by Dexter Hoyos
just to be the opening stage—was counterproductive. The notion that he
could land in Italy or Cisalpina with 11,000 troops and tie the Romans in
knots was frankly nonsense. When he had arrived there in 218 with more
than twice as many, recruiting locally thousands more, he still had not man-
aged either to crush them in their homeland or prevent them occupying all of
Punic Spain and Africa save Carthage itself. Besides, by the mid-190s no part
of Italy was in any condition or mood to rise up one more time against the
Romans: yet for an expedition to make any real impact he would have needed
much more than Cisalpine allies. As for the 100 ships that he had also
demanded, Antiochus’ whole navy was not much bigger—when war started
in 192 he could take only that many with him to Greece.6
With Hannibal also proposing to stop en route at Carthage, the king might
be forgiven for wondering just where the exile’s priorities lay. Obviously, to
have the Punic republic on side would be a great advantage: but was it guar-
anteed that if Hannibal and his friends recovered power, even thanks to
Seleucid forces, they would back the king after all, rather than keep Carthage
neutral and prosperous? If a Hannibalic coup sparked dissension in the
state—as was quite likely—would the general still go on to Italy as promised
rather than stay in Africa to support his faction? If he stayed home, Anti-
ochus would have wasted troops, ships and money. When Hannibal in turn
began having conversations with the Roman envoys during 193, any such
doubts might well seem justified. He was able to pacify the royal mistrust: but
his later proposals in winter 192 left out any mention of Carthage.
In the war, the best the Great King could find for the greatest general of
the age to do was bizarre: a rôle as naval commodore in the eastern Mediter-
ranean which in summer 190 earned him and a small Seleucid fleet a
trouncing by the Rhodians off Side in Pamphylia. With the peace-terms in
189 calling for him to be surrendered to the Romans, he had to find a new
refuge.
Six more years of rootlessness followed. First a stay at Gortyn in Crete
where (the story goes) he deflected local greed for his portable wealth by
lodging jars brimming with gold and silver in the temple of Artemis, only for
the locals to find after his departure that the jars were lead-filled with just a
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topping of valuables—a properly Hannibalic ruse if true. Next to the court
of Artaxias king of Armenia, for whom reportedly he founded the city of
Artaxata; then in service with Prusias king of Bithynia, who like the now-dead
Antiochus III made use of him in war merely as a naval commander. At least
Hannibal won his sea-battle this time, in Prusias’ brief war with Eumenes of
Pergamum, again using a characteristic surprise touch—poisonous snakes in
clay pots hurled onto the enemy’s decks to sow panic. And according to the
Elder Pliny at least, he founded a city, Prusa, for his host.
But Prusias was an unreliable protector. When Roman envoys arrived in
Bithynia late in 183 or at the start of 182 to insist on peace between the two
kings, they added Hannibal’s handover to the agenda once more, though it
may not have been part of their original instructions, and with Prusias’ acqui-
escence took steps to prevent another flight as they closed in on his country
house. To escape the indignity of capture—he no doubt recalled Syphax the
Numidian’s confinement and early death—the elderly exile, now 64, took
poison. His remains were entombed nearby, the memorial one day to be
splendidly redone in white marble by another and more successful African
leader, the emperor Septimius Severus from Lepcis Magna.7
III
The rise and fall of the Barcids’ ascendancy at Carthage played itself out
almost exactly across Hannibal’s own lifetime. More narrowly, he and his
kinsmen had dominated the affairs of the Carthaginian republic from the
later stages of the Mercenaries’ War to the last years of the Second Punic and
then again, as argued earlier, during the middle 190s. It was a dominance
shorter than that of the Magonids in the sixth and fifth centuries, but much
more spectacular.
Punic politics, as argued earlier too, remained relatively competitive after
195 if still largely aristocratic, and the one-time Barcid group—or a similar
one—continued to play a part. But no Barcids were associated with it, and no
appeal was made to Barcid or Hannibalic memories even in Carthage’s death-
struggle with the old enemy 40 years later. If Hannibal and Imilce did have a
son he did not live, or else he lived a thoroughly obscure life. Ironically, last-
ing fame and even respect sprang from those same enemies and their Greek
friends: starting with Scipio’s admiration for Hannibal, Cato’s commendation
of Hamilcar and Polybius’ broad treatment of all three Barcid leaders.
