by Dexter Hoyos
gested earlier, most naval initiatives stemmed probably from Barcid kinsmen
or supporters at Carthage, where the main fleets remained based. Even
where he probably had originated an initiative—for instance sending a fleet
into Etruscan waters in 217, and the fleet that sailed to Tarentum in 211 to
prevent enemy ships from resupplying the citadel—he still had to rely on
others to carry it out. This was a bad handicap when the quality of Punic
naval commanders was unimpressive. Bomilcar, the most active of them, had
been energetic but largely unsuccessful and is not heard of after 211 anyway.
It may well have seemed attractive, even rational, to send fleets over to
Greece in hopes of encouraging Philip V. It may have seemed more sensible
too for Mago to head for a part of Italy where he was totally unexpected,
avoiding the perils of being intercepted or being confronted by Roman
forces as soon as he landed. That such initiatives could only indirectly affect
the real war-effort, while spreading around resources that would have better
been focussed on south Italy, was a fact that obviously failed to affect the
planning.
In other words the naval advice offered to Hannibal in these later years,
and any naval moves he himself devised, were second-rate—to term it mildly.
Opportunities were not taken, bold though risky efforts not even (it seems)
considered, and instead available resources were ineptly used. This ineptness,
compounded with his own caution on land, reduced his strategic rôle during
these years to a nullity.5
The energy and resourcefulness that had once typified him now showed
itself instead in the Romans: the consul Nero in 207, and more lastingly
P. Scipio the younger in Spain. Scipio, though frustrated in south Spain by
Hasdrubal son of Gisco in 207, reinvaded the following year and overthrew
the Carthaginians in a mighty battle at Ilipa near either Hispalis (modern
Seville) or more likely Castulo. He won by putting his legions on either
wing through an involved but skilful manoeuvre which outdid in subtlety
anything Hannibal had ever tried and which was too much for the son of
Gisco. It must have confirmed to Hannibal that the Romans had produced a
commander who could equal him. He surely reckoned it was only a matter of
time till they met.6
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Scipio’s efficient follow-up to his victory drove Hasdrubal over to North
Africa and Mago to the Balearic islands, though Mago did make some last-
ditch efforts to keep a foothold on the mainland. Once Gades had
surrendered, Carthaginian rule in Spain—created by Hamilcar Barca, consol-
idated by Hasdrubal his son-in-law and extended furthest by Hannibal—was
over. Apart from Hannibal’s cramped zone in Italy beside the Ionian sea,
Carthaginian territory now was limited to North Africa itself. The Romans’
next target was obvious.
II
It would be easy to blame the Barcids’ enemies at home for wrecking Hanni-
bal’s prospects, and their own country’s, through failing to send help to him
in Italy and showing greater devotion to the war-effort in Spain. Livy offers
the latter claim at just this stage and he and other ancient writers have Hanni-
bal complain in 203 about being denied resources and left in the
lurch—thanks to Hanno the Great, Livy has him add. Many moderns agree:
Hannibal was let down by the home authorities. The truth, though, looks
more complex.7
No doubt Hannibal’s and his supporters’ position at home suffered, prob-
ably badly, after the Metaurus. Eleven years after leading the Punic state into
war he was holed up in a corner of Italy, and the Spanish empire—the Bar-
cids’ greatest gift to their fellow-Carthaginians—was close to collapse.
Hasdrubal son of Gisco had become its prime defender and he, as suggested
earlier, was an independent leader in his own right though allied with the Bar-
cids: an alliance probably due to patriotism and expediency rather than any
personal or family closeness.
Yet this cannot mean that Hannibal’s and his supporters’ influence in
affairs collapsed. Livy’s and others’ claims that he lacked home support
simply continue the litany dating back to Fabius Pictor (and probably Fabius’
Carthaginian contacts) who blamed the entire war on the Barcids to exoner-
ate the rest of the aristocracy. Even if the home authorities had turned
hostile, there was no profit for them or their city in trying to make Hannibal’s
life miserable. Were his position to become untenable or he to be destroyed,
it would simply free the Romans to unleash their fury on North Africa. In any
case the historical record does not support the notion. Least of all did old
Hanno the Great and his friends benefit from Barcid misfortunes.
The Carthaginians in reality remained full of fight. When C. Laelius raided
North Africa in 205 they certainly suffered alarm and fear, but Livy then
attests them taking energetic and wide-ranging defensive measures—raising
troops, gathering munitions, readying the fleet. With Hasdrubal son of Gisco
back home by then and effectively in charge, this vigorously practical reaction
is explicable. Livy’s picture of the Carthaginans’ gloomy spirits, even if he
based it on comments in an informed source, is at best overdrawn and
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certainly is no pointer to anti-war feeling. They were to remain pugnacious
even amid disaster in 203, as their spirited reaction to Scipio’s destruction of
Hasdrubal’s and Syphax’s camps and armies would make clear; and so did
their dealings with Scipio later in 203, as we shall see, even though by then
Hasdrubal’s repeated defeats had eclipsed him politically.
