and attacked his allies. As the years went by, the area loyal to Hannibal steadily declined as the Romans captured one town after another. This was a long process, and more than once Hannibal was able to surprise Roman forces and soundly beat them, most notably in the two battles at Herdonea in 212 and 210. The Romans suffered other major blows, such as when the city of Tarentum was betrayed to the enemy in 212; when both of the year’s consuls were ambushed and killed (one actually dying of his wounds) in 208; and when some of her Latin allies declared themselves incapable of providing further soldiers and resources for the war effort in 209. Yet for all the pressure Hannibal put upon it, the Roman confederation did not collapse and continued to exert more and more of its massive power to regain losses.

  Both Hannibal as a commander and his army as soldiers completely outclassed their Roman opponents in the early years of the war. This was not true of the other Punic leaders and their armies, who proved incapable of winning major battlefield victories over the Romans. During the war Roman military effectiveness steadily increased as soldiers and officers gained experience. This was to produce a generation when Roman commanders and their legions were of exceptionally high quality. When Hasdrubal and Mago Barca both led armies to join their brother in Italy, the former was swiftly overwhelmed and his army destroyed, the latter stopped and defeated in Northern Italy. However, at first the quality of the new Roman armies was demonstrated against opponents other than Hannibal. Even during the worst crisis in Italy the Senate continued to send resources to prosecute the war on other fronts, in Spain and Sicily and also, when Hannibal entered an alliance with King Philip V of Macedon, in Greece. In Macedonia the war, known today as the First Macedonian War, would end in stalemate and an unsatisfactory peace treaty (so much so that one of the first Roman acts after ending the war with Carthage was to enter a new bout of conflict with Philip). In Sicily and Spain the Romans would eventually win outright victories, expelling the Carthaginians from the regions.

  Finally, in 204, a Roman consul who had made his name in Spain led an invasion army from Sicily into Africa. This was Publius Cornelius Scipio, the same young man who had saved his father’s life at Ticinus and assumed command of the survivors after Cannae. At the heart of his army were two legions formed from the fugitives of Cannae, and later reinforced by men from the disasters at Herdonea. From the beginning the Senate had decided to treat these men harshly, sending them to Sicily and refusing to allow them to return to Italy. It was one of the great ironies of the war that it was these legions under Scipio which faced Hannibal after the Carthaginians had recalled his army from Italy to protect their city. At Zama in 202 BC it was a well-trained and highly experienced Roman army which faced a larger, but very mixed Carthaginian force, whose members had had little opportunity to train together. Also, unlike all Hannibal’s earlier victories in Italy, the Carthaginians were outnumbered in cavalry. The resulting battle was a tough slogging match, but in the end Hannibal’s infantry were attacked from the front by the Roman infantry and from the rear by Roman and allied cavalry, much of it drawn from the Numidian tribes. On this occasion Scipio employed no tactics as imaginative as Hannibal’s at Cannae, but the result was the same, for the Punic army was utterly defeated. Carthage had few resources left. More importantly there was little will to continue the struggle. Unlike the Romans in 216, they soon opened negotiations for peace, accepting the terms imposed by the Romans upon them. The Second Punic War was over.

  Hannibal survived the defeat of Zama. In the years after the war he won the high office of suffete at Carthage and did much to encourage the revival of his city’s prosperity. Yet a combination of political rivals at Carthage and a growing desire for revenge amongst many Roman senators eventually forced him into exile. He became a mercenary commander, fleeing to the courts of a succession of monarchs in the Hellenistic East, especially those hostile to Rome. Eventually, hunted by Roman agents, he took his own life in Bithynia in 183.16

