Basil Boioannes detachment of the elite Varangian Guard was sent. The two forces met on the river Ofanto near Cannae, the site of Hannibal's victory over the Romans in 216 BC. In the second Battle of Cannae, Boioannes achieved an equally decisive victory. Boioannes protected his gains by immediately building a great fortress at the Apennine pass guarding the entrance to the Apulian plain. Troia, named after the ancient city of Asia Minor, was garrisoned by Boioannes' own contingent of Norman troops in 1019. Soon, all the Mezzogiorno had submitted to Byzantine authority, with the exception of the Duchy of Benevento, which
Religion in ancient Rome Venus was brought from Sicily and installed in a temple on the Capitoline hill. The disasters of the early part of Rome's second Punic War were attributed, in Livy's account, to a growth of superstitious cults, errors in augury and the neglect of Rome's traditional gods, whose anger was expressed directly in Rome's defeat at Cannae (216 BC). The Sibilline books were consulted. They recommended a general vowing of the "ver sacrum" and in the following year, the burial of two Greeks and two Gauls; not the first or the last of its kind, according to Livy. The introduction of