On the fourth day before the Nones of Sextilis in 216 BC, a date the translator J. C. Rolfe gives as 2 August, Hannibal's army met both consuls of Rome near Cannae, by the river Aufidus. Polybius writes that the Romans decided to bring eight legions into the field, something they had never done before. Hannibal's Spanish and Celtic infantry gave way in the center, his African troops closed on both Roman flanks and his cavalry fell on the rear. The consul Lucius Aemilius Paulus was killed. The ancient writers count the Roman dead differently: about 70,000 infantry in Polybius, 50,000 men in Appian and Plutarch, and 45,500 foot and 2,700 horse in Livy.
The Battle of Cannae, 216 BC: Hannibal's perfect trap
2 August 216 BC · 2241 years ago
Hannibal's Carthaginian army won the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Using a double envelopment, he surrounded and destroyed a much larger Roman army, killing or capturing most of a force of about 86,000. It is still studied as the classic battle of annihilation.
Read the full story of The Battle of Cannae, 216 BC: Hannibal's perfect trap ›Also on this day
Battle on Pyana River
2 August 1377 · 649 years ago
On the Pyana river, a Golden Horde force under Arapsha fell on a coalition army of Russian principalities under Prince Ivan Dmitriyevich of Nizhny Novgorod. The Russians, whose camp had grown lax and drunken, were routed and Ivan drowned while trying to flee.
1990: Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, an invasion dated 2 August 1990 both by UN Security Council resolution 660 and by the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian. The Office of the Historian writes that a force of 100,000 Iraqi troops overran the country "in a matter of hours". The same day the Security Council condemned the invasion and demanded that Iraq withdraw all its forces "immediately and unconditionally" to their positions of 1 August, by 14 votes to none, with Yemen not taking part in the vote. That morning President George Bush said: "There is no place for this sort of naked aggression in today's world".1
