The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  He was not simply the peace-builder as later ages liked to paint him. He increased the regular army in Spain to 60,000 foot and 8000 horse, putting his brother-in-law Hannibal in 224 in charge of his cavalry forces where, we are told, the young man saw plenty of action. Other army officers would become famous, such as Hannibal’s brothers Hasdrubal and Mago, and the cavalry commander Maharbal. The territories under Barcid rule now covered roughly half the Iberian peninsula. The Romans were among those who noticed.

  They had paid Carthage limited attention, if any, after the Sardinia affair. A supposed fact-finding embassy to Hamilcar in 231 (mentioned only by the later historian Dio) is probably fiction and, even if genuine, nothing came of it. The Romans were more active both in continental Italy, where the dominant peoples were Gauls who had given them repeated trouble since around 390, and from 229 in Illyria and Dalmatia across the Adriatic, where they fought a serious war to impose a loose control. Then in 226–225 they faced the threat of a huge Gallic invasion from the north, causing them not only to mass powerful forces against it but also to send envoys to Spain. They persuaded Hasdrubal to promise that the Carthaginians would not campaign beyond the river Iber (Ebro) in north-eastern Spain.

  This agreement, not formally a treaty since it was signed off by him alone, came to play a role in arguments ancient and modern over why the Second Punic War broke out, with Roman writers claiming that it also protected Saguntum, a small but rich city on Spain’s east coast trading with Rome. This was a fiction, caused by the agreement’s plain implication that Rome had no objection to the Carthaginians campaigning – and of course subduing everything – up to the Ebro. This was a necessary fiction because Hannibal’s later capture of Saguntum was the shaky basis for Rome declaring war in 218. The Ebro-line may have seemed apt to the Romans because it would keep Carthaginian expansion well south of the Pyrenees, beyond which lay Gaul with its restless and excitable warrior peoples. Hasdrubal surely agreed to the line because it tacitly promised him freedom, in turn, from Roman interference to its south. The agreement once made, the Romans destroyed the invading Gauls and conquered their lands, then in 219 fought a second Illyrian war to confirm their trans-Adriatic hegemony. From 225 to late 220 they paid Spain and Carthage no further attention.

  THE COMING OF THE SECOND PUNIC WAR

  Hasdrubal’s assassination in 221 by an aggrieved Spanish warrior passed the generalship to his brother-in-law Hannibal, again by vote of both the army in Spain and the people at home. This was the third, and so far as we know the last, time that citizen troops had a say in who should command them. At twenty-six the new general had spent most of his life in the new province, had as a wife the daughter of a Spanish king – making the Barcid family kin to two sets of royal families, in Spain and Numidia – and was already a charismatic leader at the head of well-tested troops. Events moved swiftly from now on.

  Hannibal at once showed himself a pugnacious commander: campaigning in late 221 and then in 220 across central and north-western Spain as far as the river Duero, storming towns, and defeating a regional Spanish army along the Tagus, near Toletum, by letting them start to ford the river and then striking with elephants and cavalry followed by a general attack. Other communities, overawed, sent offers of submission, so that by autumn 220 he could claim to rule Spain as far as the Ebro (except Saguntum). In twelve months he had added nearly as much territory to the province as his predecessors had done in sixteen years, though his conquests were not so populous or developed.

  This drew Rome’s attention for the first time in half a decade. Two envoys arrived late in 220 to urge him not to cross the Ebro and, additionally, not to molest Saguntum. With Cisalpine Gaul (as north Italy was now called) in their hands, the Romans were clearly interested in stalling any further Carthaginian expansion northwards. It seems to have suited them, too, to demand that friendly but non-allied Saguntum should be left alone, perhaps to be a Spanish listening-post for them or – since it had been acting as one for years and been consistently ignored – more likely to symbolise to Hannibal and Carthage that the victor of the previous war was never going to acknowledge them as its full equal.

  In either case the move backfired, for Hannibal treated it as a threat. As Polybius implies in his account, he will have remembered how the Romans had used the mercenaries from Sardinia as the pretext for seizing it. He may also have had in mind their intervention over Messana. In spring 219 he put Saguntum under siege as a deliberate challenge to them. After a difficult siege of over seven months – Saguntum was a very different target from his previous captures – he took and sacked the city.

