Hannibal

by Patrick N Hunt

  THE FALL OF SAGUNTUM

  The end was gruesome, whether later legend has exaggerated the details or not. We are led to believe by the propagandizing Romans after the fact that the starving Saguntines, having consumed all their livestock and then their horses and all other animals, broke one of the ultimate social taboos and engaged in cannibalism. We are told by more than one ancient authority—eliciting both sympathy for the Saguntines as intended and moral outrage at Hannibal—that the broken Saguntines at last began to eat their own children, whether dead or alive. Famine had already reduced many families, not stopping at the houses of the poor but now affecting the entire aristocracy—its gold and silver useless because there was no food to purchase.

  At the end of the eight-month siege, the last outer walls were breached and the remaining weakened defenders were slaughtered, allowing the army to pour into the city unhindered. But a horrible sight met the eyes of Hannibal’s army gathering at the dead heart of Saguntum. Holding their noses at the smell, the arriving troops saw an endless pyre of slowly burning corpses, many of the last emaciated Saguntines having thrown themselves on the inferno to die in the flames after killing their own starved, half-skeletal children. Even Hannibal must have been taken aback, however accustomed to the horrors of war as he was by now. But perhaps to offset blame and guilt or to quell too many questions other than to blame Rome, after disposing of the dead, he quickly set the conquering army to divide the rich spoils of gold, silver, and other precious treasures.

  Hannibal and his officers oversaw three divisions of the Saguntine spoils of war. First there were survivors, many of them slaves; and then precious objects that could be sold; and, finally, materials of gold and silver, including bullion and coin. How many Saguntines defended the city and how many died has always been inexact, but fatalities may have been at least several thousand, given the booty that Hannibal took away, with the rest of the Saguntines now enslaved. Hannibal’s army had its share of loot, and he set apart a considerable bulk of the precious objects to be sent to Carthage, partly to buy off dissent. Hannibal apparently did not skim off any loot for his own personal wealth but instead put aside a considerable sum for the campaign against Rome he now clearly planned. His mercenaries, loyal soldiers, and officers were happy with their overall portions, a promise of future gains should they continue conquering.

  Hannibal returned to Cartagena for the winter of 219 BCE with his loyal troops to plan for the expected Roman retaliation.

  The awful word about Saguntum’s end spread quickly across Spain and over the Pyrenees to Gaul and soon even to Rome. Across the Alps and in Spain, many of the Gauls certainly got the message, repelling repeated Roman entreaties via Massilia to have no dealings with Hannibal.

  Hannibal was laying a ground plan he would follow for years: if you wished to be Rome’s ally, think long and hard.

  Five

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  OVER THE PYRENEES

  Hannibal wasted little time guessing the Roman response to Saguntum. War was now a reality: Rome had already begun to assemble old and new legions under its consuls Publius Cornelius Scipio and Tiberius Sempronius Longus. The former was a cautious and seasoned military veteran, and the latter, a hotheaded political appointee. Hannibal’s army assembling at Cartagena was a combined force of Carthaginians, Numidians, Libyans, and Celtiberians, a considerable number of them mercenaries.

  This initial army of around 90,000 soldiers and 12,000 cavalry—if we are to believe Polybius and other sources—was large but nothing like the Persian armies under Xerxes I and Darius III, where even conservative numbers suggest around 300,000 soldiers leaving Sardis on the Aegean coast with Xerxes in 480 BCE (the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus claimed 2 million) and 100,000 soldiers under Darius III at the Battle of Issus in 333 BCE.1 Hannibal’s army contained speakers from four or five language groups, but standard Punic was the dominant tongue. He had read lessons from Alexander the Great as a model for unconventionality and mobility and knew that it required great logistical skill to successfully manage such a large army of culturally diverse soldiers.

