The history of the Roman Republic was an extraordinary story of political and military success, one that already impressed contemporaries such as the Greek historian Polybius.1 After gaining control of the Italian peninsula, the armies of the Roman Republic were able to bring first the western and then the eastern Mediterranean under Roman control within only a few generations.2 It is thus easy to understand that the Roman poet Virgil, a contemporary of Augustus, in the third book of the Aeneid had Jupiter promise an imperium sine fine to the Roman people, an empire whose conquests were sacralized by the Romans’ supreme god.3 The successes of the Republic were remembered not only in this famous work of historical epic, but also in many other areas of Roman culture—in historiographical records, dramas, poems, speeches in front of the Roman people, monuments, and public rituals, especially the triumphal procession.4 After Augustus’s reign, the empire did not collapse but continued to develop into one of the largest and most enduring ruling structures in European history.5
Yet this story also contains dark chapters. We can find one of these in the twenty-second book of the Ab Urbe Condita, a monumental historiographical work written by Livy, another contemporary of Augustus and Virgil.6 In this passage, Livy describes the reactions in Rome and Italy to the news of the outcome of the first operations of the Second Punic War, which had been particularly devastating for the Romans and their allies with the heavy defeats at the river Trebia in autumn of 218 BCE and at Lake Trasimene in early summer of 217.7 In this situation, several Roman allies came to assure them of their allegiance. Hieron II, king of Syracuse and one of the most loyal allies of the Republic, had sent his envoys encouraging messages, which they now delivered to the Senate in Rome. Hieron was shaken by the misfortune of the Romans, especially by the death of their commander C. Flaminius at the battle of Lake Trasimene. No personal loss, and not even that of his empire, could have hit him harder. Yet he knew very well, so he said, that the greatness of the Roman people was almost more remarkable in adversity than in good times; Rome would therefore survive this dark hour as well. In order to underscore his message, Hieron sent not only words but also auxiliary troops, money, grain, and—just a few months after two of the most severe military defeats in Roman history to date—a statue of the goddess Victoria made of pure gold.8 The Senate gladly accepted the latter as a good omen and gave the goddess a new home in Rome’s most important temple, to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol in Rome.9
Of course, Hieron II was able to make these observations only because the Roman Republic had suffered enough defeats on the battlefield. The king himself had witnessed some of these during the First Punic War, in whose early years he himself had fought the Romans.10 Yet it was not only in the wars against Carthage that the Roman legions had paid a high price on their way to hegemony in the Mediterranean. This way was “marked with blood”—that of their enemies but also of their own soldiers.11 To draw up a list of all Roman defeats of the Republican era hardly seems possible due to large gaps in our sources.12 Even a cautious estimate comes to about ninety Roman military defeats on a larger scale—that is, with at least five thousand fallen soldiers on the Roman side.13 The defeat of Roman armies on the battlefield was therefore a regular occurrence during the whole Republican period.
Perhaps one could assume that these defeats were rather marginalized in Roman tradition, that the Romans wanted to forget their darkest hours, especially in a culture that valued and celebrated military success in such varied forms as Roman culture did.14 In this study, however, I aim to show that this was not the case; rather, the Romans found various ways of remembering their own defeats and incorporating them into the picture they drew of themselves and their history and thus made these dark hours a part of their collective identity.15 Among the numerous Roman defeats of the Republican period, I will concentrate on major defeats of the Second Punic War (218–201) and analyze representations and interpretations of these events in important Roman sources from the Republic and Early Empire, especially in the historiographical tradition.
1 Hannibal’s Triumphs: The First Years of the Second Punic War (218–216)
The course of events that led to the devastating Roman defeats to which Hieron II reacted in his message started in Spain, when, in late 219, the army of the Carthaginian commander (strategos) Hannibal conquered the city of Sagunt on the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Romans claimed Sagunt as their ally and, therefore, declared war on the Carthaginians when they were not willing to deliver Hannibal, who had ordered the attack. While the Roman side was still preparing their strategy, Hannibal led his army of perhaps thirty thousand soldiers across the Pyrenees and the Alps. Late in 218, his troops reached Italy, and, probably in December of 218, at the river Trebia, they won the first major battle of the war. In spring of 217, the Carthaginians marched south, passed the Apennine, and ambushed a second Roman army at the northern bank of Lake Trasimene in Etruria. This army had been under the command of the aforementioned consul C. Flaminius, who himself died in combat.16 This victory opened the way for the Carthaginian advance to central and southern Italy, where Hannibal’s army could now devastate the country.17 In the following year, the Romans tried to end the invasion by mobilizing the largest army the Republic had yet seen. According to Livy, the two new elected consuls, C. Terentius Varro und L. Aemilius Paullus, led into battle eight legions and the contingents of the Italian allies, probably totaling around ninety thousand soldiers. With these forces they faced Hannibal’s army, which was not even half its size, in the height of summer in 216 at the village of Cannae in Apulia. At Cannae, the Roman army suffered one of the most devastating defeats not only in Rome’s long history, but in European military history in general. According to the lowest estimates, over forty-five thousand Roman and Italian soldiers were killed on a single day. Furthermore, at least thirty thousand men had fallen in the earlier battles during the two previous years, and thousands more had been captured.18 In the years that followed, the Roman Republic fell into a severe military, political, and economic crisis that lasted for years and marks one of the most dangerous situations in Roman history. The Romans of later times would therefore have had every reason to forget these dark hours, months, and years. Yet they did not.