The Barcid ascendancy had rescued the city and the republic in their black-
est hour, created a land empire to rival or outdo the Romans’, and raised
Carthaginian fortunes to their zenith by bringing much of Italy under Barcid
dominance and recovering most of Barcid Spain from its invaders. Then
Roman resilience and Barcid mistakes brought the overstretched structure
down. The day after peace was sworn in 201 found the republic in much the
same condition as the day after Hippou Acra and Utica had surrendered in
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237: all overseas territories lost, the homeland a smoking ruin, trade shattered
and the treasury drained. That brought one more Barcid service, Hannibal’s
sufeteship, which revitalized public life and restored public resources—and
with them public confidence—enough for the effects to endure practically to
the end of the city’s existence.
These feats were not due simply to three men’s genius. On all the evidence,
Carthaginian society had a vigour and resourcefulness matched by no con-
temporary republic save Rome, and by few if any of the monarchies. The
Carthaginians’ dogged resistance in the Mercenaries’ War, their ability to
supply settlers and other personnel for the conquests in Spain, the forces—
glorious and inglorious—they put into the field and sent to sea during the
Second Punic War, and their economic recovery after 201 and especially 196,
all testify to the mettle of the people the Barcids led.
A great deal was surely owed to the unrecorded and unsung kinsmen and
friends of Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal who in practice operated the
Barcid ascendancy at Carthage. The Barcid generalissimos were largely
absentee leaders—present in Africa only between 241 and 237, around 228
and after 203 respectively. It was their men at Carthage who kept senate and
people supportive, effectively handled the not always predictable tribunal of
One Hundred and Four, no doubt filled public offices from year to year, and
won over or neutralized potentially powerful rival interests like the group
around Hasdrubal son of Gisco and the seemingly indestruct
ible (if at times
minute) faction of Hanno the Great. Without them the generals could not
have maintained the dominance of affairs and policies that even Hannibal
enjoyed until the last two or three years of his war, and it must have been with
them—those who survived and had stayed loyal—that he staged his come-
back in 196.
The Barcid ascendancy was an unusual phenomenon for a Hellenistic-era
republic. The Romans did have a largely aristocratic system of politics but
one more open and chequered, with no Roman family or coterie of friends
able to dominate it for decades and largely exclude opponents from policy-
making. Similar politics prevailed (so far as we know) in republics like
Rhodes, Tarentum and Athens. In some others an open and fractious public
life suffered transformation into monarchy virtual or real—notably Syracuse
in the fourth and third centuries, where long periods of autocracy were
merely punctuated by spasms of democracy.
At Carthage, a virtual power-monopoly was maintained through popular
support and popular politics. It was not a virtual autocracy for, with every
Barcid leader overseas, his supremacy at home rested on collaborators, whose
support he could not automatically compel and whose own initiatives he
(sometimes at least) had to follow. Moreover opposition to the ascendancy
endured and found voices; nor is there any trace of prosecutions, show trials
or violence against anti-Barcid Carthaginians. When popular support and
popular political methods faded, the Barcid ascendancy was replaced by a
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power-oligopoly, but returned briefly in 196–195 and then left behind as a
legacy (even if one not wholly intended by Hannibal) an energetic political
life something like the Roman, which lasted till the city’s final crisis. It was an
extra irony that in time Roman politics would evolve in the opposite direc-
tion—from more and more fractious competitiveness into dictatorship and
then an all-encompassing monarchy. Julius Caesar’s career path would reverse
Hannibal’s.
IV
At times the Barcids, and Hannibal in particular, have been seen as standard-
bearers of Hellenistic civilization (or a form of it) pitted against the alien
advance of Rome; or, a little less epically, as protagonists of a multicultural
Mediterranean confronting the levelling impetus of Roman imperialism. That
any of them took such a view of themselves or found it taken by contem-
poraries is unlikely. Third-century Carthage had certainly adopted elements of
Hellenistic civilization—notably urbanistic, architectural and military—but
these no more transformed the Carthaginians into a Hellenized community
than much bigger borrowings transformed the Romans 100 years later.
Again, the Barcids were all notable city-founders, from Acra Leuce to Prusa,
but no citizen of an ancient Phoenician colony would view city-founding as a
Greek-inspired activity. And while Hannibal knew Greek thanks to Sosylus
and wrote some books in the language, he hardly needed lectures from his
friend on Cleomenes III of Sparta’s recent and divisive reforms to prompt his
own (far more limited) measures in 196.8
The overwhelming likelihood is that the Barcids saw themselves as the
defenders and promoters of their own state’s safety and power, and subordi-
nated everything else to this. Certainly too they saw themselves as the
Carthaginians best-qualified for defending the city’s safety and promoting its
power and prosperity—they would hardly have been useful leaders other-
wise.
