After the Battle of Cannae, a huge number of dead soldiers remained lying on the plain, whose bodies had to be buried. I have repeatedly come across claims that if Hannibal had marched on Rome the very next day, then a week later the Carthaginians would have celebrated their victory on Capitoline Hill. Judging by the distance of 400 kilometers from Cannes to Rome, it meant a cavalry raid on the capital of the enemy of the Magarbala cavalry, which, according to the authors of these statements, had a chance to storm Rome. If such a thing had happened, it would have been the only and unique case in the ancient history of the capture of a fortified city exclusively by cavalry. But the next morning, instead of advancing on Rome, the Carthaginians had to take possession of two fortified Roman camps, in which a significant number of legionaries found shelter after the defeat. At the same time, the authors of such statements do not take into account the fatigue of the soldiers and horses of the Carthaginian cavalry after a long battle, as well as the inevitable huge number of wounded horsemen. It does not take into account the fact that Hannibal would have needed at least three days only for a decent burial of the fallen Carthaginians. This included cremation or burial in burial pits of the bodies of slain warriors: Celts, Iberians, Punians, each according to their own funeral rites. It also took a lot of time to sort out the numerous trophies in the Roman camp and remove high-quality enemy weapons from the battlefield.
According to Appian: «The Romans lost fifty thousand soldiers, many of the senators died, and with them all the military tribunes and centurions, and two of the best generals.» Polybius writes that: «All the others, numbering about seventy thousand people, fell with honor in battle. The cavalry lost six thousand horsemen. About four thousand Celts fell from Hannibal’s army, one and a half thousand Iberians and Libyans, and about two hundred mounted soldiers.» In the words of Plutarch: «In this battle, the Romans lost fifty thousand dead.» According to Livy, the Romans: «In total, forty-five thousand five hundred infantry and two thousand seven hundred horsemen were killed, half of them Roman citizens and half allies. Hannibal ordered the corpses of his fallen soldiers to be demolished and buried in one place. There were about eight thousand of them–all the best, bravest warriors. According to some reports, the body of the Roman consul (Lucius Aemilius Paulus) was also found and buried.» Quintilian estimates the irretrievable losses of the Romans at sixty thousand, Eutropius claims forty thousand dead infantry and 3,500 horsemen. Despite the differences of chroniclers in the number of Romans and Carthaginians killed in the Battle of Cannae, their number was huge, and this battle was one of the bloodiest in the second Punic War.
I have seen in the publications of Russian authors the statement that archaeologists in the vicinity of Cannes have identified the burial grounds of participants in the battle. At the same time, they make reference to the excavations in 1938 by Michele Gervasio, director of the Archaeological Museum of Bari. Then a large burial ground was discovered, and the shapes of some tombs were copied by anthropoid sarcophagi (coffins in the shape of a man): skeletons surrounded by several skulls resembled Punic warriors, to whom Roman heads were added as a trophy to the graves. The human remains collected in the tombs were supposed to belong to the Carthaginians, whereas the bones lying around could be of Roman origin. The conclusions based on this finding seemed obvious: the Cannes burials were the tombs of the participants in the battle, and they were accepted by academic scholars of ancient history.
But eighteen years later, the Department of Antiquities of the province of Puglia conducted repeated archaeological excavations in the vicinity of Cannes, and Inspector Fernanda Tine Bertocchi concluded that the Cannes tombs could not belong to the period of Hannibal’s war, but dated back to the Middle Ages, namely the tenth century. Byzantine-style earrings, signs of the Greek and Latin cross, as well as tenth-century jewelry were found in individual tombs. The entire archaeological site identified earlier was attributed to the Middle Ages. To confirm this conclusion, individual bones from the Cannes burial ground were sent to Britain for their exact dating. The bulletin of the National Physical Laboratory of Measurements V 117 dated 1968 denied that the bones sent for examination belonged to the period of the Battle of Cannes and attributed them to the end of the tenth century.
In 1018, a battle took place near Cannes on the banks of the Aufid River between the Byzantine army and the Apulian Lombards, reinforced by a mounted detachment of 250 Norman horsemen. The Byzantine emperor sent a detachment of the elite Varangian guard to help his army, which contributed to the defeat of the Lombards. Of the auxiliary Norman detachment, only ten people remained alive. Most likely, in 1938, the Byzantine burial ground of the participants of this particular battle was discovered. But it should also be noted that during the further Norman conquest of Italy, more than one battle between the Byzantines and the Northerners took place in the vicinity of Cannes.
Historian E. Gibbon writes about this: «More than twenty years after their first migration, the Normans marched only among seven hundred horsemen and five hundred infantry, and the Byzantine army, after the recall of the legions fighting in Sicily, reached – as exaggeratedly claimed – up to sixty thousand people. A herald sent by the Greeks offered the Normans a choice between battle and retreat. «Battle!» the Normans shouted with one voice, and one of their strongest warriors knocked the messenger’s horse to the ground with a blow of his fist. This messenger was sent home on a new horse. This insult was hidden from the imperial troops, but in the next two battles they learned the hard way what kind of valor their opponents were gifted with. In the fields near Cannes, Asians fled from the French braves.»
Thus, to date, archaeologists have identified only one thousand-year-old Byzantine burial ground in the vicinity of Cannes. The early burials of the Carthaginians and Romans have yet to be discovered, and the difficulty in identifying them lies in the lack of accurate data on the location of the two enemy armies in the battle of 216 BC. Historians cannot come to a consensus and determine the location of the battle with an error of five kilometers, which does not allow archaeologists to narrow down the search for ancient burials.