Hannibal escaped Fabius by luring guards with torch-lit oxen

In autumn 217 BCE, Fabius Maximus was running Rome's new 'delaying' strategy against Hannibal after the catastrophic early defeats at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene: shadow the Carthaginian army, refuse pitched battle, and starve it out. He got his chance when Hannibal, having plundered Campania, led his army into the Falernian plain — a fertile basin ringed by mountains with, by Fabius's reading of the terrain, a single practicable exit pass. Fabius moved to seal that pass and stationed troops on the high ground overlooking it, believing he had boxed Hannibal in for the winter.

Hannibal's army was loaded with plundered cattle and had no supply line home; sitting still through winter meant slow starvation, and a frontal assault on Roman-held high ground favored the defender. Ancient accounts (Polybius, Histories 3.93-94; Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 22.16-17) describe Hannibal ordering his men to gather dry brushwood, bind it to the horns of several hundred oxen taken from the plundered herds, and light it after dark, driving the panicked animals toward a ridge near, but not on, the pass Fabius was guarding.

Staged torch-lit oxen on a distant ridge to mimic a breakout, pulling the guards off the real pass so the army slipped through unopposed.

The torch-lit oxen looked like the whole army breaking out, so the Romans abandoned the real pass to intercept.

The decoy was more visually compelling than the real move, so it drew the defenders' focus away from the actual vulnerability.

The real pass was left undefended, allowing the main force and baggage to march through overnight with minimal losses.

The ruse converted a positional trap into an unopposed escape by relocating the enemy's attention rather than fighting through the chokepoint.

When a rival watches your only known channel, a larger, more convincing false signal elsewhere can pull their attention away, letting your real move slip through unnoticed.

Both Polybius and Livy report the escape as a clean success: Hannibal's army got through with minimal losses, and Fabius's failure to stop him, despite having the terrain advantage, badly damaged his political standing in Rome. The caveat: this account rests entirely on Polybius and Livy, writing decades to two centuries after the event, in a historiographic tradition where dramatic escape set-pieces were a recognized narrative convention and troop/animal numbers were routinely inflated.