Hannibal Strikes: How Carthage Almost Won the Second Punic War with the First Blow

A History of Mankind (171)

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Under pressure from Roman encroachment, the Gauls invaded Italy in 223 BC with over a hundred thousand warriors from various tribes. The Romans were ready: two consular armies closed on them in Telamon in modern Tuscany, where the Gauls suffered one of the largest single-day massacres in Italian history, leaving behind as many as 50,000 corpses.

Now a consul, Flaminius followed up on this victory with a campaign across the Po River in which he ordered the bridges behind destroyed, to cut off his own line of retreat and ensure that his troops would only be incentivized to push forward, a land-locked version of the old burn-the-ships command.

The next year, the Insubres Gauls of modern Lombardy were defeated in a battle in which – to make the point even stronger – Roman consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus (then just over 50 years of age) killed their leader in single combat; by 221 BC – when young Hannibal took control of the Punic armies in Hispania after Hasdrubal was murdered by a slave, seeking revenge for his Iberian master – the Romans were just mopping up remaining Gallic resistance and preparing large-scale colonization plans, including the construction of the future Via Flaminia from Rome through Ariminum.