Hannibal

by Patrick N Hunt

  18. Livy, History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, bk. 23, 45.3–4, says of the Punic army, “[They] have lost their sap in luxury and Campanian vice—worn out by a winter of drinking and whoring and every other excess . . . melted away is that strength of limb and staunchness of heart that brought them over the Alps and Pyrenees. Those were men, these but their relics and shadows . . . in Capua was put out the name of their valour, their discipline, their former fame, their hope of things to come.”

  19. Lancel, Hannibal, 116.

  20. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 225–26.

  21. Lancel, Hannibal, 112–13.

  22. Bradford, Hannibal, 124–25.

  23. Kluth, Hannibal and Me, 174.

  24. Healy, Cannae 216 BC, 87.

  25. Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 10.1.

  26. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 23, 32.

  27. Lorena Jannelli and Fausto Longo, eds., The Greeks in Sicily (San Giovanni Lupatoto, It.: Arsenale Editrice, 2004), 61; Lancel, Hannibal, 118.

  28. This is interesting because Bradford, Hannibal, 136, makes the case that the changing landscape of individual farm owners in South Italy—whose livelihood was destroyed in the Second Punic War, leaving them as spoils of war for the ager publicus—led to a land policy that may have paved the way for subsequent vast latifundia estates in later years in Magna Graecia. Some historians have challenged aspects of this assumption. These latifundia also drew a despairing comment from Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 18, 35, in the first century CE: that what had been the backbone of an army made up of independent farmers in the Republic working the land had reverted in his day to the work of slaves. “[T]he latifundial,” he claims, “destroyed Italy.”

  Also see Christopher Francese, Ancient Rome in So Many Words (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2007), 79, on fundus. This is also intriguing because even today, Apulia is by far the largest producer of grapes in Italy on huge agribusiness estates. But new studies argue against this large devastation of Apulia and nearby regional loss of individual farmers: see Nathan Rosenstein, “Italy: Economy and Demography After Hannibal’s War,” chap. 23 in A Companion to the Punic Wars, ed. Dexter Hoyos (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 412–29, esp. 416–19.

  29. Erdkamp, Hunger and the Sword, 161.

  30. Cicero, De Divinatione (On Divination), bk. 1, 24.49, trans. W. A. Falconer, repr. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1996), 277–78.

  31. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 3, 103; Appian, The Hannibalic War, bk. 7, 43, in History of Rome.

  32. Lancel, Hannibal, 124; Gabriel, Hannibal, 14.

  33. Polybius, Histories, bk. 8, 24–34.

  34. Timothy W. Potter, Roman Italy: Exploring the Roman World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 127–30; Patrick Hunt, “Via Appia,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. Roger S. Bagnall et al. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

  35. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 9.

  36. Lancel, Hannibal, 129, aptly suggests it was the old Taranto avenue now called Corso Due Mari; also see Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 11. This avenue is also now the border of the new island where the original peninsula has been divided with a more recent late-nineteenth-century north-south channel, connected by the Ponte Girevole. The Aragonese Castello di Taranto on the peninsular-island side immediately west of the newer channel is too far east from the original natural channel to be in the same location as the old acropolis of Taras and the Roman citadel farther to the west that guarded the natural waterway.

  37. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 11.

  SEVENTEEN: THE MARCH ON ROME

  1. Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 9.4. Here Plutarch says he quotes Poseidonius.

  2. Ibid., 13.2. The most thorough account and analysis of this is O’Connell, Ghosts of Cannae.

  3. A team led by 1978 Nobel laureate physicist Arno Penzias, mathematician and computer scientist Rob Cook, and this author has reconstructed some of this defense of Siracusa by Archimedes, beginning in 2009 and with collaborative on-site research in Siracusa since 2012. Cook, incidentally, a pioneer at Pixar, was a cowinner of the 2001 Academy Award for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering.

  4. Polybius, Histories, bk. 8, 5–6. This passage provides details about Siracusa defended by Archimedes by various war mechanisms. Among others, he names an “iron hand” attached to a chain, capsizing Roman ships when it was dropped after raising them vertically. Polybius also describes unknown war machines of Archimedes as “small scorpions.”

  5. Plutarch, Marcellus, 17.1.

  6. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 31.

