Rome

  The Roman invasion of Africa had been destroyed. But the agony was not yet over. The fleet, which had returned to Sicily for the winter, sailed back to Africa to pick up the survivors. It saw off the heavily outnumbered Carthaginian home fleet and completed the evacuation, but on the way home was struck by a violent storm off the coast of Sicily and lost all but 80 of its 350 ships.

  The struggle resumed its course as an exhausting war of attrition centred on Sicily. The Romans built a new fleet of 300 quinqueremes and captured Palermo in 254 BC. The Carthaginians landed a new army – including no less than 140 elephants – but suffered defeat when they attempted to retake the city in 251 BC. The Romans put Lilybaeum under siege in 250 BC, but their attempted blockade was broken and their naval power obliterated in a double disaster the following year, as one fleet was outmanoeuvred and destroyed in battle, and a second driven on to the coast by a sudden gale and smashed to pieces. Both sides had repeatedly raised, equipped and fielded new armies of 50,000 men and new fleets of 300 quinqueremes. Both had suffered massive losses of men and matériel. Both were groaning under the strain: Carthage faced mutiny in her Sicilian garrisons and revolt by her African subjects, the Romans growing resistance to the annual levy from her Italian allies. Yet the war was no nearer a conclusion: it remained a stalemate of elephant and whale – the Romans lacked a large enough fleet to blockade the western ports, the Carthaginians a field army with which to attempt reconquest of the island.

  Carthage sent out a new commander in 247 BC. Hamilcar Barca was a maverick aristocrat – unconventional, populist in political orientation, a firm advocate of imperial expansion. He crushed a mutiny in the Carthaginian army as soon as he arrived, and then, with his albeit modest forces, went on to the offensive, raiding the Italian coast, encouraging Roman allies to desert, and establishing a strong, forward, mountain-top position near Palermo from which to wage guerrilla war. But while Rome continued to send large armies to Sicily, Carthage refused to send reinforcements to Hamilcar, and the Carthaginian’s offensive power gradually declined; soon, the coastal raids were suspended, and the army was pulled back westwards and became inert.

  The Romans, meantime, were equipping themselves for another all-out strike. In 242 BC a new fleet of 200 quinqueremes and 700 transports sailed to Lilybaeum and established a blockade. The following year, to save the city, the Carthaginians dispatched a new fleet of their own, comparable in size with the Romans’, but, for once, less experienced and skilful. Roles were reversed: Roman sea-salts who had spent a year on blockade confronted raw Carthaginian crews just out of port. At the Battle of the Aegates Islands the Romans sank 50 enemy ships and captured 70 more. With the Roman blockade secure for at least another year, the Carthaginian garrisons at Lilybaeum and elsewhere were doomed. The home government authorized Hamilcar to secure whatever peace terms he could.

  The terms imposed by Rome were heavy: all Sicily and the islands around it were to be abandoned; Hiero and the Syracusans were to be left alone; an indemnity of 3,200 talents was to be paid in ten annual instalments; no Italian or Sicilian mercenaries were henceforward to be recruited; no Carthaginian ships were to enter Italian or Sicilian waters; and all Roman POWs were to be returned without ransom. Nor was this all. When the Carthaginian government, financially crippled by war expenditures and the indemnity, refused to pay arrears of wages to its returning mercenaries, they mutinied, marched on the capital, and raised the Libyan subject population in revolt. The result was a bitterly fought, three-year war (240–237 BC). The Romans used the opportunity to grab more territory – Sardinia and Corsica – and, when challenged, responded first by threatening a war they knew the Carthaginians incapable of fighting, and then, when their victim backed down, demanding another 1,200-talent indemnity not to attack anyway.

