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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The news that the combined forces of two consuls had been defeated made its way back to Rome and caused a panic: “People fancied that at any moment Hannibal would be at the city gates,” Livy writes.29 Rome went on full alert, staffing the islands with garrisons, calling on the allies for reinforcements, outfitting a new fleet of ships. By 217, Hannibal was moving steadily south, devastating the countryside, marching through Etruria towards Rome itself. The consul Gaius Flaminus and a reinforced Roman army met the Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene, in an absolutely catastrophic engagement fought in thick fog. Fifteen thousand Romans died, and Flaminus himself was crushed in the press; his body was never found. Once again, news of the disaster swept down to Rome. “People thronged into the forum,” Livy says, “women roamed the streets asking whom they met the meaning of the dreadful tidings which had so suddenly come…. Noone knew what to hope for or what to dread. During the next few days the crowd at the city gates was composed of more women than men, waiting and hoping for the sight of some loved face, or at least for news.”30

  There was no good news. Hannibal’s army seemed unstoppable. He continued to push south, temporarily bypassing Rome itself only in order to bring the lands below the city onto his side. “All the while the Romans followed the Carthaginian rearguard,” Polybius writes, “keeping one or two days’ march behind them but taking care never to approach any closer and engage the enemy.”31

  The following year, the two newly elected consuls Paullus and Varro joined together in an attempt to face Hannibal down. The Romans managed to field an army of over a hundred thousand, to meet a Carthaginian force of less than fifty thousand. On August 2, 216, the armies met at Cannae, on the southeastern coast.

  Thanks to their huge numbers, the Romans seem to have counted on sheer weight to crush the invaders, arranging themselves in a solid mass of men that would storm forwards with unstoppable force. In response to this, Hannibal arranged a thin front line to meet the Roman attack, one that seemed entirely unequal to the task of holding them back. But on his far left and right, back behind him, he placed his strongest and fiercest men, hired mercenaries from Africa, in two groups. He himself took his place in the front line. Unless he put himself in the same danger as those troops, he could not expect them to carry out the difficult task he had in mind.

  When the Romans advanced, the thin front line fought ferociously but retreated, slowly, as the Romans stormed forwards, drawing the Roman troops with them into a V. And then the mercenary troops on either side charged up either side of the V and attacked. The Roman force was neither prepared nor disciplined to fight on three sides at once. In the chaos that followed, fifty thousand Romans fell. Out of six thousand cavalry, seventy escaped and fled to the city of Venusia, led by Varro, who was disgraced both by the defeat and the flight.

  When reports of the Battle of Cannae came back to Rome, almost every family in Rome found that they had lost a brother, or father, or son. “After this defeat,” says Polybius, “the Romans gave up all hope of maintaining their supremacy over the Italians, and began to fear for their native soil, and indeed for their very existence.”32

  The situation only got worse when Carthaginian ships sailed for Greece and offered the king of Macedonia, now Philip V (great-great-grandson of Antigonus the One-Eyed), support to drive out the Roman “peacekeepers” on the Greek peninsula. Philip V accepted, and the Macedonians and Carthaginians together fought against the Roman occupiers and their Greek allies, which included both Sparta and the cities of the “Aetolian League” (an alliance of cities in the center of the peninsula, south of Macedonia and north of the Gulf of Corinth). Now this First Macedonian War overlapped with the Second Punic War, and the Romans were dealing with a two-front disaster.

  As in the First Punic War, fighting in the Second dragged on and on.209 In 211, the Romans managed to recapture part of Sicily by triumphing over Syracuse after a two-year siege; the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who was inside, died in the sack of the city. They were less successful in the Iberian peninsula. Roman forces led by two members of the Scipio family, the brothers Publius and Gnaeus, invaded and met Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal, who was still holding the fort for Hannibal back at home. Both Scipios died in the fighting that followed, although Hasdrubal was unable to push the Roman invaders entirely off his land.

  This gave one Roman officer—Publius’s son, known to later generations simply as Scipio—the personal hatred for Carthage which Hannibal had long felt for Rome. In 209, Scipio marched to New Carthage to avenge his father. His siege of the city was successful; Hasdrubal fled and followed his brother’s route over to the Alps and across them.

