The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  A DECADE LATER, Roman soldiers pushed off from the shores of the Italian peninsula, headed for Sicily. This was a historical moment, Polybius tells us. It was “the first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy,” and Sicily was “the first country beyond the shores of Italy on which they set foot.”4 Rome had entered into the next phase of its history; the Romans were getting ready to embark on their first overseas conquest.204

  Like most fledgling empire-builders, the Romans had an excuse for this invasion. Sicily was still divided between the control of Syracuse and Carthage, and the Sicilian harbor city of Messina, originally a Greek colony, had fallen under Syracuse’s power. But a band of renegade Italian mercenaries from Campania had sailed to Sicily and taken control of the city. The Messinians sent to both Carthage and Rome, asking for help in driving out the invaders.

  Since Rome and Carthage were technically at peace, this was not all that unreasonable. But it lit the match under a long-building bonfire. The Carthaginians got there first and discovered that the tyrant of Syracuse, Hiero II (Agathocles had died some twenty years earlier), was already on the job; he had not appreciated Messina’s turning to other powers for help, when the city was supposed to be his. Rather than start a three-way war, the Carthaginians joined with Hiero II and occupied Messina, driving out the previous invaders.

  The Romans, arriving second, refused to give up the project of besieging Messina and simply attacked the Carthaginian occupying forces instead. Afterwards, the Roman invaders spread out across the island, claiming Carthaginian-controlled land and laying siege to Syracuse as well.5

  The Carthaginians reacted by crucifying (literally) the commander who had been in charge of the Messina garrison and settling in for a fight. They could see quite clearly that this overseas venture was Rome’s first tentative prod at the land outside Italy’s borders. For the next twenty-three years, the two powers would slog on through the First Punic War (264–241).

  “Because they saw that the war was dragging on,” Polybius writes, “[the Romans] first applied themselves to building ships…. They faced great difficulties because their shipwrights were completely inexperienced.”6 This was the second first of the First Punic War. To get over to Sicily, the Roman consuls had borrowed ships from Rome’s allies and subject cities (a force called the socii navales).7 But it soon became clear that Rome could not simply rely on the navies of other cities. When a Carthaginian warship ran aground on Roman shores, the shipbuilders took it apart and modelled their own ships on it; meanwhile, crews were practicing rowing on dry land. And with the ships finished, the new Roman fleet put to sea and was promptly captured by a Carthaginian commander.8

  The Romans rebuilt and refitted and set to sea again. Two years later, Polybius says, the two navies were “equally matched.” The Romans gleaned the best part of their strategy, their law, their government, and even their mythology from other cultures, but they were fast learners.

  By 247, after seventeen years of almost constant fighting, the Romans had gained a little bit of advantage. Roman troops had landed in North Africa and established camps, although to attack Carthage itself was far beyond their capabilities; and Sicily was almost entirely in Roman hands. The leaders of Carthage removed their commanding general for incompetence and gave control of the army to a new officer, a man in his mid-twenties named Hamilcar Barca.

  Hamilcar had under his command a mixed force of Carthaginians and mercenaries, about ten thousand in all, as well as seventy elephants. He captured himself a base in Sicily from which he harassed the Italian coast, and won himself several hard-fought victories; enough so that he was able to rescue the Carthaginians “from the state of absolute despair into which they had fallen.”9

  But by 242, the war—by now in its twenty-second year—had driven both nations to a state of exasperation. “They were worn out with the strain of an unbroken succession of hard-fought campaigns,” Polybius says, “their resources…drained by taxes and military expenses which continued year after year.”10 Hamilcar’s band of mercenaries and Carthaginians on Sicily had been fighting for over three years without losing—but without taking the island either. The Romans were unable to make any headway against the Carthaginian land forces, but the Roman navy made it harder and harder for Carthaginian supply ships to reach Hamilcar’s soldiers on Sicily.

