Not wanting to lose the element of surprise, before Hasdrubal discovered he was now facing a much larger army, worsening his chances considerably, Claudius Nero won the argument against his senior colleague. Claudius Nero’s speech before the battle and the oratio recta (straight talk) have been noted in Livy’s narrative of a general’s harangue before battle with rhetorical similarity to Thucydides, suggesting a deliberate literary narrative following precedents.24 Claudius Nero had encouraged his men before they left Venusia to think of themselves as the small weight added to the scale to tip it to victory; even an incremental change such as theirs would be decisive. In addition to the initial element of surprise, their presence alone would soon unsettle Hasdrubal. On the night before battle, Claudius Nero emphasized that maintaining a brisk marching pace—in this case more than halfway up Italy—would make their strategy successful; any delay would reduce it to a reckless adventure. Ignorance worked in their favor as long as Hannibal down south thought nothing amiss. Delaying battle against Hasdrubal would give more time to both the Barcid brothers, eliminating their dual advantage: it would betray the Roman camp down south to Hannibal as having fewer troops on hand and take away any surprise benefit of larger troops assembled here against Hasdrubal.
Morning broke with the Roman army mobilizing a short distance away. Hasdrubal’s camp was possibly only seven hundred meters from the Roman camp. In a famous story related by Livy,25 Hasdrubal, with a small cavalry escort, cannily observed some old shields facing him along with some emaciated horses. Both seemed unusual to him, and he had not seen them before. Wondering if the army facing him had been reinforced, a canny deduction, he sent out his scouts to reconnoiter a long way around the Roman camp. But they reported back that the camp was the same size, with no new tents. Uneasy at the mixed report of what seemed possibly contradictory, the experienced general looked for other evidence as he had his men pull back from their camp, calling off the immediate battle. Hasdrubal soon found his answer when a report told what the Roman trumpets blared: one trumpet sounded in the praetor Licinius’ camp but two trumpets sounded in what was supposed to be only the consul Livius Salinator’s camp. The trumpet peals must have been different to distinguish a praetor from a consul, and Hasdrubal was seasoned enough to know the difference. This revealed what he possibly suspected: that two consuls were now present, where only one had been the day before. Many have said this kind of detail is too clear to be fiction, but Hasdrubal now had a conundrum to unravel with multiple possible bad implications. Could he fight a battle facing a now-compounded Roman force, leaving him even more outnumbered? Had the new consular army facing him won against his brother Hannibal? Was that why they could mobilize to meet him? Had he come to Italy too late? Had his message to his brother been intercepted? Whatever the answer, it wasn’t good and wasn’t in his favor. Hasdrubal avoided battle that day and began to retreat to the southwest, quickly making distance away from Sena until he could come up with the best strategy. Some commentators think that Hasdrubal’s quick retreat to the Metaurus panicked his army and turned their resolve to fight into fear, the worst possible scenario for planning a battle.26 Everything fell apart from that point on.
Hasdrubal had by now hired or acquired some local guides to help him avoid the coastal route he had taken to Senal and began to march mostly west that day. Maps of the region, including satellite maps, show many twisting oxbows of the Metaurus River about ten miles upstream from the coast. And, at that time, it was heavily wooded in many places. Beginning above present-day Calcinelli on the north bank of the Metaurus, many of these old oxbows are steeply sided and joined on both sides by many stream gullies off the surrounding plateau.27 The guides were not exactly trustworthy, however, and if they had promised to lead him to safety or over the river at a major fording place, they did not keep their word. It is even possible they had some allegiance to Rome and were hoping to lead Hasdrubal into a tight spot before disappearing.
The Romans were in hot pursuit, and night brought the darkness Hasdrubal hoped would cover his next move. It might have given him an option to escape into the forested hills, where he could hide, or he might have intended to follow the general course of the Metaurus deep into its Apennine source where he could cross the mountains, but we cannot easily reconstruct his reasons.28 In any case, the Romans were too close for Hannibal’s brother to escape without detection.
