Roman army of the mid-Republic to the charge followed by close melee combat, had no effective response. Nevertheless, in the years following Cannae (216-203 BC), the record of Roman cavalry in operations against Hannibal in southern Italy was creditable, scoring a number of successes in cavalry encounters although never depriving the enemy of overall cavalry superiority. The Romans finally succeeded in closing the light cavalry gap with the Carthaginians by winning over the Numidian king Massinissa, previously an ally of Carthage. This enabled the Romans to field at least an equal number of Numidians at the battle of Zama (202 BC), who, outnumbering the Roman/Italian
Sexuality in ancient Rome reviled throughout Latin literature. In general the Romans had more flexible gender categories than the ancient Greeks. A late 20th-century paradigm analyzed Roman sexuality in terms of a "penetrator–penetrated" binary model, a misleadingly rigid analysis that may obscure expressions of sexuality among individual Romans. Even the relevance of the word "sexuality" to ancient Roman culture has been disputed, but in the absence of any other label for "the cultural interpretation of erotic experience", the term continues to be used. Ancient literature pertaining to Roman sexuality falls mainly into four categories: legal texts; medical texts; poetry; and political discourse. Forms of