rne no fruit, in spite of his previous victories, and was not likely to bear fruit so long as an undefeated Roman army remained in the field. Moreover, the Romans were recruiting to massively reinforce their army, raising the main field force to eight legions, twice the normal wartime strength, and those at augmented strength.
The entire main Roman battle force, with allies, would thus at least nominally on the order of 80,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry (the latter as always disproportionately recruited from the allies). The actual strength was almost certainly somewhat smaller, for reasons discussed in an earlier chapter, but the shortfall is unlikely to have been a large one. Once the reinforcements arrived, the Roman force facing Hannibal must have been on the order of at least 75,000 men.
Polybius gives the strength of Hannibal's army at this point in the campaign as 10,000 cavalry and an infantry force that "did not much exceed forty thousand." This force would be larger than those Hannibal possessed in his earlier battles; since he was cut off from his last recruiting ground in Cisalpine Gaul, either his actual strength in 216 is overstated or he had recruited substantial numbers of prisoners of war from among the Roman allies--possibly both. In any case, once the full reinforcements arrived, the Romans must have outnumbered Hannibal by at least fifty percent, and more likely by as much as two to one.
Of the Roman force, about half were held over from the previous year's campaign under Fabius, and as suggested above these troops could fairly be regarded as veterans. The other half would be new recruits, and it is these troops that would be most in need of the seasoning that could be provided by a continuation of skirmishing action. Political factors, however, were to act against this strategy.
The newly elected consuls for 216 were Lucius Aemilius Paulus, who had deputized his predecessors as proc...