Battle of Herdonia (210 BC) Flaccus and Gn. Fulvius Centumalus). Some state that there was just one battle in fact, but there is no general agreement on this issue. Following his incursion into southern Italy in 217 BC, Hannibal defeated the Roman forces in the battle of Cannae (216 BC). This victory brought him a host of new allies from Campania, Samnium, Apulia, Lucania, Bruttium and Magna Graecia, who revolted from Rome enticed by his narrative of Roman oppression. One of these allies was the city of Herdonia in northern Apulia. It was the site of a general engagement between Hannibal and the Romans already
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