The War with Hannibal (Books XXI-XXX)

Bushels of gold rings, stripped from the fingers of dead Roman knights, poured out on the floor of the Carthaginian senate: that is how Hannibal reported Cannae, where in a single afternoon he closed his line around a Roman army far larger than his own and killed most of it. Livy tells the Second Punic War as the closest Rome ever came to ending, and he never lets you forget that the man doing it had sworn the oath as a child at his father's altar.