When we focus on what is insignificant, we are likely to neglect what is most crucial.  He who fixates on the irrelevant escrescence overlooks the significance of the larger structure.  It is with good reason that this admonition is of old date:

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. [Matthew 23:24]

But of course it is never easy to avoid becoming a strainer after gnats, or the swallower of a camel:  for man is guided principally by desire, and finds it difficult to interpolate reason when emotion occupies the podium.  The results can be catastrophic.  The Battle of Geronium, which took place in 217 B.C. during the Second Punic War, furnishes an example.  A Roman army was divided between the dictator Fabius and the impetuous Marcus Minucius Rufus, who was magister equitum, or master of the horse.  Against these forces was opposed the formidable Hannibal, who had pitched his camp on level ground between his two adversaries.  Part of his infantry he concealed in nearby rocky terrain; another part he sent to occupy a prominent hill, in order to lure the Romans out for a fight. 

Minucius foolishly took the bait, and emerged from his camp to attack the Carthaginians occupying the hill.  When they did this, Hannibal gave the signal for his concealed men to emerge from their hiding places among the rocks.  Minucius would have been cut to pieces had not Fabius rescued him from his predicament.  He survived this encounter, but his hotheaded recklessness eventually caught up with him; he was slain at the Battle of Cannae, along with around fifty thousand other Romans.    

Hannibal always had an uncanny ability to detect those who missed the forest for the trees, and permitted desire to override prudence.  The first major engagement of the Second Punic War was the Battle of the Trebia in 218 B.C.  In this contest, Hannibal was opposed by the consul Sempronius Longus.  It was during the dead of winter, and both the Romans and the Carthaginians shivered in the harsh conditions.  Hannibal had pitched his camp near the Trebia River, and the camp of Sempronius was visible to him.  The river ran flowed between the two forces. 

Hannibal first assigned Mago and some handpicked men to take up ambush positions.  He then commanded his sturdy Numidian cavalry—a devastatingly effective mobile force—to ride towards the Roman defensive works and display themselves.  He hoped this would taunt the Romans and bait the credulous Sempronius into a fight.  It is amazing how often the Romans fell into Hannibal’s cunning traps, but the record is clear that it happened again and again in the early years of the war.  Hannibal commanded his Numidians to retreat when the Romans came out to engage them, and then to cross the Trebia using known fording points to avoid the freezing water.  Sempronius emerged from his camp and attacked, as expected; his men, who had not eaten, proceeded to chase the Numidians across the river, plunging into the water during the pursuit. 

Once Sempronius’s hungry men were chilled to the bone, and debilitated by hypothermic torpor, Hannibal deployed his own men, who had been fed, rubbed with oil, and warmed with fires.  The result was a complete disaster for the Romans; Mago fell upon his rear and cut it to pieces.  Sempronius and ten thousand of his men were able to fight their way to safety, but the battle was a crushing defeat, and a harbinger of even worse days to come.  In both of these examples, the Roman commanders saw only what they were predisposed to see, or what Hannibal wanted them to see; they had no appreciation of the larger battlefield picture, no grasp of how tactics might dovetail with larger strategies.  The results were predictably ruinous.  

The seasoned man of judgment should never allow himself to be lured into activities that siphon away limited energies and time.  He must not permit himself to be dragged into fruitless conflicts from which he has nothing to gain, and much to lose.  Remove yourself from the trees, soar above the forest’s canopy, and survey all.  Seek causes, reasons, and hidden motivations.  Probe consequences both foreseen and unlikely.  He who is ruled by emotion is not the master of his destiny; he is, instead, nothing but a plaything of the Fates, those puppeteers of fearsome and unsparing power, who smile and muse over the bones of the vanquished.          

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Read more about great commanders of antiquity in the new translation of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders, which is both illustrated and annotated.