  The Romans had done nothing to help it. Why, remains a much-debated question. Essentially it seems that, just as in 264, they were at odds over whether or not to act until Hannibal’s success finally pushed them into acting. In March 218 envoys, this time travelling directly to Carthage, declared war when the adirim predictably refused to hand their general over.

  HANNIBAL INVADES ITALY

  The new war was as unnecessary as the previous one, for neither Carthage nor Rome needed conflict. Hannibal still had much of Spain to be busy in, not to mention vast areas of western North Africa. The Romans, on existing evidence, were more interested in the eastern Mediterranean. Trade and hospitable contacts between both states were as busy as ever. Yet – as in Europe in 1914 – these features were overbalanced by mutual suspicions, insecurities and ambitions.

  Carthage, with her new resources and territorial dominions, was once again at least as powerful as Rome. The Romans with their Italian allies could call on about three-quarters of a million men of military age, in a total population of three to four million. Carthage with her chora, allies and subjects from Lepcis Magna to Gades will have had a population roughly similar. In 218, according to Hannibal’s own figures (so they seem from Polybius’ account), she put into service some 122,000 troops, while Rome’s field armies totalled 71,000. Nor was any Roman general of the day – or the first decade of war – any match for Hannibal. Two drawbacks did exist: the fleets in both Spanish and African waters were puny compared with Rome’s 220 fully-equipped warships; and none of the other Carthaginian commanders in the entire war, even Hannibal’s brothers, proved better than the enemy’s.

  Hannibal had expected war before the Romans declared it. He readied a large army to invade Italy: for the alternative, to wait for them to attack him in Spain – and invade Libya too – was out of the question. The first years of his Italian expedition are by far the best known, marked by his crossing of the Alps and three great victories over one Roman army after another: at the river Trebia in December 218, Lake Trasimene in June the year after, and Cannae in Apulia in August 216 which put most of central and southern Italy at his mercy. The brilliance of these victories has made his reputation immortal – the only Carthaginian, indeed, with a name still instantly recognisable. Much of southern Italy changed sides to ally with him after 216, so that Carthage by 212 had Rome hemmed in on almost every side.

  Besides these new supporters, she had as allies the Numidian kings, the Gauls in northern Italy, Syracuse in Sicily, and the kingdom of Macedon across the Adriatic. She also controlled most of Spain. From late 216 to the middle of 207, Carthage was the greatest power in the western Mediterranean, facing a shrunken and tormented Rome.

  This supremacy was not easily won or free of severe flaws. When Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees in mid-218, leaving his brother Hasdrubal in charge of Spain, he had 59,000 troops – but, after he arrived in northern Italy, only 26,000. The usual explanations for this staggering loss are attacks by the Gauls along the route and Alpine snow and ice; but in reality the Gauls’ off-and-on attacks, all told, amounted to just seven days’ fighting, while snow and ice were met only in the final week, on the pass and the way down to Italy. Supplies en route were plentiful, even in the autumnal Alpine valleys. Nor did he leave garrisons in Gaul. The likeliest explanation is that numbers of the Libyan, Numidian and Spanish troops simply deserted �
�� both in southern Gaul, and later in north Italy before his roll-call. Luckily, the Gauls in north Italy had risen against their Roman conquerors and brought him valuable extra forces.

  The Romans’ response from 218 to 216 was to confront the invaders head-on, in the normal way of Mediterranean warfare. It was Hannibal’s way, too. Alexander the Great had shown how a series of devastating victories could bring down even the most imposing enemy; after his three, Hannibal looked to the shattered Romans to talk. Their response, unconventional by Mediterranean great-power standards but entirely in line with their own responses to Pyrrhus and to their First Punic War disasters, was to refuse talks of any kind. Meanwhile they changed their military strategy.

