Gaius Terentius Varro

Gaius Terentius Varro was one of the Roman consuls in 216 BC and shared command at the Battle of Cannae, where Hannibal destroyed a much larger Roman army. Ancient aristocratic sources often blamed Varro, a politician of comparatively humble background, for forcing the battle, while praising his patrician colleague Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Varro survived, returned to Rome and continued to receive military and diplomatic responsibilities, suggesting that the senate did not treat him simply as a disgraced incompetent.

Varro appears in Ben Kane’s Hannibal trilogy and in other novels about Cannae, where alternating command and political rivalry provide natural dramatic tension. Fiction has often repeated the hostile tradition that makes him solely responsible for disaster. More balanced portrayals note that Roman strategy was collective, the sources favoured his dead colleague and the entire leadership underestimated Hannibal’s ability to envelop the legions.