Hannibal

by Patrick N Hunt

  Birds of prey descended quickly on the field as exhausted Carthaginians sat down to rest, while other, human scavengers, began collecting trophies. This went on for days. Hannibal must have joined the team of officers surveying and scouring the field where heaps of bodies lay, searching for his wounded and the dead Roman high command. Rome’s military leadership was decimated. Not only had Aemilius Paullus perished, but other dead generals included Servilius Geminus and Marcus Minucius, the impetuous master of horse under Fabius Maximus. Twenty-nine out of forty-eight tribunes were killed,42 and eighty senators or elected magistrates of senatorial rank perished, as did more than two hundred eques: Roman knights whose gold rings the victors collected on the field of death.

  Terentius Varro was the most senior Roman leader who survived, because he fled. Why did Varro flee the battlefield so early? Was it merely self-preservation as a consul or was it the panic of an inexperienced war leader? While bravery can be foolish, we admire those whose bravery makes a positive difference just as we scorn those whose cowardice also makes a negative difference. On the other hand, was Varro’s flight that significant? Was it the main contributing factor to Hannibal’s cavalry completing the double envelopment at the rear and closing the box on Rome’s massed infantry?

  Some suggest that the great lengths that Polybius but especially Livy go to vilify Varro imply a deeper motive: namely, to deflect attention from the inconvenient truth that Paullus may have been actually the commanding consul that day.43 If true, history has done Varro an injustice, but that still does not erase his flight from battle.

  It has been often estimated that 20 percent of all Roman males between the ages of eighteen and fifty died that day at Cannae. Across its plain, the stench must have been terrible, as massing flies descended on the piles of bodies. The gravely wounded numbered in the thousands as well, some dying slowly, although many must have quickly succumbed to fever and septicemia. Livy describes in detail how some of the mortally wounded had dug their heads into the earth to smother themselves and end their suffering. He also relates in grisly fashion how one Roman, his useless arms unable to wield a weapon, in his dying rage bit off part of the face of a Numidian trapped beneath him.44 Carthaginian medics dispatched those deemed too injured to be saved, both from Hannibal’s army and the Romans. We don’t know how many days it took to bury the thousands of dead.

  AFTERMATH AND MAHARBAL’S RETORT

  The Punic cavalry leader, Maharbal, urged Hannibal to march on Rome immediately—boasting he could feast atop the Capitolium, the main temple on Rome’s most sacred hill, in five days—but Hannibal demurred. No doubt he was thinking back to how Saguntum had taken six months to fall even with siege weapons, and Rome was much vaster and better protected, with a large wall, a good water supply, and still a large population that could see to its defense. His army was exhausted, and the road would be very long—250 miles—for the hardened veterans, and longer yet for the wounded and sick they could not leave while still in enemy territory. Fresh cavalry could have barely made the trip in five days, let alone taken the city.45 Maharbal is said to have retorted, “You know how to win but not how to take advantage of victory.”46

  Livy maintains that many believed this decision not to immediately move squandered an opportunity and saved Rome. This notion has been popular through history, some agreeing with Maharbal and Livy.47 Whether taking Rome was truly attainable or too remote a goal we will never know for sure, although Hannibal was most likely wise in his assessment. It is certain that if Hannibal had been able to take the city of Rome, history would have been different but that looms as one of the largest “ifs” in military history. Hannibal had another plan and different ambitions.

  When Hannibal began negotiations following his victory at Cannae, setting steep prices for ransom of the Roman prisoners but releasing the Celtic allies who had fought for Rome and sending them home, he told the Romans he was not waging a war to exterminate Rome but merely to recover the dignity and guarantee the survival of Carthage and its place in the Mediterranean. He wanted Rome to settle a peace that would reverse the humiliating losses of Sicily and Sardinia and the costly penalty of the war indemnity Hamilcar Barca had paid out from Spain; a peace that would return the status Carthage had before the Treaty of Lutatius of 241 that took away its sea trade.