  This was not entirely a bad thing for the Carthaginians, since Hasdrubal brought with him not only his own forces, but eight thousand conscripted Celts, and had picked up yet more men on his journey from New Carthage to the Alps. He sent a letter to Hannibal, arranging to meet him and combine forces in Umbria.

  The letter was intercepted by Roman officers, and was read. At once the nearest Roman forces turned to mount a surprise attack on Hasdrubal before he could get down to Umbria. Hasdrubal’s allies did not acquit themselves well (“Gauls always lack stamina,” Livy remarks).33 Over fifty thousand of Hasdrubal’s men fell, and Hasdrubal himself, seeing that he was doomed, galloped straight into the Romans massed ahead of him and died fighting. The Romans cut off his head, carefully preserved it, and took it with them; when they reached Hannibal’s own outposts, they threw the head over into Hannibal’s camp.34

  Hannibal had lost both his brother and the Iberian colony, which had become a Roman province. The balance had begun, slowly, to tip towards Rome; and the Romans put a thumb on the scale by closing their second front in Macedonia in order to concentrate on Carthage. In 207, the same year of Hasdrubal’s death, Roman soldiers began to withdraw from the fruitless fighting on the Greek peninsula. Both the Greek cities and Philip V himself were, in Livy’s phrase, “sick of the long and tedious war,” and the Romans themselves could see that their troops were needed closer to home. Scipio had suggested that the new battleground should be North Africa; the Romans should go on the offensive and sail directly for Carthage, a strategy which might well pull Hannibal away from the Italian countryside.

  In 205, Philip V signed an agreement with the Greek cities to his south, the Peace of Phoenice. It gave the Romans control of a few smaller cities, turned over other territories to Macedonia, and halted all hostilities between Macedonia and the Aetolian League. With all soldiers now free for a North African attack, Scipio put together an invasion force. In 204, he landed on the North African coast with a combined army of Romans and North African mercenaries.

  His invasion had exactly the hoped-for effect: the Carthaginians sent a frantic message for help to Hannibal. And Hannibal came home. He was acting from patriotism, but it was a vague and reluctant patriotism; he had not been in the country of his birth since the age of nine, and he left most of his men in Italy, perhaps hoping to return soon. He had not yet fully carried out his father’s wishes; Rome still stood. “Seldom has any exile left his native land with so heavy a heart as Hannibal’s when he left the country of his enemies,” Livy says. “Again and again he looked back at the shores of Italy…calling down curses on his own head for not having led his armies straight to Rome.”35

  Once at Carthage, he recruited himself an army of reluctant Carthaginians and African mercenaries to join the few veterans he had brought back with him. Then, in 202, Hannibal and Scipio met for peace talks at Zama, just south of Fair Promontory. Perhaps the peace talks were genuine, but Scipio had sent for reinforcements, and was waiting for them to arrive. The defeat of Cannae, fourteen years ago, was still fresh in Roman memory; the young sons of the dead were now in their twenties, battle ready and furious.

  The Roman reinforcements arrived; the peace talks, inevitably, failed; and the Romans and Carthaginians joined in battle for the final time. Scipio had planned well. On the open country of Italy, always playing t
he aggressor, Hannibal had been unbeatable. But now the conditions under which he fought best had been reversed. He was fighting a defensive war in unfamiliar rocky land, with an army “composed of men who shared neither language, customs, laws, weapons, dress, appearance, nor even a common reason for serving.”36 They fought mostly for cash, and for a share of the plunder; and when Scipio’s army thundered down on them, far too many of them broke line and retreated out of fear.

  The Battle of Zama ended with Scipio in total control of the field; Hannibal had been forced, finally, to seek refuge in Carthage. Here he told the senate that he could not lead them to victory. Peace with Rome was the only option. The Carthaginian senate agreed, and Carthage surrendered itself to Scipio. For his triumph, Scipio earned himself the title Scipio Africanus from his countrymen. Carthage was forced to give up its fleet, bringing an end to its ambitions to spread across the west; five hundred of the ships were towed away from the shore, under Roman orders, and set ablaze, where they all burned to the waterline and then sank.37 The Second Punic War had ended.