  The Phoenician cities in the western Mediterranean had existed for 500 years, surviving numerous great wars with the Greeks. Yet within 25 years of Carthage’s first military clash with Rome, the settlements on Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica had been liquidated, and the mother-city was paying out vast sums each year to fill the coffers of her victorious enemy. The First Punic War was the most shattering defeat in Carthaginian history. Politically traumatized, the Carthaginian ruling class split into opposing factions of doves and hawks. The doves were led by Hanno and supported mainly by the landowning aristocracy: they favoured peaceful co-existence with Rome, defence of the African empire, and an avoidance of costly and potentially disastrous foreign wars. They assumed – almost certainly wrongly – that they would be safe at home; that Rome would never come for them there. For the merchant aristocracy, however, there was not even temporary respite in prospect. Much of their trade was already crippled, and it took little imagination to picture the consequences for what remained if Roman expansion went unchecked. The hawks who represented them favoured a ship-building programme, overseas expansion, militant hostility to Romans, Italians and Greeks on all fronts, and preparations for a war of revanche to recover what had been lost. Their leader was the veteran general Hamilcar Barca, the former commander in Sicily. The Barca faction quickly established its political ascendancy. And Hamilcar already had a son who could be expected to succeed him as leader of the faction: his name was Hannibal.

  Enemy at the gates: the Second Punic War, 218–202 BC

  Aggression and arrogance characterized Roman imperialism between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, a combination that frequently caused it to over-reach itself, straining its military power to the point where it was broken in defeat. The Greeks, of course, had words for this: hubris, meaning gross, violent and abusive behaviour born of overweening pride; and nemesis, the righteous indignation and retribution which hubris provoked. It was Rome’s bullying of its punch-drunk enemy during and after the First Punic War that inspired a new spirit and resolve in Carthage. And it was a new offensive in the north, against the Gauls of the Po Valley, that was to provide Carthage with powerful local allies when they launched a war of revanche.

  Romans and Gauls had clashed violently in the Third Samnite War, and in its aftermath the territory of the Senones tribe, the so-called ager Gallicus, had been annexed. Fifty years later, with the passage of a new land law in 232 BC, Latin settlers began arriving in numbers, displacing local Gauls, who presumably escaped northwards as refugees to foster a sense of injustice and danger among their compatriots of the Po Valley. Who would be next?

  In 225 BC, a great coalition of the Cisalpine tribes (those ‘on our side of the Alps’), supported by contingents from Transalpine Gaul (those ‘across the Alps’), mobilized an army of 70,000 warriors and invaded Roman Italy. The Romans, able to draw on the manpower and logistical resources of the whole Italian peninsula, raised 130,000 men against them. Though the Gauls promptly retreated across the Apennine passes into Etruria, the Romans eventually succeeded in manoeuvring them into a pitched battle. Undeterred by the odds, despite facing attack on two sides, the Gauls deployed with confidence. The sight of their great host was, according to Polybius, ‘awe-inspiring’. The Romans, though encouraged by their tactical advantage, were ‘at the same time dismayed by the splendid array of the Celtic host and the ear-splitting din which they created. There were countless horns and trumpets being blown simultaneously in their ranks, and as the whole army was also shouting its war-cries, there arose such a babel of sound that it seemed to come not only from the trumpets and the soldiers but from the whole of the surrounding countryside at once. Besides this, the aspect and the movements of the naked warriors in the front ranks made a terrifying spectacle. They were all men of splendid physique and in the prime of life, and those in the leading companies were richly adorned with gold necklaces and bracelets.’(10) But the Battle of Telamon was a massacre. Though the Gallic shield-wall held for a time against attacks front and rear, it was broken by a furious Roman cavalry charge into its flanks. Polybius records that some 40,000 Gauls were killed and at least 10,000 captured. After this victory, the Romans conquered Cisalpine Gaul in a seri
es of campaigns between 225 and 220 BC, consolidating their triumph by founding two new colonies on the middle Po at Cremona and Placentia.