  Hannibal also predicted that the northern Celts who had rebelled against Rome following Ticino and Trebia, as well as Rome’s mercurial allies in South Italy—including some of the Samnites and Greeks as well as Apulians, Lucanians, and Bruttians—would turn from Rome to him if he exerted enough pressure once they saw Rome’s vulnerable position after such a resounding defeat. He was proven mostly correct for a few years. Livy claims that the upper classes in Campania generally preferred Rome, but the lower classes sided mostly with Hannibal.48

  One Roman conclusion from Cannae must have been a concession that not only did their one “knockout blow to Hannibal” not work but also that one singular battle was unlikely. This would certainly justify Fabian caution.49 Yet Hannibal seriously misjudged the Romans if he thought they would accept Cannae as a final defeat. Maybe earlier wars had offered sufficient outcomes for a thoroughly vanquished enemy to capitulate as he expected of Rome, but Rome was a new breed of people that would fully admit defeat only on its own terms. Too many Romans believed their destiny was to expand as an empire, not simply go back to being merely a regional power. Before Hannibal, Pyrrhus beat the Romans time and again, but the victories were costly, and Rome never gave up.50 Nor would Rome relinquish its newfound sea rule. Cannae, terrible as it was, did not offer Rome enough of a reason to sue for peace because the city itself was untouched, however anguished it was over such a great loss. Polybius says the vanquished Romans died bravely,51 but he omits this same eulogy of valor in the four thousand Carthaginian deaths. Despite Livy’s popular tale about Maharbal belittling Hannibal, we can only wonder about Hannibal’s exact thoughts and mood at the end of the battle and what he was calculating. His decision not to march on Rome after his overwhelming victory at Cannae would no doubt haunt Hannibal the rest of his life.

  Sixteen

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  THE CAMPAIGN FOR SOUTH ITALY

  When the unbelievable shock of Cannae reached Rome, the city was filled with the cries of loss and grief to the gods. When Varro arrived with his few stragglers, even this deserting general was welcomed merely because he had managed to survive for the sake of Rome when so many had perished. Fabius Maximus and his policy of not engaging Hannibal were vindicated, but he wouldn’t have mourned any less than others over the disaster. Whether or not Fabius knew that his son and Cornelius Publius Scipio the younger had survived is mostly immaterial.

  Now even the mention of Hannibal sent palpable waves of fear through the people. While the Senate tried its best to encourage the people and even strengthened city defenses, Rome was in a panic. A famous phrase, “Hannibal ad portas,” “Hannibal at the Gates,” became popular, although many people say that happened almost a decade later when Hannibal actually marched directly on Rome to draw a Roman army away from Capua. Would Hannibal now march on Rome? Would “Hannibal at the gates” suddenly be all too real? Polybius says that immediately after Cannae, Rome fully expected and watched for Hannibal to appear.1

  Hannibal did not materialize at Rome, however. His attention turned elsewhere.2 The mercurial erstwhile allies of Rome were his new targets, especially in South Italy, where Hannibal hoped to open resupply routes from Carthage. His fateful decision to move south instead of north to Rome itself would provide the battered city some badly needed breathing room. As Hannibal had hoped, the results of his victory at Cannae undermined the loyalty of many South Italians to Rome. He wanted to appear as the restorer of old Greek liberties through Carthaginian largesse.3 Some South Italian cities surrendered fairly quickly and other city-states in Campania opened their gates to Hannibal, realizing it was better to be on the side of a victor. After Cannae, Hannibal had left Apulia, s
ome of whose peoples now sided with him, and moved first into old Samnite territory south of Rome and eventually to the lands of Greek city-states.4

  Many of the people who still resented Rome’s expansions and who were only recent acquisitions or territories of Rome—forced by war or a superficial alliance, such as some of the Greeks of Magna Graecia—now backed away from Rome, as did Lucanians south of Campania. Along the Adriatic coast, the defections to Hannibal included many of the Italic peoples of Apulia and the Samnites of central Italy, who had been subjugated at the beginning of the century in the last Samnite War (298–290 BCE). But nowhere was realignment of non-Roman Italy toward Hannibal wholesale or quick. A portion of Lucanians remained loyal to Rome, but even the Lucanians who did align with him were more inclined to identify locally rather than regionally,5 making it hard for Hannibal to bring a region into a relationship with him as a holistic identity.

