Cannae was Hannibal’s pinnacle but, as Mark Healy notes, “paradoxically, the very success of Cannae was in some way his long and slow undoing”24 because the Romans finally learned the lesson of Fabius Maximus: do not fight Hannibal directly but let the circumstances of occupation wear him down. This may not yet have been obvious when Hannibal sat encamped on Mount Tifata overlooking Campania, just as the Samnites had done many years before. Hannibal knew he was being observed warily by three Roman forces that kept their distance: one southward at Suessula above Nola, where Claudius Marcellus guarded the access area east of Naples and possibly Naples as well25, another force on the northern edge of Campania at Teanum (Teano), led by none other than Fabius Maximus as consul, watching over approaches to the Via Appia and protecting the northern interior access route to Rome too; and the last, near Casilinum (modern Capua) on the Voltumus River, led by Tiberius Gracchus, only a few miles northwest of ancient Capua. A fourth Roman force would soon be stationed east in Apulia near Brundisium, under Marcus Valerius Messalla, to guard the loyal Roman allies there.26 Most of these troops had the dual purpose of keeping an eye on rebel Capua and containing Hannibal, keeping him from a possible march north toward Rome.
How long could Hannibal afford to sit it out? In Greece, having heard of Rome’s defeat at Cannae, King Philip V of Macedon agreed to an alliance with Carthage, and Hannibal had received his emissaries in his Mount Tifata camp. This was a positive development. Partly because of new high taxes demanded by Rome, Sardinia also revolted against it, a move bolstered by Carthage, and this made Hannibal look good as well. In the North, the Celtic Boii tribe would soon crush a Roman force under Postumus Albinus at Modena in early 215, reasserting its independence. This too was good news. When Hieron II died at ninety years old in 215, after he had aided Rome for decades, his grandson and successor, Hieronymus, led the city of Siracusa in Sicily away from Rome, temporarily undermining the Roman hold on the Mediterranean between Carthage and Italy.27
These events could have lulled Hannibal to ignore diplomacy as a tool, less familiar to him than the battle strategy he used so masterfully as a weapon. Although he was a superb commander of disparate peoples and as charismatic a leader as any general in history, Hannibal’s strong suit was not negotiation. The profound difference between the harshness of an aggressive war in an often-hostile battle environment and the need for more open communication and protracted negotiation with potential allies cannot be overstated.
Campania was hardly Rome, but it was a ripe Roman plum and close enough to Rome for Hannibal to savor, especially for its agricultural bounty from rich volcanic soils. A general who had faced challenges of feeding his invading army would look favorably on maintaining sway over Campania for as long as possible. But the tide would soon be turning and the successes short lived. The Romans cannily began to perceive that Hannibal could not easily conquer walled towns by siege, having no equipment to do so, and any fortified city allied with Rome possessing adequate freshwater access and a good hoard of food or located on a coast and supplied by sea was practically invulnerable. Even the small Greek city of Petelia on the Gulf of Taranto held out against a siege for eight months in 215. Although he tried three times, Hannibal was unsuccessful in taking Naples, which easily received goods by its excellent port, while the patrolling Roman fleet and Greek allies in Italy such as Rhegium controlled the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy. The Carthaginian fleet under Hasdrubal the Bald meant to reinforce the Sardinian revolt was driven by storm into the Balearic Islands, and the old Roman veteran Titus Manlius Torquatus crushed the Sardinian rebellion against Rome in 215 for a second time. He had already originally subdued it in 235 in between the First and Second Punic Wars. In addition, a Roman naval fleet of fifty ships under Marcus Valerius Laevinus at Brundisium in 215 discouraged any real Macedonian alliance in Italy with Hannibal.
SUCCESSES OF FABIAN STRATEGY, AVOIDING HANNIBAL IN DIRECT BATTLE
The wise delaying tactics of Fabius Maximus were working and beginning to wear down Hannibal’s veterans and allies. Did Hannibal wonder how and why the Romans had changed the rules of war—defeated decisively in the First Punic War until their surprise victory at the very end in 241 BCE, and then defeated decisively again between 218 and 216 at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae but still resistant? Did the superb tactician sense that the wheel of fortune that had stopped with him on top was now beginning its descent?
