Battle of Cannae

The Battle of Cannae was fought on 2 August 216 BCE near the village of Cannae in Apulia, in south-eastern Italy, during the Second Punic War. The Carthaginian general Hannibal surrounded and destroyed a much larger Roman army, inflicting one of the heaviest defeats in Roman history. Cannae became the classic example of a double envelopment, studied by soldiers for more than two thousand years.

The Punic Wars were a series of conflicts between Rome and Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. In 218 BCE Hannibal led an army from Carthaginian Spain over the Pyrenees and the Alps into northern Italy. He defeated the Romans at the Trebia River that winter and, in 217 BCE, ambushed and destroyed a consular army at Lake Trasimene. The dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus then adopted a policy of avoiding pitched battle and wearing Hannibal down, but this strategy was unpopular in Rome. For 216 BCE the Senate decided to confront Hannibal with an army of unprecedented size, commanded by the two consuls, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro.

Hannibal had seized a Roman supply depot at Cannae, near the Aufidus River. The Roman force that marched against him numbered, according to the ancient historian Polybius, about 86,000 men, including allied Italian contingents, though some modern scholars think the true figure was lower. Hannibal had perhaps 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry: Africans, Spaniards, Gauls and Numidian horsemen. He was outnumbered in infantry but stronger in cavalry.

The two consuls held command on alternate days, and the battle took place on a day when Varro was in charge. The Romans packed their infantry into an unusually deep formation, intending to smash through the Carthaginian centre by sheer weight. Hannibal placed his Gallic and Spanish infantry in a forward-bulging line in the centre, with his experienced African infantry held back on either side and his cavalry on the wings.

As the Romans pushed forward, the Carthaginian centre gave ground steadily without breaking, drawing the Roman mass deeper into a pocket. Meanwhile Hannibal's heavy cavalry, under Hasdrubal, routed the Roman horsemen on one wing, then rode behind the Roman army to help defeat the allied cavalry on the other. The African infantry turned inwards against both Roman flanks, and the returning cavalry closed the rear. Crammed together and unable to manoeuvre, the Roman army was cut down over several hours.

The scale of the slaughter is not in doubt, but the numbers are. Polybius put the Roman dead at about 70,000, while Livy gave a figure of around 48,000, with many more captured. Modern estimates commonly fall between these. Among the dead were the consul Paullus and dozens of senators and former magistrates; Varro escaped. Hannibal's losses were much lighter, between about 5,700 and 8,000 men, most of them from the Gallic contingent in the centre.

After Cannae several regions of southern Italy, including the important city of Capua, went over to Hannibal, and Philip V of Macedon and Syracuse soon allied with Carthage. Yet Hannibal did not march on Rome, which he probably lacked the siege equipment to take, and the Roman Republic refused to negotiate. Most of central Italy stayed loyal. Rome returned to a strategy of attrition, rebuilt its armies and carried the war to Spain and later Africa. Hannibal remained in Italy for more than a decade but was finally recalled and defeated by Scipio Africanus at Zama in 202 BCE.

Cannae has been held up as the model of a battle of annihilation. Military thinkers from the Roman era to the twentieth century analysed it, and the German general staff studied it closely before the First World War. Its larger lesson is often drawn from the aftermath: a crushing tactical victory did not win the war.

Our 200 BCE map shows the Roman Republic and Carthage shortly after the Second Punic War, with Rome now in control of Spain's coast.