  Altogether, between the end of the Third Samnite War in 290 BC and the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 BC, the territory of the Roman Empire roughly doubled, with the addition of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Cisalpine Gaul. Some territories were integrated under traditional legal arrangements. Loyalists – like the rulers of Syracuse and Messina – were rewarded with nominal independence and ranked as ‘allies’ (socii). Rebels sometimes lost their land to Latin and Roman settlers brought in to form new ‘colonies’ (coloniae) – like Cremona and Placentia on the Po. But most new territory was organized into ‘provinces’ (provinciae), each governed by a Roman magistrate (at this time a praetor, the number of whom elected each year gradually increased in line with the growth of Empire), and most local inhabitants were reclassified as members of ‘foreign communities’ (civitates peregrinae): they were, in other words, mere subjects of the Roman state, obliged to pay tribute but denied political rights. Integration was problematic: the rapid expansion of the empire, the lack of rights for most new inhabitants, and the greed of the empire-builders sometimes combined to produce explosive revolts. Roman officials were often corrupt. Private profiteers had the contracts to collect taxes. Settlers grabbed the land of local peasants. Native chiefs were befuddled by loan sharks and ran up hopeless debts. Those who protested were beaten up by soldiers. As the reality of conquest and ‘foreign’ status sank in, a sullen anger often bubbled beneath surface calm, an anger that could flash into revolt if organized. Cisalpine Gaul was such a place, when, at the end of 218 BC, a Carthaginian army burst over the Alpine passes and entered the Po plain.

  This army had marched from Spain, where the Barca faction had been busy building a new empire since 237 BC. Led first by the great Hamilcar, then by his son-in-law and former first lieutenant, Hasdrubal, the Carthaginians had won control of much of the Iberian peninsula, sometimes by military conquest, sometimes by diplomacy and alliances with the Spanish chieftains. The peninsula was a patchwork of peoples and tribes with an Iron Age culture, each group centred on a hill-fort girded by defensive walls of dry-stone masonry and mud-brick. The ancients described the inhabitants as ‘Celtiberians’, a fusion of native Iberians and incoming Celts from the north, and there is much archaeological and place-name evidence to support the idea of a hybrid culture spreading across Spain from the Pyrenees. Tribes near the east and south coasts were also recipients of limited influence from the Greek and Phoenician trading cities established there: imported wine carriers and ceramic table-services turn up at some of the larger hill-forts. The Celtiberians had a strong military tradition fostered by endemic tribal warfare and an impressive array of iron weapons. Their heavy infantry fought mainly as swordsmen, using either the curved falcata or the straight-sided gladius, both cut-and-thrust weapons designed for slashing and stabbing. They wore little or no armour, but carried large oval body-shields, and may also have been equipped with javelins. Certainly there were Spanish light infantry so armed, their javelins including a barbed variety made entirely of iron, and a short pilum, which had a narrow head and a long thin metal shaft designed to penetrate shields and armour. The Spanish way of war – as first encountered in the Second Punic War – was to have a profound impact on the Roman army. The pilum and the gladius (the latter known to Roman soldiers as ‘the Spanish sword’) were both adopted by the legions.

  Spain offered much to the Carthaginians: a barrier against further Roman expansion; mines that produced abundant copper and silver for paying mercenaries; a rich military recruiting-ground; and new markets for Carthaginian merchants. The conquests of the 230s and 220s, moreover, were no drain on the Carthaginian state: they were made to pay for themselves, and the new territories developed into a semi-independent Barca fiefdom, complete with its own capital city at New Carthage. Hamilcar probably envisaged Spain as the launch-pad for a war of revanche against Rome from the outset. Livy recounts an old story that implies as much: ‘Hamilcar, after the campaign in Africa, was about to carry his troops over to Spain, when Hannibal, then about nine years old, begged, with all the childish arts he could muster, to be allowed to accompany him; whereupon Hamilcar, who was preparing to offer sacrifice for a successful outcome, led the boy to the altar and made him solemnly swear, with his hand upon the sacred victim, that as soon as he was old enough he would be the enemy of the Roman people.’ Livy then explains that Hamilcar’s ultimate purpose in the conquest of Spain was ‘an enterprise of far greater moment’(11) that only his death in 229 BC prevented him seeing through.

