The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic

by Robert L. O'Connell

  Remarkably—given the truism of history being written by the winners—Polybius had available to him a substantial body of work that told the story from the Carthaginian, or at least Hannibalic, side. Two historians in particular, Sosylus the Spartan and Silenos from Kaleakte, accompanied Hannibal to Italy and stayed with him “as long as fate allowed.”7 While Polybius is dismissive of Sosylus as a gossip, the Spartan knew Hannibal well enough to have taught him Greek, and a surviving fragment of his seven-book history indicates some competence. This is significant since some believe that Polybius’s account of Cannae may have actually come from Hannibal himself speaking to Sosylus or possibly Silenos.8

  Even skeptics concede Polybius a place, along with Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, in the first tier of ancient historians. Without his single-book account of the First Punic War, we would know very little about this conflict, the longest in ancient history. His lost recounting of the Third Punic War is thought to have provided the basis of the historian Appian’s narrative, who here is far better than elsewhere. Yet it was Polybius’s rendering of the second war with Carthage that made and preserves his reputation as a great historian,9 even though the account has a gaping hole in the middle. Fortunately for our purposes, the narrative ends right after Cannae and—with the exception of a few fragments mostly on campaigns in Sicily and Spain—picks up just before the final climactic battle of Zama. Nevertheless, the absence of the middle narrative clouds many issues and leaves us reliant on a single source, Livy, who is more the storyteller and less the analyst. Polybius above all sought the truth, weighing the facts carefully, and characteristically looking at both sides of things controversial; he is the rock on which our understanding of the period is anchored. Still, as scrupulous and fair as Polybius was, his affiliations, sources, and purpose left him with some biases—Scipios, Fabians, and their friends are generally made to look good, and others may have been scapegoated to cover for their mistakes. And ultimately it is his view that Rome and not Carthage deserved to survive. He was also not very good with numbers. His armies are smaller or larger than they should be; at Cannae his dead outnumber those who could have taken part in the battle.10 There are other incongruities. No one is perfect.

  Certainly not Livy, or, more formally, Titus Livius. Recently a prominent classicist joked that Herodotus, historiography’s eternal tourist, sported a Hawaiian shirt.11 In this vein it is possible to imagine Livy as an ancient version of a Hollywood mogul, capturing the sweep of Rome’s history with a notably cinematic flair. Of Livy’s original 142 books only 32 survive, but luckily ten of those are devoted to the Second Punic War, and it is almost possible to hear marching across those pages the faint thunder of the original score—cymbal, kettledrums, and trumpets—the clatter of short swords striking Gallic shields and the impassioned Latin of senators debating what to do about Hannibal. In all of historical literature it is hard to match the ghastly clarity of Livy’s Cannae battlefield the morning after, as he pans the wreckage strewn with dead and half-dead Romans, shredded survivors begging for a coup de grâce. The man knew how to set a scene. This is also the problem. Livy’s history looks better than it actually is. Verisimilitude is not truth, just the appearance of truth.

  A native of what is now Padua, Livy was born in 59 B.C., his life span almost exactly bracketing that of Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first emperor—or princeps, as the main man preferred. Livy began writing at thirty, or approximately 190 years after Cannae; so there was nobody left to talk to. He pretty much stayed put, avoiding battlefields and archives, instead relying exclusively on literary sources. He used Polybius but seems to have derived him, at least in part, from an intermediary. Livy probably based his depiction of Cannae and the war’s early years primarily on the now lost seven-volume history of L. Coelius Antipater, who had used many of the same sources as Polybius, particularly Fabius Pictor and Silenos. This commonality helps explain why Polybius’s and Livy’s renderings of events basically track in parallel. Yet unlike Polybius, Livy had absolutely no experience as a soldier or as a politician, being unique in that regard among important Roman historians.12 Because he was an amateur writing for amateurs, his battle descriptions focus on clarity and take place in distinct stages.13 Given the chaos of actual combat, this helps make the mayhem more coherent, but it definitely warps reality.

  An analogous criticism can be leveled at Livy’s treatment of political decision-making. He was a fierce patriot and partisan, and despite the success of the Augustan regime, the conservative oligarchic senate remained his ideal. Meanwhile, those perceived as “popular” politicians—Flaminius, Minucius, and above all Terentius Varro (the star-crossed supreme commander at Cannae) came in for what is likely more than their fair share of abuse. Livy is also in his element setting up a forensic dustup, with rivals artfully framing the issues and relentlessly undermining opposing positions—logical tours de force until it is realized they are utterly artificial. How could he have known, beyond the barest outline, what was said?

