Hannibal Hannibal belongs to the select group

As one moves inward from this outer circle of hazy recollection, one finds a variety of lasting imprints left by Hannibal and his campaigns. Fabius Cunctator and his strategy of avoiding a pitched battle with Hannibal has made "Fabian" a byword for a policy of delay and gradualism, and in Britain once gave its name to a distinctive branch of the socialist movement.

The Battle of Cannae is one of the handful of engagements that holds an enduring fascination at military staff colleges: the textbook example of a perfect envelopment action, leading to annihilation of the loser at the cost of almost trifling costs to the victor. As recently as the Persian Gulf campaign of 1991, Cannae was evoked as a model for the coalition's objectives in outflanking and enveloping the Iraqi army in Kuwait. It is perhaps less certain how often instructors and students at staff colleges reflect upon the great paradox

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be too seldom repeated. The fundamental basis of Roman military power was its manpower. In the First Roman War, largely a naval war, the Carthagenians had faced the frustration of seeing the Romans lose fleet after fleet, only to replace them; as great as was the achievement of replacing the ships, replacing their large crews was an equal if not greater one. In the Second Roman War, on which Hannibal was now embarked, he would defeat army after army, only to find himself facing even larger Roman armies in the next campaign season. The Romans were able to do this because they could draw on most of the population of Italy as a recruiting base, but that reservoir depended in turn on the resilience of a political structure of Roman-dominated alliances. Had this alliance system frayed sufficiently, the Romans could never have made good their enormous losses, and sooner or later they would have been ground down. Hannibal's entire strategy of invading Italy was most rational given the assumption that this would occur. In spite of success with the Cisalpine Gauls, who were not yet part of the alliance system as such, and later with the Capuans and other southern Italians and Italo-Greeks, who were, disintegration of the Roman s
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Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)