At the Battle of Cannae, 2 August, 216 B.C., Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca administered one of Rome’s most crushing military defeats. Depending upon the ancient source, Roman losses on the Apulian battlefield numbered anywhere from roughly 50,000, as Livy relates, to around 70,000, as Polybius insists. Hannibal had enacted a double envelopment of the Roman army, a maneuver widely considered to be a tactical masterpiece that is to this day studied in war colleges around the world. The headstrong Roman consul Gaius Terentius Varro blundered straight into a cunning trap set for him by the brilliant enemy commander. Surrounded, the Romans were slaughtered by a numerically-inferior opponent, with few escaping the encirclement.
This episode was written by Marc DeSantis.
Marc is an ancient warfare podcast regular and author of Rome Seizes the Trident and the science fiction series The Memnon War.
>>Download<<