How much of Hannibal’s tactical experience would be wasted if no Roman would throw down the gauntlet of battle challenge or if Rome engaged in battle only with the armies of his Italian allies? Both Hannibal and the Romans ravaged South Italy as the theater of a strange war where the armies circled but hardly fought. Each side inflicted a scorched-earth policy on the neutral territories or punished the allies of the other, devastating the small farms and savaging the local agrarian economies as they seized the crops to feed their armies. If Hannibal ravaged farmlands allied with Rome, or if the Romans ravaged regions allied with Hannibal, this competition for basic food needs often sent the residents fleeing and left rich farm areas empty—a bleak situation from which an independent agricultural South Italy may have never quite recovered.28 Historians have estimated basic rations of Hannibal’s army during winter alone to be about six hundred grams of grain per day for each soldier.29 This bare minimum would contribute to long-term malnutrition if the army could not acquire more food. Long after the fact, the Roman statesman and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero relates an odd dream of Hannibal in his philosophical treatise De Divinatione that he says originated from Coelius, a student of Hannibal who had carefully read the contemporary Greek account of Silenos, Hannibal’s Greek “recorder.” In the dream that reputedly came to him after Saguntum, Hannibal was ordered by Jupiter to bring the war into Italy but given a divine guide who warned him not to look back. In the dream, he couldn’t resist looking back and saw a horrible, monstrous apparition, covered with snakes, following him into and through Italy with immense devastation as it overthrew every house and tree. But his divine dream counsel was not to look back wherever he marched, only to continue onward.30 It is not without irony that the dream imagery seems to resemble a trampling elephant shaking its trunk in its ravaging charge.
HANNIBAL’S SACRIFICE AT AVERNUS AND SOJOURN AT SALAPIA
Since Cannae, Rome had raised a total of eighteen legions and had a hundred thousand soldiers in the field, even excluding allies. Hannibal moved troops back and forth from his camp at Mount Tifata in Campania to his camp at Arpi on the other side of the Apennines, a maneuver he would repeat several times with the change of seasons.
Two unrelated events from 214 show a different side of the previously successful general, who may have begun to wonder about the future. The first happened on his march to the town of Cumae, which was the location of the oracle of the Sibyl of Cumae. According to legend, Hannibal made sacrifices and inquired about the future from the oracle of the Cumaean Sibyl at this time. If true, it gives insight into a man of the highest military ingenuity whose confidence may have been eroding.
The second brief narrative that surfaces among so much military history is Hannibal’s winter at Salapia, situated between Arpi and Cannae, where he is reported to have shared his bed with a local prostitute of note (or she shared hers with him). Both Pliny and Appian relate the story31 almost as a consoling event during his frustrated occupation. This tryst seems to have lasted all winter, and some have concluded that Hannibal fell in love with the prostitute. Because it is one of the rare texts about Hannibal having anything to do with a woman other than his wife, Imilce, back in Spain—whom he hadn’t seen for more than a decade—there are historians who have suggested that Hannibal was not given to womanizing but that instead the general’s appetites were moderate and under the same discipline as the rest of his nature.32
THE TAKING OF TARENTUM
Although fewer military opportunities came his way with the Romans’ Fabian strategy of avoiding co
nfrontation, Hannibal showed that he could profit by other means beyond the devious and flexible battle strategy he had mastered. The main southern port city of Tarentum fell to Hannibal by intrigue beginning in the winter of 213.33 Facing west on the great arch of the instep of Italy’s “foot” on the Gulf of Taranto. Tarentum was originally a well-placed Greek colony from Sparta established in the late eighth century BCE, named Taras after a myth hero. The original colony was very wealthy. Its prized location gave it an exceptional inner harbor inside a protected bay, one of the reasons Hannibal badly wanted it as a potential resupplying base for Carthaginian reinforcement.
