ABSTRACT
The disaster at Cannae entered the Roman national consciousness as one of the darkest days in Roman history, joining the defeat at the Allia and subsequent sack of Rome by the Celts under Brennus. Hundreds of years later the poet Juvenal would write of how schoolboys would discuss as rhetorical exercises whether Hannibal ought to have followed his victory at Cannae by marching on Rome (Juvenal, Satire 7.160-4), and twenty lines of his tenth satire are devoted to the futility of Hannibal’s ambitions (Satire 10. 147-67). Juvenal presents Hannibal himself as a one-eyed, elephant-riding maniac, and the fact that he took his own life with a poisoned ring is seen as a humiliating punishment for the bloodshed at Cannae. Juvenal may have seen Hannibal’s campaigns as pointless, serving no purpose except as subjects for schoolboy orations, but almost 300 years after he wrote, Ammianus Marcellinus, in attempting to convey the scale of the Roman defeat at Adrianople, sadly declared that no Roman army had ever suffered so heavily in battle, save that which was destroyed at Cannae (Amm. 31. 13.14).
