His one chance was to win another great battle, and so to overawe south Italy, to make his base absolutely secure, and to force gradually northward the leaven of anti-Roman feeling on which he calculated. For the rest of that year, 217 B.C., he could not get this chance; the Senate, still cool-headed, had appointed a cool-headed dictator,[6] who knew that his slow and steady citizen soldiers were no good match for a mobile professional army skilfully handled, and steadily refused to accept battle. Not even when Hannibal forced his way northward to the rich plain of Campania, and tried to gain over the wealthy city of Capua, would Fabius be tempted to fight; he dogged the enemy’s footsteps, and once tried to catch him in a snare, from which Hannibal escaped by a clever ruse. But next year the Senate dispatched the two new consuls, with an army not far short of 100,000 men, to deal with the enemy in southern Italy; and here, reluctant though one at least of them was, Hannibal enticed them into a battle by seizing a valuable dépôt of stores at a town called Cannæ, near the sea, in the plain of Apulia. Though far inferior in numbers, he contrived by consummate tactics to draw the solid Roman legions into a net, and then used his mobile Numidian cavalry to prevent their escape to the rear. The fight became a butchery, in which 80,000 Romans are said to have fallen. The largest army ever yet sent out from Rome was totally destroyed, and it would seem as if she could no longer escape from her deadly foe.
At this point, the high-water mark of Hannibal’s successes, we may pause to see how the Senate met the news of this most terrible disaster. At no moment in Roman history is the sterling quality of the Roman character and spirit so conspicuously shown. The Senate had to meet not only the immediate military crisis in Italy, but the problems of military and naval policy in Spain, in Sicily, and in the plain of the Po. At home, too, they had to deal with what we may call a religious panic; the people, and especially the women, were beginning to lose nerve, and to fancy that their gods had forsaken them. We can believe the Roman historian when he says that any other people would have been crushed by a catastrophe like this. But the wise men of the Senate simply sat down to repair it, never dreaming of giving in. The city was made safe, fresh legions were enrolled, and thanks were voted to the surviving consul “for not despairing of the republic.” They would not ransom the prisoners in Hannibal’s hands, nor receive the officer whom he sent for this purpose. They were not moved even by the news that southern Italy, the Bruttians, Lucanians, Apulians, and most of the Samnites, had joined the enemy, and that isolated towns farther north had deserted them. Capua, the second city of Italy, was betrayed to Hannibal, and he was thus enabled to advance his base from Apulia into the plain of Campania, without leaving an enemy in his rear: but the Senate did not despair. In due time the ranks of this Senate, sadly thinned since the war began, were filled up by a dictator with the best and most experienced citizens available. All possible means were adopted of keeping up the idea of “the peace of the gods”; an embassy was even sent to Delphi; the religious panic speedily quieted down. At the beginning of the next year provision was made as usual for the military commands in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain, and also for a fleet which was being got together at Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber. Within a few months after the battle all was going on in Rome as usual.