By 264 BCE,34 the Romans had renamed this old colony Tarentum as a station along the Via Appia en route to Brundisium. With an island (Isola San Pietro) protecting its outer bay, Mare Grande, its old city and acropolis were on a peninsula guarding only one entry into the large inner bay harbor, the Mare Piccolo. All of this made it an exceptional catch for Hannibal if it could be turned away from Rome. The ancient walled city of Tarentum—which had also sided with Pyrrhus against Rome at the beginning of the century—was thus protected by water except for a fortified narrow isthmus. A frustrated Hannibal would have been unsuccessful in taking it by force.
Hannibal also needed Tarentum because Fabius and Rome had captured his eastern Apulian redoubt of Arpi. This limited the maneuverability Hannibal needed badly in the large peninsula of South Italy, since Brundisium to the east and Rhegium in the west remained stoutly Roman ports. Hannibal also hoped to join forces with Philip V of Macedon and needed a port to do so. Rome considered the Tarentines soft and ill-suited to military endeavors, partly because their climate was mild and their fishing culture relaxed. The marine ambience and hot sun reflecting off miles of sea seemingly combined to make everything happen slowly, giving them an appearance of indolence that contrasted with northern vigor in the eyes of Rome’s citizen militia farmers.
Rome had long suspected Tarentum of not being trustworthy and had demanded hostages in the capital; some had escaped and been cavalierly executed by a stern Rome as examples of perfidy, which turned Tarentine sentiment further against Rome. When Hannibal was back in the South and looking for ways to take the Roman-garrisoned city, thirteen young Tarentine aristocrats took matters into their own hands. Led by a young man named Philemenus, they pretended to go out on a hunt and left through a Roman-guarded city postern gate right before nightfall. When they neared Hannibal’s camp, his sentries caught them and brought them to Hannibal. Having complained about their treatment under Rome, including the execution of hostages, their story seems plausible. These young Tarentines would betray their city to Hannibal to be better treated. The stratagem appealed to Hannibal’s wiliness. Hannibal promised these Tarentines several vital concessions: his army would not set up a garrison inside the city, and he would not ask for any tribute from its citizens. Furthermore, there would be no looting by his army when Tarentum fell. Only the Romans in the city would be plundered or forced to pay tribute. But the real question Hannibal and the Tarentines faced was how to get Carthaginian forces past Roman guards.
As ringleader of the plot, Philemenus was also known in Tarentum to be a good hunter, so when he returned to the city early the next day after having spent much of the night in Hannibal’s camp, he took with him animals that Hannibal had given him to make his hunting foray appear successful. Philemenus arrived at the same postern gate from which he’d left, and the Roman sentries who knew him by sight from frequent passages thought nothing unusual.
The next phase of this stratagem required Hannibal to appear sick and laid up to the Romans, unable to go out from his camp for a while. But as the plan matured with details, Philemenus left Tarentum by the same postern gate on multiple occasions overnight and met secretly with Hannibal, returning each time with animals or meat that he appeared to have hunted. This mollified the Roman sentries, with whom he often shared the meat. Finally, when the pattern was so well established that the Roman sentries opened the postern gate upon hearing him whistle his return, the plot was set. By night, Hannibal stealthily moved ten thousand infantry, including two thousand Celts and a cavalry force, on a fast march about ten miles outside Tarentum. But he apparently split the force into two groups, approaching the small, fortified peninsula from opposite sides. A Numidian cavalry contingent of eighty horsemen was to scout out the intervening distance, pretending to be on a foraging raid if the Romans noticed them. But their orders were also to kill anyone who might have observed the troop movements.
