17. Mark Healy, Cannae 216 BC: Hannibal Smashes Rome’s Army (Oxford: Osprey, 1994), 52.
18. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 79.4–5.
19. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 117.
20. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 79.1–12.
21. Atkins, 270.
22. Shean, “Hannibal’s Mules,” 159–87.
23. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 2.
24. Ibid.
25. Justin Denholm and Patrick Hunt, “Hannibal’s Ophthalmia” (unsubmitted article manuscript under peer review in various medical journals, 2014). Denholm is a medical doctor in Australia with the Victorian Infectious Disease Service, Royal Melbourne Hospital and University of Melbourne. The authors suggest any number of possible infections from bacterial or viral agents, including but not limited to conjunctivitis, each of which is known to cause blindness. “Hippocrates tells us ophthalmia is more common in spring, at the time when Hannibal went through the marshes; Herodotus (VII.229ff.) reports two Spartans afflicted before the battle at Thermopylae.”
26. Thomas W. Africa, “The One-Eyed Man Against Rome: an Exercise in Euhemerism,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 19, no. 5 (1970): 528–38.
27. Robert Garland, Hannibal, Ancients in Action Series (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010), 75.
28. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 8, 5.11.
29. De Beer, 96.
30. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 79; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 2.
31. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 184.
32. There is considerable debate over Hannibal’s route after the Arno. On the one hand, if Hannibal were trying to avoid meeting Flaminius and his army, he could have followed the abundantly fertile plains of the Val di Pesa and Val d’Elsa route (although this would have been the easier, expected route) from modern Scandicci to Poggibonsi and Siena west of Arezzo, and then turned east toward modern Sinalunga and the Valdichiana. Or, after Faesulae, he could have followed south from modern Bagno a Ripoli to San Donati in Collina or the curving Arno Valley southeast from Pontassieve through to Figline Valdarno, Montevarchi, Pergine Valdarno, and so on (mostly parallel to the modern A1 autostrada after Bagno a Ripoli) to the Valdichiana—although it too had a fair share of marshes that weren’t drained until the nineteenth century.
The Val di Pesa and Val d’Elsa routes were laden with rich farmland, and he could have leisurely bypassed south of Arretium altogether without any need to engage Flaminius. On the other hand, the Arno Valley route was not at all the expected passage due to its spring flooding, but it would have led Hannibal directly to Arretium unless he marched covertly at the end and crossed southwest from near modern Bucine to Rapolano Terme around the Monte San Savino Hills. Placed strategically at Arretium, Flaminius could have either gone west to meet Hannibal crossing the Etrurian plains after the Apennines or north to aid Servilius Geminus at Ariminum if Hannibal had marched east instead along the Po Valley to the Adriatic coast. The author notes that the year 2013 was a wet year for much of the Arno reaches between Florence and Arezzo, and many of the river’s channels and oxbows flooded considerably, even though civil engineering draining projects throughout the last several centuries has mitigated much of the former flooding.
33. Michael P. Fronda. Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy During the Second Punic War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14.
34. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 60.
THIRTEEN: TRASIMENE
1. Bettina Diana, “Annibale e il Passagio degli Apennini,” Aevum 61 (1987): 108–12.
2. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 82.1–3.
3. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 118.
4. Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 52.
5. Lancel, Hannibal, 93.
6. Timothy P. Wiseman, New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C. to A.D. 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); also see Andrew W. Lintott, “Novi Homines,” Classical Review 24, no. 2 (1974): 261–63.
7. Lily Ross Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies: From the Hannibalic War to the Dictatorship of Caesar, Jerome Lectures, 8th series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1966); also see (although it concentrates on the first century BCE) Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
8. Andrew W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–4. At the outset, Lintott connects Polybius’ association of Rome’s ultimate “phenomenal military success with the excellence of her constitution” as well as the “constitutional innovations that the [Second Punic] war brought about” and unwritten tradition and precedent.
9. A censor was a Roman officer in charge of the census and some financial duties as well as oversight of public morality.
10. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 21, 62.
11. Ibid.
12. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 185. Without necessarily agreeing, Goldsworthy notes the “tradition which places the sole blame for the disaster on the commander.”
13. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 80.3–4.
14. Garland, Hannibal, 75.
15. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 4.
16. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 83.3–4.
17. Ovid, Fasti, bk. 6, 767–68. Lancel, Hannibal, 93, keeps to June 21, although, before Julian calendar reform, this actual day might have been in May, not the summer solstice, according to Briscoe, “Second Punic War,” 49.
18. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 187, notes, however, that advancing Roman armies able to see their enemy—in this case, the only visible contingent of African and Spanish heavy infantry at the end of the valley—rarely “reconnoiter” just before battle.
19. Peddie, Hannibal’s War, 69.
20. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 119.
21. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 84.4–5.
22. Ibid.
23. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 119.
24. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 84.9–10. Polybius also stated that the Roman soldiers, seeing the merciless death all around, also begged their own comrades to dispatch them, no doubt in fear of Hannibal’s army and knowing Celtic customs of decapitation.
25. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 6.1.
26. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 84.6.
27. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 6.1–2.
28. Ibid, 6.4–6.
29. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 64.
30. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 6. The 75 percent casualty rate is correct only if I am accurately extrapolating the thirty thousand dead and captured alongside the ten thousand escapees.
31. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 118.
32. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 85.5; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 7.
33. Briscoe, “Second Punic War,” 49.
34. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 65.
35. Sabin, “Face of Roman Battle,” 4, notes that a 14 percent casualty rate for the loser is more in keeping with earlier classical Greek hoplite defeats but that a casualty/capture rate of more than 50 percent is not unusual for Roman infantry battles. But the Trasimene Roman casualty figures of up to 75 percent—and 100 percent of the following cavalry encounter—are simply catastrophic. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 65, claims that Hannibal’s army at Trasimene was around sixty thousand, including allies.
36. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 7.
37. Ibid.
FOURTEEN: FABIUS MAXIMUS AND ESCAPE
1. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 67.
2. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 191.
3. Garland, Hannibal, 78.
4. Ibid.
5. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 90.4–6.
6. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty, 117.
7. B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Classic Book on Military Strategy, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Meridian, 1991), 26–27.
8. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 89.9.
9. Walter Scheidel, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, I: The Free Population,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 1–26, esp. 4. Noting problems with demograp
hic data, Scheidel qualifies his quantitative estimates with several caveats and reservations about his and others’ extrapolations while showing the harmony with Polybian accounts; also see D. W. Baronowski, “Roman Military Forces in 225 BC (Polybius 2.23–24),” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 42 (1993): 183–202. Walter Scheidel also notes Italian historian Elio Lo Cascio’s contribution to this demographic problem, “Recruitment and the Size of the Roman Population from the Third to First Century BCE,” in Debating Roman Demography, ed. Walter Scheidel (Leiden, Neth.: E. J. Brill, 2001), 111–38.
10. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 90.11ff.
11. Fronda, “Hannibal: Tactics, Strategy, and Geostrategy,” 250.
12. Rawlings, “War in Italy, 218–203,” 305.
13. Paul Erdkamp, “Manpower and Food Supply in the First and Second Punic Wars,” chap. 4 in A Companion to the Punic Wars, edited by Dexter Hoyos (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 68–69.
14. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 21, 23.4.
15. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 127.
16. “Casilinum,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World (Brill’s New Pauly), ed. H. Cancik, H. Schneider, and M. Landfester (Leiden, Neth: E. J. Brill, 2012); cross-referenced to Livy, History of Rome, bk. 23, 17.
17. Peddie, Hannibal’s War, 83.
18. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 93.2.
19. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 17.
20. Ibid., 18; Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 71.
21. Lancel, Hannibal, 100, suggests that Hannibal had also previously tried this stratagem successfully in the Alps against the Celts, possibly after one of the mountain ambushes.
22. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 94.4–5.
23. Bradford, Hannibal, 99.
24. Kluth, Hannibal and Me, 149.
25. Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage, 41.
FIFTEEN: CANNAE
1. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 113.5.
2. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 41.
3. Gregory Daly, Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second Punic War (London: Routledge, 2002), 16.
4. Back in Rome in 219, Paullus was said to have not shared the spoils equally, and although charges were brought against him, along with his fellow leader Marcus Livius Salinator, Aemilius Paullus was acquitted (Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 35).
5. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 198–99.
6. Lancel, Hannibal, 103.
7. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 199.
8. Lancel, Hannibal, 103, quoting Livy’s vilification, non humilis solum, sed etiam sordido loco ortus, or “not only humble but also foul and impure.”
9. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 39.
10. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 110.3, 116.13.
11. Erdkamp, “Manpower and Food Supply,” 69.
12. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 108.3–109.13; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 39. Livy places the essence of this exhortation not in the mouth of Paullus to his men, like Polybius does, but in the mouth of Fabius Maximus to Paullus back in Rome.
13. As related by Bradford, Hannibal, 115.
14. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 43.
15. Silius Italicus asserts it in his epic poem Punica, vol. 1, trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Loeb Classical Library, 1961), bk. 8, 663–64 and bk. 9, 495, as well as in his notes, 440.
16. Lancel, Hannibal, 105.
17. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 110.2.
18. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 200.
19. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 110.3.
20. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 77ff.
21. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 113.3.
22. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 205.
23. This figure does not include the ten thousand soldiers who were guarding the Roman camp and therefore were out of the battle.
24. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 46, says Maharbal, but Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 114.7, says that Hanno commanded the Numidian cavalry.
25. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 207.
26. Ibid., 208.
27. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 47.
