Hannibal’s Campanian sojourn was perfectly logical. First, as Polybius stated,10 this move would result in one of two Roman responses: either the Romans would be forced to engage him in battle, or, by not engaging him, they would concede he was the master of Italy. He in turn could then persuade many more Italians to defect.11 Second, because supplying and feeding an army are such vital parts of warfare, having sufficient food for soldiers and fodder for animals can make or break a campaign. Tactics must adapt accordingly based on food availability. Living off the land, as Hannibal’s invading army had to do—even more so than the Romans—meant that raiding farms and taking livestock were a necessity. In addition, what Hannibal seized deprived Rome of resources.12
Some historians have calculated the statistical needs of ancient armies and have compiled reasonable data to suggest that a consular army of several legions plus allies (around 20,000 men and 3,500 horses and pack animals) would consume around 35 tons of wheat and 25 tons of barley daily along with an optimum amount of 10,000 liters of wine and 2,000 liters of olive oil.13 Daily grazing of animals during the right seasons was an absolute given, but winter added a huge strain on food supply. Armies would plan for whatever needs lay ahead from harvest time onward. So Hannibal felt justified in occupying Campania to acquire food for his army; whatever the risks Hannibal knew that this was his window of opportunity to acquire supplies.
According to Livy,14 who rarely misses an opportunity to showcase Punic perfidy, Hannibal would soon devise a clever ploy to further undermine trust in Fabius. Like many Roman patricians, Fabius owned rich farmland in Campania, and Hannibal had learned the location from Roman deserters or locals. He then destroyed all the surrounding farms but left the land and vines of Fabius completely untouched. Livy says that Hannibal then spread rumors that Fabius was spared because he had made a secret deal with Hannibal. Fabius was mortified and delegated his son Quintus to sell the rich farm, using the proceeds to ransom Roman prisoners.15
Whether Livy’s tale is true or not, Minucius was close to mutiny at Fabius’ continuing reluctance to engage Hannibal. Even the Senate was beginning to doubt whether Fabius’ caution was the right strategy as the profitable harvests of Campania were seized by Hannibal. Fabius Cunctator, the Delayer, was assailed by nearly everyone around him for his caution. This combination of rumor and scorn would have made many Roman patricians angry, but not Fabius, who had great patience and a thick skin.
HANNIBAL’S ESCAPE FROM THE AGER FALERNUS
Fabius determined in autumn that Hannibal was about to return east to Apulia for the coming winter, planning passage out of the Ager Falernus through the lower Apennines with his enormous column of spoils, including the thousands of head of cattle, many laden with harvested food supplies. Hoping to trap Hannibal in Campania, Fabius sent Minucius to block the Appian Way, the road south from Rome toward Capua, in the narrow coastal valley of Sinuessa. Meanwhile, he and his army occupied the heights of the Volturnus Valley at the gorge of Casilinum,16 about three miles north of Capua—the only other way east out of Campania and where he expected Hannibal to cross. Fabius was right about Hannibal’s route, and he was convinced he had Hannibal and his army boxed in. When Hannibal’s scouts reported that the pass was blocked and guarded by Roman troops, Hannibal halted his army until nightfall in plain view of Fabius.
While Hannibal pondered the situation, Fabius sat tight, wondering what Hannibal would do. It certainly appeared that the Carthaginians were poised to break out the next day. Fabius knew that if Hannibal weighed the circumstances, he would see that only with great loss of life and a decimated army could he even reach the pass, since Fabius had four thousand Romans nearby to guard it and could easily defend the narrow route.17 Believing the next morning would be one of destiny, Fabius retired after dark to sleep for the night, certain he had Hannibal contained and possibly could end Hannibal’s campaign.18
But Hannibal hatched a clever scheme. At dusk he called a supply officer and told him to have his men collect and bundle as many dry sticks as possible from the surrounding valley floor and scrub. Since it was past harvest at the height of the year’s dryness before the rains, this was accomplished easily, and the pile of dry tinder wood grew huge as Hannibal’s men worked under the cover of dark and in silence.
