Fabius Maximus thought outside the box. The normal Roman response to foreign aggression was to confront the enemy on the battlefield. Fabius was astute enough to realize that Hannibal was a military genius and that the Romans at that time had no general remotely capable of defeating him on the battlefield. When he was appointed dictator in 217 B.C. after the disastrous Battle of Trasimene, he devised a strategy that would thwart Hannibal’s aims. He declined to meet Hannibal on the battlefield unless the circumstances were clearly in his favor (which they never were) and he set about to deprive Hannibal of the sustenance he needed to maintain his army. At one point he thought he had Hannibal and his army trapped in Campania where they were running out of food, but Hannibal devised a plan that allowed his army to escape over the mountains. He attached bundles of dried foliage to the horns of 2000 oxen he had taken as plunder and set them on fire late at night. He then drove the panicking beasts over the mountain pass. The Romans guarding the pass thought they were seeing something supernatural and fled, then Hannibal and his army escaped over the pass to Apulia.
This was a major setback for Fabius but if he had been allowed to continue his strategy, he probably would have starved Hannibal’s army out within a year or two.
Unfortunately, the Romans were keen on having a military confrontation and they elected as Consul Gaius Terentius Varro who boasted that he would bring Hannibal to battle and defeat him the day he got sight of him.
Varro’s Co-Consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus was a more cautious man, but the Roman Senate decreed that there must be a battle, and they assembled an army of 80,000 Roman and allied soldiers. Fabius was adamantly opposed to such a confrontation, and he went to see Paullus to try to dissuade him from the venture:
“Lucius, I think you know why I have come to see you. If neither Consul had any sense, I would not bother to say anything because I would be wasting my time. If both Consuls had sense, I would not have to say anything because I could depend upon them to do the right thing. In this case one Consul has sense and the other does not, so I have come to talk to the Consul who does.”
“What would you have me do, Quintus Fabius?”
“Lucius, you know we are headed for a disaster if Varro gets his way. Flaminius only began to play the madman’s Consul when he got to his province, at the head of his army. Varro was raving even before he stood for the office of Consul! The man knows nothing of military matters, not even as much as Flaminius did, and Hannibal is a consummate genius! Varro probably doesn’t even know that you want to hold the high ground when you begin a battle, nor that you want the wind to be at your soldiers’ backs and not in their faces. He has no notion of how to choose a battlefield. Believe me, Lucius, Hannibal will cut our army to pieces. I don’t care if we have twice as many men as they do. One of Hannibal’s battle-hardened soldiers is worth ten of our raw recruits. But Hannibal does not have time on his side. He is in a foreign land, a hostile land, amidst all hostile and disadvantaged circumstances, far from his home, far from his country. He has peace neither by land nor sea, no cities nor walls to receive him. He sees nothing anywhere which he can call his own. He lives daily by plunder. He scarcely has a third part of the army which he conveyed across the Iberus. Famine has destroyed more than the sword. The few remaining lack provision. Do you doubt that by remaining quiet we shall not conquer him who is daily sinking into decrepitude. (Livy, book 22, paragraph 39). The only way to defeat Hannibal is to continue as I and Geminus and Regulus have been doing. We must not fight him on his own terms. Lucius, you must put an end to this madness!”
Unfortunately, Paullus felt unable to defy the will of the Roman Senate and people. He and Varro led their legions out to Apulia where they were soundly defeated by Hannibal with losses of about 55,000 legionaries at the Battle of Cannae.
After this disaster Fabius, having been proven correct, became the leader of Rome and maintained a policy of not confronting Hannibal on the Battlefield. Unfortunately, Hannibal was now able to make alliances with many of the tribes and cities of Italia which made Fabius’ strategy far less effective than it would have been if the Battle of Cannae had not taken place. The war became one of attrition in which Rome gradually clawed back Hannibal’s territorial gains over the next ten years. By 206 B.C. they had Hannibal and his army bottled up in a small area of Bruttium.
Eventually, the Romans found a military genius of their own, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus who drove the Carthaginians out of Spain and then defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama, forcing Carthage into a peace treaty on Roman terms. Were it not for this general, the war would likely have ended in a stalemate.
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