Historical fiction
The Shield Left Behind
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.
Rome does not forgive its survivors. The men of Cannae are sent to Sicily as the legiones Cannenses, forbidden Italy, spat on in the streets. When Scipio comes asking for volunteers for Africa, Titus asks for the first row, and Scipio gives it to him in a form he did not expect: the small round shield of the skirmishers, and a place at the front of the battle, where the elephants come.
A novel of cowardice and courage, and the long distance between them.
A spare, luminous novel of cowardice and courage in the Second Punic War.
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The Shield Left Behind follows a survivor of Cannae across fourteen years of disgrace, exile, and the long war against Hannibal, toward the field at Zama. It is available in English, Italian (Lo scudo abbandonato), and Romanian (Scutul Lăsat în Urmă).
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