Battle of Cannae

Overview

The Battle of Cannae was a key engagement of the Second Punic War between the Roman Republic and Carthage, fought on 2 August 216 BC near the ancient village of Cannae in Apulia, southeast Italy. The Carthaginians and their allies, led by Hannibal, surrounded and practically annihilated a larger Roman and Italian army under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. It is regarded as one of the greatest tactical feats in military history and one of the worst defeats in Roman history, and it cemented Hannibal's reputation as one of antiquity's greatest tacticians.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The Battle of Cannae was one of the most consequential engagements of the Second Punic War. A Carthaginian force of roughly 50,000 under Hannibal encircled and effectively destroyed a Roman and Italian army nearly twice its size, inflicting between 67,500 and 80,000 Roman casualties against Carthaginian losses of fewer than 8,000. The scale of the annihilation represented one of the worst defeats in Roman history and demonstrated that Carthaginian forces could operate deep inside the Italian peninsula and defeat Rome's largest field armies. The battle cemented Hannibal's standing as a commanding general and established Cannae as a benchmark of encirclement warfare studied across subsequent centuries. Within the Second Punic War, the destruction of so large a Roman force — commanded by consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro — forced Rome to reckon with the limits of its standard military approach and compelled a strategic reorientation in how it engaged Carthaginian forces in subsequent campaigns.

Tactics

Forces & casualties

Commanders (11)