  Hannibal did have at least two opportunities to put crushing pressure on them, but avoided it. After Trasimene, the Romans and his own side expected him to march direct on Rome, only four days away for an army and fewer for cavalry. A fleet from Carthage sailed to the Etruscan coast to link up with him, only to find that he had swung east to the Adriatic. After Cannae a year later, with almost no Roman forces left in the field, he again chose not to advance on the city. Livy’s famous tale has his bold cavalry general Maharbal comment sourly that ‘you know how to win, Hannibal; you don’t know what to do with victory’. It was certainly impossible to take Rome by siege. Cutting it off from outside, though, was feasible especially when there were no organised Roman forces in the countryside to cause trouble, and could have been done as early as the aftermath of Trasimene. Like Mathos’ and Spendius’ mutiny at Tunes in 241, this could also – and perhaps decisively – have been the signal to all of Rome’s restive fellow-Italians to come over to the clearly dominant invader.

  HANNIBAL, MASTER OF SOUTHERN ITALY

  Hannibal preferred to operate in central and southern Italy and seek to win over their cities and cantons. He sent home non-Roman prisoners without ransom to spread word that he had come to free Rome’s oppressed allies. Nothing came of it until his crushing victory at Cannae: then a series of Italians, beginning with the Campanians of Capua – despite their shared citizenship with Rome – began to defect. Between late 216 and summer 212 the Capuans were joined by most of the Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians, several Apulian cities, and many of the southern Italian Greeks – especially Tarentum, won over by a bloodless coup in 212. Cannae also encouraged the king of Macedon, Philip V, to make an alliance in 215 with the conquering Carthaginian, for he too had resentments against Rome. A year later the ring around Rome tightened further when Syracuse – no longer ruled by old Hiero – joined Hannibal’s coalition largely through the efforts of a resourceful pair of brothers, Hippocrates and Epicydes, officers in Hannibal’s army and grandsons of Arcesilaus, the Syracusan exile at Carthage who had killed Agathocles’ elder son in 307.

  Carthaginian aims in the war must be inferred from events. No statement of aims survives apart from Livy reporting that Hannibal assured Roman prisoners after Cannae that ‘for him it was not war to the death: his fight was about honour and power’. Whatever later ages thought, physically destroying Rome was not a goal, nor even reducing it to a political nullity. The alliance with Macedon guaranteed that each state would help the other should another war occur with the Romans – taking for granted that there would still be a Rome capable of making war. In fact Hannibal had already sent one of his senior lieutenants, Carthalo, to sound out the Romans about talks (Carthalo had a family guest-friendship with the Roman leader Quintus Fabius Maximus, famous for his ‘delaying’ tactics against the invaders), though the senate at Rome refused him access.87

  Even if Rome continued as a state, common sense required Hannibal and Carthage to make sure that it would be as shackled as possible. The treaty with Philip V promised Macedon the districts in and around Illyria which the Romans controlled, while Carthage’s alliance with Syracuse in 214 notionally divided Sicily between the two signatories at the old Halycus line. In Italy Hannibal had to be tactful. Treaties with Capua and other Italian states guaranteed their freedom and self-government, and compulsory military support was not required from all (not from Capua, for instance). The Capuans, and maybe others, expected him to go home after the war – in the Capuans’ opinion, it was their turn to dominate Italy. But this was hardly an outcome that Hannibal could envisage, even if he had to pretend he did. Only a strong postwar Carthaginian presence, no doubt with him or another Barcid leader in charge, could prevent Italian chaos from erupting, enabling the surviving Roman state to regain its dominance or Philip V to be tempted to intervene.

  LIMITATIONS AND SETBACKS

  The unyielding determination of the Romans brought Carthage’s hopes down. Instead of seeking terms after their defeats as other states commonly did (Carthage included), they returned to Fabius’ tactics of avoiding battle, shadowing Hannibal’s movements, and attacking the rebel Italians. By 212 there were 25 legions in the various theatres of war from Italy to Spain, as well as powerful fleets at sea. Up to a third of Roman and loyal Italian manpower was under arms. Despite his victories and new allies, Hannibal was put essentially on the strategic defensive, with the Romans as early as 214 beginning to subdue places that had defected. This solid fightback was an important reason why he sought allies beyond Italy, to stretch Roman resources as widely as possible.

