Battle of Cannae
The Battle of Cannae on 2 August 216 BCE is the most studied tactical engagement in military history: Hannibal, commanding roughly fifty thousand men, encircled and annihilated a Roman force of approximately seventy thousand, killing an estimated fifty to sixty thousand in a single afternoon. Hannibal deployed his weaker Gallic and Spanish infantry at the center in a convex arc that he allowed to bend inward under Roman pressure, while his superior African heavy infantry on the flanks swung inward to complete the encirclement. The trapped Romans had no room to wield their weapons and were methodically slaughtered. Among the dead were a consul, two former consuls, twenty-nine of forty-eight tribunes, and eighty senators. Cannae entered military theory as the paradigm of the double envelopment, studied by commanders from Scipio Africanus to Schlieffen; yet it failed to win the war, because Rome's allied cities, though shaken, did not defect en masse.
- Category: Military
