Due to Hannibal’s string of unbroken successes during his descent through northern Italy (218–216 B.C.), the Senate had transferred command of the legions from its brilliant general Fabius Maximus—given pro tempore dictatorial powers in the field—back into the hands of its annually elected consuls, who for the year 216 B.C. were the aristocratic and careful L. Aemilius Paulus and the more adventuresome Terentius Varro, the latter purportedly a popular leader of the masses. Scholars have criticized Varro’s decision to march the army on the morning of August 2 across the Aufidus River into the flat, treeless plain of Cannae (command rotated between the consuls on alternating days). In fact, the Roman general had reason to initiate battle, since Hannibal’s mounted patrols were raiding his lines, devastating the surrounding countryside, and making it ever more difficult to keep such a huge force well supplied. The specter of such a huge army gave his men confidence that at last they could catch Hannibal in an open plain. Their superior numbers and organization might annihilate his mercenaries, who would have no chance for ambush or cover by darkness or fog. A year earlier Roman weight had almost crushed the Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene before being entrapped and outflanked in the mist. At Cannae the plain was relatively flat, the weather windy but reasonably good, and the Carthaginians seemingly deployed only in front of the legions, making the resort to deception unlikely.
Varro’s real mistake lay in committing most of his forces at once— only 10,000 Roman reserves were left behind far from the battlefield in two camps on either side of the river—without keeping a third line ready to exploit success or prevent collapse. In any case, because Varro either worried about the quality of his new replacement recruits or desired to ensure that his army was not strung out too far, he reduced his battle line to about a mile. Out of an army of between 70,000 and 80,000, not more than 2,000 could engage the enemy at the front in the initial attack. The depth of the Roman mass in some places along the long line was well beyond thirty-five men, and as great as fifty—the deepest formation in the history of classical warfare since the great mass of the Theban army had obliterated the Spartans at Leuctra (371 B.C.). But at that earlier battle, the Theban column met few cavalry and a timid king, and was led by the gifted tactician Epaminondas.
There may have been only 40,000 Carthaginian infantrymen facing an army almost twice that size. Surely, most other enemies who faced such a huge force would have crumbled before the legionary onslaught. The difference was in large part due to the tactical genius of Hannibal, who adapted his battle plans precisely to facilitate the impatience of Roman tactics. As we have seen, Hannibal and his brother Mago stationed themselves with the less dependable Gauls and Spaniards right at the acme of the Roman attack, convinced that their presence could steady their unreliable troops long enough to conduct a gradual withdrawal, to backpedal slowly, sucking in the oncoming Roman weight. The Punic center was bowed out toward the Romans—Polybius called the curious formation a mēnoeides kurtōma, “a crescent-moon-shaped convexity”—both to hide somewhat the African pikemen on the wings and to give the impression that the line was deeper than it actually was. The bulge allowed a margin of retreat: the greater the distance the center backpedaled without collapse, the easier the wings might envelop the narrower Roman formations.
The key for Hannibal and his European allies was to survive until North African infantry on the wings—the elite of Hannibal’s army—and cavalry streaking to the rear and sides could enclose the enormous legionary mass, thereby deflating its forward pressure before it smashed the core of the Punic army. Livy noted in his history of Rome that the Punic center was far too thinly deployed “to withstand the pressure” (22.47). The problem was that there were not more than 2,000 to 3,000 legionaries at the front of the huge column who were actually fighting with drawn weapons; the others, more than 70,000, were pushing blindly ahead on the assumption that the cutting edge of their army was mowing down the enemy in front. The least trained were probably on the wings—and thus the first to confront the closing jaws of Hannibal’s superb African infantry. Whatever the estimation of our ancient sources concerning the Gauls and Spaniards, they fought bravely and in some sense saved the battle for the Carthaginians.
