Book Review: The Ghosts of Cannae

Robert L. O’Connell. The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic. New York: Random House, 2010. 336 pages.

This book, by military historian Robert O’Connell, looks at the hows and also the whys of the battle of Cannae, one of the most conclusive–but ultimately least decisive–battles in Western history. In 216 B.C,, Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general, inflicted a nearly-mortal wound on the Roman republic. The Roman army lost more men on that day than any other army in any other battle in history. Yet Hannibal ultimately was unable to defeat Rome, and 14 years later suffered his own defeat at Zama, in northern Africa, a battle which effectively ended the Second Punic War. THE GHOSTS OF CANNAE takes the reader from the origins of the Roman/Punic conflicts to the aftermath of the wars.

The book, generally a synthesis of ancient and modern scholarship on Rome, Carthage, and their conflicts, gives the reader a great deal of information. We learn how soldiers on both sides trained, how much equipment they carried, and what it took to get them in the field. O’Connell also sheds light on the political maneuvering that, more than military needs, often determined the pace of the war.

Given that all of this happened about 2,200 years ago, there’s not the same sense of immediacy you’d get from an account of a more recent war–surviving records are sometimes fragmentary, and there is simply a great deal about many of the central characters that we don’t know. At this stage, though, vivid personalities are pretty much the realm of historical fiction, as there’s just not enough in the historical record to flesh out characters. This at times makes the reading a bit one-dimensional, but O’Connell’s good sense of space and geography gives the battles enough context to seem real.

All in all, it’s a good military history of an epic battle, and a good read for those interested in military history.

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