What Did Roman Soldiers Actually Do After Losing

The morning after Cannae, Hannibal sorted his prisoners into two lines: Romans, and everyone else. The Romans got a price tag, and daily life in ancient Rome's army after a defeat turned out to be stranger, and harsher, than the battle itself. It's about the version of you who would have been standing in that line. Start with 8,000 prisoners waiting to hear whether the Senate would buy them back, and end with the survivors who spent more than ten winters forbidden to sleep within ten miles of a town. Along the way, roman history gets very specific about losing: a law that treated captured men as already dead, barley rations, a ten-foot pole held all day, a whole army marched under a yoke of spears, and Romans who came home forty years later. Topics covered: the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal, the Roman Senate's ransom vote, postliminium, decimation, the Cannae legions in Sicily, the Caudine Forks, the captives of Carrhae, the Varus disaster, and Scipio. 0:00 Sorted, Priced and Waiting 4:25 The Morning After Cannae 7:25 Rome's Vote on Its Own Prisoners 16:04 Nine Miles From the Nearest Roof 18:27 Decimation, Barley and the Yoke 23:36 Forty Years Far From Home Stay to the end. Hannibal saw some of the Cannae survivors again fourteen years later, and it did not go the way he planned. #AncientHistory #RomanHistory #BattleOfCannae REFERENCES 📜 Livy, History of Rome (Books 22–26) — the Cannae aftermath, the ransom vote, Busa, Scipio at Canusium, the Sicily exile and the ten-mile rule 📜 Polybius, Histories (Book 6) — decimation, barley rations, and Hannibal's reaction to the Senate's refusal 📜 Digest of Justinian (Book 49) — postliminium and the legal status of Roman captives 📜 Livy, History of Rome (Book 9) — the Caudine Forks and the surrender of Postumius 📜 Plutarch, Lives of Crassus and Flamininus — Carrhae, the mock triumph, and the 1,200 captives freed in Greece 📜 Suetonius, Augustus and Julius; Tacitus, Annals 12 — punishments in the ranks, Dyrrachium, and the Varus survivors This video is for educational purposes. Some scenes are told in a storytelling style, and ancient writers often disagree with each other, sometimes by tens of thousands of men. Where historians still argue, we've tried to say so.