28. Fernando Quesada Sanz, pers. comm., February 21, 2011. Also see Sanz, “Patterns of Interaction: ‘Celtic’ and ‘Iberian’ Weapons in Iron Age Spain,” in Celtic Connections: Papers of the Tenth International Congress of Celtic Studies, Edinburgh, 1995, vol. 2, Archaeology, Numismatics, Historical Linguistics, ed. W. Gillies and D. W. Harding (Edinburgh, Scot.: International Congress of Celtic Studies, 2006), 56–78. Quesada Sanz noted the “falcata was accepted as the ‘national’ weapon of the Iberians,” 58. Note in his fig 2. the high concentration of falcata finds distribution in Andalucia and around Cartagena, where the Carthaginians were concentrated.
29. Polybius, Histories, trans. Paton, bk. 3, 114.3.
30. Ibid., 115.3.
31. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 141.
32. Dexter Hoyos, “The Age of Overseas Expansion,” in A Companion to the Roman Army, ed. Paul Erdkamp (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 63–80. Hoyos discusses Cannae especially in 66–69 and notes the old phalanx on 68.
33. William Desmond, “Lessons of Fear: A Reading of Thucydides,” Classical Philology 101, no. 4 (2006): 359–79; speaking in general of a climate of fear as a political current but also in specifics, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. 3, 82.2, where “war is a violent master (or teacher).”
34. Daly, Cannae, 167–68.
35. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 83.
36. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 91.
37. The presence and impact of the falcata at Cannae is still debated. Iberian Iron Age weapons expert Fernando Quesada Sanz (pers. comm.) at the Universidad Autonóma de Madrid notes that the falcata was not any more important at Cannae than other weapons were, also publishing on this elsewhere in addition to the above note (for instance, Fernando Quesada Sanz, Arma y Símbolo: la Falcata Iberica, Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, Diputación de Alicante, 1992). Also see John Gibson Warry, Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors, and Warfare in the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome (London: Salamander Books, 1993), 103, 218. A modern weapons maker from Los Angeles, Dave Baker, has reconstructed in his studio foundry the Iberian falcata that some scholars maintain (for example, Lancel, Hannibal, 36, 107; Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 22–25) was used at Cannae. I have held and swung one of these vicious blades and have seen it chop through entire pig necks and watched the flesh fly off—easily cleaved and flensed because the incredibly sharp piercing blade of Spanish steel flares out behind a center of gravity that makes its lethal force even greater as its drops. I shudder to think of it at Cannae in experienced hands if it was used at all there. It might be interesting to note a ceramic relief of a falcata-like blade from the third century BCE on an underground tomb pier in Cerveteri’s Etruscan Necropolis, Tomb of the Shields.
38. Daly, Cannae, 167; he also mentions that this could equally exhaust the heavy infantry Libyans on the other side.
39. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 117.6, says 4,000 Celts, 1,500 Spaniards and Africans, and 200 cavalry; Lancel, 2000, 108. I might be tempted to side with Polybius here because Livy quotes the same number of Carthaginians (55,000) to perish later at Metaurus, and he may have tried to create parity for justification of a Roman triumph equal to the Cannae loss.
40. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 49. He numbers as Roman prisoners the 10,000 guarding the larger camp who had been kept out of battle, the 7,000 who had fled to the smaller camp only to be captured, and the 2,000 who had fled and sought refuge in the fortified village of Cannae itself and were taken prisoner there.
41. Patrick Hunt, When Empires Clash: Twelve Great Battles in Antiquity, 88.
42. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 160.
43. Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 69, also notes how much Polybius needed to preserve the honor of the Aemilii family name, his ultimate sponsors.
44. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 51.6ff.
45. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 215.
46. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 51.2.
47. Bernard Montgomery (Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery, Victor of El Alamein), A History of Warfare (Cleveland: World, 1968), among them.
48. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 88, referring to Livy, History of Rome, bk. 23, 14.7, and bk. 24, 2.8, respectively.
49. O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae, 174.
50. Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage, 46, suggests that Hannibal could have drawn different conclusions from Pyrrhus’ example, such as the need to fight in Italy and remain there, and additionally that Rome might capitulate if none came to its aid; also see Kluth, Hannibal and Me, 123.
51. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 117.4.
SIXTEEN: THE CAMPAIGN FOR SOUTH ITALY
1. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 118.5.
2. Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 94.
3. Lancel, Hannibal, 110.
4. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 61.
5. Elena Isayev, “Identity and Culture,” chap. 2 in “Inside Ancient Lukania, Dialogues in History and Archaeology,” supp. 90, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2007: 25–26.
6. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 58.6–7.
7. Bradford, Hannibal, 129. While seemingly desperate, this type of recruitment has been a not-infrequent conscription method in history, especially with people convicted of minor crimes but unable to secure freedom, partly due to poverty, and Rome needed able bodies more than moral right.
8. O’Connor Morris, Hannibal, 194–95.
9. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 5.
10. Jean-Michel David, The Roman Conquest of Italy, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 61.
11. Lancel, Hannibal, 113.
12. Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 87.
13. Cassius, fragment 57.30; Appian, Punica, 63; Valerius, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium, 9.6.
14. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 23, 15.
15. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 222.
16. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 118.10.
17. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, 16.
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