By this time, the bulk of the Roman army had mostly gone to sleep, leaving only the Casilinum Pass itself guarded. Hannibal then had his men collect two thousand of the strongest cattle from the spoils and wait for his orders after their dinner meal. He pointed out a ridge above and not far from the Casilinum Pass but away from where he knew the bulk of Fabius’ army to be camped and told them to mark it well because they would be furiously driving the cattle to that spot in the middle of the night. Hannibal’s army rested for a few hours until around three o’clock in the morning when the Romans would be sleeping most deeply.
Awaking his army camp in whispered quiet, Hannibal ordered his men to tie the thick bundles of branches between the horns of the two thousand cattle and light them all together with fire as quickly as possible. The dry branches caught fire, and the cattle were prodded forward. It looked to anyone watching that a whole army was suddenly moving up the ridge through the low brush. The assembled bulk of Hannibal’s full army with the rest of the spoils waited, hushed in great discipline below the Casilinum Pass under the noses of the unsuspecting Romans. The brilliant stratagem caught the Romans completely by surprise.
The frightened cattle with burning firebrands thundered up the ridge away from the pass, their fire-lit bundles looking just like thousands of torches carried by men; Livy says that the brands also scorched the hillside vegetation, causing even more fires that seemed to enlarge the enemy troops before the Roman eyes.19 A group of Hannibal’s chosen cattle drivers with pikemen herded the massed cattle from behind and on both sides, keeping them together, while others goaded them with weapons from the rear. The sleepy Roman guard units on watch noticed the moving fires and immediately jumped up, yelling and running toward the illuminated mass, thinking that Hannibal had sent his entire army that way because he was aware that the pass was guarded.
If the body of Fabius’ main waking army also thought the same thing, and many of them tried to sleepily assemble and head off Hannibal’s “army” of cattle ascending the ridge, the darkness covered the whole enterprise well. Meanwhile, Hannibal’s army passed quietly en masse toward the now-unguarded Casilinum Pass and quickly and safely made it through. The Romans made so much noise in their haste that they were blind to anything but their mistaken quarry as they tried to cut off this escaping army of cattle. Hannibal had anticipated this by choosing to run the cattle up the ridge in a direction away from both the Casilinum Pass and the main Roman army camp so that no Romans would cross his path as he took the pass.
When Fabius was wakened and told about the moving lights and noise, he refused to call out the rest of his army, thinking this was a trap.20 Although there were a few fights between the pursuing bewildered Romans on the ridge and Hannibal’s cattle-prodding skirmishers, even the Cartha-ginian pikemen and drivers quickly disappeared in the confusion. Some of the cattle escaped with them over the ridge and through the woods on the other side to catch up to the main Carthaginian force, the fires between their horns extinguished. Hannibal sent some of his armed Spaniards to fight any following Romans and accompany the last pikemen. About a thousand overzealous Roman soldiers were slaughtered as they tried to return to the Casilinum Pass.
The confused Roman army reassembled at dawn, and to Fabius’ and the Romans’ great disappointment and shamed befuddlement, morning light in the Volturnus Valley revealed that Hannibal’s entire army had escaped Fabius’ trap minus only a thousand or so cattle. This was the phantom army that had tricked the Romans in one of Hannibal’s most famous maneuvers.21 While Fabius had initially guessed right about Hannibal’s route, his Carthaginian counterpart had more correctly gauged that the conservative Fabius would hold back his full army during the night, t
hinking rightly that there was a trick under way, as Polybius wrote.22 Fabius waited out the night before fully assessing the situation.23
Hannibal’s forces now moved quickly eastward, virtually unopposed, back to Apulia for their wintering. This was not only a return with rich rewards in booty from the very heart of Roman agricultural wealth in Campania—further demoralizing Rome—but also another psychological victory for Rome’s enemies, rightly bolstering their confidence in Hannibal.
When word got to Rome, the humbled Fabius Maximus was criticized greatly for letting Hannibal escape—not least by his rival Minucius, who raged more at being absent during the maneuver than for hurt Roman pride. If overcautious Fabius Cunctator was personally prescient to delay meeting Hannibal in battle, many Romans shuddered to think what might happen if their two armies actually met under the same leadership. Minucius lobbied everyone he could in Rome to replace Fabius as dictator. Fabius, unshakable although much maligned, was no fool and knew that the cleverest and most elusive commanders could reverse the tide by pretending to be the quarry when they were really the hunters.24 Given the chance, he would still bide his time in the waiting game. For all the short-term perceptions of weakness in his “Fabian strategy,” Fabius Cunctator’s decision to “not meet Hannibal in the open field unless Rome had the advantage” would turn out to be wise.25
Fifteen
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CANNAE
Cannae still elicits a shudder from almost everyone after more than two thousand years. A considerable part of Hannibal’s reputation as a military genius seems to rest on this half day in early August of 216 BCE, perhaps more than is justifiable.