Just in time, the charges of African horsemen at the flanks and at the back, the ubiquitous barrage of missiles, and the sheer confusion of seeing enemies in all directions stalled the Roman advance. Hannibal, in broad daylight and without cover, had created an ambush by the sheer deployment and maneuver of his men—and he had done so while battling at the apex of the Roman assault, convinced that his physical presence in the maelstrom would allow his outnumbered and exhausted hired Iberians and Gauls to backpedal without collapsing. The envelopment was soon completed. A thin wall of Punic and European irregulars held tight a surging throng of Roman infantry. Had each legionary killed one man before dying, the battle would have been a decisive Roman victory. Had they known that their adversaries were only two or three ranks deep, the legions might have broken out. The wind, dust, noise, and panic brought on by rumors that the enemy was everywhere only added to the chaos. Because of the enormous losses during the prior two years at Trebia and Trasimene, the Romans at Cannae were fresh recruits without many veterans to calm their fears, and thus immediately became demoralized at the realization that for a third time an enormous Roman army was being led into a Punic trap from which few might escape alive. Many must have been adolescents and so have frantically thrown down their weapons the second they realized they were trapped. The great strategist Ardent du Picq believed that Hannibal had guessed right that the “terror” and “surprise” resulting from his encirclement would outweigh “the courage of despair in the masses.” In short, panic killed the legionaries at Cannae. Still, for a time the prominence of so many Roman luminaries on the field of battle—like the presence of doctors, lawyers, and other elites at the gates of Auschwitz—must have given some the false reassurance that total destruction was impossible. The army at Cannae was larger than the citizen population of every city in Italy except Rome, and contained enough aristocrats to have run most of the legislative and executive branches of the Italian republic.
Hannibal Barca (“Grace of Ba‘al Lightning”) had little respect for legionary repute. At nine he had sworn an oath of eternal hatred toward Rome—dramatically portrayed in Jacob Amigoni’s magnificent oil canvas—and was one of the few foreigners in the entire history of the ancient world who actually welcomed frontal assault against Western armies. The African desired to break Roman legions outright in the field, as part of his larger plan to discredit the entire notion of Roman military invincibility, and so systematically uncouple Rome’s allies in central and southern Italy.
Shattered and disgraced legions meant a weak and divided Italy, which would leave Carthage free to arrange its mercantile affairs in the western Mediterranean as it saw fit, and at the same time avenge the shame of defeat of the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.). From the time of his descent from the Alps in October 218 to the slaughter at Cannae on August 2, 216 B.C., Hannibal had killed or captured in battle somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 legionaries, along with hundreds of the senatorial and knightly classes, including two consuls at the head of their armies and numerous ex-consuls in the ranks. In the space of twenty-four months a third of Rome’s frontline troops of more than a third of a million men of military age were to be killed, wounded, or captured in the bloodbaths at Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. Cannae, then, was no fluke.
After the Roman massacre at Cannae, Hannibal did not march on Rome—to the great dismay of military pundits, from his contemporary subordinate Maharbal (“you know how to win a battle, Hannibal, but not how to use your victory” [Livy 22.51]) to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. For the next fourteen years Hannibal would experience a seesaw series of victories and defeats inside Italy that had little strategic effect upon the course of the Second Punic War, until he was recalled to Carthage to save his homeland from the invasion of Scipio African
us. Not far from Carthage itself at Zama (202 B.C.), Scipio’s legions defeated Hannibal’s veterans, and Carthage submitted to harsh Roman terms that essentially ended its existence as a military power in the Mediterranean. The city’s ultimate destruction was only a half century away (146 B.C.).
Hannibal, who had left Carthage for Europe in 219, had unknowingly been on a fruitless odyssey of some twenty years, a vast circuit across the Mediterranean, Spain, the Alps, and Italy that came to a close thousands of dead later where it had all begun—and with a Roman army once again free to march on Carthage itself. As the historian Polybius concluded of the Roman recovery after Cannae and its effect on the Carthaginians: “Hannibal’s pleasure in his victory in the battle was not so great as his dejection, once he saw with amazement how steady and great-souled were the Romans in their deliberations” (6.58.13).