  CANNAE IN HISTORY

  Cannae was Hannibal’s greatest triumph, but there was nothing inevitable about the course of the battle in spite of the brilliance of his plan. There was no guarantee that Hasdrubal’s cavalry would be able to smash through the Roman horse quickly enough, for the confined space between the River Aufidius and the infantry in the centre limited the advantage derived from their numerical superiority. Hasdrubal was required not simply to rout the Roman cavalry, but also then to rally his men, keeping them in good enough order to perform further complex manoeuvres and mount other attacks. Throughout history it has been the exception rather than the rule for cavalry to operate in such a controlled manner, for the very speed and exhilaration of the charge foster disorder. Similarly, Hannibal knew that defeat of the Gallic and Spanish infantry in the centre was inevitable, but required them to hold out for just the right amount of time. If they broke too soon, before the Romans had become wearied and disordered in a prolonged combat, then the enemy foot would break through with such force that it was unlikely the Libyans would have the power to stop them. In the event the very numbers of the Roman infantry, and the deep and closely packed formation they had adopted, worked against them, merging the individual maniples into an unwieldy crowd utterly incapable of reacting to a changing situation. This process took time, and until its later stages the Roman foot continued to create a massive forward momentum, which there was no assurance that either the first Punic line or the Libyan reserves would be able to halt. In the event everything went Hannibal’s way, but things might easily have been different.

  Cannae has long held a peculiar fascination with soldiers and scholars alike. As recently as the Gulf War in 1991, the UN Commander General Schwartzkopf claimed to have drawn inspiration for his brief and devastatingly effective land offensive from Hannibal. During the Second World War Rommel was not the only German officer to desire or claim to have inflicted a ‘Cannae’ on the enemy. Earlier in the century Von Schlieffen, the architect of the plan used for the German invasion of France in 1914, was obsessed with Hannibal’s victory, studying the battle time and time again for inspiration as he painstakingly drafted and re-drafted his grand design. The resultant plan bore only a superficial similarity to the Carthaginian’s tactics at Cannae and was conceived on an infinitely grander scale. It also failed.

  Other battles where an enemy has been enveloped on both sides, surrounded and suffered terrible casualties are sometimes likened to Cannae, whether their outcome was the product of chance or deliberate design. The battle of the Falaise Gap in August 1944 is one such victory, but, when it is remembered that this was the culmination of months of fighting in Normandy and fought between armies of many hundreds of thousands over a huge frontage, the similarities with the single day’s fighting on a narrow plain beside the Aufidius seem to recede. Cannae was a battle very much of its time. It was a formal affair, preceded by days of cautious manoeuvring, as the rival commanders strove to give their own soldiers confidence and as many advantages as they could. Battles were too important to be risked lightly, though both sides expected them to be the decisive element in a campaign. Hannibal excelled in this type of fighting and even here, where the actual battlefield was chosen by his Roman opponent, he was able to turn this to h
is advantage. He won because he was able to exploit the superiority of his own army and senior subordinates and overcome the numerical advantage of his opponents. His tactics were an ingenious and imaginative response to the local situation, but it was only through his own and his officers’ leadership and skill, along with the bravery of his soldiers, that they proved successful.

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  Adrian Goldsworthy is an award-winning historian of the classical world. He is the author of numerous books about ancient Rome, including Hadrian’s Wall, Caesar, How Rome Fell, Pax Romana, and Augustus. Goldsworthy lives in South Wales.

  APPENDIX 1

  Numbers

  A: HANNIBAL’S ARMY

  1. The March to Italy

  Date: Spring 218 setting out from New Carthage

  Detachments and Losses: 12,000 cavalry & 90,000 infantry + 37 elephants

  Source: Polybius 3. 35. 1 & Livy 21. 23. 1 Appian Hann. 4

  Date: Summer 218 left in Eastern Spain

  Detachments and Losses: 1000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry at least 11,000 other less reliable troops sent home

  Source: Polybius 3. 35. 5–6 Livy 21. 23. 3–6

  Date: Summer 218 after crossing the Pyrenees

  Detachments and Losses: 9,000 cavalry and 50,000 infantry

  Source: Polybius 3. 35. 7–8

  Date: Summer 218 after crossing the River Rhône

  Detachments and Losses: 8,000 cavalry and 38,000 infantry

  Source: Polybius 3. 60. 5

  Date: Late autumn 218 in Northern Italy after crossing the Alps

  Detachments and Losses: 6,000 cavalry (mixed Numidian and Spanish) and 20,000 infantry (12,000 Libyan and 8,000 Spanish)