  The Carthaginians were the first to call a halt. In 241, the home city sent Hamilcar a message: they did not want to abandon him, but it was now impossible to continue sending food and weapons. He had the power to handle the situation however he pleased. This powerless authority left Hamilcar with no option but surrender. He came down with his troops from their base, halfway up Mount Eryx, in “grief and rage,”11 and under protest submitted to a treaty which required Carthage to give up all of Sicily, to release all prisoners, and to pay a sizable fine over the next ten years.12

  The war was over. The Senate ordered the doors to the Temple of Janus shut, to symbolize peace everywhere in the lands that belonged to Rome. Sicily was now one of those lands; it had become Rome’s first foreign province.

  This peace had in it the seeds of a more terrible conflict.

  BACK TO THE EAST, other battles dragged on. Ptolemy II of Egypt (now married to his sister) and Antiochus I (son of Seleucus) bickered about the Syrian border between their territories, and handed their quarrels on to their sons, but apart from this, the succession passed to the next generation without much change. Ptolemy II died in 246 and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy III; Antiochus I (following old Persian tradition) put his oldest son to death for treachery and left his throne to his second son, Antiochus II, instead.205 Over in Macedonia, Antigonus II, grandson of the One-Eyed, died in his eighties after almost fifty years as king and was followed by his own son as well.

  Down in Egypt, Ptolemy III had a prosperous twenty-two-year rule. Antiochus II did not fare nearly as well. Six years after he took over the Seleucid empire, he lost the satrapy of Bactria; it rebelled, under its Greek governor Diodotus, and declared itself to be an independent kingdom with Diodotus as king. Bactria was distant from any of Antiochus II’s capital cities, over rough country, and the king was unable to reconquer it. Not long afterwards, a native Parthian nobleman named Arsaces declared his own homeland of Parthia free as well. Antiochus II was preoccupied with his western border; he was fighting a war with Egypt over control of those old Western Semitic lands, including the old Phoenician, Israelite, and Judean territories, and he could not hold onto two borders of his huge empire at the same time.206

  He finally managed to make a temporary peace with Ptolemy III, and the two kings sealed the bargain with a royal marriage; Ptolemy III’s daughter went north and married Antiochus II as his second wife. The bargain didn’t get Parthia and Bactria back, though, and Antiochus II’s indignant first wife poisoned him, so the peace was a failure all around.

  He was succeeded by his son (by his first wife) Seleucus II, who failed to retake the two rebellious satrapies and then died from falling off his horse. Seleucus II’s oldest son only managed to rule for three years before his own commanders assassinated him; the throne then went to the younger son, Antiochus III.

  He was only fifteen when he became king of the Seleucids in 223. With a boy on the throne, both Media and the old Persian heartland joined Bactria and Parthia in rebellion. But Antiochus III was made of stronger stuff than the three kings before him. He went on campaign and ticked off conquests one by one: the edges of his domain in Asia Minor which had started to flake away; Media and Persia, both forced to surrender to Antiochus when he personally led his army against them at the age of eighteen; eventually, Bactria and Parthia as well. These last two territories he did not try to reabsorb. He made a peace with both the Bactrian and the Parthian kings, which secured his eastern border and allowed him to pay a little more attention to the west.207

  This was a good plan, as Egypt’s hold on its own border was loosening. In 222, Ptolemy III had been succeeded by his s
on Ptolemy IV, who was universally disliked by all of his biographers. “He was a loose, voluptuous, and effeminate prince,” Plutarch remarks, “…besotted with his women and his wine.”13 “He conducted his reign as if it were a perpetual festival,” Polybius says with disapproval, “neglected the business of state, made himself difficult to approach, and treated with contempt or indifference those who handled his country’s interests abroad.”14 As soon as his father died, he poisoned his mother so that she wouldn’t plot against him, and followed this up by having his younger brother Magus scalded to death, since Magus was alarmingly popular with the army.15

  Ptolemy IV’s affairs were mostly run by his mistress, her brother Agathocles (“that pimp,” Plutarch calls him), and one of his advisors, a Greek named Sosibius who seems to have made the decisions for him while he gave his attention to “senseless and continuous drinking.”16 Ptolemy IV died in 204 (probably of liver failure), leaving his throne to his five-year-old son Ptolemy V. Sosibius and “that pimp” apparently then forged documents making them regents for the child.

