he expenditure of time and effort in a preliminary campaign against the alliance system.
In hindsight, Hannibal was plainly wrong. While it is impossible to say how a direct move against Rome after Cannae might have fared, his attack against the alliance system certainly failed in the long run. The alliance system was strained, but it did not break, or not to a sufficient degree for Hannibal to achieve his objectives. Hannibal's military, political, and moral strength relative to Rome was probably never greater than immediately after Cannae. Thenceforth the "correlation of forces" and the initiative gradually swung more and more toward Rome.
How and why that happened will be covered in detail in subsequent chapters dealing with that phase of the campaign. The question immediately at hand is why Hannibal might have miscalculated at the outset--why, that is, he supposed that an attack on the Roman alliance system was his most productive course, and why it failed to provide him with the gains he must have looked for from it. Two points of argument may be set forth: first, that Hannibal had a theory of the Roman alliance system, from which he drew conclusions about its potential lack of cohesiveness when under attack, and second, that his theory was incorrect.
It should be admitted from the outset that Hannibal's ultimate failure does not in itself prove that his strategic theory was defective. History is full of accidents and contingent events; plans undertaken with every logical hope of success have failed because someone unreasonably gave way, or put up an unreasonable resistance. Suppose, to bring it to cases, that when Hannibal appeared before Neapolis and defeated its cavalry, the Neapolitans had seen the handwriting on the wall and opened their gates to him. They had every good reason to do so. Hannibal was plainly on the ascendent. Rome's armies were smashed, and the Neapolitans lacked the strong emotive ...