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.
On the second of August, 216 BC, the largest army Rome had ever raised marched onto a plain beside the river Aufidus and was swallowed whole. Titus Labonius, a farmer's son from the Sabine hills, lived — and could never afterward say for certain whether he had lain still beneath the dead a heartbeat longer than a brave man would have.
Rome does not forgive its survivors. Marked with the disgraced legiones Cannenses and shipped to rot in Sicilian exile, Titus keeps the one thing he did not throw away: a battered oval scutum, its vermilion long faded, a wolf's head his mother scratched into the wood behind the boss. For fourteen years he soldiers the long way home — through shame, through Spain, through the slow unmaking of Hannibal — toward a field in Africa called Zama, where a man who once left his shield behind will learn at last whether he ran, or only survived.
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.
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).