Another Tarentine conspirator, Nico, waited by the city’s larger Teminitis gate. A fire signal announced the quiet approach of Hannibal’s two forces in the dead of the night near the wall, since timing was critical. As soon as Hannibal’s signal fires flared and were observed inside the city, Nico at his gate gave the same flare signal, as did Philemenus near his usual gate. The flares inside and outside the city were just as quickly extinguished before anyone else noticed. Nico’s small group of Tarentines suddenly forced its way into the eastern gate’s Teminitis barracks, killing all the sentries and opening this gate. Half of Hannibal’s designated troops quietly entered the city in organized haste, with Hannibal himself in the column. Then Philemenus arrived at his postern gate with about four men, likely a little earlier than usual before it started to become light. But his familiar voice and whistle told the Roman sentries all was well, and they opened the gate. Two of his companions carried an enormous boar. He must have dawdled a bit at the open gate, displaying the boar to the admiring sentry. As Livy recounts,35 while one Roman looked at his trophy boar, from the blind side, Philemenus skewered this sentry just as Hannibal’s other force of a thousand Africans arrived at the now-unguarded gate. His men killed any other sentries as the Carthaginians poured into the city from two sides. The Celts were split into three groups of about seven hundred men and reconnoitered the city with two Tarentine guides each, being ordered to secure the main streets and slay any Romans recognized by the guides, who also informed any Tarentine citizens awakened in the uproar and warned them to be cooperative and quiet.
The noise of combat in the city roused many, but confusion reigned. A Roman trumpet pealed in the theater, having been stolen by the conspirators and calling any Roman soldiers who rallied there into an ambush. The Roman commander escaped in a small rowboat to the well-fortified citadel guarding the water channel at the end of the peninsula between the large and small bays, locking himself in with the remaining few thousand soldiers who managed to escape the wholesale slaughter of Romans. When dawn arrived, the citizens saw slain Romans in the streets and Carthaginian and Celtic warriors and realized that Hannibal had taken the city. They quickly acquiesced except for any Roman allies, who were either imprisoned or slain or also escaped to the citadel.
That day when civic order was restored after the fighting ceased, Hannibal gathered together all the citizens and promised in amicable words that no harm would come to them. He also asked them to go home and inscribe the word “Tarentine” on their doors so that his men would instead plunder only Romans or their sympathizers. In this way, his men were released into the city and acquired significant Roman booty, while the Tarentines were spared as promised. Hannibal kept his word, and the transition was mostly peaceful.
One immediate drawback was that the Romans controlled the citadel, meaning they could be resupplied from the open sea by a relieving Roman fleet. Hannibal tried to attack the citadel but found it was nearly impregnable, somewhat isolated by a partial channel. Worse, the Tarentine fleet that he’d hoped to employ was also trapped inside the inner bay. In usual manner, Hannibal devised a way to get the ships out of the inner harbor without going by the threat of the Roman citadel. He had the citizens drag their ships overland on the isthmus by wheels or rollers attached to their undersides on vehicle yokes and brought them safely out to sea, where the outer harbor was accessible and now usable for Hannibal.36 He also had a channel dug deeper to fully isolate the citadel and reinforced it with a s
tockade to keep the Romans locked in. He also hoped to use the Tarentine fleet to blockade fresh supplies delivered to the citadel.37 By this clever ruse, Hannibal took a wealthy and great city with a good harbor and coastal access. Nonetheless, although Metapontum and a few other cities were soon taken by Hannibal, strengthening his position in South Italy, he had not succeeded in completely dislodging the Romans from Tarentum. They kept the citadel until the city was retaken by Rome in 209, again by betrayal.
Seventeen
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THE MARCH ON ROME
Two cities were now allied against Rome: Capua in Campania and Siracusa in Sicily. But Carthage was not able to reinforce and protect its allies in Italy or Sicily, both by lack of commitment and foresight but also because it no longer controlled the seas. Rome was stung by Capua’s defection to Hannibal after Cannae, but Capua was close enough for Rome to mobilize multiple armies against it until Rome finally recaptured it after a siege. Siracusa held out longer than expected in part because of the ingenuity of one man: Archimedes.
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