2 The Darkest Hour (?): Representations and Interpretations of Rome’s Defeats in Roman Historiography
Unfortunately, we do not know how Romans and other Italians reacted to the news of the outcome of the battles at Lake Trasimene or Cannae in the days, weeks, and months that followed these events. Roman historiographical accounts preserved extended records of these reactions, but the earliest of these accounts to have survived is Livy’s, which was written nearly two hundred years later.19 Reactions from the time immediately after Rome’s defeats are thus no longer preserved. We know, however, that the first Roman historian, Q. Fabius Pictor, who himself fought in the Second Punic War, probably devoted large parts of his work to the account of this conflict, but his books are preserved only in fragments, few of them relating to this war.20
Another Roman historian who actively fought the Carthaginians was M. Porcius Cato the Elder. His text, the Origines, is also preserved only in fragments, but one of these gives at least an idea of how the defeat might have been presented here: “Then the Master of the Horse advised the Carthaginian dictator: ‘Send the cavalry to Rome with me; on the fifth day your dinner will have been cooked for you on the Capitol.’ ”21 And: “Then the dictator the following day ordered the Master of the Horse to be summoned: ‘I shall send you, if you wish, with the cavalry.’ ‘Too late,’ said the Master of the Horse, ‘they have already been alerted.’ ”22 These short sentences were almost certainly originally part of Cato’s account of the immediate aftermath of the battle of Cannae.23 In the first fragment the commander of the Carthaginian cavalry, who is sometimes called Maharbal in later accounts, urges Hannibal (here with the title dictator, probably in the sense of general without a colleague) to send him to the city of Rome and let him conquer the Roman capital within days. But the dictator hesitates until it is too late.24 Although these fragments offer only a few lines of Cato’s work, the short sentences indicate that the Origines emphasized the threat to the city of Rome itself by Hannibal—whether or not he would really have been able to capture Rome—and we should especially note that the Capitol is mentioned here. The Capitol was the political and religious center not only of the city of Rome, but of its empire more generally.25 According to several sources, the Capitoline hill had been the last stronghold that the Romans could defend when Celtic warriors from northern Italy had captured Rome in the early fourth century. This so-called Gallic disaster had a prominent place in the cultural memory of the Republic and the Early Empire.26 It therefore seems that, according to Cato, Hannibal was close to achieving what not even the Gauls were able to do—namely, conquer Rome and the Capitol and perhaps change Rome’s history forever. Here Cato provides an interesting glimpse of the idea of counterfactual history in Roman culture. What would have happened if Hannibal had ordered his cavalry to march on Rome? Would the Roman success story never have developed?
Most modern researchers would deny the possibility that Hannibal’s troops had a chance to succeed.27 The whole dialogue is probably an invention, yet it may indicate how severe and devastating Cato (as a contemporary witness of the war) saw the time immediately after the battle of Cannae; it was a point at which Rome’s history could have taken another path.28 Unfortunately, because Cato’s full account is not preserved, it is not possible to confirm this interpretation and discover whether and, if so, how Cato may have further emphasized this line of thought.
In the late first century BCE, however, Livy also included this dialogue in his account of the war, where we can closely analyze how he integrated the Roman defeats and their aftermath in his narrative of the history of Rome. Livy’s version can be found in books 21–30, the third decade, of his work. This section, although of course in many ways connected to the rest of the Ab Urbe Condita, can be characterized as a monograph of its own, with its own narrative arcs, climaxes, and, at the end, after long and severe perils, redemption and victory for the Roman side.29
Livy’s interpretation of the events and results of the Second Punic War is a moral one, in which a lack of respect for the Senate and the community’s political rules, as well as a lack of reverence for the gods, have dire consequences. Successes are likewise attributed primarily to holding on to traditional values and the outstanding ability of Rome’s exemplary generals and soldiers (rather than, for example, superior military resources).30 In Livy’s text, the defeats of the war offer an opportunity to reflect on the consequences of character defects among generals and the Roman people in general, on the value of concordia and the dangers of discordia, and on the path that led the Romans out of this most severe crisis.31 Especially in this part of his work, defeats are caused above all by the recklessness and selfish striving for fame of individual generals as well as by the disunity of the Roman people.
