Tom Holland

It's been a pulverizing day.

On top of that, Rome is almost 300 miles away.

And so Mahabal and his light Numidian cavalry, they could have probably got there in about five days, but it would have taken the infantry a fortnight.

And what if Hannibal turns up in front of the walls of Rome and the Romans refuse to capitulate?

Hannibal does not have any siege equipment, so he'd have two options.

He could either...

launch an assault but if that fails then it you know i mean that's an embarrassment and it kind of it it um it wipes out the moral and psychological advantage that he's got from his victory at can i or he could put it under siege but does he have enough men hannibal doesn't really you know he he's a long long way from home will he have enough men will he have enough materials

to bring Rome to her knees by putting her under siege.

So all these factors may have weighed on Hannibal's mind, but I think the simplest and likeliest explanation for Hannibal's decision not to immediately go herring off towards Rome is simply that he assumes, in the wake of the calamity that he's inflicted on the Romans at Cannae, that the Romans are now bound to capitulate.

I mean, those are the rules of war that had governed the conflicts between Carthage and Syracuse, for instance.

Yeah, I mean, Hannibal is not naive.

I mean, he understands the metal of the Romans very, very well.

But he does also have, I think, very immediate reasons for thinking that Roman morale has finally been broken.

Firstly, do the Romans have enough manpower now to carry on the fight?

They've lost something like 100,000 men in under two years.

I mean, that is a completely crippling loss.

But on top of that, in the wake of Cannae, there are plenty of straws in the wind suggesting that Roman Ryle is really, really on its uppers.

So not everyone in the Roman task force that had been defeated at Cannae had actually died.

Some, a few, had managed to break out through the Carthaginian lines as they kind of pressed in on the captured Romans.

And also there were something like 10,000 men who had been left as a reserve in the main Roman camp, which was on the other side of a river from the plain where the battle had been fought.