  With their spies reporting that Hannibal was almost on the move toward the Ebro, the Romans planned to send an army by ship under Longus to lay siege to Carthage. They also readied another army to sail to Spain under Scipio to stop Hannibal at the Ebro River.2

  PLANNING THE MARCH TO INVADE ITALY

  Through the spring of 219 BCE, Hannibal recalled troops from all over southern Spain. Outfitting them properly entailed another few months of tasks, such as blacksmithing and leatherworking on top of basic training. In the end, the huge force melded into an army. He made sure his troops knew their objectives: march to Italy and perhaps ultimately toward Rome’s heart. Some soldiers would have been daunted and deserted quickly. Others would have found the great distance a lure for adventure and, as Hannibal would have promised, plenty of loot along the way as a magnetic pull.

  The Celtiberians and other Spanish recruits would have required great discipline to bring them up to an acceptable standard of military preparedness. It is likely that after discovering how much drudgery was involved in a march, more than a few Spanish mercenaries also melted away from the camps by night during the midspring march of about 288 miles from Cartagena to the Ebro crossing. It is likely that Hannibal’s army crossed the river in the late spring of 218 BCE, possibly not long after its high-water mark at the end of the spring snow melt in Cantabria to the far west and while much of the wetlands would still be flooded or at least saturated.

  THE EBRO RIVER

  The Ebro River crossing was an important indicator of Hannibal’s historical resolve. As a major Spanish river flowing east to the Mediterranean sea, in nearly any season it could not be forded easily. Coastal swamps would have forced Hannibal’s army a few miles inland, probably to cross near the Celtiberian village of Dertosa (now Tortosa). Here the river became mainly nonnavigable upstream because of the rapids descending from the plateau above the town, a fording place controlled by the Iberian tribe of the Ilercavones.3 Hannibal would have had to either conquer or bribe this tribe to use its boats and other services to get an army over. Even in summer, the Ebro is at least a hundred yards wide at that point, while at its delta, the river broadens out even more through many meandering waterways.

  It is the Ebro River that gave Spain its ancient name of Iberia, the land of the Ebro watershed. If the successful siege of Saguntum was not enough, Hannibal’s crossing the Ebro was obvious provocation, demonstrating that he knew what he was doing by challenging Roman authority over such a clear demarcating line. It would have taken at least a day for the army to be ferried by the boats and manpower of local folk, requiring both constant logistical support for the scores of thousands of soldiers, pack animals, and elephants—and a well-trained wary eye for hostile local clans that could have objected that this was a major trespass into their territory. Hannibal knew his Ebro crossing would be perceived as a threat to many Iberians and a formal declaration of war to the Romans. It would further undermine Celtic confidence in Rome’s power to stop Hannibal. But crossing the Ebro could also be a bottleneck that would further tempt Celtiberian resistance.

  Hannibal now encountered considerable trouble from local Celtiberian and Iberian clans as he marched north beyond the Ebro during late spring and into the early summer. This resistance delayed him far more than he wished between May and early June. The hilly Catalonian area provided many hiding places for skirmishes and potential ambushes from Celtiberian tribes, which reduced Hannibal’s pace northward.4

  By the summer, Hannibal had endured an obvious lack of enthusiasm from his erstwhile ally the Carpetani, a Celtiberian tribe that had provided soldiers only because it had little choice. They seem not to have been sympathetic to fighting their Iberian neighbors. Facing the Pyrenees Mountains—to them a daunting barrier they had never scaled and a point of no return—three thousand Carpetani infantry soldiers from the same tribe that had vigorously opposed Ha
nnibal before being subdued quickly deserted, as Livy tells it.5 This is not all that surprising, as they were now far from their home in central Spain and had been pressed into reluctant service after being conquered. Plus, there had been little shared loot to keep even their superficial loyalty.

  Hannibal took stock and trimmed his force by dismissing another seven thousand Celtiberians, for a loss of about ten thousand soldiers before even leaving Spain. But he expected his Spanish allies to guard his flanks and keep intact his long communication and supply lines with Cartagena, paying bribes and leaving a sizable payment in silver to this end. To further ensure this lifeline and prevent reprisals from unhappy tribes, Hannibal also left behind in Spain another eleven thousand Carthaginians and Libyans along with twenty-one elephants and at least eighty-two ships under the command of his brother Hasdrubal.6 This meant that his force was probably reduced to fewer than seventy thousand soldiers.