In the first years of the war, Livy saw this disunity increase more and more in both nature and extent, culminating in the greatest defeat of the war at Cannae. At first in his account of the battle at the River Trebia, the dispute between individual commanders who cannot agree on the strategy of their campaign smolders, then, in the run-up to the battle of Lake Trasimene, discordia spreads to the whole army in the field, and, before the campaign that is to end at Cannae, it finally reaches the capital and the people as a whole, with fatal consequences for the entire Republic.32 In his account of the events in Rome, Livy focuses especially on the elections and other internal political conflicts in late 217/early 216, which are fought between a morally upright Senate and its most prominent representatives L. Aemilius Paullus (one of the consuls of the year 216) and Q. Fabius Maximus (dictator in 217 and one of the most experienced leaders of the Republic) on the one side, and popular demagogues from outside the establishment, above all C. Terentius Varro (the other consul of 216) on the other. Varro, who is portrayed as a man of questionable family background but with strong support from large parts of the plebs, attacks the war strategy of the Senate and calls for a quick attack on the Carthaginian army, while Paullus and Fabius attempt to follow a more careful strategy.33
A closer look at some passages reveals more details of Livy’s narrative. For instance, in an early chapter of book 22, C. Flaminius, one of the consuls of the year 217, decides to confront Hannibal’s army against the counsel of the Senate and his war council in the camp (my emphasis):
The consul had become headstrong as a result of his earlier consulship, having no respect, not just for the laws and the Senate, but even for the gods. His natural recklessness had been further nourished by good luck, which had secured him success in civilian and in military life. It was therefore perfectly clear that Flaminius would have no regard for god or man, and that his conduct would be characterized throughout by arrogance and lack of caution. And, to make him more ready to yield to his natural defects, the Carthaginian was preparing to stimulate him and stir him to action. […]
He gave the order for the standards to be quickly pulled from the ground, and he himself leaped onto his horse. But the horse suddenly took a stumble, throwing the consul over its head. All the bystanders were terrified at this apparently dreadful omen for the start of the campaign but, to add to it, word was brought that, despite the standards-bearer’s greatest efforts, one of the standards could not be pulled out of the ground. […]
The officers, as well as disagreeing with Flaminius’ strategy, were also dismayed by the twofold portent; but the rank and file in general were delighted with their commander’s determination—they felt optimism, without asking themselves what it was based on.”34
Apparently, even the gods themselves warn the Roman general, who ignores all human objections and divine signs, such that his actions lead to the fatal consequences at the northern bank of Lake Trasimene.35
In two other passages that are set before the Cannae campaign, Livy describes how the experienced general and politician Q. Fabius Maximus counsels his political ally L. Aemilius Paullus who is to lead the Roman army against Hannibal together with his colleague C. Terentius Varro. In Fabius’s opinion, Varro is even more dangerous than Hannibal because he will stir up the army against his colleague and bring ruin to all Romans.
For you are wrong, Lucius Paullus, if you think you will have any less of a fight with Gaius Terentius Varro than you will with Hannibal, and I wonder if you might not in future have this man [Varro] as a more dangerous adversary than that redoubtable enemy of ours.