  But Roman writers have a reason to paint Carthage the aggressor. We cannot be sure of Hamilcar’s intentions. We do know that, while Carthage was fighting the Celtiberian tribes and Rome the Cisalpine Gauls, the two states’ relations were governed by an agreement that the River Ebro in north-east Spain should be the boundary of their respective spheres of influence. We know also that, contrary to this agreement, the Romans had an alliance with the city of Saguntum, which lay on the east coast far to the south of the Ebro line – deep within the Carthaginian sphere. Much has been written – apparently without irony – about the ‘defensive’ character of Roman imperialism, not least in relation to the dispute over Saguntum at the outbreak of the Second Punic War. Yet the facts are plain enough: Rome had no existing interests south of the Ebro when the alliance with Saguntum was made, and therefore the only possible interpretation of the alliance is that she was introducing a Trojan Horse into a Carthaginian preserve. It was as if the Carthaginians had formed an alliance with the Cisalpine Gauls. Though the implications of the Saguntine alliance have remained unclear to some modern scholars, they were not so to the Carthaginians at the time: Rome had imperial ambitions in Spain. As William Harris, author of the most thorough deconstruction of the theory of ‘defensive imperialism’, puts it: ‘A full explanation [of Rome’s conduct towards Carthage between the wars] must include the usual advantages which were expected from successful warfare and the aggressiveness with which these from time to time informed Roman conduct. Spain in particular was probably regarded by Roman senators as a rich prize that could be won in a war against Carthage. Hopes of glory, power and wealth, together with the habit of armed reaction to foreign opponents, mingled with what were seen as the needs of defence.’(12)

  In 220 BC the alliance between Rome and Saguntum was activated. The Romans intervened in a dispute in the city to shore up the authority of the pro-Roman elements. Soon afterwards a Roman embassy appeared at New Carthage demanding a guarantee of Saguntine independence. The new Carthaginian commander in Spain sent home for advice on dealing with the crisis. He promptly received the authority he needed: the Carthaginian army moved against Saguntum and captured it in 219 BC after an eight-month siege.

  The Romans had sent no military assistance to Saguntum. To have done so would have been a logistically hazardous enterprise. But this was of no great concern to them. Saguntum did not matter for itself, but as a casus belli. When they received news of the fall of the city, they sent a delegation to Carthage to demand the surrender of the Carthaginian commander in Spain and the restoration of Saguntine independence. Livy describes a dramatic scene on the floor of the house once the Carthaginian council of elders had rejected the Roman demands. ‘Fabius [leader of the Roman delegation], in answer, laid his hand on the fold of his toga, where he had gathered it to his breast, and, “Here,” he said, “we bring you peace and war. Take which you will.” Scarcely had he spoken, when the answer no less proudly rang out, “Whichever you please – we do not care.” Fabius let the gathered folds fall, and cried, “We give you war.” The Carthaginian senators replied, as one man, “We accept it; and in the same spirit we will fight it to the end.”’(13)

  The Barca faction had got the war they may long have hoped and planned for, but it was the Romans who started the Second Punic War – by making an alliance with Saguntum, by intervening
directly in its affairs, and by issuing an ultimatum when it was suppressed: all in violation of the Ebro agreement. But this time they had truly overreached themselves, grossly underestimating the strength of the Carthaginian empire in Spain, the size and professionalism of the Carthaginian army assembled there, and, above all, the brilliance of the young Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, whom the soldiers had acclaimed commander-in-chief after the assassination of his predecessor in 221 BC.

  Aggressive intent and arrogant overconfidence – hubris – were implicit, too, in Rome’s military strategy at the start of the war. She planned to send one consular army to Spain, the other to Africa. Both were moving to their destinations when news reached their respective commanders that Hannibal had imposed his own grand strategy on the war. Sending 15,000 men to guard Africa, he crossed the Ebro with his main force and headed north. Leaving 11,000 men to hold north-eastern Spain, he crossed the Pyrenees and headed into Gaul with an army of 50,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry and 37 elephants. His final destination was the Po Valley, and his march there is one of the epics of military history. Gallic tribes contested his crossing of the Rhône and forced him into an unwanted battle. The Romans, diverted from their intended assault on Spain, landed at the mouth of the Rhône, defeated his cavalry, and drove inland looking for a fight; but the Carthaginian veered away northwards. Another Gallic tribe ambushed his army in a narrow Alpine pass; a desperately dangerous struggle ensued before the enemy was routed. Finally, snow and rockfalls turned the passage of the Alps into a nightmare trek in which thousands perished. When his army descended to the western edge of the Po Valley, it had shrivelled to less than half its original size. Those remaining were exhausted and isolated, adrift in hostile territory, threatened by winter cold, lack of supplies, and the imminent onset of powerful Roman armies coming by forced marches to the battle zone. A bold strategic move had left the Carthaginian cause hanging by a thread.