Hasdrubal was possibly unnerved by the prospects of what had happened to his brother Hannibal, who had not met up with him while an enemy army had met him instead. His army was in flight mode, and this signaled a bad portent to his allied Celts and his guides. The retreat backfired when his two guides disappeared during the night, likely not wanting to be caught with his army. Hasdrubal was now forced to follow the river course with its channel cut into the plateau, his only topographical clue of direction in the dark. Caught in the bends of the river valley, Hasdrubal may have been looking for a fording place in the river29 where he could cross with his army to relative safety at some point, but without the guides, his army became lost in the steep bends, enabling the Romans to catch up easily by morning. Livy notes the “twists and turns of the tortuous river,”30 suggesting that Hasdrubal’s retreat was now deep into the old Metaurus oxbows. Many of his Celts had also either scattered, abandoning the rest of the marching army somewhere along the way, or had made camp where Hasdrubal had initially planned to rest until he found his army too closely pursued. The Celts may have stopped to sleep, aligned in their tribal groups—reverting to old loyalties when Hasdrubal’s infrastructure began collapsing—although they had also consumed enough wine to be in a stupor.31 Many knots of Celts possibly slept along high gullies or up streams they had followed. Hasdrubal forged on in the dark with the rest of his army. The Romans intercepted Hasdrubal partly because their scouts were following an army rather than a river, and the Romans could have avoided the oxbows by traveling above along the plateau away from the bends, knowing where the oxbows would come back if they had proper local guides. Many of the Roman troops could have come straight across from Sena, halving the distance once advance scouts who observed from safe distances signaled Hasdrubal’s troop movement directions.
That next morning—ironically, about the midsummer solstice, possibly even the same day Hannibal had won at Trasimene a decade earlier—a weary Hasdrubal heard and saw he was trapped. He had to face a Roman army bristling and ready for battle. He may or may not have made his way out of all the oxbows, but his back was to the steep hillside in the Metaurus River Valley. He had no choice but to do battle. He tried to assemble his army in order in the tight space, setting his Spanish forces on his right behind his fifteen elephants at the far edge, with his remaining Celts on his left but uphill.
Hasdrubal knew the Romans would find it difficult fighting uphill and that his doughty Spanish forces on lower ground would face the brunt of the battle. Livius Salinator’s army faced Hasdrubal’s Spanish, who fought bravely and gave no quarter, although outnumbered. Porcius Licinius faced Hasdrubal’s center with his army. At first, the battle was fairly even because Hasdrubal used his remaining Celts in the steep terrain to his advantage to attempt offsetting the numerical discrepancy—an echo of his brother’s tactics. But having no time to escape, Hasdrubal also had no hidden ambushes for the Romans as Hannibal had often set up.
The Punic war elephants were mostly useless and unmanageable, charging pell-mell into the tight space, causing as much havoc to Carthaginians as Romans. Six elephants were killed outright—some slain in battle with their drivers or miserably by their drivers, who pounded spikes with mallets into the base of their skulls when they attacked their own forces—and at least four elephants crashed right through all the Roman lines, wandering aimlessly in the countryside until captured later. The elephants were either abandoned by their drivers or some drivers were picked off along the way through the Roman lines.32 War elephants needed open ground to build up any momentum in charging and were not at all effective i
n a steep river valley.
Claudius Nero soon realized he would not prevail uphill against the Celts and could not come around their flank on the right because of the steep topography, so he changed his tactics by improvising brilliantly. He pulled back a considerable number of his rear troops, leaving the rest engaged against the Celts, and moved the smaller force around behind Livius Salinator’s fighting line all the way to the far left, where the ground was flatter and more open. Now Hasdrubal’s veteran Spanish troops were exposed in a dual attack on their rear from Claudius Nero while still fighting Livius Salinator’s army on their front. Claudius Nero’s maneuver proved to be the deciding factor at Metaurus, as the Spaniards, however resolute, along with Hasdrubal himself, were mowed down from both sides—“cut to pieces,” as Polybius says.33 The Celts gave way to the relentless onslaught once the Spanish were decimated, or even before, when they saw the battle turning, some fleeing. Hasdrubal now knew the battle was lost and threw himself courageously and somewhat suicidally into the thickest fighting where he fell, choosing to die honorably rather than be taken prisoner and paraded through Rome in shackles.