With Hannibal you will fight only in the battlefield; with Varro you are going to be fighting in all places, and at all times. Against Hannibal and his legions you will have to do battle with your cavalry and infantry; Varro, as commander, is going to attack you with your own soldiers.36
In the next section, both generals and their armies leave Rome. Yet as Livy underscores, they do not leave together; each is accompanied by only a part of the populus Romanus, which thus presents itself as deeply divided. “They say that Paullus left after this conversation, with the leading senators at his side. The plebeian consul was attented by his plebeien adherents, a group impressive in numbers, but lacking men of distinction.”37 As a careful reader would expect, this disunity leads to disastrous results.38 The Romans will lose the following battle, and thousands of them indeed do lose their lives.39
Although Livy presents consuls such as Flaminius and Varro as highly responsible for the defeats that occurred under their command, he adds more nuance to their characterization in his battle descriptions. For instance, in the description of the fighting at Lake Trasimene, Livy crafts an image of the consul Flaminius who, despite all the defects of character he showed earlier, now proves himself as a capable battle commander and fighter. He fights bravely, serves as a shining example to his men, and eventually meets an honorable death on the battlefield. This passage seems to be a Livian invention (or, at least, he integrated it masterfully in his wider narrative), because Polybius gives no description of Flaminius’s heroic last fight in his account, which is earlier than Livy’s.40
Livy’s account of this death in battle also demonstrates the complexity of the Livian narrative. Although Flaminius is portrayed as an exemplary warrior in the face of defeat, Livy also brings to attention the consul’s former weaknesses, as well as the unholy and harmful opposition to the Senate and the gods that had marked Flaminius’s entire career. He is killed by a Celtic warrior (Livy even knows his name, which is unusual for Celtic characters in his work), who aims to take revenge for his people who were killed in an earlier Roman campaign into Gaul that was led by Flaminius in his first consulate, allegedly against the will of a strong majority in the Senate.41 This passage, therefore, can—and perhaps was intended to be—interpreted in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is a lesson in how moral vices and defects, especially opposition to the Senate and ignorance of the will of the gods, fall back on a person in the end. On the other hand, it also illustrates how true Roman character is revealed in the hour of battle and in the face of defeat, so that even a demagogic outsider such as Flaminius fights and dies as a hero on the field, thereby fulfilling his duties toward the Roman people.42
The death of a Roman commander also forms the central passage of Livy’s description of the fighting at Cannae.43 Here L. Aemilius Paullus—portrayed earlier in the text as a capable commander, a righteous man, and champion of the senatorial establishment—follows his colleague, Varro, who is in charge of the command of the whole army on the day of battle, into the fight, even though he strongly objects to Varro’s tactical approach.44 After he engages in the fight to lead his soldiers against the Carthaginians, we find him dying, covered in blood, and leaning against a rock, at which point the battle pauses for a moment or two so that he can give final instructions to one of his loyal soldiers and set unity among the Romans above his own fate:
The military tribune Gnaeus Lentulus was riding by when his eyes fell on the consul sitting on a rock and covered with blood.
“Lucius Aemilius,” he said, “on you alone the gods should look with favor, the one man free of blame for today’s debacle. Take this horse while you still have some strength left. I shall be at your side; I can raise you up and protect you, so that you do not add tragedy to this battle with the death of a consul. Even without that there is enough to weep and grieve for.”
“God bless your courage, Gnaeus Cornelius,” replied the consul, “but do not waste in useless pity the little time you have to escape the enemy’s clutches. Go, take this official message to the Senate: they must see to the fortifications of the city of Rome, and secure them with troops, before the victorious enemy arrives. […]
For myself, let me breathe my last amidst my men, the victims of this massacre. Thus I can avoid standing trial again after my consulship, or coming forward as my colleague’s accuser, to defend my innocence by blaming another.”45
His colleague, Varro, leaves the battlefield alive. Remarkably, we now no longer find in Livy any accusations against the fleeing consul, who was earlier portrayed as highly responsible for the inner conflict and the implementation of a fatal strategy. On the contrary, we see him return to Rome in an often quoted and discussed passage at the end of book 22.
And yet these defeats and allied defections prompted no talk of peace anywhere amongst the Romans, neither before the consul’s arrival in Rome, nor after his return, which brought back to mind the disaster they had suffered. Such was the strength of character of the citizenry at that very time, that, on the return of the consul from the debacle for which he was primarily responsible, people of all classes streamed out to meet him, and thanked him for not having lost confidence in the republic. Had he been a Carthaginian leader there is no manner of punishment that he would not have faced.46
As mentioned above, in the previous chapters of Livy’s text, Varro is blamed for his behavior and his decisions that led to Rome’s defeat. According to Livy, Varro was a rebellious demagogue who forced a wedge between the Senate and the Roman people and, consequently, contributed to the deep discord on the Roman side. Furthermore, he is characterized as a popular leader of great military incompetence. As Livy emphasizes, this man is now, after the defeat, met by “people of all classes,” which in a way mirrors the earlier passage mentioned above in which Varro and Paullus leave Rome in disunity and are each accompanied only by their own supporters.47
Whereas discord and inner conflict once dominated the political scene in Rome, therefore, now concord and solidarity is demonstrated; it was the defeat, one could conclude, that brought back the virtues and the attitude that rank, in Livy’s interpretation, is among the most important preconditions for Rome’s enduring military and political success.48 The Carthaginians would have severely punished a general like Varro, who lost so many soldiers and such an important battle. But the Romans, because they are morally upright and able to stand together in a crisis, do not punish their own fighters, not even Varro.49 Livy urges his readers to understand that this would not have been the Roman way. For Romans, defeat is a punishment for their disunity and neglect of divine prodigies, but it is also an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and to reunite the entire Roman people when they bear with exemplary strength of character the kind of disaster that, as Livy emphasizes a few passages earlier, would cause any other nation to collapse.50 Moreover, because concordia has now been regained, the Senate and the people of Rome are prepared to drive the foreign invaders out of Italy.
