Lucius Aemilius Paullus (consul 216 BC)

Lucius Aemilius Paullus was the Roman consul who argued against fighting at Cannae and died there. He is not the Aemilius Paullus who conquered Macedon; that was his son, born seven years before this battle. He was consul first in 219 BC, when he and his colleague conducted the second Illyrian war and drove Demetrius of Pharos out of the Adriatic, and he was prosecuted afterwards over the division of the spoils and acquitted narrowly. He was elected again for 216 BC as the candidate of the senatorial aristocracy, paired with Gaius Terentius Varro, who had campaigned on attacking Hannibal at once. The two men held command on alternate days, which is the detail that decided the battle. Paullus wanted to keep to broken ground where Hannibal's superior cavalry could not be used and to continue the war of position that Fabius had begun. On 2 August 216, on Varro's day, the Roman army of perhaps 80,000 deployed on the open plain by the Aufidus with its infantry packed unusually deep. Hannibal let his centre give way, held the flanks with African infantry, and closed the rear with cavalry that had already destroyed the Roman horse. Around 50,000 to 70,000 Romans were killed in an afternoon, including eighty senators and Paullus himself, who is said by Livy to have refused a horse offered to him for escape and to have told the man to tell the Senate to fortify Rome. Varro survived and was formally thanked for not despairing of the Republic, which is one of the stranger judgements in Roman public life.

• Lived: 260 BCE – 216 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: politician, military_leader