The Romans ransacked the Carthaginian camp, killing the sleeping Celts, who could barely move. Gathering up loot and as many of the captured enemy who had survived or surrendered, the Romans were elated at their success—perhaps the first major victory in Italy. Hasdrubal, a once mighty but now slain Barcid, was likely soon decapitated to relieve years of Roman frustration. Once the knowledge of victory soaked into the minds and emotions of the resting Roman soldiers, the news bolted like lightning to Rome along the Via Flaminia. Although some rumor possibly trickled in an advance wave, the city quickly knew by the sight of the joy and confidence on the faces and demeanor of the victory envoy of cavalry officers riding thunderously into the city and straight to the Senate. Rome declared the victory of Metaurus a temporary national holiday, and rejoicing was heard everywhere by an astonished people rushing along the streets to the heart of the city to celebrate ridding themselves of one of the shadows looming over their shoulders. Although the long war was far from over, the sun must have seemed to shine brighter that day than most could remember in Rome.
For his part, Claudius Nero turned quickly southward with his tired army back to Venusia, marching as fast as possible—it all happened in about two weeks—before Hannibal had any news of the defeat and death of his brother. Unless the military intelligence in the ancient world had a superb chain of human links and spies on horseback, two weeks would be a fair time for word to travel on foot three hundred miles, especially if the Romans were attempting to keep the news from Hannibal. Perhaps it is not odd given the patrician politics of Rome that the bold consul Claudius Nero was not given the victory he mostly earned; instead, the credit went to his coconsul Livius Salinator, who had commanded a larger force. At this time, the Claudii were greatly overshadowed by the Aemilii, Fabii, Cornelii, and other families. If Claudius Nero felt robbed, we will likely never know, although he served out the war honorably but quietly mostly in the backwaters.34 On the other hand, because he did his duty by returning quickly to the field in Lucania, he apparently did not accompany Livius Salinator back to Rome, where the senior consul received the hero’s welcome.
More dramatic, the number of Carthaginian dead at Metaurus is likely best summed up by Polybius as only ten thousand Carthaginians and Celts (in contrast to Livy),35 although the “Carthaginians” included Spanish as well as African troops.36 Some important captured Carthaginian officers who had survived were held for ransom. After this defeat, the Celts were almost done as an ally of Carthage. The Romans lost only two thousand in the battle, and Metaurus was the most lopsided battle since Cannae but with a dramatic reversal of fortune. Metaurus became the turning point of the war both in confidence for war-hardened Rome and in undermining whatever success Hannibal had achieved in his string of incredible victories. This was a squandering of capital that Hannibal had accumulated as a fearsome juggernaut. The double threat Barcid invasion of Italy feared for so long was finally answered.
Partly because he was still hemmed in by Roman armies and because his own intelligence network had failed for resources and dwindling revenue, Hannibal found out after Rome did about the Carthaginian disaster at the Metaurus. But Claudius Nero had a trophy Livius Salinator did not, even though his colleague had the victory. If the story is true, Hannibal was in his tent in his camp, possibly wondering where his brother was, when a hard-riding Roman cavalry envoy was allowed under diplomatic truce into the camp. The Roman horseman flung a sack into his tent, and the startled Hannibal peered inside to see his brother’s gory head. Hannibal responded: “There lies the fate of Carthage.”
