Gaius Terentius Varro

Gaius Terentius Varro commanded the Roman army on the day it was destroyed at Cannae, survived, and was thanked by the Senate for it. The ancient tradition, which is largely Livy and largely hostile, makes him a butcher's son and a demagogue who owed his consulship to the popular assemblies and his defeat to his own rashness. Modern historians have been sceptical of most of that: he held the praetorship and the aedileship first, which a genuine outsider could not have done, and the strategy of seeking a decisive battle was the Senate's policy as much as his, since Rome had raised the largest army in its history precisely in order to use it. He shared the consulship of 216 BC with Lucius Aemilius Paullus and the two alternated command daily. On his day, 2 August, he drew up some eight legions with their infantry deepened and narrowed against a Carthaginian army half the size. Hannibal's centre withdrew under the pressure, his African infantry closed on both flanks, and Hasdrubal's cavalry sealed the rear, so that a Roman force too tightly packed to use its weapons was killed where it stood. Varro escaped to Venusia with about seventy horsemen. The Senate met him on the road and thanked him publicly for not having despaired of the Republic - a gesture that was partly about him and mostly about refusing to concede that Rome could lose. He went on to hold commands in Picenum and Etruria for years afterwards and served on embassies, which is not how Rome treated a man it actually blamed. He was still being sent abroad on public business more than a decade later. Whether the disaster was his fault at all is one of the oldest arguments in Roman historiography, and the case against him rests almost entirely on writers working two centuries after the event from sources friendly to the Aemilii.

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