  Hannibal had sent many of Rome’s captured Italian allies home, wanting to make a statement that his battle was with Rome, not Italy at large. Soon after Cannae, Hannibal sent Carthalo, one of his noble Carthaginian officers, with a small delegation of Roman prisoners to the capital to sound out Rome about conditions for peace and to demand ransom for thousands of Roman prisoners.6 With both old and new leadership—Fabius Maximus was appointed consul for the third time, since his military strategy seemed to be the only one working—Rome refused to negotiate, rejecting ransom offers. Instead, the Senate levied new recruits for its depleted army, thus reconstituting four new legions that even included eight thousand slaves. Rome was sufficiently desperate to conscript paroled criminals, Romans nonetheless, who were promised freedom and annulment of former charges in exchange for enlistment.7 In such an unconventional manner, Rome fairly quickly raised about twenty-five thousand army recruits regardless of public opinion. Making up for weapons lost to Hannibal, the Romans even took down trophy weapons—some possibly archaic—from temples.8 Livy mentions the commission of six recruiting officers in order to inspect any able-bodied Roman male in every village for his fitness to bear arms.9

  In a monetary crisis due partly to war, Rome increased taxes in order to rebuild the legions and even asked its upper classes to donate gold, silver, jewelry, and other capital assets. As a measure of its deep financial crisis, Rome secured a loan from old King Hieron in Siracusa in grain. The cost of war was heavy, since Rome even borrowed from the tax collectors, and the relationship between precious metals such as gold and silver was altered as money itself was devalued. Even large portions of the ager publicus—public land—were sold.10

  While these Roman recruiting efforts mounted, Hannibal moved into Campania, aiming to take Neapolis (modern Naples) to acquire its excellent port. But a siege of Naples was very difficult due to its strong fortifications and excellent port, so Hannibal turned his attention to Capua instead as an easier campaign.11 Capua was the major city of South Italy, north of Naples by about twenty-one miles. It also defected to Hannibal after debates and vacillations between the winter of 216 and the spring of 215, having seen enough of his marauding armies a year or so earlier when Fabius Maximus had tried to trap Hannibal within Campania. Capua’s ruling elite still backed Rome to an extent, having made considerable alliances, including via marriage, but the bulk of the common population backed Hannibal. This was a decisive coup at the time for Hannibal.

  However, one local setback south of Naples was that the elder Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus, a five-time consul who had conducted the successful Gallic War of 225 BCE, reinforced the city of Nola. His presence with an army of two legions in the newly refortified city turned away Hannibal’s forces on several occasions.

  The Italian territories newly backing Hannibal were by no means secure, and he would have to watch his back at all times. Hannibal sent his brother Mago south with half an army to secure as much allied territory and good will as possible, as well as local reinforcements for his army. In 215 the Bruttians in the extreme south also brought a force to fight with along with Hannibal’s lieutenants Hanno and Himilco against mostly Greek city-states such as Rhegium, Locri, and Crotone that either still sided with Rome or withheld allegiance to Hannibal. Locri surrendered, and the Bruttian allies were disappointed they couldn’t loot it because it became a Carthaginian holding. These city-states would become an Achilles’ heel to Hannibal over the next decade because of stubborn fickleness and the South Italian patchwork of disorganized independence that allowed no one city-state dominance that would sway the others.

  While quite a few Roman allies in South Italy were holdouts, including Brundisium and Barium (Bari),12 much of Italy looked ambiguously upon the Carthaginians, with whom they shared little, including language and culture. They also had no common denominators among themselves when Rome was at its nadir. Instead, each city looked out for itself regardless of either a currently diminished Rome or a distant Carthage.

  Hannibal purportedly set at least one bad example in Campania during 216 and 215, in a failure of diplomacy that would haunt him if true. When besieging Nuceria in the Sarno Valley about ten miles east of Pompeii, Hannibal promised the Nucerians they could surrender and leave the town with one or two garments, nothing else. Historians such as Valerius Maximus, Appian of Alexandria, and Dio Cassius, among others, said that when the city finally fell, Hannibal locked up the city elders in the civic baths and suffocated them; the rest of the people were forced to leave, allowed to depart to wherever, but he killed many on the way. Some of these late sources say he repeated this behavior at Acerra, also throwing its Senate into deep wells.13 But the atrocity is not recorded by Livy, who rarely omits anything that would damage Hannibal. Instead, Livy repeats the story of the starved city and how its citizens were allowed to leave with one garment. Livy even adds that Hannibal promised rewards to anyone who joined his army, although all refused. Livy says the surface generosity was in keeping with Hannibal’s policy “to maintain his character of mildness toward all Italians except Romans.”14 Some scholars are convinced that this Nucerian anecdote in Maximus, Appian, and Dio is fictitious.