  CROSSING THE PYRENEES

  After about three months out of Cartagena, with his army traveling north through Catalonia, Hannibal’s scouts would have determined the best route over the Pyrenees. Geography was always vital to any army’s logistics, and Hannibal was a master at understanding advantages and disadvantages of terrain and geography, even unfamiliar new terrain. From reports via tenuous allies or conquests among the Iberian locals, Hannibal’s scouts would have known the Catalonian coastal route was both difficult and long, complicated by steep cliffs plunging into the sea.

  On the Spanish side, Hannibal’s army would have continued along the Llobregat stream north up to its Pyrenees source through oak and scraggly pine forest flanking the Perthus Pass (El Pertus in Spanish; Le Perthus in French, or Col du Perthus), the lowest elevation in the region. The troops would have descended on the Celtic French side where the mountain stream tumbles north until meeting the Tech River, crossing at some point possibly just below Banyuls-dels-Aspres into fully Celtic territory of Gaul. The Perthus Pass is thirty kilometers (eighteen miles) south of modern Perpignan in France. Hannibal’s scouts would have heard from allied or conquered Celtiberians, Iberians, and Celts that this was the best route north directly into Gaul and thus the most logical crossing place through the Pyrenees. Even then, it seems to have taken Hannibal nearly a month to fight his way over the mountains.

  In the late first century BCE, the practical Romans would build their Via Domitia road through this same low pass between Gaul (Gallia Narbonensis) and Hispania (modern-day Spain) for the same reasons that Hannibal chose the route: to avoid the coastal bays, cliffs, and marshes.

  HANNIBAL’S PARLEY WITH THE CELTS

  Polybius says that late that summer, Hannibal made promises to and received concessions from assembled Celts gathered from as far away as the Boii tribe of Italy about how together they would keep Rome from enlarging its territory in Gaul on both sides of the Alps.7 Normally, competing Celts would not convene in such numbers, so Hannibal must have convinced them that he was only passing through their lands and forming an alliance against an expanding Rome that would not be content with Italy. No doubt Hannibal provided ample evidence from recent Roman expansion in central and northern Italy. Italian Celts like the Boii would have agreed from their own experiences with Roman expansion.

  HANNIBAL’S TROOP STRENGTH FROM SPAIN TO GAUL

  One question that ancient history always leaves open to modern debate is the reporting of numbers of combatants fielded by nations at war. The actual numbers of soldiers in Hannibal’s army over the long journey from Spain to Gaul are difficult to confirm and even confusing or contradictory. It seems likely that his army was already reduced by nearly half before he even arrived in Gaul. The soldiers who stuck with Hannibal by late summertime in southern Gaul would have been mostly veteran, committed soldiers. It was certainly a typically wise strategy for Hannibal to keep some of his loyal North Africans (Carthaginians, Numidians, Libyans) in Spain to cover his back and send some questionably loyal Spanish allies over to North Africa—some as soldiers to guard Carthage and others as hostages.

  HANNIBAL ARRIVES IN GAUL TO ROMAN SURPRISE

  The surprised Romans heard from their Massilian allies that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenees and was in Gaul. Some of the Celtic tribes, such as the Boii in the eastern Po Valley now rebelled en masse against the Romans in northern Italy, and the Boii brought the Insubres in the Piedmont region of the western Po Valley into their revolt with them,8 driving the Romans eastward from around their outpost at Placentia (modern Piacenza) all the way back to their colony at Mutina (modern Modena). The Romans rapidly changed their own war plans. They had been too late to stop Hannibal at the Ebro. Now, hearing that he had already crossed the Pyrenees, Rome had to protect Italy against likely invasion, so it kept all these legions ready in Italy. Hannibal’s relative speed through northern Spain and the Pyrenees—frustratingly slow by his standards—still eclipsed the Romans’ marching pace.