  Sosibius died months later, leaving Agathocles, his sister, and their mother at the top of the Egyptian power heap. Not for long; the trio had made themselves so unpopular that a mob, led by the army, stormed the palace, dragged them out into the street, stripped them naked, and tore them to pieces in a frenzy: “Some [of the mob] began to tear them with their teeth,” Polybius says, “others to stab them, others to gouge out their eyes. As soon as any of them fell, the body was torn limb from limb until they had dismembered them all, for the savagery of the Egyptians is truly appalling when their passions have been roused.”17

  Young Ptolemy V was enthroned in Memphis with a proper Egyptian council of advisors, but when he was twelve, Antiochus III marched against the northern Egyptian border. Josephus records that Antiochus, whom he calls king “of all Asia,” “seized on Judea.”18 The invasion ended in 198 at the Battle of Panium, when the Seleucid and Egyptian armies clashed near the head of the Jordan river. When the fighting was over, Egypt had lost hold of its Western Semitic territories for the last time. It would never again reach into those northern lands. Ptolemy IV’s reign is described by almost every ancient historian as the end of Egypt’s greatness. The ancient country’s renaissance under its Greek rulers was over.

  FARTHER WEST, Hamilcar Barca was still smarting under the Roman-imposed terms of peace. Carthage’s greatness had been blocked; the Carthaginians had lost the Mediterranean islands which had formed their empire, and the Romans were planted firmly on them instead.

  Hamilcar decided to make up for the loss by moving the Carthaginian empire a little farther west. He would take a force of soldiers and settlers to Iberia—modern Spain—and plant another Carthaginian colony to replace the losses at Sicily. This Iberian colony would be a new center of Carthaginian might—and it would also serve as an excellent base from which to launch retaliatory strikes against Rome. His humiliation at Sicily had turned into a loathing which he did his best to pass on to his young son Hannibal, as Polybius records:

  At the time when his father was about to set off with his army on his expedition to Spain, Hannibal, who was then about nine years old, was standing by the altar where his father was sacrificing…. Then [Hamilcar] called Hannibal to him and asked him affectionately whether he wished to accompany the expedition. Hannibal was overjoyed to accept and, like a boy, begged to be allowed to go. His father then took him by the hand, led him up to the altar and commanded him to lay his hand upon the [animal] victim and swear that he would never become a friend to the Romans.19

  The oath of eternal hatred sworn, Hamilcar, with son and settlers, set sail.

  The Carthaginian expedition reached the Iberian peninsula in 236 and set about conquering itself a new little kingdom. From his center of operations, Gadir (modern Cadiz), Hamilcar succeeded in setting up his new colony. It was here that Hannibal grew up, watching his father wheedle and browbeat the surrounding peoples into submission: “[Hamilcar] spent nearly nine years in the country,” Polybius tells us, “during which time he brought many tribes under Carthaginian sway, some by force of arms and some by diplomacy.”20 He also sent spies across the Alps into the north of the Italian peninsula, to scout out a possible invasion route.21 Hannibal grew to adulthood without ever setting foot in his home city of Carthage.

  Meanwhile, the Romans sailed for the first time to Greece, where they had been invited to protect the island of Corcyra from the double threat of invasion by other hostile Greeks and the ongoing attacks of the northern Gauls. When the intervention was over, a Roman garrison remained, theoretically as a peacekeeping force; Rome was not yet ready to attack its Greek neighbors.

  In that same year, 229, Hamilcar Barca died in battle while besieging a Celtic stronghold. Hannibal, now eighteen, was not considered quite old enough to take command. The governance of the Iberian colony went instead to his older brother-in-law, who does not seem to have shared the family loathing for Rome; he spent the next eight years governing the Iberian colony (and founding a city called, grandly, New Carthage) and ignoring the Romans to his east. Perhaps he might have built a new and lasting kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, but one of his slaves killed him in 221, and leadership of the Spanish forces fell to the twenty-six-year-old Hannibal.