In a series of passages Livy describes how the Romans, under the impression of their defeats, discuss its causes and the lessons they have learned. After all their earlier mistakes and moral failures, the Romans now show themselves as willing to learn and ready to face the challenge of Hannibal’s army united. In fact, as Hieron II had announced after the defeat at Lake Trasimene, they are almost more admirable in misfortune than in fortune. For Livy is now able to report numerous acts of heroic self-sacrifice and examples of greater moral stability than could be observed in the first years of the war. This is especially true for the Senate. Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the most severe defeats, the Senate now appears as a center of prudent action and, under the leadership of the experienced and respected Q. Fabius Maximus, makes many decisions with great unity that, although somewhat unusual, lead to the rescue of the Republic.51
Two examples may illustrate this. The first one is taken from Livy’s description of the battlefield at Cannae on the morning after the battle. Here the Carthaginian soldiers “gather the spoils and inspect the slaughter, which was a shocking sight even to the enemy,” which gives a testament of the highly violent scenes of fighting the day before. It should be noted that this passage is one of the rather rare examples of more detailed battlefield account in Livy’s work, because it seems that he generally tried to avoid such descriptions. After the most disastrous of all Roman defeats up to that point in Rome’s history, however, the images of “some gory figures” appear who “rose up from the midst of the carnage when their wounds, smarting in the cool of the morning roused them to consciousness, and then they were cut down by the enemy.” But even this depressing passage holds a little spark of hope for the Roman side, because the Carthaginians find a
Numidian, with nose and ears torn off, who was pulled out alive from beneath a dead Roman who was lying on top of him. When the Roman found his hands no longer able to hold a weapon, his anger had turned to fury and he had died while he was tearing his enemy apart with his teeth.
The message is clear: any Roman would fight to the very last to defend his homeland against the foreign invaders.52
The second example is the story of the prisoners of Cannae, which was widely remembered and often quoted in the Roman tradition.53 After the battle, a division of several thousand Roman soldiers was captured. According not only to Livy, but also to other historiographical accounts and passages in speeches of Cicero or in poems of the Imperial period, these soldiers are accused of not attempting to escape and fight their way through the Carthaginian ranks. That they surrendered and were taken captive would have put the Senate and the Republic as a whole in an unfavorable position due to the demands for ransom that Hannibal could now make. In fact, the Roman Senate probably refused to buy back these prisoners, who were then sold into slavery. In the cultural memory of the Roman Republic, this incident henceforth served as a negative example of the characterless behavior of desperate soldiers, on the one hand, and as a glorious hour of the principled Senate, which did not deviate from the observance of its principles even in the greatest distress and need.54 Unity and virtues, Livy’s readership can learn, are restored not merely by the experience of defeat, but above all through the leadership of the Senate, which had regained its leading role in the Republic and which set the greater good and exemplary behavior above the individual.55
Consequently, the hours and days after Cannae are indeed in Livy’s text (and not only there) one of the darkest hours in the history of the Republic. At the same time, however, they bring the rebirth of true Roman spirit and concord among the Roman people. This line of thought fits well with the time in which Livy wrote and published his text. The fact that his account of the Hannibalic War places the center of prudent action in the Senate, while discord and the associated failures are interpreted as the result of rebellious activities on the part of individual demagogic tribunes or other troublemakers shows Livy’s alignment with the values of the old Republic. As a child of the time of the civil wars, Livy, like many of his contemporaries, had ample opportunity to learn to appreciate the high value of inner unity. It is surely the case, then, that he saw this unity as a central prerequisite for the well-being of Rome in the past as well as in the present.56
3 New Hope Inspired by Rome’s Darkest Hour
Livy’s influential account, as well as further representations and reinterpretations in other works that followed Ab Urbe Condita, enabled the defeats of the Second Punic War to retain their place in the historical memory of the Romans until Late Antiquity. For example, in the fourth century CE, Ammianus Marcellinus recalled the battle of Cannae to describe the great military disaster of his own lifetime, the battle of Adrianople (378 CE). In terms of its extent, this disaster, in which even the Roman emperor Valens I himself had fallen, could only be compared with the defeat of Cannae.57 A generation later, only a few years after the sack of Rome by a Gothic army in the year 410 CE, the poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus mentions Hannibal in the context of a veritable hymn to Rome in the first book of his poem De reditu suo as an example of a dangerous crisis overcome by eternal Rome. The defeats of the old days are at the same time a lesson and a sign of hope, because what “cannot be sunk rises again with greater energy, sped higher in their rebound from lowest depths; and, as the torch held downward regains fresh strength,” so, too, does Rome strive “from lowly fortune […] more radiant aloft.”58 Rutilius refers to defeats in Roman history, after which Rome rose again and again; the Romans, it seems, were for Rutilius, as they were for Hieron II six hundred years before, more admirable and remarkable in adversity than in good times.