Twenty-one
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ROMAN TRIUMPH, ITALY TO SPAIN
After Metaurus, Rome breathed a considerable sigh of relief, and the Senate decreed three days of grateful prayer. From a distance at Venusia, Claudius Nero had shown Hannibal some of his captured African soldiers now in chains. If the sight shocked him, Hannibal would not have given the Romans any satisfaction. Hannibal soon left for Bruttium, where no Roman armies went after him, but armies on several sides mostly penned him in. For the moment, Hannibal had only two small ports left: Croton in the west side of the Gulf of Taranto (he evacuated his garrison from Metapontum), on the “ball of the instep foot” of Italy; and Locri on the Ionian coast farther south across the mountains on the opposite side of Rhegium, practically at Italy’s “toe.” But Hannibal would lose Locri to Scipio with help from the city of Rhegium in 205, when Scipio crossed over from Sicily. So Hannibal’s territory and influence continued to wane as Roman fortunes waxed. As one scholar observes: “Ultimately the Romans prevailed on the battlefield because, however incompetent and divided the leadership was at times, military service formed a part of every aspiring citizen’s upbringing.”1
HANNIBAL AT LACINIUM AND HIS BRONZE PLAQUE
Around this time that Rome left Hannibal alone at the foot of Italy during 206–205, and he entered a lull without fighting anywhere—there were few territories and allies to defend anyway—he must have had enough time on his hands to be somewhat reflective. Since no armies came after him, maintaining their distance, did Hannibal wonder if Rome now chose to consider him little of a threat?
Apparently for the first time, Hannibal did something difficult to read as having any tactical or strategic value. He erected a bronze plaque in the Temple of Juno at Cape Lacinium, now long since gone along with most of this temple at what is now called Capo delle Colonna but witnessed by Polybius and others. As the earlier hybrid Phoenician-Etruscan gold tablets of Pyrgi indicate,2 Hannibal’s Phoenician ancestors had considered Juno (or Uni) to be an Italian version of their goddess Astarte—hence some of the myth symbolism of the Roman poet Virgil for the reciprocal relationship between Juno and Queen Dido in the Aeneid—so this was an apropos dedication from a Carthaginian in a Juno temple.3 The full bilingual Punic and Greek text of Hannibal’s plaque is unknown, but if Livy is right, it recorded some of Hannibal’s achievements as his self-reflexive res gestae, or “things accomplished.”4 Polybius, who saw it, has quoted only the numerical troop strengths listed there by Hannibal,5 including from his long march of 218.
Several have called the bronze tablet a memorial to a huge ambition6 that, in retrospect, went mostly unfulfilled. Others wisely noted Livy’s text deliberately culminating his book 28 about this bronze tablet as a literary bridge that “indicates the end of Hannibal’s successes in Italy, separating the past, which belonged to Hannibal, from the future, which will be Scipio’s.”7 Regardless of Livy’s rhetorical intent in his narrative, he must not be far off if Hannibal is now sufficiently contemplative about his Italian sojourn of fifteen years, wanting to leave some document of his impact in a mostly hostile land that would love to erase all traces. If this is an accurate assessment of Hannibal, he must have been pensive after Hasdrubal’s recent defeat and death and his own confinement to Bruttium, knowing that
Carthage was unable and unlikely to send him any more significant help.
THE BATTLE OF ILIPA AND CARTHAGE ABANDONS SPAIN
Spain remained a war theater into 206, as Carthage empowered Mago Barca, Hannibal’s youngest brother general, and Hasdrubal Gisco to fight on in the South, west of Cartagena. Near present-day Seville on the Guadalquivir River, about 275 miles due west of Cartagena in southern Spain and only sixty miles from the southern coast of Spain, lay the Roman town of Ilipa, showing how deeply Romans had penetrated into what was only recently the stronghold of a thoroughly Punic Spain.
Scipio set up camp only to be attacked by dual cavalry forces commanded by Mago and Massinissa the Numidian prince. Scipio had been prepared for this and had massed his own cavalry behind a hill from where they swooped in and put the Punic cavalry to flight. The Roman and Carthaginian armies—about 50,000 infantry and 4,500 cavalry for the Carthaginians, if Livy is right,8 nearly equal in infantry at 45,000 and equal in cavalry, according to Polybius9—soon gathered in force and lined up for battle without full engagement, only to do reconnaissance of each other with a few preliminary skirmishes of light infantry and cavalry for sensing strengths and weaknesses for several days. Hasdrubal Gisco commanded the Carthaginians, and Scipio observed his deployment tactics, including that the Carthaginians were slow to assemble for potential battle in the mornings. He had also observed that Hasdrubal placed his heavy Libyan infantry in the center of his battle formation, with his elephants on the two flanks. Scipio now put in place a devious plan that would have impressed even Hannibal.10
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