Welcome back! When we left off last time,
Rome was reeling from a major defeat at the Trebia River, bested by Hannibal’s
superior generalship and the consul Sempronius Longus’ rash pride.
Today we pick up in the aftermath of that battle,
with Rome's legions scattered, Rome itself exposed.
It's the winter of 216 and, luckily for Rome,
ancient war simply did not happen in winter:
foraging was too hard and conditions in the field were too rough.
So Hannibal set his troops up in winter quarters
and began to prepare for the next season's campaigns.
Meanwhile in Rome, the consular elections that Longus was so worried about took place
and Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius Geminus were elected.
And here again we’re gonna see some of the dangers of Roman politics.
You see, Gaius was populist, and so concerned that the patrician senate
would try to keep him occupied if he ever showed his face in Rome
that he sped off to join the newly raised legions without ever returning to the capital
to complete the religious ceremonies that would officially confirm his consulship.
He raised four legions of fresh troops and marched north to keep Hannibal bottled up
and prevent him from ravaging the Italian countryside.
But Hannibal, ever crafty, had different plans in mind.
He once again chose an impossible route,
leading his men through an uncrossable swamp to outmaneuver the Romans.
The conditions were truly horrid. Men would drown in their sleep,
sinking slowly into the waterlogged muck as they tried to rest.
Hannibal himself suffered terribly in the crossing,
his eyes becoming so infected with a marsh disease
that he eventually just had to cut one of them out.
But through all this Hannibal rode on, sitting atop one of the last remaining elephants,
taking up position in the very rear of the army
so that if any man thought of turning tail and deserting now,
that man would see his general riding quietly behind on the great Grey beast.
But all of this hardship achieved Hannibal’s aim.
He emerged in Etruria far behind the Roman lines.
Nothing stood between him and Rome…
Of course, we know that his goal never actually was Rome.
Hannibal never really thought that he had the strength to take Rome anyway.
Instead, he focused his campaign on convincing the rest of Italy to join his cause,
but the new consul Gaius Flaminius didn't know that.
As soon as he heard reports that Hannibal was in Etruria,
he began a forced march back to defend the capital.
And, naturally, this is exactly what Hannibal was hoping for.
About 150 miles north of Rome, at a place called Lake Trasimene,
Hannibal prepared his ambush.
Now, he chose this point for its unique geography,
it's a wide lake whose northern shore presses against a series of steep hills
with just a shallow strip of land between the hills and banks of the lake.
In the hills around the lake,
Hannibal hid his cavalry and a sizable contingent of his infantry,
stationing the rest of his foot soldiers on the tiny path between the lake and the hills.
And then he waited.
As predicted, Flaminius charged through the narrow entrance to the lake,
racing to catch Hannibal before he got to Rome.
And, of course, with that goal in mind,
he ordered his men to attack as soon as he saw what he thought
was the tail end of Hannibal’s troops at the other side of the lake.
But then, the second his men were out of the entrance to the narrow lakeshore road,
Hannibal’s cavalry emerged and closed up their path of retreat.
And then, before the Romans even had time
to understand the dire situation they'd just put themselves in,
the Carthaginian infantry came barreling down the hillside
and crashed right into the Roman flank. It was a slaughter.
Horses and men screamed as they were cut down and drowned
in a panicked attempt to escape the carnage.
At the end of the day, of an army of 40,000,
only 10,000 men remained to be counted among the living.
With their legions scattered and having suffered not one,
but two massive defeats which would bring any other nation to its knees,
the Romans turned to an ancient solution in times of crisis:
dictatorship.
Now, you have to understand that in Rome,
a dictatorship wasn't what we think of when we hear that word today.
It was a constitutional office and, stranger still to our modern ears,
it was an office democratically ratified by the senate.
You see, in Rome, a dictator was chosen at the most dire of times,
when the gridlock and faction of Roman democracy couldn't be afforded.
A dictator was empowered to make all decisions during a crisis.
He would set state policy and his word was law,
with no checks by the senate or the Roman people.
And then, after six months,
he would give the position up and Rome would go back to its democracy.
And you know what else is weird to our modern ears?
They always did.
Until waning days of the republic, every dictator voluntarily stepped aside,
gave up that power and handed the reins of the government back to the people.
It really gives you a sense of the culture
and Roman honor that this happened every time for almost 500 years.
And this time was no exception.
The Romans elected Quintus Fabius Maximus and,
as much credit as history gives Scipio for his final victory,
this choice may actually be the most important of the war.