Yet, if Ammian’s recourse to Cannae or Rutilius’s hymn to the resilience of Rome had some evocative intent, or both hoped that history would repeat itself once more, they would have been disappointed. In contrast to the Republic of the Punic Wars, the Roman Empire of their time was not able to recover again. More than six hundred years after the trial by Hannibal’s army and the dark hours of the Second Punic War, a new world emerged on the ruins of the western Roman Empire, a world in which the idea of an eternal Rome was carried on, but in a different form.59
Polyb. 1.1–4.
For accessible general surveys see, e.g., Rich, “Fear”; Rosenstein, Rome and the Mediterranean; Sommer, Rom; Blösel, Die römische Republik; and Bradley, Early Rome.
Verg. Aen. 1.279.
See, e.g., Hölscher, “Images of War”; Itgenshorst, Tota illa pompa; Beard, Roman Triumph; Östenberg, Staging; Lange and Vervaet, Roman Republican Triumph; Hölkeskamp, “Hierarchie und Konsens,” 209–218; Hölkeskamp, “Self-Fashioning”; and Davies, Architecture and Politics, 29–32, 61–65, 110–130, 168–174, 199–205, 224–236, 257–264, all with further references.
On this transition, see Eich, Die römische Kaiserzeit, 11–53.
On Livy, especially the third decade, see Levene, Religion; Levene, Livy; Pausch, Livius; Lentzsch, Roma, 305–366; Oakley, “Livy”; Van Gils and Kroon, “Discourse-Linguistic Strategies,”; and Briscoe and Hornblower, “Livy,” all with references to older literature.
Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent dates are BCE.
Livy 22.37.1–9.
Livy 22.37.10–12.
On Hieron II, esp. his role during the First Punic War, see Lehmler, Syrakus, 52–55.
Schulz, Feldherren, 180. On the often high Roman casualties in war, see also Rosenstein, Rome at War, 107–140 and Clark, “Defeat,” 191.
On this problem, see already Turner, “Imperial Reactions,” 279 and Lentzsch, Roma, 4.
Schulz, Feldherren, 180. Lists of Roman defeats can give an idea; see Rosenstein, Imperatores, 179–204; Clark, Triumph, xi–xiii; and Engerbeaud, Rome, 473–501.
See n. 4.
For a general discussion of the term “collective identity,” see Straub, “Identität,” 290–300.
Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 62–67 and Seibert, Hannibal, 147–156.
Erdkamp, Hunger, 141–142; Seibert, Hannibal, 167–170; and Christ, Hannibal, 83–84.
The vast number of studies on Cannae is almost impossible to survey, but see, recently, Le Bohec, Histoire, 189–192; Daly, Cannae; Goldsworthy, Cannae; and Beck, “Cannae,” each with references to older literature.
For extensive discussions of these traditions see, e.g., Beck, “Cannae” and Lentzsch, Roma, 249–304.
FRHist 1 F 22 = FRH 1 F 31 (= Polyb. 3.8.1–8); FRHist 1 F 23 = FRH 1 F 32 (= Livy 22.7.1–4).
FRHist 5 F *78 (= Gell. 10.24.7; Macrob. Sat. 1.4.26: igitur dictatorem Carthaginiensium magister equitum monuit: ‘mitte mecum Romam equitatum; diequinti in Capitolio tibi cena cocta erit’).
FRHist 5 F 79 (= Gell. 2.19.9: deinde dictator iubet postridie magistrum equitum arcessi: ‘mittam te, si uis, cum equitibus.’ ‘sero est,’ inquit magister equitum, ‘iam resciuere’).
See the commentary in FRHist 3, 126–127.