  Hannibal turned his back on New Carthage and immediately began to prepare for an overland invasion of Roman territory. He started to fight his way along the coast in order to clear a safe passage towards the Alps. When he drew near to Massalia, the city (which had been on good terms with Rome ever since helping the Romans buy off those invading Gauls) appealed to Rome for help.

  The Romans sent a message to Carthage, warning that if Hannibal progressed past the town of Saguntum, they would consider this an act of war. Hannibal promptly besieged and sacked the town, upon which Roman ambassadors travelled to Carthage itself to present the final ultimatum to the Carthaginian senate: Surrender Hannibal, or face a second Punic War.22 The Carthaginians objected that Saguntum, which was a Celtic settlement, wasn’t an ally of Rome; the ambassadors countered that Saguntum had once appealed to Rome for help, many years before, so Rome could now claim that the town was under Roman protection.

  73.2 The World of the Punic Wars

  The bottom line was that both cities were determined to go to war. “On the Roman side there was rage at the unprovoked attack by a previously beaten enemy,” Livy says, “[and] on the Carthaginian, bitter resentment at what was felt to be the grasping and tyrannical attitude of their conquerors.”23 When the senior Roman ambassador shouted that he carried both peace and war in the folds of his garment, and would let war fall from it if they weren’t careful, the Carthaginian senators shouted back, “We accept it!”24

  And so Hannibal headed for the Alps in 218. He left his brother Hanno in charge of the Iberian colony, and took with him an army that ultimately numbered over a hundred thousand foot soldiers, perhaps twenty thousand cavalry, and thirty-seven elephants.208

  In response the Romans dispatched two fleets, one heading for the North African coast and the other, under the command of the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio, bound for the Iberian peninsula. Cornelius Scipio anchored at the mouth of the Rhône, intending to intercept Hannibal and his army before they could cross it, but Hannibal’s army had moved so much faster than expected that Cornelius Scipio arrived at their crossing place three days too late. Hannibal was on his way towards the mountains.25

  His men were a bigger problem than the Roman pursuit. They were mostly African-raised, and the Spanish coast was the coldest land they had known; they were terrified by the thought of ascending the steep unknown slopes, and their first sight of the Alps was no help. “The towering peaks,” Livy says, “the snow-clad pinnacles soaring to the sky, the rude huts clinging to the rocks, beasts and cattle shrivelled and parched with cold, the people with their wild and ragged hair, all nature, animate and inanimate, stiff with frost: all this, and other sights the horror of which wor
ds cannot express, gave a fresh edge to their apprehension.”26 And they were constantly threatened by wild local tribes; in the first such attack, the Carthaginian horses panicked on a narrow mountain trail, and both soldiers and horses slipped and were thrown over the trail’s edge, to break on the rocks thousands of feet below. As they marched higher, glassy ice beneath a layer of snow sent more men and animals sliding to their death.

  The crossing, Livy tells us, took fifteen days, and Hannibal himself reckoned that he lost a staggering thirty-six thousand men, as well as thirty-four of the elephants. He came down on the plain near the Po river with a demoralized and shrunken army, to face Cornelius Scipio, who had sailed as quickly as possible back to Italy with part of his own force in order to face him. News of the successful crossing soon reached Rome as well, and the Senate immediately recalled the invasion force in North Africa in order to strengthen the defense of the homeland.

  Cornelius Scipio and Hannibal met at the Ticinus river in November of 218. Weary as they were, the Carthaginian cavalry broke through the Roman line almost at once. The Romans scattered; Scipio himself was badly wounded. “This showed,” Livy says, “that…the Carthaginians had the advantage.”27

  Cornelius Scipio’s forces retreated in order to meet up with the troops from North Africa, which had arrived back in Rome to great and dangerous acclaim; Rome was suffering from a perilous disconnect between public perception and reality. “The people’s confidence in the ultimate success of Roman arms remained unaffected,” Polybius writes. “Thus, when Longus [the commander of the North African contingent] and his legions reached Rome and marched through the city, the people still believed that these troops had only to appear on the field to decide the battle.”28 This was far from the truth. When the armies met again, a month later, at the Trebbia river, a full third of the Roman troops fell.