20. The Perfect Battle
In Hannibal’s plan for the Battle of Cannae, once the Romans were in the sack, the African infantry positioned to the Gauls’ sides would wheel inwards and attack the Roman flanks. By then, the Carthaginian cavalry would have defeated the Roman cavalry. It would then turn around, and attack the enemy infantry’s rear, and thus completely encircle the Romans. Things worked out exactly as the Carthaginian general had planned, and in a battle viewed as the gold standard for tactical generalship, the Romans were nearly wiped out. Only 10,000 out of 87,000 Romans escaped, and the rest were either slaughtered or captured.
Alas for Hannibal, he had won a great victory, but not the war. The Romans learned their lesson, and from then refused to take the Carthaginian general head on. They kept him bottled up in southern Italy for years, while they attacked Carthage on other fronts, seized its empire in Spain, and defeated its allies in Sicily. Eventually, Roman general Scipio Africanus led a counter-invasion against Carthage itself, and Hannibal was recalled to defend his homeland. There, he lost the climactic battle of the war at Zama, in 202 BC. He was eventually forced into exile, and took his own life circa 182 BC in Bithynia, in today’s Turkey, to avoid capture by the Romans.