Livy 22.51.1–2; Val. Max. 9.5.ext. 3; Flor. 1.22.19–20; Amm. Marc. 18.5.6. In the Livian tradition, Hannibal’s cavalry officer is called Maharbal. In Plut. Vit. Fab. 17.1 he is named Barca, and in Silius Italicus’s Punica (Sil. Pun. 10.375–376) it is Hannibal’s brother Mago who commands the Carthaginian cavalry.
Hölkeskamp, “Capitol,” 144–147 and Walter, Memoria, 160–161.
See, e.g., Ungern-Sternberg, “Eine Katastrophe”; Ungern-Sternberg, “Gefahr”; Richardson, Fabii, 116–152; Engerbeaud, Rome, 391–426; and Lentzsch, Roma, 73–149, all with further references.
See, e.g., Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 85–86; Le Bohec, Histoire, 203; Erdkamp, Hunger, 177–178; and Schulz, Feldherren, 212.
Cf. Beck, “Cannae,” 218: “Der Erinnerungsort Cannae wurde damit auf alle Zeiten zum Denkmal dafür, daß die römische Erfolgsstory wenigstens einmal, im Jahr 216, auf des Messers Schneide stand.” See also Lentzsch, Roma, 271 and Oakley, “Livy,” 178–179.
On the composition of Livy’s third decade, see the masterful analysis in Levene, Livy, 1–81. See also Van Gils and Kroon, “Discourse-Linguistic Strategies,” 193–194 and Ridley, “Livy,” 17: “The third decade was perhaps the most self-contained, most monograph-like, of all his work.”
On Livy’s explanations for Roman defeats in the Second Punic War and for his moral interpretation see Ridley, “Livy”; Levene, Livy, 261–316; and Lentzsch, Roma, 214–366, with further references.
On concordia and discordia as leitmotifs in Livy’s narrative of the Cannae campaign, see also Van Gils and Kroon, “Discourse-Linguistic Strategies,”, 220–222.
Cf. Oakley, “Livy,” 169: “the thematic expansion to the battle highlights above all the disunity in the state caused by the improvidence and folly of Varro, who follows a long line of other improvident commanders.”
Livy 22.25.18–19; 22.26.1–4; 22.34.1–35.1; 22.39.4–8; 22.41.1–3; 22.42.3–12; 22.44.5; 22.45.5. On these passages, see Bruckmann, Die römischen Niederlagen, 73–75; Burck, Einführung, 93–97; Will, “Imperatores”; Bernard, Le portrait, 139–141; Geist, Der gescheiterte Feldherr, 78–79, 103; Levene, Livy, 170–171, 189; Lentzsch, Roma, 321–323; Oakley, “Livy,” 163–166; and Van Gils and Kroon, “Discourse-Linguistic Strategies,” 209–222.
Livy 22.3.4–14: consul ferox ab consulatu priore et non modo legum aut patrum maiestatis, sed ne deorum quidem satis metuens; hanc insitam ingenio eius temeritatem fortuna tuna prospero civilibus bellicisque rebus successu aluerat. (5) Itaque satis apparebat nec deos nec homines consulentem ferociter omnia ac praepropere acturum; quoque pronior esset in vitia sua, agitare eum atque inritare Poenus parat, […]. (11) Haec simul increpans cum ocius signa convelli iuberet et ipse in equum insiluisset, equus repente corruit consulemque lapsum super caput effudit. (12) Territis omnibus, qui circa erant, velut foedo omine incipiendae rei, insuper nuntiatur signum omni vi moliente signifero convelli nequire. […] (14) Incedere inde agmen coepit primoribus, superquam quod dissenserant ab consilio, territis etiam duplici prodigio, milite in volgus laeto ferocia ducis, cum spem magis ipsam quam causam spei intueretur. All translations of Livy’s text in this essay follow the translation by J.C. Yardley.
Levene, Religion, 38–43 and Levene, Livy, 288–291.
Livy 22.39.4–5: Erras enim, L. Paule, si tibi minus certaminis cum C. Terentio quam cum Hannibale futurum censes; nescio, an infestior hic adversarius quam ille hostis maneat; cum illo in acie tantum, cum hoc omnibus locis ac temporibus certaturus es; adversus Hannibalem legionesque eius tuis equitibus ac peditibus pugnandum tibi est, Varro dux tuis militibus te est oppugnaturus.
Livy 22.40.4: Ab hoc sermone profectum Paulum tradunt prosequentibus primoribus patrum: plebeium consulem sua plebes prosecuta, turba conspectior, cum dignitates deessent.
On the ways in which Livy stirs his readership through his narrative, see Pausch, Livius.
