Battle of Cannae Hannibal at Cannae, with approximately 86,000 Roman and allied troops. They massed their heavy infantry in a deeper formation than usual, while Hannibal used the double-envelopment tactic and surrounded his enemy, trapping the majority of the Roman army, who were then slaughtered. The loss of life on the Roman side was one of the most lethal single day's fighting in history; Adrian Goldsworthy equates the death toll at Cannae to "the massed slaughter of the British Army on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916." Only about 15,000 Romans, most of whom were from the garrisons of the
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