Because unlike everyone else in Rome,
whose plan seemed to consist of just charging at Hannibal
and seeing if they could beat him to a pulp, Fabius had a different strategy.
And it was a strategy that all of Rome hated,
a strategy that wouldn't win the war or kick Hannibal off of Italian soil,
a strategy that wasn't glorious or heroic…
but it was the strategy that almost certainly saved Rome in the end.
Against unbelievable opposition, against calls for his head and jeers in the street,
Fabius decided he wasn't going to fight Hannibal, at least not directly.
Instead, he shadowed Hannibal’s movements,
keeping his army always on favorable ground, limiting Hannibal’s movement
and picking off foraging parties or scouts when he could catch them...
but never accepting the battles that Hannibal kept trying to lure him into,
battles that almost certainly would have meant the end of Rome.
This strategy sticks with us even today.
Now known as Fabian tactics,
leaders from George Washington to Barclay de Tolly have used it to pull victory
from what looks to outsiders like certain defeat.
But these tactics were incredibly unsatisfying to the people of Rome.
They saw Hannibal ravaging the countryside and felt it was cowardly to,
as it seemed to them, just let that go on.
But Fabian stuck to his gladius
and continued trying to contain Hannibal rather than taking him head on.
This led many in Rome to start to clamor for his Master of Horse,
one Marcus Minucius Rufus, to take over and save them from such craven acts.
Hannibal himself though had a different outlook.
. He could see how much damage Fabius' delaying tactics were doing to his army,
how every passing day stretched his already thin supply lines,
how every day the Roman soldiery regained a little of that confidence
that had been shattered by the two crushing defeats at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene.
And here is where you've got to love Hannibal.
He had heard rumors of the Roman discontent with their dictator,
so as his army went about devastating the country side,
Hannibal would burn everything except any lands he found that were owned by Fabius,
leading people in Rome to start whispering
that Fabius had made some sort of secret deal with Hannibal.
But Fabius stayed the course and bided his time,
waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
And at last, that moment came when Hannibal marched into Ager Falernus in Campania.
You see Ager Falernus is essentially a valley with 8 passes
that an army the size of Hannibal’s could use to enter and exit.
Five of these passes were either blocked by an unfordable river
or firmly in Rome's control
and Fabius, as soon as his scouts told him that Hannibal had entered the valley,
immediately sent troops to hold the other three passes:
bottling Hannibal up inside.
This should have been the end for Hannibal, but ever crafty,
he had one more trick up his sleeve.
One night, the Roman sentries saw a mass of torches approaching one of the passes
and struck up the alarm.
Hannibal was trying to break through by cover of night.
So of course, against the orders of Fabius, they raced out to push Hannibal back
and maybe finally have the decisive battle
on their own terms Rome so desperately needed. But when they got there?
Oxen.
You see Hannibal had rounded up all the oxen in the valley
and tied torches to their horns, and then he drove them towards the Roman position.
And as soon as the Romans took the bait and rushed out to do battle with the oxen?
Yeah, Hannibal and his entire army really did slip away under cover of night.
Fabian was recalled and in a measure that would destroy the office of dictator forever
Minucius, his master of horse was chosen as co-dictator.
This is something that there was no legal formula for,
it was something that had never ever happened before in Roman history
(after all it does kind of render the office of dictator pointless
once you can elect as many as you want).
But that's just how much the Romans hated the year
without a major victory Fabius had given them.
Minucius immediately took command of half of the army and headed straight for Hannibal,
and, like every other Roman general,
was immediately out maneuvered and his forces were nearly wiped out.
In the end, they were only saved because Fabian, so derided by the people of Rome,
was watching from a nearby hill
and decided he couldn’t allow so many Romans to perish,
and threw his forces into action, turning the tide of the battle
and rescuing the beleaguered Minucius and his men.
To his credit, Minucius, now humbled,
immediately placed himself back in a subordinate role to Fabian
and let him finish out his year without the Romans seeing another disastrous defeat.
But then comes Varro...
Here is a man who gets elected consul by overwhelming acclamation
running on the platform that he is gonna stop the cowardly policies of Fabian,
raise the largest army Rome has ever seen and go crush Hannibal.
You can probably already guess how this is going to ends...
Varro and his co-consul did indeed raise the largest army Rome had ever seen:
drawing up 16 new legions to march south to hunt down and destroy Hannibal.