According to Livy, 45,500 infantry soldiers died and 2,700 men of the cavalry forces died at Cannae (Livy 22.49.15). Polybius has even higher numbers (Polyb. 3.117.2–4: 70,000 and 5,630). The casualties for the Roman side at Lake Trasimene are reported as 15,000 soldiers killed and 10,000 or 15,000 captured (Polyb. 3.84.7; Livy 22.7.2–4). On these numbers, cf. Walbank, Commentary, 1:419–420, 440; Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 65; Seibert, Hannibal, 153–154; Goldsworthy, Cannae, 155; and Daly, Cannae, 23, 198.
Livy 22.6.1–2. On this passage, cf. Ridley, “Livy,” 24; Levene, Livy, 171, n. 18; and Lentzsch, Roma, 343–344.
Livy 22.6.2–4.
Cf. Levene, Religion, 39–40; Levene, Livy, 290; Johner, La violence, 109–110; Beck, Karriere und Hierarchie, 267; and Lentzsch, Roma, 330–331.
Cf. Van Gils and Kroon, “Discourse-Linguistic Strategies,” 224: “The Peak of this scene and […] of the Cannae story at large.”
Livy 22.41.3; 22.45.5. That Paullus opposed Varro’s tactic and simply followed his colleague out of loyalty on the battlefield, as Livy reports, does not seem trustworthy. Cf. Lazenby, Livy, 78–79; Seibert, Hannibal, 189 n. 2.; and Beck, “Cannae,” 213.
Livy 22.49.6–11: Cn. Lentulus tribunus militum cum praetervehens equo sedentem in saxo cruore oppletum consulem vidisset, ‘L. Aemili’ inquit, ‘quern unum insontem culpae cladis hodiernae dei respicere debent, cape hunc equum, dum et tibi virium aliquid superest et comes ego te tollere possum ac protegere. Ne funestam hanc pugnam morte consulis feceris; etiam sine hoc lacrimarum satis luctusque est.’ Ad ea consul: ‘Tu quidem, Cn. Corneli, macte virtute esto; sed cave, frustra miserando exiguum tempus e manibus hostium evadendi absumas. Abi, nuntia publice patribus urbem Romanam muniant ac priusquam victor hostis adveniat, praesidiis firment; privatim Q. Fabio ⟨L.⟩ Aemilium praeceptorum eius memorem et vixisse adhuc et mori. Me in hac strage militum meorum patere exspirare, ne aut reus iterum e consulatu sim aut accusator collegae exsistam, ut alieno crimine innocentiam meam protegam’. On this passage, see most recently Oakley, “Livy,” 168 and Buijs, “ET RATIO,” 280–281.
Livy 22.61.13–15: Nec tamen eae clades defectionesque sociorum moverunt, ut pacis usquam mentio apud Romanos fieret neque ante consulis Romam adventum nec postquam is rediit renovavitque memoriam acceptae cladis; quo in tempore ipso adeo magno animo civitas fuit, ut consuli ex tanta clade, cuius ipse causa maxima fuisset, redeunti et obviam itum frequenter ab omnibus ordinibus sit et gratiae actae, quod de re publica non desperasset; qui si Carthaginiensium ductor fuisset, nihil recusandum supplicii foret.
Cf. Livy 22.40.4. See also Oakley, “Livy,” 182.
Cf. Lentzsch, Roma, 339–351, with further references.
On stereotypical descriptions of Carthaginians, see Gruen, Rethinking, 99–140, who, however, also sheds light on nuanced perspectives on the Carthaginians in Greek and Roman literature.
Livy 22.54.10–11.
Livy 22.55.1–57.1; 22.57.7–12. Cf. Bruckmann, Die römischen Niederlagen, 94; Beck, “Cannae,” 209–210; Jaeger, Livy’s Written Rome, 99–103; Lentzsch, Roma, 335–336; and Oakley, “Livy,” 171.
Livy 22.51.5–9. On this passage, see also Oakley, “Livy,” 172.
The whole passage is in Livy 22.58.2–61.10. Cf. Oakley, “Livy,” 176–177, with an emphasis on the speeches in this passage.
Walter, “Die Botschaft.”
Cf. Bruckmann, Die römischen Niederlagen, 94.
On this topic, see Ridley, “Livy,” 30, 38; Dahlheim, “T. Livius,” 60–61, 66–72; Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 280–287; and Lentzsch, Roma, 343.
Amm. Marc. 31.13.14. Cf. Meier and Patzold, August 410, 78. On these events, see Meier, Geschichte, 171–183.
Rut. Namat. 1.115–132.
Cf. Lentzsch, Roma, 429–430 for further references.
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