  7. Nigel Bagnall, The Punic Wars: Rome, Carthage, and the Struggle for the Mediterranean (London: Macmillan, 2005), vii; Lancel, Hannibal, 133.

  8. Chester G. Starr, A History of the Ancient World, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 486; Starr also notes that the year 212 was the “high point of Roman drafts.”

  9. Michael P. Fronda, “Hegemony and Rivalry: The Revolt of Capua Revisited,” Phoenix 61, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 83–108.

  10. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 7; Lancel, Hannibal, 130.

  11. Gregory K. Golden, “Emergency Measures: Crisis and Response in the Roman Republic (From the Gallic Sack to the Tumultus of 43 BC)” (PhD diss., Classics, Rutgers University, 2008), 163.

  12. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 9.

  13. Erdkamp, Hunger and the Sword, 178.

  14. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 10.

  15. Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, bk. 3, 20.

  16. Polybius, Histories, bk. 9, 7.3.

  17. Bagnall, Punic Wars, 259.

  18. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27; Scipio in Spain, 16.

  19. Caven, Punic Wars, 201.

  20. Dexter Hoyos, The Carthaginians (New York: Routledge, 2010), 67.

  21. Barry Strauss, Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 7–8.

  EIGHTEEN: WAR IN SPAIN

  1. O’Connor Morris, Hannibal: Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, 259.

  2. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty, 117–18. Hoyos also notes that, from the beginning, Fabian strategy alarmed Hannibal. This must also be true partly because it would take away his blitzkrieg field advantage as an invader against cumbersome armies with split leadership. Time and attrition were not in his favor; he needed battles where he could win by cunning and by exposing and exploiting Roman weaknesses.

  3. Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage, 235.

  4. Hunt, “Ebro River.”

  5. Roman fleets had taken and then lost Pantelleria between 255 and 254 BCE in the First Punic War but recaptured it in 217. At least 30 anchors quickly abandoned with a treasure hoard of 3,500 bronze coins from this period have been found at Punta Tracino and in the sheltered harbor of Cala Levant on Pantelleria; see, by way of comparison, Dr. Leonardo Abelli, University of Sassari. L. Abelli, ed. Archeologia subaquea a Pantelleria, “ . . . de Cossurensibus et Poenis navalem egit . . .” Ricerca series maijor 3. (Ante Quem, Sicilia:, 2012, esp. 55–62, 107–120.

  6. Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, 97.3; also see Howard Hayes Scullard, “The Carthaginians in Spain,” chap. 2 in Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed., vol. 8, Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 BC, ed. A. E. Astin et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 56.

  7. Lancel, Hannibal, 135, although Livy, History of Rome, bk. 24, 49, claims he was seventeen.

  8. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 25, 33. This story may or may not be true. Hasdrubal certainly had the means to do so with Cartagena silver.

  9. Ibid., 36.

  10. Howard Hayes Scullard, A History of the Roman World 753–146 BC (London: Routledge, 2004), 225.

  11. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 17.

  NINETEEN: SCIPIO CAPTURES CARTAGENA

  1. Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumwissenschaft, ed. G. Wissowa et al. [n.d.] (Stuttgart), 7, cols 1462–70.

  2. Polybius, Histories, bk. 1
0, 3.3–6.

  3. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 22, 53.

  4. R. T. Ridley, “Was Scipio Africanus at Cannae?,” Latomus 34, no. 1 (1975): 161–65.

  5. The epigraphic evidence in the Corpus Inscriptorum Latinarum is without a definable year date: CIL I,1, 280 (201) [P. Cornelius P. f.] Scipio Africanus cos bis censor aedilis curulis trib mil.

  6. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 19; Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 2.

  7. Among many others, see Theodor Mommsen, History of Rome, 5 vols., trans. William Purdie Dickson (1901), vol. 2, 160; Arnold, 300–302; Theodore Ayrault Dodge, Hannibal, new introduction by Ian M. Cuthbertson, repr. (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005), 571–72; O’Connor Morris, Hannibal: Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, 256; B. H. Liddell Hart, Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoléon, repr. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 7; Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 136–37; Bradford, Hannibal, 170; Lancel, Hannibal, 138; Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 271, among many others.

  8. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 19, names as absurd the sightings of huge serpents and other prodigies at Scipio’s birth in his mother Pomponia’s bedroom.