CARTHAGE AND THE WEST
What is remarkable about Cannae is not that thousands of Romans were so easily massacred in battle, but that they were massacred to such little strategic effect. Within a year after the battle the Romans could field legions nearly as good as those who fell in August—themselves fresh replacements for the previous thousands killed at Trebia and Trasimene— but now to be led by Senate-appointed commanders who had learned the lessons of past tactical imbecility. Scholars attribute this resilience of Rome to its government’s remarkable ability to reorganize its legions, mobilize its citizenry, and do so in legal, constitutional fashion that guaranteed the support of even the lowliest farmer. Hannibal would come to learn in Italy that the Roman army was not so much better equipped, better organized, more disciplined, and more spirited than his mercenary forces as far more insidious. It could be cloned and replicated at will even after the most abject of disasters, as recruits and their officers still willingly joined the army, mastered a hard course of training, and thus became linked to both their fathers, who were rotting in the soil at Cannae, and their sons to come, who would soon kill thousands of Africans outside Carthage itself.
Victory brought Hannibal few new troops, whereas defeat created entire new legions for Rome. A legionary in his fifties who was sliced to pieces at Cannae no doubt went to his death believing that his infant grandson, like himself a Roman citizen, would someday wear the same type of armor, undergo similar training—and in a battle to come avenge his fall and Rome’s disgrace in Africa, not Italy. And he would be right. The army that would massacre Hannibal’s mercenaries at Zama (202 B.C.) represented less than a tenth of the available infantry and naval manpower that Rome had at its disposal at the time. Throughout the entire nightmare of the Second Punic War, the Romans, as Livy pointed out, “breathed not a word of peace” (22.61). Hannibal’s success at Cannae resembled the Japanese surprise at Pearl Harbor—a brilliant tactical victory that had no strategic aftermath and tended to galvanize rather than unnerve the manpower of the defeated. The assemblies of Romans and Americans mobilized vast new armies after their embarrassments; the confident forces of the imperial war states of Carthage and Japan basked in their battle success and hardly grew.
It is difficult to attribute Rome’s success at making good such catastrophic losses entirely to their singular idea of a constitutional form of government, inasmuch as the Carthaginians themselves had also evolved beyond both monarchy and tyranny. Given their common Hellenic source, there is some superficial similarity between the constitutions of Carthage and Rome. In addition, Carthage’s Phoenician mother language had been the prototype of the Greek alphabet, while Punic literature— libri Punici— which was written in Punic and Greek, was well respected by Roman writers. That communality was natural given Carthage’s similar integration for the past century in the Hellenistic economy of the eastern Mediterranean, its sophisticated practice of viticulture and arboriculture, and its own prior three centuries of contact with the free Greek city-states through constant warring and colonization in Sicily.
The Carthaginian coast was closer to the ancestral Hellenic cultures in Sicily and southern Italy than was Rome. Many Greeks by the fourth and third centuries would be more knowledgeable of the coastal North Africans than of Italians in the hills of central Italy. Despite lurid stories of child sacrifice at the sacred burial ground (the tophet)— a practice that seemed to flourish the more wealthy and urban Carthage became—the huge bureaucracy of priests and diviners of the bloodthirsty god Ba‘al, and the brutal record of the Magonid dynasty (whose kings were priests and supreme commanders in the field), the Carthaginians fielded armies not that different from other mercenaries of the eastern and largely Hellenic Mediterranean.