  Hannibal, who had given up his Roman ambitions to defend a city he barely remembered, remained in Carthage, joining the senate in an attempt to help the Carthaginians rebuild their savaged world. For this, he got very little gratitude. Six years or so after the Battle of Zama, Hannibal got wind of a plot. His own countrymen were planning to turn him over to the Romans as a gesture of goodwill.

  At once he took a ship and fled from Carthage. He had been back in his homeland for barely seven years. He would never return to it again.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Roman Liberators and Seleucid Conquerors

  Between 200 and 168 BC,

  the Romans and Seleucids clash,

  Greek Bactria stretches down into India,

  and Latin becomes an official language

  AT THE AGE OF FIFTY, Antiochus III was now in his thirty-second year of rule over the Seleucid empire. He had pushed the Seleucid border down through the old Egyptian holdings, and had forced both Parthia and Bactria to a peace, accomplishments that later earned him the title Antiochus the Great. Now he decided to embark on a new campaign: to go west and capture some more of Asia Minor, perhaps even crossing the Hellespont and taking Thrace as well.

  He knew that if he didn’t make some move to the west, he was likely to find Romans breathing down his neck. Buoyed by their victory over the Carthaginians, Roman troops were now looking back to the east. The largest power left in the world was the Seleucid empire, and with Hannibal conquered, Antiochus III was Rome’s new enemy.

  The king who was about to get pinched between these two powers was Philip V of Macedonia, who had managed to emerge from the First Macedonian War in pretty good shape. There were still Roman peacekeepers down in Greece, but Macedonia had increased its holdings in the Peace of Phoenice. And while the Romans were preoccupied with Carthage, Philip V had made a secret treaty with Antiochus III to divide up Egyptian territories which had once belonged to the Ptolemies.

  The Romans were quite sure that Philip V was still planning to invade Greece, and they did not want the peninsula under the control of a pro-Seleucid king; Greece needed to remain a buffer between Rome and the power of Antiochus III. In 200, almost before peace with Carthage had been concluded, Roman troops marched on Philip V.

  The Aetolian League once again jumped onto Rome’s side, as did Athens, and this Second Macedonian War was brought to a speedy close by 197. In the final battle, fought at Cynoscephalae, Philip’s soldiers were so thoroughly beaten that the king of Macedonia was afraid he might lose his throne itself.1 But the Romans, who did not want to spend the next decades fighting to hang on to the Greek cities, proposed a peace that would allow Philip V to stay in Macedonia. Philip was to give up all thought of conquering Greek cities, surrender all of his warships, pay a fine, and withdraw all of his soldiers from Greek territory. The Roman consul Flaminus, who was in charge of the Roman forces in Macedonia, was given permission to play the Merodach-baladan/Napoleon/Sargon II/Cyrus card: he announced that the Romans had now liberated the Greeks from Macedonian oppression. “All the rest of the Greeks both in Asia and in Europe are to be free and to enjoy their own laws,” the decree read.

  Polybius notes that there were a few skeptical voices, at this; more than one Aetolian leader pointed out that “the Greeks were not being given their freedom, but merely a change of masters.”2 But the Romans insisted on their own disinterested benevolence (“It was a wholly admirable action…that the Roman people and their general should have made the choice to incur unlimited danger and expense to ensure the freedom of Greece,” Polybius gushes),3 and the cities of the Achaean League, which included Corinth, were pleased to sign a pro-Roman treaty, as long as it was also anti-Macedonian.

  No sooner had the treaties all been signed than Antiochus III appeared in the north. By 196, he had blown through the disorganized resistance that met him in Asia, crossed over the Hellespont to claim Thrace, and was looking down on the new Roman allies. He was rather more inclined to start a war with Rome than not, partly because he now had a new military advisor: Hannibal, who had shown up at the Seleucid court after fleeing from Carthage. Hannibal had left his native city in bitterness and fury; his love for Carthage had faded, but his loathing for Rome remained. His arrival at the court of Antiochus III, the only power great enough to challenge the Romans, was a continuation of his lifelong obsession: “He impressed upon Antiochus,” Polybius tells us, “that so long as the king’s policy was hostile to Rome he could rely upon Hannibal implicitly and regard him as his most whole-hearted supporter…for there was nothing that lay in his power that he would not do to harm the Romans.”2104

  Taking away Greece would undoubtedly harm the Romans. The Greek cities, caught between an old and frightening power to their northeast and a new and frightening power to their west, divided in their allegiances. The cities of the Aegean League kept their treaty with Rome, but the Aetolian League agreed to make an alliance with Antiochus III instead. More Roman troops arrived in the south of Greece while Antiochus’s Seleucid troops (accompanied by Macedonian allies and elephants) came down from the north.