  Unfortunately, contiguous detailed narratives cease after Hannibal’s victories at Ticino, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. Even Polybius becomes spotty as a primary source. Although Livy provides continuing information, it is not necessarily reliable.15 Polybius turns his attention away from Hannibal and Italy to the events of Greece and the East.16 After Cannae, we greatly miss, as Richard Miles says, “the unfailingly critical eye of Polybius” for lengths of time in the Second Punic War.17

  But Capua and other captured or aligned cities caused problems for Hannibal. Livy even claims that Capua greatly softened his veterans—suggesting it became “Hannibal’s Cannae,” winning his army’s soul with the luxury of wine, women, and song.18 This is an exaggeration, because his army was maintained over the next decade, but Capua would prove expensive to keep and eventually became a deadweight to protect. Needing quick sea links to Carthage,19 Bruttium at the southern tip of Italy would be a promising staging area for Hannibal in the next few years, but ultimately it never fulfilled its promise, partly because its soldiers, like those of other locals in South Italy, were reluctant to campaign far afield of their home territory. Even under Carthaginian leadership, they did not fight as well against Roman forces as did Hannibal’s veterans, who gradually diminished due to casualties.20

  HANNIBAL AS RELUCTANT OCCUPIER?

  After Cannae, Hannibal sent a victory delegation to Carthage. The delegation had mixed results. The spoils of battle were compelling, especially the two-hundred-plus gold rings of captured Roman equites magnified by the huge number of Roman deaths, but some in Carthage’s Gerousia ruling council challenged how many Roman allies had defected as a result of Cannae. Hannibal’s detractors back in Carthage, such as Hanno, also stated how costly “Hannibal’s War” was in terms of lives lost and depleted resources, ignoring how little Hannibal had depended on Carthage for anything since 219. Plus, some of Hannibal’s seasoned Ce
ltic warrior allies now felt no longer needed for invasion and lacked the booty of new Roman loot to keep them in the far South. They chafed to return to their clans and were allowed to go home, which weakened Hannibal’s military presence. The new South Italian soldiers from defecting cities were not their equal.

  Mostly because the battles of Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae had been lopsidedly decisive and Hannibal’s envoys could make a summarily strong case for Rome’s weakened military, some modest reinforcements joined Hannibal from Carthage in 215, first bringing 4,000 Numidian cavalry along with 40 elephants and some silver and provisions. That same year, Carthage planned to add reinforcements of 12,000 infantry, 1,500 cavalry, and 20 elephants, as well as a sea force of 60 warships. But Rome’s new campaigns in Spain against Carthage diverted this promised aid. Carthage also hoped to win back Sardinia, so other Punic resources were diverted there too. Thus, Hannibal had to forego badly needed reinforcements that would have made his occupation much less of a burden and his Italian campaign against Rome much easier.21 Only in 214 did Hannibal receive a few more reinforcements: troops, supplies, and war elephants landed at Locri from a Punic fleet under Bomilcar, whose naval role rarely did much good for Carthage in the extended war as Rome now controlled most of the western Mediterranean region.

  From 216 to 206, Hannibal had to walk a fine line between forcing the South Italians to deploy against Rome and respecting their independence, since he had made a case for restoring the liberties Rome had taken. The South Italians did not respect a distant Rome, but neither did they fully trust Hannibal circling in their backyard for years. Ultimately, Hannibal’s diplomatic policy did not work, especially backed by his nonindigenous occupation army, which could not forage and loot these mercurial quasi-allies. Hannibal had met his objectives for wreaking havoc on Rome’s military, expecting a conventional surrender that never came.22 Was he prepared to consolidate his allies with an army of occupation? Following the Fabian policy of nonengagement, the Romans waited to nip at his heels wherever he marched because he could not be putting out fires everywhere at once. Italy would soon become what one historian has aptly named Hannibal’s “shrinking prison of success.”23