Battle of Grumentum

Overview

The Battle of Grumentum was fought in 207 BC between Romans led by Gaius Claudius Nero, and a part of Hannibal's Carthaginian army. The battle was a minor engagement that Roman sources inflated as a major success. According to Livy, the Romans killed 8,000 Carthaginians and took 700 prisoners for the cost of 500 dead Romans. The Carthaginian loss figures for dead and prisoners appear suspiciously out of proportion to each other. Just north of the battlefield the next day, an irregular clash occurred where allegedly another 2,000 Carthaginians were killed. Afterwards, Nero marched north, where he defeated and killed Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal at Metaurus. The battle is described by Livy at 27.41–42.

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

Significance

The Battle of Grumentum in 207 BCE was a Roman engagement against part of Hannibal's Carthaginian army, commanded on the Roman side by Gaius Claudius Nero. Ancient sources, principally Livy, credited the Romans with killing 8,000 Carthaginians and taking 700 prisoners at a cost of 500 Roman dead, with a further irregular clash the following day north of the battlefield accounting for an alleged 2,000 additional Carthaginian casualties — figures that Livy's own account renders suspect by their disproportionate relationship to one another. The battle's operational significance lies less in its immediate result, which Roman sources are judged to have inflated, than in what followed: Nero subsequently marched north and defeated and killed Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal at the Battle of the Metaurus, a decisive engagement of the Second Punic War. Grumentum thus marked a preliminary step in the sequence of operations that culminated in denying Hannibal the reinforcements his brother had been bringing from Spain.

Forces & casualties

Commanders (3)