Gaius Terentius Varro

Roman politician of relatively modest origins (his father is sometimes called a butcher in the hostile tradition), elected consul for 216 BCE alongside Lucius Aemilius Paullus. The senatorial-aristocratic tradition preserved by Polybius and developed by Livy casts Varro as the rash and demagogic consul whose insistence on battle produced the disaster at Cannae, in contrast to Paullus's restraint. Modern scholarship is more cautious: the alternating-command convention means Varro alone cannot bear responsibility for the engagement, the source tradition is shaped by family memory and political alignment, and Varro continued to hold imperium and senior commands for years after Cannae, including the embassy to Philip V, which is hard to square with the figure of contempt the literary tradition presents. He survived the battle by retreating with a small force and was famously thanked by the senate on his return for "not despairing of the Republic."