"Cannae" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them on a similar height of renown. Still their time continues in admirable study. But it is like the story of the Volscian and Samnite combats, read in the day when the consul, flying through the streets of Rome, brought the news of Cannae. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the ninth of August, A.D. 378, the fatal day, the second Cannae, from which Rome never recovered as from that first, the young world and the old world met, and fought it out; and the young world won. The light Roman cavalry fled before the long lances and heavy swords of the German knights. The knights turned on the infantry, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... mountains; while all the rest of Italy was admitted to privileges for which ancient history had elsewhere furnished no precedent. Hence the invasion of Hannibal half a century later, even with its stupendous victories of Thrasymene and Cannae, effected nothing toward detaching the Italian subjects from their allegiance to Rome; and herein we have a most instructive contrast to the conduct of the communities subject to Athens at several critical moments of the Peloponnesian War. With ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... history of a great military conqueror, there seems to be often some one great battle which in importance and renown eclipses all the rest. In the case of Hannibal it was the battle of Cannae, in that of Alexander the battle of Arbela. Caesar's great conflict was at Pharsalia, Napoleon's at Waterloo. Marathon was, in some respects, Darius's Waterloo. The place is a beautiful plain, about twelve miles north of the great city of Athens. The battle was the great final contest between Darius ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... they had lost by their own rashness. A great number of brave and distinguished officers perished in the battle of Hadrianople, which equalled in the actual loss, and far surpassed in the fatal consequences, the misfortune which Rome had formerly sustained in the fields of Cannae. Two master-generals of the cavalry and infantry, two great officers of the palace, and thirty-five tribunes, were found among the slain; and the death of Sebastian might satisfy the world, that he was the victim, as well as the author, of the public calamity. Above ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... fields. I leave the reader to judge whether "Te Deum" would be sung on that night. A Gazette Extraordinary was issued; and my brother had really some reason for his assertion, "that in conscience he could not think of comparing Cannae to this smashing defeat;" since at Cannae many brave men had refused to fly—the consul himself, Terentius Varro, amongst them; but, in the present rout, there was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... brigands, besides making a dozen prisoners. When I say we, I mean my companions; for having no weapon, I had discreetly remained with the volunteers. The scene of this gallant exploit was on the classic battle-field of Cannae. This captain, who was not the friend I had joined the day after my brigand adventure, was a most plucky and dashing cavalry officer, and was well seconded by his men, who were all Piedmontese, and of very different temperament from the Neapolitans. ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... comes two hours before you expected it; to sit with your Livy before you and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol, and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae, and heaping them into bushels, and to be so intimately present at the actions you are reading of, that when anybody knocks at the door it will take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own study ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... told, were groomed with old Italian wine, Hannibal marched through Apulia and ravaged Campania, dogged by the dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus, whom he vainly endeavored to entice into an engagement. He wintered at Gerontium, and in the spring took up a position at Cannae, on the Aufidus. A Roman army of 80,000 men, under the consuls L. AEmilius Paulus and P. Terentius Varro, marched against him. Hannibal flung his troops (he had but 30,000) into a space inclosed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... goblins? Lavater imputes the greatest cause of spectrums, and the like apparitions, to fear, which above all other passions begets the strongest imagination (saith [1607]Wierus), and so likewise love, sorrow, joy, &c. Some die suddenly, as she that saw her son come from the battle at Cannae, &c. Jacob the patriarch, by force of imagination, made speckled lambs, laying speckled rods before his sheep. Persina, that Ethiopian queen in Heliodorus, by seeing the picture of Persius and Andromeda, instead of a blackamoor, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Unhappy wantons! Scipio, on the other side, when he was but a boy (about two or three and twenty), being informed that certain patricians of Roman gentlemen, through a qualm upon the defeat which Hannibal had given them at Cannae, were laying their heads together and contriving their flight with the transportation of their goods out of Rome, drew his sword, and setting himself at the door of the chamber where they were at council, protested "that who did not immediately swear ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... Wars have seldom a keen appreciation of the merits of the contest. That it was at first a struggle for empire, and afterward for existence on the part of Carthage, that Hannibal was a great and skillful general, that he defeated the Romans at Trebia, Lake Trasimenus, and Cannae, and all but took Rome, represents pretty nearly the sum total of their knowledge. To let them know more about this momentous struggle for the empire of the world Mr. Henty has written this story, which not only gives in graphic ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... Groecia. RHI'GAS, CONSTANTINE. War song. Rhodes, island of; sculptures of. Rhoe'cus, a sculptor. Roger, King of Sicily. Rome and the Romans; called into Sicily, and become masters of the island; defeat of, at Cannae, and victory of, at Cynocephalae; become masters of Greece and Macedon; their administration of Greece. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... "David," said he—"for I cannae bring to mind the name of your landed estate, and so will make so bold as to call you David—that door, being open, is the best part of ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... AEmilius Paulus, would have gone on in the same cautious plan of starving Hannibal out without a battle, the other, Caius Terentius Varro, who commanded on alternate days with him, was determined on a battle. Hannibal so contrived that it was fought on the plain of Cannae, where there was plenty of space to use his Moorish horse. It was Varro's day of command, and he dashed at the centre of the enemy; Hannibal opened a space for him, then closed in on both sides with his terrible horse, and made a regular ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the battalions which broke over the French frontier under Wellington perhaps the most formidable fighting force known in the history of war. To quote Napier once more: "What Alexander's Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal's Africans at Cannae, Caesar's Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon's Guards at Austerlitz, such were Wellington's British soldiers at ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... its armies, yet this was not without great difficulty;[22] and Rome would have been destroyed by Carthage, had she not been preserved by a civic fortitude in which she surpassed all the nations of the earth. The reception which the Senate gave to Terentius Varro, after the battle of Cannae, is the sublimest event in human history. What a contrast to the wretched conduct of the Austrian government after the battle at Wagram! England requires, as you have shown so eloquently and ably, a new system of martial policy; but England, as well as the rest of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in person, and, though it struggled gallantly, was overwhelmed and utterly destroyed by the arrows of the terrible Persian bowmen. Herodian says, no doubt with some exaggeration, that this was the greatest calamity which had ever befallen the Romans. It certainly cannot compare with Cannae, with the disaster of Varus, or even with the similar defeat of Crassus in a not very distant region. But it was (if rightly represented by Herodian) a terrible blow. It absolutely determined the campaign. A Caesar or a Trajan might have retrieved such a loss. An Alexander Severus was not ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson |
