October 7, 2026
The Shield Left BehindAuthor: Alessandro CatorciniAmazon Rating: 4.7 Genre: Historical Fiction Price: |
He left his shield in the dust at Cannae. He spent the rest of his life deciding what that made him.
Titus Labonius grows up on a Sabine farm under a shield that hangs on the wall, and under the line of Greek his father says over it: it is a beautiful thing to die in the first row, fighting for the land that bore you. When his father dies, the shield comes down from the wall and goes to war on Titus’s arm.
On the second of August, 216 BC, Hannibal destroys the Roman army at Cannae. Titus is buried beneath the dead of his own tent and crawls out at dusk unhurt, and the shield is gone. That night the tribune Sempronius Tuditanus forms six hundred men into a wedge and breaks out through the Numidians, and Titus walks out with them, shieldless on the exposed side, saved by a stranger’s shield.
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