  9. Liddell Hart, Scipio Africanus, 5.

  10. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 2.12–13.

  11. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 270.

  12. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 20.6, says near Saguntum, but this would have deterred Scipio from marching south of the Ebro to Cartagena, as Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 134, rightly points out.

  13. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 2.13; Ridley, “Was Scipio Africanus at Cannae?,” 161.

  14. Peter van Dommelen, “Carthago Nova (Cartagena),” in Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. Roger S. Bagnall et al. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

  15. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 8.1.

  16. Peddie, Hannibal’s War, 149.

  17. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 271.

  18. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 9.7; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 42.6.

  19. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 11.4, making it about thirteen thousand feet in circumference.

  20. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 136–37.

  21. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 8.4.

  22. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 10.10–12; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 45.

  23. A. Lillo and M. Lillo, “On Polybius X.10.12: The Capture of New Carthage,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 37 (1988): 477–80; Dexter Hoyos, “Sluice-gates or Neptune at New Carthage, 209 BC?,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 41 (1992): 124–28; Benedict J. Lowe. “Polybius 10.10.2 and the Existence of Salt Flats at Carthago Nova,” Phoenix 54, nos. 1/2 (2000): 39–52.

  24. Lowe, “Polybius 10.10.2,” 49.

  25. Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome, 7 and esp. chaps. 12–13.

  26. Polybius, Histories, bk. 10, 15.4–6.

  27. Ibid., 18.1–2.

  28. Jan Libourel, “Galley Slaves in the Second Punic War,” Classical Philology 68, no. 2 (1973): 116–19, esp. 117.

  29. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 139; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 26, 50.

  30. Garland, Hannibal, 102.

  31. R. Bruce Hitchner, “Review: Roman Republican Imperialism in Italy and the West,” American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 4 (October 2009): 651–55, esp. 654. Hitchner notes the “striking intentionality” that these three venues were also the main ethnic communities—Celtiberian in Tarraco, Punic in Carthago Nova, and Greek in Emporion—but also that initial Roman interest was military and strategic.

  32. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, 301.

  33. Scullard, History of the Roman World, 227.

  34. J. S. Richardson, Hispaniae: Spain and the Development of Roman Imperialism, 218–82 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60–61; S. J. Keay, Roman Spain: Exploring the Roman World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 50; Keay, review of Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation, by L. A. Curchin, Brittania 24 (1993): 332–33.

  35. Naturally, this should also be factored by Roman recall of any Punic coins from circulation to remint them as Roman. See Paolo Visona, “The Punic Coins in the Collection of Florence’s Museo Archeologico: Non nulla Notanda,” Rivista di Studi Fenici 27 (1999): 147–49; Visona, “A New Wrinkle in the Mid-Carthaginian Silver Series,” Numismatic Chronicle 166 (2006): 15–23; Visona, “The Serrated Silver Coinage of Carthage,” Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 86 (2007): 31–62.

  36. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, 49–54, 110, 116–17, 229.

  37. The Archaeological Museum of Cartagena (Museo Arqueologico Municipal, Cartagena) has a highly useful permanent exhibition on the economic history of mining in the region from Punic through Roman periods; where silver is or was once found, lead ore is a corollary metal source (silver and lead pairing in igneous sulfide metal deposition), and Rome also fully exploited this metal too, as historic traces of lead oxide even in Greenland ice demonstrate.

  TWENTY: METAURUS

  1. Bradford, Hannibal, 186.

  2. The number of Hasdrubal’s troops is greatly disputed both en route and at Metaurus. Bagnall, Punic Wars, 263, says they numbered thirty thousand before the Battle of Metaurus. En route, Hasdrubal picked up Celtic recruits passing through Gaul, possibly swelling his numbers to forty-eight thousand if Appian, Roman History, bk. 8, 52, is trustworthy, although many doubt this high figure. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 239, suggests that Hasdrubal had “significantly less than the Roman troop strength of forty thousand soldiers at Metaurus” and goes on to say that while Hasdrubal spent gold lavishly to acquire Celtic mercenaries, he did not have the numerical advantage. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 190, also suggests there were twenty thousand to thirty thousand soldiers in Hasdrubal’s army. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 49, seems more unreliable than usual, suggesting far more than sixty thousand Hasdrubal soldiers, a number that Bradford, Hannibal, 193, calls “fanciful.”

