Overwhelms the moral sense

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 131.

Contemporary scholars and general students often display a natural empathy toward Hannibal. It is easy to champion an underdog as courageous as Hannibal, and easier still for us moderns to find Roman aggression and imperialism of the third through first centuries B.C. loathsome — their tally of slaughtered Spaniards, Gauls, Greeks, Africans, and Asians finally overwhelms the moral sense. But if we ask what are the military wages of constitutional government and the resulting battle dividends of citizenship, the answer is not found with a Juvenal’s “one-eyed commander perched on his monstrous beast,” but with the nameless and silent men who were gutted and left to rot under the August sun of Cannae.

Polybius, who witnessed firsthand the later barbaric destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. and wrote of Cannae seventy years after the Roman defeat, rightly attributed Rome’s resurgence after the catastrophe to its constitution and the rare harmony between civilian and military affairs under consensual government. The aftermath of the slaughter on August 2, 216 B.C., affected the Greek historian as no other event in Roman history. He used the occasion to present a long analysis of the Roman constitution and the legions—nearly all of book 6 in his history—which remains the clearest and most concise account of those institutions to this day. Polybius ended his excursus about Rome’s remarkable constitutional and military system with a final thought on the aftermath of Cannae:

For although the Romans had clearly been defeated in the field, and their reputation in arms ruined, yet because of the singularity of their constitution, and by wisdom of their deliberative counsel, they not only reclaimed the sovereignty of Italy, and went on to conquer the Carthaginians, but in just a few years themselves became rulers of the entire world. (3.118.7–9)