Carthage, like the Hellenistic monarchies of the era, recruited phalanxes of pikemen, incorporated elephants into its ranks, and employed professional Greek tacticians and generals to train and advise its paid soldiers. Though outnumbered, Hannibal’s men were not in the same predicament as the Aztecs or Zulus, who suffered from vast technological inferiority against their outnumbered Western enemies. In the military sense Carthage had also become a quasi-Western state through fighting Greek hoplite armies and hiring phalangite mercenaries since the era of its early-fifth-century invasions of Sicily. The Spartan mercenary Xanthippus was brought in to reorganize the entire Carthaginian army during the First Punic War. Our ancient sources also credit him with engineering the pivotal victory over Regulus’s Roman army that perished outside Carthage in 255 B.C. The Greek historian Sosylus accompanied Hannibal on his campaigns and served as a direct conduit of Hellenic military expertise and exempla. Hannibal himself sought to forge ties with King Philip V in Macedon in hopes that phalangites from the Greek mainland might land on the eastern coast of Italy to coordinate joint Punic-Macedonian attacks on Rome.
While its government was more aristocratic than the Roman constitution, Carthage by the time of the Second Punic War was also governed by two annually elected magistrates (suffetes), who worked in tandem with a deliberative body of thirty elders (gerousia) and a high court of 104 judges, all of whose decisions were ratified by a popular Assembly of a few thousand nobles. The historians Polybius and Livy were able to use, if clumsily so, Greek and Latin political nomenclature—ekklēsia, boulē, senatus,consul—to approximate Carthaginian offices and institutions in their descriptions of Hannibal’s civilian overseers. Even Aristotle in his Politics includes frequent mention of Carthaginian constitutional practice in a discussion of earlier forms of lawful oligarchies, praising its mixed government, which separated powers among judicial, executive, and legislative branches.
Carthage may have been a Phoenician colony founded in North Africa at the end of the ninth century B.C. by the mythical Elissa-Dido. In language, religion, and culture it was a Semitic people who had emigrated from its mother city of Tyre. Nevertheless, by the third century B.C. its political structure was quasi-Western in nature, and its economy was fully tied to the northern shore of the western Mediterranean.
Where Rome most fundamentally differed from its Punic neighbor to the south—besides in matters religious and linguistic—was in the notion of citizenship and the responsibilities and rights inherent in being a civis Romanus, a political idea that far transcended the legalistic aspects of a deliberative body merely following constitutional precepts. The early Western notion of consensual rule that arose in the eighth century B.C. in rural Greece was at its inception rife with contradictions, since the original discovery of politics meant not much more than a minority population of middling property banding together to decide on community policy. The radical concept that citizens should craft their own government raised an immediate paradox: who were to be the citizens and why?
If civic participation in early, broadly oligarchic Greek city-states originally marked a revolutionary invention of consent by the governed, such governments nevertheless often represented less than a fourth of the total resident population. Yet, as Plato lamented, there was a constant evolutionary trend toward egalitarianism and inclusion in the city-state. By the fifth century, especially in Boeotia and some state
s in the Peloponnese, the qualification for voting and office-holding was as small as a ten-acre farm or the cash equivalent.
The eventual result was that the clear majority of free adult male residents of the surrounding territory by the fifth century B.C. could participate fully in Hellenic government. At imperial Athens and among its democratic satellites every free male born to a male citizen, regardless of wealth or lineage, was eligible for full citizenship, giving rise to an enormous navy of free citizen rowers. Even more startling, the spread of Western democratic ideology evolved far beyond formal matters of voting, but lent an egalitarian aura to every aspect of the Greek city-state, from familiarity in speech and dress to a sameness in public appearance and behavior—a liberality in private life that would survive even under periods of monarchy and autocracy in the later West. Conservatives like the anonymous so-called Old Oligarch (ca. 440 B.C.) scoffed that slaves and the poor were treated no differently from men of substance at Athens. Plato felt that the logical evolution of democracy had no end: all hierarchies of merit would disappear as even deckhands would see themselves as captains, with a birthright to take their turn at the rudder whether or not they knew anything about seamanship. Even the animals at Athens, he jested, would eventually question why they, too, were not equal under an ideology whose aim was to lower all to a common level.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 15