  Source: Polybius 3. 56. 4

  Of these figures Polybius specifically attributes the last set to an inscription erected by Hannibal on the Lacinian Peninsula (3. 56. 4). He does not appear to have derived the other numbers from such a reliable source, and this has sometimes led to these being questioned by historians.* Ultimately it is impossible to know whether the numbers given for the early stages of the expedition are accurate or not. If they are correct, then Hannibal detached around 22,000 men before leaving Spain and lost around 4,000 cavalry and 50,000 infantry through combat, desertion, disease and attrition in the five months it took him to march from New Carthage to Italy. The losses may be broken down for each stage of the journey as follows:

  1. New Carthage to the Pyrenees

  21,000 men

  2. Pyrenees to the Rhône

  13,000 men

  3. Rhône to Italy

  20,000 men

  Polybius comments that Hannibal had lost nearly half of his army in the last phase of the march, mostly in crossing the Alps (3. 60. 5). Losses amongst baggage animals had been proportionally even higher (3. 56. 2). However, it is noticeable that throughout the march his cavalry had suffered a lower percentage loss than his infantry, 50% compared to 88%. This is surprising, since horses will usually break down before men. The cavalry were very much the élite of Hannibal’s army and it is probable that he took particular care of them. This, perhaps along with higher morale, may explain this marked difference.

  Whether or not these figures are correct, all of our sources believed that Hannibal’s army suffered very heavily on the march to Italy, especially during the passage of the Alps. Probably the bulk of such losses were as a result of physical weakness or disease which made it impossible for men to keep pace with the column, or through desertion. If Hannibal’s army was initially as large as Polybius believed, then the overwhelming bulk of its manpower most probably consisted of recently recruited Spaniards. Tribal warfare did not require the same stamina as such a long march and probably did little to prepare warriors for its rigours.

  Polybius provides us with the most plausible estimate of Hannibal’s strength and losses. However, Livy says that there was a very wide range of numbers given by his sources. Lucius Cincius Alimentus was one of Rome’s first historians, a senator who fought in these campaigns and was at one stage taken prisoner by the Carthaginians. He claimed that he had heard Hannibal say that he had lost 36,000 men and an enormous number of horses and baggage animals after crossing the Rhône. Alimentus estimated that Hannibal had 10,000 cavalry and 80,000 infantry on arrival in Italy. However, as Livy points out, this figure is of little value for it included the many Gallic and Ligurian tribesmen who would rally to Hannibal’s cause after his crossing of the Alps (21. 38. 2–5).

  2. The Campaigns in Italy, November 218–spring 216 BC

  (a) The battle of Trebia, December 218 BC:

  (i) Overall total − 10,000 cavalry (6,000 Spanish and Numidian + 4,000 Gauls) 28,000 infantry (8,000 skirmishers and 20,000 close order infantry of whom at least 12,000 were African, 8,000 Spanish and 8,000 Gauls).

  Sources − Polybius 3. 72. 7–9, Livy 21. 55. 2–4.

  (ii) Losses − unspecified, but relatively light amongst the Africans and Spanish, and heavier amongst the Gauls. However in the winter months many men and horses died along with all of the army’s elephants (Polybius 3. 74. 10–11).

  (b) The battle of Lake Trasimene, June 217 BC:

  (i) Overall total − unspecified, but it is clear that Hannibal had been joined by a significant number of Gallic tribesmen before he left Cisalpine Gaul. He must have had at least the 50,000 men present at Cannae since he received no reinforcements before that battle.

  (ii) Losses − 1,500, mostly Gauls and 30 senior officers (Polybius 3. 85. 5). 2,500 in the battle and ‘many’ subsequently of their wounds (Livy 22. 7. 3).

