Cannae - what would Scipio Africanus have done?

[Cantabrigian]

Wouldn't it be more accurate to suggest that what he intrinsically brought with him was a belief in examining the past behaviour of the enemy for clues to his next move.

You may well be right, but I think you could generalise it to say that what all the great leaders (Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio, Caesar) did that made them different from everyone else was that they actually thought about stuff, and reacted to stuff. 

The accounts of their battles tend to have a lot more stuff coming on.  It could be said that this is merely due to more attention being payed to their battles (and that hence the description of other battles being simple "line them up and let them go" affairs is completely unrealistic).  But I tend to believe that "great" leaders did bring an element of flexibility and reactiveness to their commands.

I suggest it was impossible for anyone to anticipate the use of the African veterans and the slow pull in of the centre line, and equally it was impossible to anticipate that the cavalry failure would be so catastrophic

I don't think it was impossible to anticipate that Hannibal would try something.  Given his record it seems unlikely that he would just settle for a straight head-on fight.  So a wise commander would expect the unexpected, and have some resources to deal with it.

Of course, if Hannibal had known he was facing someone of Scipio's capabilities (i.e. not a complete numpty), he probably wouldn't have agreed to battle either.

[Dave Beatty]

Interesting question. As my long suffering wife will tell you I've spent the better part of a week tramping over Cannae trying to square the historical accounts with the actual battlefield and as near as I can figure the fundamental problem is the Romans allowed themselves to be drawn into situation that resulted in 'canalization' - they were funneled into an area where the crush from behind forced those in front to become so tightly constrained as to be unable to effectively fight. So to perhaps answer the original question, 1. As point out Scipio was there (but as a very young cavalryman apparently) but 2. Scipio would never have accepted battle on that terrain. He would have lured Hannibal onto grounds of his own choosing and destroyed him there (to paraphrase Rommel)... IMHO