Cannae (author's notes)

Some notes on this series of narrations of the epic battle of Cannae.

Jul 07, 2025

Hannibal's feet tread on the Roman spoils of Cannae. Sculpture made by Sebastien Slodtz in 1722, located in the Louvre Museum. Photo taken by me.

Narrating Cannae, and in particular the life of Hannibal, is something I set myself as a life plan when I was no more than a naive student of history. I chose Cannae, because it is indisputably Hannibal's great work in terms of pitched battles. Never were the odds more against him, and never was he so close to ending the Roman Republic and its history as we know it. But first and foremost, what strikes me deeply in Cannae, is the genius of Hannibal, and this can be seen from many angles. The fact that Hannibal not only convinced, but motivated warriors from different peoples, who could barely communicate with each other (such as Iberians, Gauls, Numidians), to fight against an enemy that was outnumbering them, and made them believe that victory was possible by following a plan that defied numbers, seems to me so incredible as to be captured in a story. What Hannibal achieved on August 2, 216 BC became one of the most spectacular victories in history, without equal in terms of the complexity of the execution of the Carthaginian army and the quality of the opponents they faced. The genius of one man, reflected in its entirety in the valleys of Cannae, is something worth narrating.

Indeed, what I tried to narrate and explain through the accounts of different generals and officers from both sides who participated in the battle that day, is precisely the tactical moves that led Hannibal to dominate and annihilate an army of more than eighty thousand men suffering minimal casualties. It is essential to understand that the combat here was not won mainly by the bravery and warrior capacity of the soldiers, but by the strategy applied with precision and coordination in an army that had multiculturalism as one of its main elements. The coordination between the Numidian, Balearic, Greek, Gallic, Iberian and Brutian contingents and their Carthaginian officers was always exemplary. As the Roman historian Livy states (28. 12), perhaps Hannibal's main feat was not in his incredible victories on the battlefield, but in his ability to keep together for more than fifteen years an army as varied and multicultural as his own, made up of diverse peoples who did not share language, beliefs, rites, clothing or ways of fighting, but who were always willing to go to war and die for their general.

But let's return to the maneuver itself, what I tried to capture in this Cannae's narrative. The battle took place on the south bank of the Aufidus River, which both armies had to cross to form up. Hannibal's plan was simple but revolutionary: set up a curved phalanx formation to the outside, leaving his veteran troops in the rear of the flanks, waiting for the right moment to spring into action. His weaker troops, the Gauls and the Iberians, led by Mago and Hannibal respectively, shaped that curve that lured the Romans into the trap. Of course, those were only some of the elements of the plan. The key was Hannibal's cavalry, composed mainly of Numidians, Iberians and Gauls. The Numidians in particular, had proven to be far superior horsemen to the Romans in the previous two years of warfare, and also possessed overwhelming numerical superiority.

The left wing of the Carthaginian cavalry, composed mainly of Gallic and Iberian horsemen, was led by Hasdrubal. Once he had put to flight the Roman cavalry under the command of the consul Aemilius Paullus, he was able to move to the other end of the battlefield to reinforce the Numidian cavalry, which was fighting against the allied cavalry of Rome, under the command of the consul Varro. The effect was as Hannibal had foreseen. Varro and his cavalry fled, leaving the Carthaginian cavalry a free way to position themselves in the rear of the Roman army and charge. At that point, the Carthaginian phalanx had collided with and absorbed the colossal Roman army, giving ground in an orderly fashion until the exposed curvature of their formation was transformed into a reverse curve. Then the African infantry intervened, appearing behind the lines of Gauls and Iberians to maneuver and turn against the flanks of the Roman army, which was still pushing. When the Carthaginian cavalry fell to the rear of the legionaries, the nearly eighty thousand men fighting for Rome that day were surrounded by less than forty thousand men. What happened next is history.

Polybius establishes the Roman casualties at about seventy thousand (3. 117. 1-3). Livy, somewhat more optimistic, puts them at forty-eight thousand (22. 49). Modern historians tend to choose Livy's figures, in the belief that ancient historians tended to exaggerate battle casualties to make their accounts more epic. In any case, the disaster for the Republic was total, even leading some army officers to propose to abandon Rome and seek refuge outside Italy (Livy, 22. 53).

Of course, my approach to these kinds of narratives is to make them as close to reality as possible, or at least to the record of the past that the ancients left us. For that, my first source, and the one I always recommend using as the main one when studying the Punic Wars, is the Histories of the Greek Polybius, who was not only an eyewitness to the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War, but even had the opportunity to interview veterans of Hannibal's army to elaborate his account.

The movements of troops in the days prior to the battle as well as in it, described in the narrative, follow to the letter the data given by Polybius. I have done the same for the disposition of the troops and their respective performances in the battle. As was customary at the time, generals were expected to set an example and raise the morale of their troops by fighting alongside them. It was common for generals and high officers, such as the Roman consuls and tribunes or the horseman Hasdrubal of our history, to take up positions alongside the cavalry, the most elite units of the Hellenistic armies. Gaius Terentius Varro and Aemilius Paullus, the generals in charge of the massive army that Rome raised for Cannae, fought in the cavalry wings. Their counterpart, Hannibal, fought where he felt it was most necessary to show his presence and control the synchronized movement of the units: the center of his phalanx of Iberians and Gauls, for which he was aided by his younger brother Mago, often overshadowed in history by the imposing figure of Hannibal.

As described in the narrative, Varro, the consul who had decided to accept Hannibal's offer of battle, managed to escape from the field of destruction that Cannae had become and took refuge in the city of Venusia, from where he made his way to Rome. Contrary to what most of us would think, the Roman senate did not reproach him for his performance at Cannae, but thanked him for remaining in the service of the Republic even in such a disaster (Livy, 22. 61), and kept him in active military service until the end of the war, a clear demonstration that the Romans knew that what happened at Cannae was not due to ineptitudes of their officers, but to a superior genius they did not know how to deal with yet.

Thank you for reading this far. This series of narratives was definitely an experiment, but a pleasant one (hopefully for you too), and I hope I was able to capture well what was Hannibal's tactical genius in achieving victory that day, one that earned him a place on the podium of the greatest generals in history. I hope to publish more of this series in the future.

Sebastián Panatt