That's not quite right. Hannibal was using tactical formations when the Roman's didn't know much beyond how to march over someone with large numbers of troops. This is during the 2nd Punic War. After getting slaughtered at Lake Kasimere, the Romans adopted a strategy of absorbing the enemy, much as the Russians would do later.
It was Scipio Africanus who was with his father at his fathers death at Lake Kasimere, who studied HANNIBAL's tactics and turned them back on him and ended up conquering Carthage.
To me one of the grand lessons of history is this: No one likes to have their own tactics used against them.
To me one of the grand lessons of history is this: No one likes to have their own tactics used against them.
Snip...Scipio's critics would argue that he did not so much outwit Hannibal, as merely copy his tactics in extending the line of battle and allow for his superior troops to do the damage.
They already had tactics. They got reformed and refined.
Snip...Had Cannae exposed Roman tactics as primitive, then Scipio's reforms had turned his army into a fighting machine which could match even commanders as great as Hannibal.
The Roman army had mastered tactics and now could begin with its near unstoppable conquest of the civilized world.
The battle in which Scipio Africanus supposedly saved his father's life was at the River Ticinus (a tributary of the Po), near the end of 218. His father was killed in Spain in 211 fighting against Mago, the brother of Hannibal, and Hasdrubal the son of Gisgo. I think Scipio Africanus was in Italy at the time of his father's death (he had recently been curule aedile in Rome). When the news reached Rome that Scipio's father and uncle had been killed in Spain, he was sent there as a proconsul, a very unusual step because he had not held any of the offices with imperium (praetor, consul, dictator, or magister equitum).