Tiberius Sempronius Longus

Tiberius Sempronius Longus was the Roman consul who insisted on fighting at the Trebia and lost an army doing it. He was elected for 218 BC, the first year of the second Punic war, and was given Africa as his province with orders to invade it - the war Rome intended to fight, and never did. He had got as far as Sicily when Hannibal crossed the Alps, and was recalled north to join his colleague Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had been wounded in a cavalry action at the Ticinus and wanted to wait for spring. Sempronius did not. His term was running out, he wanted the victory under his own name, and Hannibal knew both facts and provoked him by raiding villages of the Cenomani who had come over to Rome. On a December morning Hannibal sent Numidian horse across the river to skirmish and withdraw. The Romans followed, wading the freezing Trebia without having eaten, and formed up wet and cold against troops who had breakfasted and oiled themselves by fires. The Carthaginian cavalry drove off the Roman wings, and Mago's two thousand men, hidden in a watercourse since before dawn, struck the rear. Perhaps two thirds of an army of 40,000 was lost. About 10,000 legionaries in the centre cut their way straight through and reached Placentia, which is why Rome had an army at all the following spring. He reported a victory prevented by the weather, and the Senate did not believe him. He was not prosecuted and he was not re-elected. The Trebia is the first of the three disasters - with Trasimene and Cannae - that taught Rome to stop giving armies to consuls in a hurry, and the lesson took two more years and fifty thousand more dead to land.

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