  (c) Gerunium, autumn 217 BC

  (i) Overall total − not stated.

  (ii) Casualties − some of Livy’s sources claimed that 6,000 Carthaginians were killed (22. 24. 14). Polybius says vaguely that many were killed, but also claims that the greater part of Hannibal’s army was not present (3. 102. 8). It is probable that the figure of 6,000 is hugely exaggerated.

  (d) The battle of Cannae, August 216 BC:

  (i) Overall total − 10,000 cavalry (maximum of 6,000 Numidians and Spanish, and the remainder Gauls) 40,000 infantry (perhaps 8,000 skirmishers and 32,000 close order foot: absolute maximum of 12,000 Africans and 8,000 Spanish (and probably fewer) and the remainder Gauls.

  Sources − Polybius 3. 114. 5, Livy 22. 46. 6.

  B: THE ROMAN ARMY AT CANNAE

  1. Numbers:

  (i) Polybius’ version (3. 107. 9–15, 113. 5):

  Eight legions each of 5,000 infantry and 300 cavalry, supported by the same number of allied foot and more cavalry.

  Total = 80,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry (2,400 Roman, if all legions were at full strength, and the remainder supplied by Latin and Italian allies).

  (ii) Livy’s alternatives (22. 36. 1–5):

  (a) 10,000 new soldiers enlisted as replacements − total c. 50,000–55,000.

  (b) Four new legions formed to add to the four already at Gerunium (each legion either 4,000 foot and 200 horse or 4,200 foot and 200 horse). Total = c. 64,000–67,200 infantry and 4,800 cavalry.

  (c) A variation on (b): four exceptionally strong legions enrolled, consisting of 5,000 foot and 300 horse, and supplements sent to bring the existing legions up to the same strength. Twice as many cavalry and an equal number of infantry also supplied by the allies − total c. 80,000 infantry and 7,200 cavalry.

  Livy’s narrative clearly assumes that estimate (c) was correct, but some scholars have preferred the lower estimate. Brunt stated that the lower estimate is to be preferred ‘… because the success of Hannibal’s tactics at Cannae is unintelligible if the Roman forces outnumbered his own by two to one’. As we have seen in the main text, the opposite is true, for the deep formation adopted by the Roman centre makes no sense if the Romans had roughly the same number of infantry as the enemy.*

  2. Identity of the legions in 216
BC:

  Assuming that Polybius was correct and there were eight legions at Cannae, half had been raised in late 217 or early 216 and the other four were the troops formerly commanded by the dictator. These consisted of:

  1. The two legions formed by Fabius Maximus (Livy 22. 11. 2–3) in 217.

  2. The two legions formerly commanded by Servilius Geminus. The cavalry of this army had been wiped out in Centenius’ disaster in the days after Trasimene. Geminus had taken command in March 217 of half the army which had re-formed after Trebia. Flaminius took over the two legions commanded by Sempronius Longus, and Servilius Geminus took those of Scipio (Livy 21. 63. 1, Appian Hann. 8). One of these legions had been stationed in Cisalpine Gaul in 218 under the command of the praetor Lucius Manlius Vulso. The other had originally been raised for Scipio’s expedition to Spain, but was sent instead to Cisalpine Gaul when the Boii rebelled.

  * For discussion see J. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War (Warminster, 1978), pp. 33–48, H. Delbrück (trans. W. Renfroe), History of the Art of War 1 (Nebraska, 1975), pp. 357–362, B. Caven, The Punic Wars (London, 1980), pp. 105–106, and J. Peddie, Hannibal’s War (Gloucestershire, 1997), pp. 100–108.

  * For a discussion see F. Walbank, Polybius 1 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 439–440, Lazenby (1978), pp. 75–76 and Delbrück (1971), pp. 325–327. G. de Sanctis, Storia dei Romani vol. 3 (Turin-Florence, 1953), ii pp. 131–135 and P. Brunt, Italian Manpower (Oxford, 1971), pp. 418–419 argue for the lower figure.