Battle of Cannae required Hannibal to subdue a considerable part of the hinterland to cut the enemy's supplies and secure his own. Even after the tremendous losses suffered at Cannae and the defection of a number of her allies, Rome still had abundant manpower to prevent this and maintain considerable forces in Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and elsewhere despite Hannibal's presence in Italy. Hannibal's conduct after the victories at Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae, and the fact that he first attacked Rome only five years later, in 211 BC, suggests that his strategic aim was not the destruction of his foe but to dishearten
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