The Battle of Cannae

It was--by all accounts--a blood bath. And it is--by all accounts--the most stunning battle ever fought.

And it was slow slaughter. Little by little, they were drawn into a death trap, an impossible and impotent formation so that they could barely use their arms; slowly squeezed in on all sides by the Spanish, the Numidians, and the Carthaganians, they found, to their horror, the crescent closing in on them; and hour by hour, jammed in a hellish rat hole with no escape, suffocating, choking, some, out of desperation, asphyxiating themselves in the bloody ground on which they found their feet slipping, infinitely slowly, they were hacked to pieces: 50,000 of them in a single day, in a space as large as a modern football stadium.

The slaughter was absolute, the defeat unprecedented, and the calamity unimaginable: In less than two years Rome had lost--parsing the population in modern terms--the equivalent of ten million men--all of the war dead from 1939 to 1945 put together.

Generals through the ages, right up to Norman Scharzkopf in the First Gulf War, have obsessed over this battle, and will, no doubt, continue to do so: What Hannibal achieved was the perfect victory--the complete encirclement of the enemy.

Here's Polybius' account. And here's an illustrated description of the Battle.