The Battle of Zama was fought around October 19, 202 BC and marked the final and decisive end of the Second Punic War. A Roman army led by Scipio Africanus defeated a Carthaginian force led by Hannibal. Soon after this defeat on their home ground, the Carthaginian senate sued for peace, ending the 17-year war.
Despite nearly two years of constant victories, much of it on Italian soil, the Carthaginian commander Hannibal was still in Italy, although confined to the south of the peninsula. Scipio led an army of Roman legionnaires, with Hannibal leading an army composed of local citizens and veterans from his Italian campaigns. Hannibal’s army consisted of 50,000 infantry, 80 war elephants, and 4,000 cavalry, while Scipio had a total of 34,000 infantry and 8,700 cavalry. Putting his inexperienced cavalry on the flanks, Hannibal aligned his troops in three straight lines behind 80 war elephants.
Hannibal hoped that the combination of war elephants and the depth of the first two lines would weaken and disorganize the Roman advance. He would then complete a victory with his reserves in the third line and overlap Scipio’s lines. Though this formation was indeed well-conceived, it failed to produce a Carthaginian victory. In total, as many as 20,000 men of Hannibal’s army were killed in Zama, while 11,000 were wounded. The Romans lost as few as 1,500 dead and 5,000 wounded.
