Hannibal at the gates

2 August 216 BC. At Cannae in southern Italy, Hannibal's outnumbered army has closed like a hand around the largest force Rome ever fielded. By evening the Republic has lost perhaps fifty thousand men in an afternoon, among them a consul, two quaestors, and a third of the Senate's sons. Hannibal's cavalry commander Maharbal begs him to ride at once: send the horsemen ahead, follow with the army, and in five days he will dine on the Capitol. Hannibal, whose army is exhausted and carries no siege train, praises his spirit and refuses. Maharbal answers with the sentence historians still argue over: you know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use one.

In the timeline recorded here, Hannibal sits his horse in the red evening above the field, and the silence after Maharbal's words runs longer. The army is spent, the city is two hundred and fifty miles away, and every reason to refuse still stands. But he has just watched Rome's largest army cease to exist between his wings, and he decides that terror, ridden hard, can do what ladders cannot. He gives Maharbal the Numidian horse before the dust has settled. The rings of the Roman dead go into sacks, and the army turns north on the Via Latina, toward the city that has never seen him.