Gaius Flaminius: The Sources, The Record, The Man (Forgotten Men of the Roman Republic) Kindle Edition

A road that has lasted twenty-two centuries. A decisive military victory over the Gauls. A provincial governorship so competent that the locals honored his memory a generation later. Two consulships, a censorship, a praetorship, a tribunate, and one of the great public building programs of the Roman Republic. The career of Gaius Flaminius was substantial by any measure. Yet the ancient sources remember him almost exclusively for the catastrophic Roman defeat at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, where fifteen thousand soldiers died in a three-hour ambush laid by Hannibal Barca.For well over two thousand years, the tradition has presented Flaminius as a reckless demagogue whose impiety and ambition led inevitably to disaster. Modern scholars have increasingly traced this hostile portrait to its origins in the work of Quintus Fabius Pictor, a Roman senator and political opponent who was present at the battle. He had every reason to blame the dead consul rather than the system he represented.This volume, the third in the Forgotten Men of the Roman Republic series, reconstructs the full career from the ancient sources. It measures those sources against modern scholarship and asks how a career of this substance came to be reduced to a cautionary tale. If the first two volumes examined men who were forgotten, this one examines a man who was remembered, but remembered wrong. Read more