The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic [64kbps]

By Robert L. O'Connell
Published by Tantor Media in 2010
Tags: nonfiction, history, military history, roman history
MP3, Unabridged, English (1400167221)

Other battles are perhaps just as famous — Thermopylae, Waterloo, Gettysburg — but the aura of Cannae, where Hannibal obliterated the largest army the Roman Republic had ever put into the field, is unmatched. The battle is unparalleled for its carnage, with more men from a single army killed on that one day, Aug. 2, 216 B.C., than on any other day on any other European battlefield: something like 50,000 Romans died, two and a half times the number of British soldiers who fell on the first day of the Somme.

In the last century Cannae has acquired added significance. The quintessential annihilation battle of encirclement, it has become a benchmark for overwhelming operational success. Its long shadow reached into the frozen bunkers of encircled Stalingrad, where officers of the German Wehrmacht watched the Russian jaws snap shut behind them and reflected despairingly on the coincidence that the name of their commander, Friedrich Paulus, echoed that of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the Roman consul killed at Cannae.

It is therefore not surprising that the recent boom in military histories of the ancient world has already given us at least two books on Cannae in the last 10 years. An author needs to ask what he can bring to the topic that is new. The distinctive edge of “The Ghosts of Cannae” is Robert L. O’Connell’s consistently professional instinct for the behavior of men and units on the battlefield. He is able to put himself and his reader on the ground at Cannae, gagging in the heat of a southern Italian midsummer, assailed by an overload from every one of the five senses.

With a scrupulous recognition of the dangers of a “pornography of violence,” O’Connell spells out what was involved in the process of systematically butchering the helpless Roman army, in “what must have been the most horrific several hours in all of Western military history.” He notes that “other than those who succumbed to the heat, each of the men who died had to be individually punctured, slashed or battered into oblivion.”

Above all, O’Connell, the author of several military histories, points out that the participants did not have the benefit of a modern battle diagram. Color coding and dotted arrows would have revealed at a glance the thinned-out Carthaginian center between the menacingly packed forces on either flank, ready to swing in once the Romans had committed to the pocket. But even from horseback, the Roman commanders’ field of vision was severely limited, and O’Connell’s imaginative evocation of their point of view makes his reconstruction of their battle plan extremely convincing.

With hindsight, the Romans’ determination to fight Hannibal looks deluded or desperate, but O’Connell must be right to stress how confident they would have been in the size of their force and in the proven ability of the sword-fighting Roman legionaries. Two years before, when Hannibal first descended onto the northern plain of Italy, the main force of the Roman legions had managed to carve through the enemy in front of them at the battle of the River Trebia, even as their Italian allies on the flanks were being annihilated. At Cannae, Paullus and his co-commander, Caius Terentius Varro, must have thought things were going according to plan as the enemy’s center gave way and the legionaries started to press forward.

Yet, though it took another 14 years, Hannibal lost the war, leaving Rome as the pre-­eminent Mediterranean power. As O’Connell shrewdly demonstrates, Hannibal’s understanding of politics and alliances derived from the Carthaginian empire and from the deal-cutting princes of the Hellenistic world. Neither model allowed for the revolutionary nature of the Italian alliance system, which was guided by the granite resolve of the Roman governing class.

The supreme tactical victory at Cannae has made Hannibal the envy of professionals ever since, but he could not cash it in for a strategic victory: 70 years after the battle, his home city of Carthage was reduced to powder, and it was his enemies who went on to rule the Mediterranean and its hinterlands for another five centuries. Military experts may purr over the perfection of Hannibal’s achievement by the banks of the River Aufidus, but the more enduring lesson is that tactics alone cannot win a war.