Fabius Maximus the Delayer: Strategy Against Hannibal
Rome appointed a dictator in 217 BC who refused to fight Hannibal, and the strategy that saved the state nearly got him removed. Hannibal had destroyed one consular army at the Trebia and another at Lake Trasimene, where some 15,000 Romans were killed in a defile in fog beside the lake, and Rome had no field force between him and the city. Quintus Fabius Maximus was made dictator and adopted a policy that had no precedent in Roman practice: shadow the Carthaginian army, hold the high ground, cut off foragers and stragglers, deny battle absolutely, and let a force operating hundreds of miles from any base wear itself out. It worked, and it was unbearable to watch. Italian allies whose land was being burned saw a Roman army standing on the hills doing nothing; the soldiers were humiliated; and his own second in command was given equal authority by a vote of the assembly, which is unheard of for a dictatorship, and promptly walked into a trap from which Fabius extracted him. He was nicknamed Cunctator, the delayer, as an insult. His term ended and Rome elected consuls who intended to fight, and 50,000 or more men were killed at Cannae the following August. The nickname then became an honorific, and the strategy was resumed for a decade. Ennius wrote the line about one man restoring the state by delaying, and a nineteenth-century socialist society took its name from him. Fabian is now an adjective for a strategy of attrition and postponement, applied to everything from guerrilla warfare to gradualist politics. The society founded in London in 1884 took the name deliberately and put a tortoise on its stained-glass window.
- Year: 217 BCE
- Category: Military
