Livy wrote Rome’s history in the late first century BC. This is Book 22 of that work. Earlier books of the Second Punic War are lost; what survives already showed Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, crossing the Alps and beating a Roman army at the Trebia in northern Italy. He is now loose in the peninsula.

Fog on Lake Trasimene in central Italy. The consul Flaminius — one of two officials elected to run Rome for a year — marches into an ambush; the lake takes the dead. Quintus Fabius Maximus is named dictator, an emergency commander, and will not give Hannibal the open battle the city wants. Delay is a weapon, and a scandal. Minucius almost wrecks the army chasing glory. Then Cannae, on the plains of Apulia in the south. Varro and Paullus share a command that will not share a mind. Hannibal surrounds the largest Roman levy ever raised and wipes it out. The Senate refuses cheap ransom for the captured. After Cannae the question is whether Rome still exists.