Reconstructing the battle from sometimes confusing or even slightly contradictory sources is challenging, but enough consensus exists to provide a fairly reliable account. Even after winnowing out the hyperbole that accompanies such events, Cannae remains a singularly dramatic day. Standing on the hill above the valley where the Aufidus (now Ofanto) River winds to the coast, and walking back and forth on the narrow plain that is about a mile or so wide on an August day similar to that in the summer of 216, I was reminded that however peaceful and still it looked, the horrible fate of so many Romans in that battle had made Cannae infamous.
THE HUMILIATION OF MINUCIUS
After Hannibal’s brilliant but narrow escape at Volturnus, for most of 217 BCE, the armies primarily watched each other from a safe but wary distance. Whether encamped or moving, Fabius Maximus determined Roman policy despite his frustrated detractors in the field and back home in the Senate. Many skirmishes and raids took place between Campania and Apulia, not all of them in Hannibal’s favor. But one skirmish—or little battle—stands out in 217 that reinforced the reputations of Hannibal and Fabius Maximus and showed the true colors of Marcus Minucius Rufus.
That summer, Fabius returned to Rome briefly to conduct obligatory religious rites, so the chafing Minucius as magister equitum finally had his chance to show his self-perceived valor and willingness to fight, in contrast to Fabius. Portions of Hannibal’s army encamped at Geronium in Central Italy, 155 miles from Rome, had been sent out piecemeal to gather food supplies in raids in order to last the winter, and Minucius attacked a third of Hannibal’s army that lacked the support of cavalry mobility. This action was counter to the strategy that Fabius had set in place in order to avoid direct engagement. While not entirely victorious in the skirmish—the Romans had five thousand casualties to the Carthaginians’ six thousand—the rapturous accounts Minucius reported back to Rome made it sound like a major victory.
It seemed to many of Fabius’ detractors that at last Rome had a champion ready to match Hannibal. In Rome, a senatorial decree made Minucius’ office of magister equitum equal in authority to that of the dictator Fabius as army commander. That autumn, always looking for an opportunity to damage the Roman army, Hannibal discovered through his spies that an emboldened Minucius was chafing for action. Hannibal set a trap for him near Geronium.
Hannibal knew that a full Roman force would have been too large to take on at this time. But if he drew out one half of the divided Roman army under conditions he could control and inflicted great damage before the other half of the army joined, Hannibal could turn a numerical disadvantage into a temporary advantage. Plus, Hannibal understood Minucius’ psychological disposition with his eager propensity to fight (now overconfident after the first summer skirmish) compared with Fabius’ caution and unwillingness to fight. Hannibal believed he could thus exploit a divided army whose leadership was also divided. By night, under cover of darkness, Hannibal set up a force of at least five thousand soldiers hidden in many groups of two hundred to three hundred in hollows alongside and behind the main hill where he would lure Minucius.
In the morning Hannibal’s army left the safety of Geronium and provoked Minucius with a visible force of light infantry. Minucius rashly engaged Hannibal with the half of the Roman forces under his command. Partly due to the hidden Carthaginians, who then rose up and attacked the Roman flanks that were fighting Hannibal, the skirmish turned into an ambush from behind and a rout of the Romans. A reluctant Fabius had to come to the rescue with the remaining Roman force. But after coming on the scene with his half army, Fabius disengaged without a full battle, instead committed warily to only a rescue and retreat. Likewise, Hannibal, having made his point and having destroyed many Romans, also withdrew his army rather than risk further attrition. Thus humiliated, Minucius was again reduced to being under the command of Fabius until Rome recalled both of them in December of 217, when Fabius’ term of dictator expired. Hannibal had been bold when necessary and similarly held back as needed.