Even after Zama in 202 a prominent senator urged them to fight on, and
when Hannibal unceremoniously shut him up the rest of the Mighty Ones,
far from approving, were so annoyed that the general had to apologize. When
peace was finally made in 201 a younger leader of the dogged Hanno the
Great’s anti-Barcid circle—yet another Hasdrubal, obscurely nicknamed ‘the
Kid’—assured the Roman Senate that even though he and Hanno had long
been urging peace on the Carthaginians, they had been ignored.8
Interestingly enough, after the Metaurus and Ilipa no one at Carthage
seems to have suggested that the time had come to make peace-overtures. In
255 when hard pressed by the invading Regulus, the Carthaginians had
offered to talk, and report or legend had it that some years later they sent the
same man, now their prisoner, to urge peace at Rome. Arguably it would now
be in their own best interests to see whether they could reach some sort of
compromise settlement—even if it meant sacrificing Spain. But had any
overture been made we should have heard of it, for Roman annalists would
hardly let such a sign of weakness slip by unmentioned.
Perhaps Hannibal, Hasdrubal and their countrymen felt that the Romans,
who had refused to negotiate after Cannae, would take nothing less than
unconditional surrender (an opinion almost certainly wrong, as
Scipio’s
terms in both 203 and 202 were to show). Perhaps they felt too that even now
the situation might change if only Hannibal held on. More of the Romans’
exhausted allies might withhold men and munitions, as several had from 209
on; the general might yet win a big victory in the south; in Spain, till 206, or
afterwards in Liguria, the other Punic commanders might pull off a lifesaving
success; Philip V might somehow master Greece and be able to lend help;
Numidia unified under Syphax could help make Africa unconquerable by
invaders and that in turn might prompt the enemy to offer terms.
Barcid pride and self-interest would contribute as well. Appian tells a story
set during the siege of Capua in 211 in which Hannibal refuses to relieve the
city because, he says, if the war were to end he would lose his generalship.
This looks like an invention or, if based on fact, like an ironic Hannibalic joke
put into the wrong context: it would better illustrate his position and his wor-
ries around 206. Returning home under a compromise, after all the
expectations of victory, would be not just humiliating but politically perilous.
It would certainly end his supreme command, and with it what was left of
Barcid primacy in the state.9
But refusing to consider offering terms was not just Hannibal’s personal
attitude. As mentioned above, his fellow-Carthaginians, senators and ordi-
nary citizens, were ready to fight on. The very fact that their homeland and
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city were now liable to be invaded no doubt strengthened their resolve—just
as the invasion of Italy in 218 had strengthened the Romans’. Politically the
danger may well have buttressed Hannibal’s own authority despite his set-
backs and strategic isolation. After all, as war-leader they had no ready
alternative: Hasdrubal son of Gisco, however formidable he had become in
domestic affairs, still had no aura of victory against the Romans, though he
would keep trying.
Thus the Carthaginians’ overall commitment to the war meant continuing
to support the Barcids in practice—and any others who also devoted them-
selves to it, the son of Gisco most obviously. By now Barcid political primacy
can have rested only on the qualified consent of other leading aristocrats,
notably the son of Gisco and his supporters, and so on a great deal of bar-
gaining, compromise and give-and-take; plus the fact (as it seems) that no one
wanted to give the primacy to Hanno the Great and his anti-war circle.
Whether much enthusiasm continued for Barcid political primacy may be
doubted. After 207 all the factors that had brought Hamilcar and his succes-
sors their mastery of the state had dwindled: charismatic leadership (with
Hasdrubal dead and Hannibal becalmed), continual victories, territorial
expansion and regular widely shared booty. All that the Carthaginians had left
was the darkening war, and memories.
The élite tribunal of One Hundred and Four, in particular, need not have
felt that it or the republic owed all that much any more to Hannibal and his
family and friends. There was no question of attacking him in the midst of
the war, or even of attacking him at all (it did not happen after the war
ended). But equally there was no need for sentiment. If he could yet save
something from the wreck of Punic fortunes, there would continue to be
room for him and his followers at the highest levels of public life. If he could
not, he and they need not expect to play a major rôle in Carthage’s future.
Many other aristocrats, no doubt including former friends and protégés of
the Barcids themselves, were ready to take on that rôle—especially members
of the Hundred and Four.