Knowing that Hannibal was encamped at Cannae
with his 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry,
Varro immediately took his army of 80,000 and marched straight at him.
When they got to Cannae, a dispute occurred between the two consuls.
Paullus, the elderly patrician co-consul of Varro was nervous about that flat,
open terrain around Cannae.
He wanted to move the army to the nearby hills to neutralize the Carthaginian Calvary.
Varro, on the other hand, saw the numerical advantage the Romans held
and wanted to engage Hannibal in battle before he could get away.
So, of course, similar to what we saw at the Trebia, regardless of Paulus' misgivings,
when it was Varro's day to command the army,
he deployed them on the field and engaged the Carthaginians.
And what happens next is one of the most famous battles in all of military history.
This is where we get to see Hannibal at the height of his genius.
This is where we find out why Cannae
goes down in the annals of military scholarship as the battle.
Why throughout time many of the greatest generals
- right down to the 20th century - have referred to it as a “work of art”;
though if there can be art in something that involves so much slaughter, I really don't see it.
But this is where we at last get to see Hannibal’s greatest moment,
achieving something often termed impossible in the study of military tactics:
the encirclement of a greater army by a lesser army.
This is where Hannibal pulls off one of the greatest mind games of all time…
For you see, Hannibal deployed his troops in an inverted crescent
with his weakest infantry in the center of the arc,
protruding towards the Roman line, and his strongest infantry on the flanks.
As soon as Varro saw this, he redeployed his troops.
Normally, Roman infantry is spread out in a checkerboard like pattern
in order to give them more room to maneuver,
but seeing the weakness of the Carthaginian center
Varro massed his troops in the middle packing them close,
hoping to use them as a ram to drive straight through the less reliable forces opposite them.
But what he didn’t know was the Hannibal had placed himself
and his brother Mago in the center, as if to say to these troops
“We haven’t abandoned you, if you die, we die too. So don’t flee.”
And it worked.
The roman hammer smashed into the front line but - instead of causing a total route -
it simply forced the Carthaginian center back, step by step.
And the Romans, seeing the center giving ground, kept pushing,
until that inverted crescent began to right itself and then started to push in.
But during all of this, the better Carthaginian infantry,
the ones on the flanks, hadn’t given an inch.
They were still where they were at the start of the battle,
which now meant they were on the Roman flanks.
Suddenly infantry on the wings wheeled around
and encircled the now over extended Roman center;
at the same instant, the Carthaginian cavalry
which had driven the Roman Cavalry off the field swept into the back of the Roman line.
The net was closed. That already tight Roman formation was pressed so close
that men couldn’t even raise their arms to swing their swords.
It was a total slaughter: hundreds of men were butchered each minute, until sunset.
Livy tells us the panic was so great that at the Roman center
there were men who out of manic terror dug holes in the dirt and buried their heads
up to the neck in the ground so they would suffocate to death.
Of the 80,000 Romans who took the field that day, only three thousand escaped.
After the battle, the rings of the roman nobles were collected
and six thousand of them were poured upon the floor of the Carthaginian senate.
Among them were the rings of Gnaeus Servilius Geminus,
the consul who tried to temper Flaminius and keep him from engagement at Lake Trasamine,
Marcus Minucius Rufus, Fabius’ Master of Horse who only the previous year
had been humbled at the hands of Hannibal and came to understand the wisdom of Fabius,
and poor Lucius Aemilius Paullus, Varro’s co-consul who just the previous day
had counseled Varro not to engage Hannibal on open ground.
Poor Paullus who, when wounded, ordered his cavalry to dismount
and formed one of the great last stands of Cannae.
Poor Paullus who, when offered a horse by one of the few military tribunes
to escape the battle, said: “Cornelius, do not waste in useless pity
the few moments left in which to escape from the hands of the enemy.
Go, announce publicly to the senate that they must fortify Rome
and make its defence strong before the victorious army approaches,
and tell Fabius privately that I have ever remembered his precepts in life and in death.
Suffer me to breathe my last among my slaughtered soldiers…”
But among all those rings there was one conspicuously absent:
Varro’s, for he had no such compunction about taking a horse.
So there we will leave off for today, the flower of Roman youth destroyed,
their leaders all dead and gone, their armies scattered,
and nothing between Hannibal and Rome…
So join us next time for the conclusion of the Second Punic War.
Thanks for watching.
Subtitled by: Louis Lenders (louislenders@hotmail.com)