Professor Josephine Quinn

And they've got more troops.

So Rome's got somewhere between 70,000 and 85,000 troops.

There are 50,000 Carthaginians and allies at this point.

But the reason that Hannibal wins is this amazingly brilliant tactic, which is that he has a deliberately weak centre in his army to attract the Romans to attack him in the centre.

And then he has cavalry, a very strong cavalry on both wings with one of his nephews and who's called Hanno and another guy called Hasdrubal on the other side.

Another one, yeah.

And so what happens is that the Romans kind of surge into the centre where they see the weakness and then they're surrounded by the cavalry.

And this is complete and bit of tactical brilliance on Hannibal's part.

And Rome suffers incredibly heavy losses.

After Cannae, he's in the south of Italy.

About 400 kilometres.

No, no, he doesn't.

He doesn't, though.

I'm afraid he's really sensible.

I mean, what he does is he consolidates... I'm actually in shock that he didn't do that.

OK.

But eventually, so he does eventually march on Rome, but it's five years later, in 211.

And so Hannibal marches right up to the gates of Rome, but he doesn't attack.

Well, the later Roman sources make it out to all be a kind of terrible mistake.

There's a hailstorm that he takes as an unfavourable omen.