Quote Originally Posted by CCPAirborne
No offense taken of course, and I'm all for precious Rome just like you, but yeah, Hannibal could've won. He just decided not to take the city of Rome itself because he thought he could just make the Romans settle for a treaty that acknowledged the Carthaginians were superior.
We don't know why he didn't attack Rome, but it may have been for a better reason than you attribute to him. His army wouldn't have been in top shape after Cannae, and as the following years were to prove, the Romans were still capable of creating more legions. Hannibal also lacked siege equipment, and IIRC Rome was too big to invest properly, so he may well have been incapable of taking it.