RAW ROMAN RECRUITS
One huge war factor almost always in Rome’s favor was its seemingly endless supply of young recruits to form new legions of mostly citizen militia, whether fresh off the farms or from the cities. These soldiers would expect to return home to farms and cities when the war was over. By lowering the age of service to sixteen, Rome replenished the army from the attrition of Volturnus and Geronium as well as the legions lost by Sempronius at Trebia and Flaminius at Trasimene. These new legions would be added to the trained forces that Fabius and Minucius commanded while stalking Hannibal. Rome’s new army preparing that spring of 216 for a great battle in the summer was half made up of raw recruits who had hardly trained and had never faced a real enemy.
To deliver a knockout blow to Hannibal, Rome now put together a combined force of at least eighty thousand infantry of Romans and allies and six thousand cavalry—an astonishing eight legions1—but only four of them had any real battle experience. The discipline and battle order for which Rome would become legendary was not yet there, since molding recruits into a single fighting unit requires time for practice drills. Livy claims that almost two-thirds of the combined army were raw recruits,2 thus relatively untrained. Some maintain the full army was together on the field only a few weeks before the great battle of Cannae, suggesting that so much time was spent in gathering recruits that the consuls joined in Apulia only a week prior to the battle.3 If naïve Romans hoped that sheer numbers would be enough to overwhelm Hannibal’s veterans desperate to survive in a hostile country, they were dangerously overoptimistic. On the other hand, if the Roman army was suspect, the leadership was somewhat impressive.
LUCIUS AEMILIUS PAULLUS
Lucius Aemilius Paullus was a member of one of the “first families” (likely the gentes maiores) of Rome, a famous patrician of the Aemilia family. As consul for the second time, he already had a distinguished career with a military triumph in Illyria in 219, having defeated Demetrius of Pharos, ruler of coastal Illyria—although with a dent to his reputation over unequal spoils of war.4 As one of the consuls, he would share command of this army, the largest Rome had ever assembled for battle to date.5 Rome was confident of his proven leadership abilities as one of the most respected generals from a prominent family steeped in the oldest traditions of Rome; a man who would bring time-honored va
lues to the field of combat. The Aemilia clan was even said to trace its lineage back to Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome as successor to Romulus, the orphaned mythical founder—with his twin, Remus—of Rome, and some legends even had it descended from Ascanius, son of Aeneas. Although the Aemilia were most strongly associated with Sabine origins, the ethnic and cultured people east of early Rome, they were in any case one of Rome’s vintage families.6 Aemilius Paullus was at this time fairly old, possibly in his late fifties or even sixty, although this is uncertain, but he was undeniably one of the most senior Roman military commanders of this period. Aemilius Paullus as consul had not been in command very long—perhaps only weeks—and most of that time, he was on the march to Apulia. Polybius, generally reliable, wrote his history under Aemilian sponsorship, which influenced his account.
CAIUS TERENTIUS VARRO
On the other hand, Caius Terentius Varro was a plebeian, but he had risen in the Roman public ranks, having been a praetor in 218 and a popular speaker, often against the Senate. History has not treated Terentius Varro well, perhaps even more poorly than he deserves.7 Certainly some of the shame of Rome’s defeat at Cannae rests on his shoulders, yet perhaps too much relative to the fact that much of the newly composed army was inexperienced. Historians such as Livy, biased toward old patrician families, have also derogated him—contemptuous of his humble origins8—because Varro was another Roman “new man,” first in his family elected to high office and not from one of the old patrician families like Aemilius Paullus, whose family could posthumously defend his name. While Varro was elected from the popular Plebeian Party, Livy calls Varro arrogant and impatient. He says that Fabius Maximus spoke words of counsel to Paullus in Rome before Cannae, warning him that his coconsul Varro was a demagogue, a reckless madman.9 Fabius told Paullus he would be fighting two enemies; Carthaginian and Roman in Hannibal and Varro. Livy also claims the relationship between the two Roman consuls was more like competing gladiators than colleagues. Polybius is also unrestrained, although mostly omissive in his narrative about Varro, calling him inexperienced but also a disgrace.10 How much of Livy’s diatribe against Varro is true, we don’t know, but Varro’s battle actions around Cannae seem to have been more impulsive than those of Paullus.
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