This is not to claim that their policies were all well judged, still less always
the best. Was expansion into Spain a better long-term move than expanding
within North Africa? Numidia had potential, as Masinissa afterwards was to
show. Was focussing on a military establishment by land the most rational use
of resources? Carthage’s history, economy and location—including the
strategic vulnerability of Punic Africa—arguably made strong naval forces
just as vital (and the Barcids had the lessons of the previous Punic war to
remind them). Was confronting the Romans over Saguntum a sound reaction
to their embassy of 220, when restraint might have avoided war or, at least,
might have forced the other side into more overtly aggressive moves that
could have given the Carthaginians the moral high ground—and conceivably
some military and diplomatic advantage as well?
Not all of Hannibal’s military decisions look the best either. Could he have
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executed the march to Italy more efficiently so as to reach Cisalpine Gaul less
late in the year and with something like the 50,000-plus troops who had fol-
lowed him across the Pyrenees, or at any rate the 46,000 he had led over the
Rhône? It would have made an incalculable impact on the war. Was it an
effective long-term strategy not to follow Cannae with a march on Rome?
And indeed was it defensible to invade Italy at all with no alternative offen-
sive strategy to fall back on if the Romans failed to be cowed by two or three
defeats—any more than they had been cowed by both defeats and natural
disasters in the earlier war?
The lack of some alternative offensive strategy condemned his expedition
to operating stagnantly in southern Italy while hoping for some new event or
arrival to revitalise its efforts. Co-operation with Macedon and then Syracuse
flopped: instead of achieving a concentration of fresh forces against the
enemy, Hannibal managed to disperse not only Roman military efforts (a
strategic plus) but likewise Carthaginian. When a new opportunity did
occur—after the destruction of the brothers Scipio in Spain in 211, then in
207 on Hasdrubal’s advance across the Alps with a fresh army—the Punic
strategic response was pathetic.
Conceivably too Hannibal could have done more to shore up Barcid for-
tunes at Carthage, at any rate in the second half of the war when they began
to fail. While the war went well the Barcid ascendancy was self-sustaining, but
it was unwise to expect that to continue once a practical stalemate descended
on operations, and plain folly to expect it after Punic and Barcid fortunes
started to slide. From 218 if not earlier (we do not know when Hannibal’s
brothers went to Spain) until 201 the only Barcid brother to set foot in
Carthage was Mago in autumn and winter 216–215, and his purpose was mil-
itary. No doubt relatives as well as close family friends worked hard politically,
as mentioned earlier, but with the tide turning it would have been politic for
brother Hasdrubal, for instance, to pay a visit home to shore up allegiances,
inspect the workings of administration and organize fresh forces. In the slow
years after 211, in an off-campaign season, Hannibal himself might have
risked it. In either case it might have revitalized both the Barcid group at
home and the war-effort.9
Hannibal’s taking the home front for granted was to be expected, for in
contrast to his father and brother-in-law he had
virtually no experience of
Carthaginian political life before 201. Maintaining the Barcid ascendancy at
home was, in effect, done for him. His political business managers at
Carthage, unsung and unremembered, must have been both skilled and
devoted—and probably he took all that for granted. What they might have
achieved for Barcid interests, had the Barcid warriors during the war kept
closer personal contact with their home city, can only be guessed.
This enduring detachment from home politics was one more mistake—
and a serious one—of Hannibal’s leadership. Of course he might argue that
every general, even the greatest, makes mistakes. But few great generals have
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been at the same time the political leaders of their states: and of those few,
none detached himself so completely from the ongoing business of politics
and government at home. Since war and victories were his trademark, mili-
tary defeat meant the end of his and his family’s political mastery. Yet the
continuing vigour of Barcid political interests after 201 surely testifies not
just to the self-centred ineptitude of those who supplanted him, but also to
the strength of the relationships built up over 30 years of success and—not
least—to the charismatic appeal of Hannibal’s own personality.
V
The Romans found it hard to decide about him. He was both a fearsome
enemy, more fearsome than Pyrrhus or later on Mithridates of Pontus, and at
the same time a figure with qualities worth admiring—in his energy, resource-
fulness, leadership and devotion to his country practically a Roman manqué.
Scipio Africanus opposed intervening against him in 195 and their supposed
friendly meeting at Ephesus a couple of years later, even if invented, shows
that the Roman hero was not remembered as a Hannibal-hater. Cato, who
respected Hannibal’s father and disliked Scipio, possibly saw some good
points in Scipio’s opponent too even if he judged the attack on Saguntum a
breach of treaty.10
The non-Roman Polybius not only sought to be objective about the Bar-
cids (and saw virtues in all of them) but even registers the opinion that
Hannibal was justified to fight in 218. Of course he states this obliquely—his
work was aimed at Roman as well as Greek readers—and he later qualifies it