The Punic Wars: Hannibal

CHAPTER 2 · 218–201 BC · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

The long blue arrow is one of history’s most audacious campaigns. In 218 BC Hannibal Barca leaves New Carthage in Spain with perhaps 90,000 men, crosses the Rhône, and takes 37 elephants over the Alps in autumn snow — arriving in Italy with barely 26,000 survivors. It is enough. At the Trebia he baits a Roman army into an icy river and kills half of it; at Lake Trasimene he stages the largest ambush in military history and destroys another, consul and all; and at Cannae, on 2 August 216, his outnumbered army bends backward on purpose, wraps its cavalry around the Roman flanks, and annihilates

The turn: Cannae, 2 August 216 BC.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.