In other words, during these years the dominance of the ‘order of judges’,
as Livy terms them, was very likely emerging, or more accurately re-emerging
after decades of Barcid overshadowing.10
III
In 205 P. Scipio, barely 30 and now consul, took command of Roman forces
in Sicily with a commission to prepare the invasion of Africa. The opponents
of this project, led by the old and cautious Fabius the Delayer, demanded
total concentration on Hannibal first: ‘let there be peace in Italy before there
is war in Africa’, says Fabius in the speech Livy gives him. Not only would
invasion mean a new army outside Italy for the hard-hit Roman treasury to
maintain, but the thought of what Hannibal might yet do while their best
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general was overseas was worrying to many Romans (in Livy, Fabius frets that
he might even march on the city again). Even though the opponents of inva-
sion were outvoted, their worry was clearly shared by others, for Scipio was
not allowed to conscript troops but only to accept volunteers, as well as using
the forces already in Sicily—the survivors of Cannae and other disasters,
some of them already in their twelfth year of service. This gave him some
four legions, though he also had a fleet. Hannibal in south Italy was still
watched by as many as seven.
The sharp anxiety felt by so many Romans about Scipio’s project testifies
to the fear that Hannibal still caused. This even though he was doing almost
nothing in his region: in 206 he gave the consuls a fright in a gorge near Con-
sentia, then let them bring Lucania back to heel while he stayed quiet in
Bruttium. He spent some of his time composing the record of his military
career which, the year after, he set up as an inscription in both Punic and
Greek in the temple of Hera at Cape Lacinium (now Capo Colonna, the
name commemorating its ruins) near Croton. In the far north he had a
brother equally cautious or sluggish. Had he shown greater energy and a
spark of his old inventiveness, he could well have excited such fresh alarm at
Rome that Fabius’ side would have won the debate against Scipio’s. That was
surely now a major part of his mission in Italy—to keep Africa free of inva-
sion. Instead of trying to fulfil it, the general busied himself with his
memoirs, a discouraging sign.
During the year, though, he did come near to a confrontation with his new
rival. Locri went over to the enemy but one of its two citadels remained
Punic-occupied. The standoff drew both Hannibal southwards from his
cantonment and Scipio from Messana in Sicily. The Romans under Scipio
made a sortie as Hannibal’s army moved up to the assault—and Hannibal
withdrew, followed at night by his Locri garrison. It was a performance nei-
ther glorious—Scipio beat him to the city and kept his prize—nor
particularly skilful, but fateful. Scipio with a few thousand Roman troops at
Locri was surely outnumbered even if Hannibal came south with only part of
his army. Destroying him would have prevented Zama and so, even now, have
changed history.
No further opportunity offered itself. Instead an epidemic of some kind
struck the region, damaging both the Roman forces there and—more
severely—Hannibal’s, which Livy reports as also short of food. Livy avers
elsewhere that the general controlled t
oo little territory to guarantee enough
local produce for his men, but since he then seems to have had no food trou-
ble in 204 and 203 maybe the harvest was poor in 205. His shortage would
have been eased had a supply fleet from Carthage, 80 strong, made it to his
coast but—in yet another lacklustre Punic naval performance—this was
blown wildly off-course into Sardinian waters and taken by the Romans.11
In 204 Scipio sailed from Lilybaeum in Sicily to Africa, landing at Utica, 30
miles (50 kilometres) north of Carthage. Although he had only 40 warships
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to escort his transports, the Carthaginians’ fleet completely but predictably
failed to intercept him or fall on him as he disembarked; and although they
had known for a year that he planned to come, they had no proper forces in
hand to confront him. This hardly reflects well on Hasdrubal son of Gisco’s
leadership in Africa. Instead the city suffered a ferment of alarm and feverish
preparation—exactly as one year earlier when Laelius raided—while the
Roman army set about establishing itself on Carthaginian soil and was joined
by the exiled Masinissa. The first Punic efforts against it were left to small
cavalry forces with predictably disastrous results. Then by the time Has-
drubal and his son-in-law Syphax mobilized proper armies, it was winter
and—even though they had Scipio cooped up on a narrow peninsula, with
his fleet beached and communications overseas seasonally impossible—they
were content to set up their camps not far inland from his. Syphax, encour-
aged by Hasdrubal, even began negotiations with him about a compromise
end to the war.
Hannibal’s priorities amid all this are a puzzle. During the same year he
scrapped inconclusively in Bruttium with the Romans and lost still more
strongpoints, including Consentia and Clampetia—probably his last footholds
on the western side of Bruttium. The following year’s campaigning was yet
more inconclusive (Livy merely repeats some of the events of 204 without
noticing the doublets) until he was recalled home. All this while Punic Africa
was invaded by the enemy’s foremost general, who threatened Carthage with
direct attack and in 203 was to win one victory after another.