  Carthage’s own war-effort was comparable to Rome’s. Hannibal built up his forces with Samnite, Lucanian and Bruttian recruits to numbers big enough to enable him, for a couple of years, to detach a secondary army under his nephew Hanno for operations further south while he fought in Campania. Overseas, large armies operated against the Romans in Spain and Sicily, and the navy was revived with fleets in African and Spanish waters. It may well have been in these years, too, that the Barcid authorities governing Carthage constructed the famous artificial ports to accommodate her expanding fleet (Chapter VI). With the Roman navy regularly raiding her coasts, protected harbours for both naval and merchant shipping would be vital.

  The years from 212 to 210 began a slow turn in the fortunes of the war. Macedon and Syracuse proved useless as allies, with Macedon soon pushed out of Illyria and Syracuse captured in 212 by the redoubtable general Marcellus. Carthaginian relief forces failed both before the capture, when an army with its general perished (not for the first time) in Syracuse’s malarial marshlands, and after, when, as mentioned earlier, a new general’s arrogance towards his best officer Mottones caused the latter to join Marcellus and contribute to defeating his ex-friends. In Spain, Hannibal’s brothers and a colleague named Hasdrubal son of Gisco succeeded in shattering the Roman invaders in 211 (with able help from Numidian cavalry led by Naravas’ young kinsman Masinissa), yet did nothing to exploit their victory. Hasdrubal made no effort to lead forces to Italy, either, where he had been awaited since 215. Hannibal himself could neither prevent nor break the Roman siege of Capua which began in 212 – not even by launching his famous march on Rome in 211, for he could not pull the besiegers to pursue him and the city was firmly garrisoned. After Capua surrendered, he spent the next eight years in southern Italy: trying to defend his shrinking parcel of allies as one after another fell back into Roman hands, still winning or drawing occasional battles, but being constantly harassed – especially by Marcellus until the latter’s death in action in 208.

  The loss of Capua was followed by a thunderbolt in 209. Publius Cornelius Scipio, the twenty-five-year-old new Roman commander in Spain, captured New Carthage in a surprise attack by sea and land while all three Carthaginian generals were over-confidently quartered elsewhere. In 208 and 206 Scipio defeated them in two great battles, at Baecula and Ilipa, which ended Carthage’s thirty-year rule in the peninsula. Scipio returned to Rome to become consul in 205 and prepare to invade Africa.

  METAURUS, ZAMA AND PEACE

  Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal did leave Spain to reach northern Italy in 207, but brought no help to his increasingly beleaguered elder brother in the south. Hannibal was so circumscribed by Roman armies that the consul Gaius
Claudius Nero could lead an élite force northwards to join his colleague Marcus Livius Salinator facing Hasdrubal. They destroyed the new invasion at the river Metaurus, just inland from the Adriatic. Nero took Hasdrubal’s head back to deliver to his brother: Carthaginians might remember how in 309 the Syracusans had sent the head of Hamilcar son of Gisco over to Agathocles.

  Hannibal hung on in the very south of Italy for four more years. Now he probably hoped that, as long as he stayed, he would keep Africa safe from invasion; indeed old Fabius Maximus opposed Scipio’s project for this very reason. Moreover in 205 Italy was yet again invaded by a Barcid, Hannibal’s surviving brother Mago. Yet by landing in Liguria Mago gave himself no better chance than Hasdrubal of reaching their brother; eventually his invasion was crushed and he himself mortally wounded. By then Scipio was conquering Libya, and Hannibal was finally called home.

  The defence of North Africa was first led by the Barcids’ ally Hasdrubal son of Gisco and Syphax, king of Numidia. Originally king of the western Numidian Masaesyli, Syphax had united the country by driving out the would-be king of the Massyli – Masinissa – and had married Hasdrubal’s daughter, the cultured and beautiful Saponibaal (in Latin, Sophoniba, often misrendered ‘Sophonisba’). They failed to repel Scipio, who landed near Utica in 204 to be joined by Masinissa. After a lengthy period of insincere negotiations, he destroyed their camps and armies in a night attack early in 203, then defeated their new armies inland on the Great Plains near Bulla in the upper Bagradas valley. With Syphax captured, Masinissa was recognised by Scipio as king of all Numidia – though the new king was forced to renounce his new wife Sophoniba, whom he married after falling in love at first sight (or so the tale was told). At his command, she took poison, completing the romantically tragic story.