Roman army of the mid-Republic placed unprecedented strains on Roman manpower, not least on the Order of Knights and the First Class of commoners which provided the cavalry. During Hannibal's apocalyptic march through Italy (218–216 BC), thousands of Roman cavalrymen were killed in the field. The losses were especially serious for the equestrian order, which also provided the army's senior officers. Livy relates how, after Cannae, gold rings (a badge of knightly rank), recovered from the corpses of Roman knights formed a pile one "modius" (about 9 litres) large. In the succeeding years 214–203 BC, the Romans kept at least 21 legions in the field
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