  The two armies met in 191 at the Pass of Thermopylae. The Roman legions were exhorted by their consul in terms that tended to confirm the worst suspicions of the Aetolian leaders: “You are fighting for the independence of Greece,” the consul bellowed, “to free now from the Aetolians and Antiochus a country which you earlier freed from Philip. And after that you will open up to Roman domination Asia, Syria, and all the wealthy kingdoms stretching as far as the rising sun. The entire human race will revere the Roman name only after the gods!”5 It was not a particularly convincing speech of liberation, but it did the trick. The Romans drove Antiochus’s army back, killing thousands, and he was forced to withdraw entirely from the peninsula.

  The defeat was the beginning of the end for Antiochus the Great. As he backed up, he lost part of his Asia Minor conquests as well; the satrap of the Asia Minor province called Armenia, Artaxias I, set himself up as a king around 190. The Romans then carried the fight over into Seleucid land, under another member of the Scipio family. Antiochus gave Hannibal command of a naval force, and himself commanded a land defense, but both failed. Hannibal’s fleet surrendered off the south coast of Asia Minor; Antiochus’s army was defeated again, this time at Magnesia. Scipio earned himself the title Asiaticus for his victory, while Antiochus was forced to sign the Treaty of Apamea, which deprived him of most of his navy as well as his territory north of the Taurus Mountains.

  Nor did Philip V escape. He was punished for his friendship with Antiochus by losing his navy, his border cities, and his son Demetrius, who was hauled off to Rome as a hostage for his father’s good behavior.

  Antiochus’s defeat encouraged other satrapies to revolt. The following year, in 187, Antiochus the Great was killed in a minor battle against a rebellious satrap to the east. His son Seleucus IV inherited the Seleucid throne, but was force
d, like Philip V, to send his oldest son and heir to Rome, also as a hostage.

  Hannibal, deprived of his protector, fled. Plutarch says that he eventually settled in an obscure little town on the coast of the Black Sea, where he had seven underground tunnels dug from his house that emerged a “considerable distance” away in all directions, so that he could not be cornered by Roman hit men.

  But in 182, at the age of sixty-five, he was recognized by a Roman senator who happened to be visiting the local king. The senator threatened the king with the wrath of Rome should Hannibal be allowed to escape. So with reluctance, the king sent out his own local guard to block the seven passages and kill the old general. Rather than allowing himself to be taken alive, Hannibal drank poison. His last words, according to Plutarch, were “Let us ease the Romans of their continual dread and care.”6

  THE DIMINISHING THREAT of Seleucid invasion gave the Bactrians, to the east, a chance to expand their own territory. Their current king, a Greek Bactrian named Demetrius I, had his eye on the southeast: on India, which since the days of Alexander the Great had been a mirage of wealth, just waiting to be conquered.

  There was no single strong king in India to resist invasion. After Asoka’s death, his sons—inheriting their father’s legacy of philosophical preoccupation—lost their grip on his land. In the fifty or so years between Asoka’s death in 240 and Demetrius I’s invasion, seven kings of Mauryan descent ruled over a diminishing territory.

  The last of these Mauryan kings was Brhadratha, whose reputation as a devout Buddhist survives in sacred texts which describe his thousand-day penance in search of truth. During these thousand days, he is said to have left his oldest son in charge of the throne.7 This suggests a king with a loose hold on power; and in fact Brhadratha lost his kingdom, sometime around 185, to the commander of his army, who assassinated him. The commander, a devout Hindu named Pusyamitra Sunga, took control of what was left of the empire. His reputation too survives in Buddhist texts; he is said to have led a persecution against Buddhists in an attempt to reestablish Hindu orthodoxy. Since several stupas (Buddhist sacred monuments) have been dated to his reign, this may not be entirely true. All we can say for sure is that Pusyamitra founded a dynasty, and began to expand the old kingdom of the Magadha. Unlike his predecessors, he was willing to fight for his power.