August 216 BC
After Cannae
Polybius gives 70,000 Roman and allied infantry killed, 10,000 captured and perhaps 3,000 escaped, and only 370 of 6,000 cavalry surviving. Livy gives 45,500 infantry and 2,700 cavalry killed, and about 19,000 captured on the field and in the two camps. Among the dead he counts 29 of the 48 military tribunes and 80 senators or former magistrates. Hannibal loses 5,700 men by Polybius’s count, 4,000 of them Gauls, and about 8,000 by Livy’s.
Hannibal counting the rings of the Roman knights killed at Cannae, marble by Sébastien Slodtz, 1704, LouvreWikimedia Commons, Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Hannibal Barca (by Sébastien Slodtz) counting the rings of the Roman knights killed at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), Marble, 1704, from the Gardens of the Tuileries, Louvre Museum (8270402664).jpg)
Varro escapes to Venusia with 70 horsemen. Livy writes that 600 men under Publius Sempronius Tuditanus fight their way out of the smaller camp, and that about 10,000 survivors gather at Canusium. There, by his account, the young Publius Cornelius Scipio makes the officers who talk of leaving Italy swear to stay.
Roman women in the temple of Mars after the news of Cannae, engraving after Lodovico Pogliaghi, about 1885Wikimedia Commons, Lodovico Pogliaghi, Public domain (Lodovico Pogliaghi - Roman women in the temple of Mars after Cannae, 215 BC.png)
Arpi, Salapia, Herdonia and Capua go over to Hannibal, and later Tarentum. Philip V of Macedon allies with him, and in 215 BC Syracuse follows under its new king Hieronymus. The Roman Senate refuses to negotiate, forbids public mourning beyond 30 days and raises new legions from landless men and slaves.
Sources
- Polybius, Histories, book 3, 117.
- Livy, History of Rome, book 22, 49 to 61.
- Adrian Goldsworthy, Cannae (2001).
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