  Hannibal’s next great challenge was to cross the wide Rhône River, which flowed from the Alps to the Mediterranean. Fortunately, he would be crossing at one of its lowest points. But after that would come the even greater challenge of traversing the Alps. Hannibal’s allies in Gaul had informed him of the obstacles as well as the local routes taken by their people for centuries over the mountains. Hannibal had been advised by the Celts about the short montane summer at high altitude. He knew that the mountain passes would be covered in deep snow by autumn and that weather in the towering mountains was far from predictable. Having distributed silver to his Celtic allies, promising them much more loot, and gathering as much information as he could from scouts, spies, and allies, Hannibal began to move as quickly as possible toward the Rhône.

  HANNIBAL’S USE OF SPIES AND INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

  While nearly all commentators praise or admire Hannibal’s tactics of surprise, many fail to appreciate his superb use of intelligence gathering and espionage that helped secure his victories. In some ways, he set precedents in the ancient world.9 Polybius says that Hannibal did not go uninformed over the Alps but carefully sought reliable information from Celts and other sources.10 Hannibal employed many scouts and advance reconnaissance, as Polybius mentions frequently. Livy cites a Carthaginian spy who worked for two years in Rome itself before being caught. His punishment was to have his hands cut off.11 Some of Hannibal’s spies spoke Latin like natives, from long-term contact with Romans. He also used speakers of other languages, possibly Etruscans (from modern-day Tuscany and Umbria) and other Italians who were naturally wary of Rome. He must have employed local wagoners and carters, Etruscan metalworkers, craftsmen, and food suppliers, and possibly had more than a few moles among the Roman allies. He might even have had a bevy of camp followers—often foreign women—who used “pillow talk” to extract information from Romans. How information got back to Hannibal is impossible to say, since it was intended to be secretive, but it must have worked sufficiently well. And he was probably not squeamish about using some form of torture to extract information.

  Both Polybius and Livy say that Hannibal often used disguises and wore different wigs and costumes for different occasions but mostly for concealment—so much that “even his familiars found difficulty in recognizing him.”12 Hannibal was so much like the “cunning” Odysseus, whom he certainly knew about. Some of Hannibal’s deliberate models were readily found in Greek legend and literature. As long as he had the financial resources, Hannibal paid in silver, although he had to be careful that his Carthaginian money was not traceable to his enemies.

  But now it was time to cross the Rhône.

  Six

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  CROSSING THE RHÔNE

  The most obvious reason Hannibal did not follow the Mediterranean coast to Italy is that the Alpes-Maritimes mountains stretch south almost to the modern Riviera, a route fully controlled by Rome. Here on the east mouth of the Rhône River lie Massilia (Marseilles) and Nicaea (Nice); Massilia commanded the only relatively flat ground to the west of the highland coast.
The many towns and outposts loyal to Rome along the coast would have contested any passage through this territory. Hannibal certainly knew that taking this traditional route would have meant fighting all the way with fully engaged armies.

  Hannibal skirted the marshy wetlands and salt lakes (étangs) on his right by staying close to the Rhône Valley’s western low plateau, but he also veered away from any territory on the eastern Rhône mouth controlled by Massilia, hoping to stay clear of Massilian informants and spies who would report to Rome. He moved as quickly as possible by uneasy tribes such as the Volcae, which were on both sides of the Rhône River Valley. It was probably the end of August, and local crops would have been mostly harvested.

  Despite the wide meanderings of this great river and intermittent Celtic farming on both sides above modern Fourques and the waterlogged Camargue, the vegetation changes from marsh to forest. At this time, deciduous trees such as poplars would have grown probably within a hundred meters of the riverbank at many places. If Hannibal’s army had sought such forest cover while marching northeast, at the gain of disguising his movements, the risk was that it would have slowed him considerably.