  3. Polybius, Histories, bk. 11, 1.1.

  4. Appian, Hannibal’s War, 52.

  5. Patrick Hunt, “Rubicon,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. Roger S. Bagnall et al. (Malden. MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

  6. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 39; this may be debatable, Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 189.

  7. “Grumentum,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.

  8. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 44.

  9. Garland, Hannibal, 105.

  10. According to Austin and Rankin, Exploration, 90–91, the Romans were learning to copy Hannibal’s military intelligence gathering.

  11. Goldsworthy, Punic Wars, 239.

  12. Bagnall, Punic Wars, 263.

  13. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 38.

  14. A propraetor was an appointed chief administrator of a province, serving after fulfilling his office of praetor, usually as a military commander or an elected magistrate. Also see Pat Southern, The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 331, 339.

  15. Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 4, ed. G. Wissowa et al. (Stuttgart, Ger., n.d.), 7, 246.

  16. Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 11.3–12.3.

  17. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 41, claims that Hannibal lost eight thousand men and six elephants. Although he identifies these soldiers as Carthaginian, it is far more probable they were Bruttians or the like.

  18. Ibid., 46. Livy doesn’t fully indicate the route after the Piceni (of Picenum) and the Praetuti people (around Aprutium or the region of Praetutium?, roughly modern Abruzzo). Also see Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, eds, Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 2001), 74, although far later, also see Sonia Antonelli, Il Territorio di Aprutium, Aspetti e forme delle dinamiche insediative tra Ve XI seculo (Palombi Editore, 2010).

  19. Strabo, Geography, bk. 5, 4.2.

  20. Lancel, Hannibal, 147.

  21. Potter, Roman Italy, 135–37.

  22. N. Alfieri, “Sena Gallica,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.


  23. Warry, Warfare in the Classical World, 128.

  24. Elizabeth Keitel, “The Influence of Thucydides 7.61–71 on Sallust Cat. 20–21,” Classical Journal 82, no. 4 (1987): 293–300, esp. 295n8. She points out five distinctive narrative rhetorical elements: reflections, harangues, exhortations, summaries, and repetition.

  25. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 47.

  26. Bradford, Hannibal, 192.

  27. Caven, Punic Wars, 214, suggests that the battle was near or above Sant-Angelo.

  28. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 188.

  29. Peddie, Hannibal’s War, 179.

  30. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 47.

  31. Polybius, Histories, bk. 11, 3.1.

  32. Ibid., 1.12; Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 49.

  33. Polybius, Histories, bk. 11, 1.11.

  34. Bagnall, Punic Wars, 263–67.

  35. Although Polybius, Histories, bk. 11, 3.2–3, does not give statistics for the number of Hasdrubal’s original troops, he estimates just ten thousand casualties at Metaurus. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 27, 49, on the other hand, claims that fifty-seven thousand Carthaginians died there. This is highly suspect, especially because much earlier (bk. 25, 6), he says that Cannae (where he contends fifty thousand Romans perished) is thus avenged. Livy seems to be trying to compensate with his seven thousand more Carthaginian dead at Metaurus alongside their general (Hasdrubal) than Roman dead at Cannae with their general (Aemilius Paullus). He may have wanted to mitigate the humiliation of Cannae for Rome, like an infernal balance book, but this didn’t fully happen in Italy, which may have frustrated Livy.

  36. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War, 190.

  TWENTY-ONE: ROMAN TRIUMPH, ITALY TO SPAIN

  1. Bagnall, Punic Wars, 89.

  2. Philip C. Schmitz, “The Phoenician Text from the Etruscan Sanctuary at Pyrgi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 4 (1995): 559–75.

  3. In the Aeneid, book 4, Virgil plays up the close relationship between the goddess Juno and Queen Dido of Carthage, making Dido a priestess of Juno who seems to sacrifice herself to the goddess. Juno’s divine wrath then pursues Aeneas by the dying queen’s curse. Virgil’s partial explanation for the enmity between Carthage and Rome is that Aeneas abandoned Dido. Henry Purcell’s famous mournful song “Dido’s Lament” from the opera Dido and Aeneas relates the queen’s sorrow in her suicide.