  This speaks to a larger point. Ancient history is replete with such speechifying, useful in delineating issues, dramatic, and at times rhetorically elevating (think Thucydides’s Melian dialogue or Pericles’ Funeral Oration), but it is not to be taken literally. There were no voice recorders or stenographers. Most speeches were extemporaneous. Consider also the obligatory harangues given by commanders to their troops before battle. Livy and Polybius are full of them. Here the problem is not only accuracy but transmission; even generals blessed with the most basso profundo of voices would, without amplification, have had trouble being heard by more than a fraction of their armies, numbering in the multiple tens of thousands. And in Hannibal’s case, he would have had trouble being understood by his soldiers, who undeniably spoke a polyglot of tongues and dialects. The words we have are plainly not the words that were said.

  Still the Second Punic War is remembered far better than most events this far back in time, blessed not just with two sources, but two historians at or near the front rank. Our good fortune becomes almost embarrassingly obvious when the competitors—foot-draggers progressively removed from the drumbeats of war—are considered. Most important is Appian, an Alexandrian Greek who made his mark in Rome and then settled down in the middle of the second century A.D. to write a twenty-four book history that is more a cluster of monographs than a continuous chronicle. The quality varies with the sources, which are often hard to identify. When he uses Polybius for the Third Punic War, he is fine, but his account of the Second Punic War is bastardized and garbled—so much so that the great German historian Hans Delbrück quotes Appian’s entire version of Cannae just to show how lucky we are to have Polybius and Livy!14 Appian’s rendering of the battle of Zama reads like something out of The Iliad, with the principals Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, and Masinissa all engaging in individual duels. The Romans, as we shall see, did have a penchant for single combat, so this might have happened, but it very probably didn’t. They were all too busy being generals. That’s the way it is with Appian; things that appear ridiculous on average just might have happened, so they cannot be entirely dismissed. Unlike Polybius’s, Appian’s numbers do generally add up; the size of his armies and his casualty figures are as good as anyone else’s. Even Appian’s nonsensical take on Cannae has a redeeming feature—a carefully plotted ambush, more dimly recalled by Livy and something never to be entirely discounted when dealing with Hannibal, the proverbial trickster.

  It’s much the same with the others. Still further removed in time, Dio Cassius, a Roman senator whose family hailed from Bithynia in Asia Minor, wrote an eighty-book History of Rome in the third century, of which only about a third still exists in fragments, but it is supplemented by a continuous summary composed by Zonaras, a twelfth-century Byzantine monk. Dio Cassius was reported to be a thorough researcher, but also a fancier of rhetoric, so his account is often a matter of style over substance. The net effect is something like sedimentary rock, earlier stuff compressed and disto
rted to the point where it is hard to make out much that is cogent beyond a few interesting details. There is an accounting of Cannae and it does contain an ambush, but it is impossible to tell if Dio Cassius used sources independent of those we already have.

  Besides narratives, there is also a body of biography—but a slim one. Most famous and useful is Plutarch, who assembled in the late first century A.D. a series of parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans. While his aim was to delineate the character and personality of his subjects, he still managed to include lots of useful historical bits and pieces. Regrettably, Hannibal and Scipio Africanus are not covered, but the biographies of Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, and Titus Quinctius Flaminius all provide information that either corroborates or enlarges upon the fabric of reliable knowledge. Cornelius Nepos, a Roman biographer from the first century B.C., also composed lives of both Hannibal and his father, Hamilcar, which contain information not otherwise available, but they are short to the point of being cursory.

  The rest of the quilt amounts to a collage of snippets from the geographer Strabo; the scholar Pliny the Elder; and the historians Diodorus, Pompeius Trogus, Justin, Eutropius, and Timagenes of Alexandria. All refer to one or another item of interest. Finally, there is one very large and unsightly patch, so homely it mocks the entire process of preservation. That would be the Punica of Silius Italicus, a monumentally bad epic on the Second Punic War, which at twelve thousand verses remains the longest piece of Roman poetry still available to us. Wading through this monstrosity of simile and bloodletting in search of something useful, the reader is reminded of the sheer randomness by which all but a scrap of the Annales by Ennius (a far better poem that some argue had an impact on Polybius) was lost, while Silius was conserved. Still, as bad as was his art, Silius was a political survivor in the time of Nero and seems to have grasped two critical aspects of the Second Punic War—that Cannae was a pivotal point in Roman history, and that the need to develop a general who could fight Hannibal on something approaching even terms was the genesis of Rome’s slide toward civil war and eventually despotism.15 Was this the poison pill that Hannibal slipped Rome? This in turn brings us to the second of the two questions asked earlier: Why should we care?

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  In the ancient world and most epochs that followed, history was viewed as the preceptor of princes. And behind this was a faith in fate, a fear of manipulative deities, and a belief that if only prior mistakes could be learned from and their repetition avoided, good fortune might smile on the protagonist. We have a far different view today. Physicists tell us that nothing is preordained. Consequence is highly contingent, so sensitive to small perturbations at the start of an event sequence that virtually any outcome within the range of the possible can become reality. Prediction may be on the skids, but those same physicists also tell us that unfolding events have a way of mysteriously self-organizing. So is the past really such a misguided flashlight on the future? Long before the science of complexity stuck itself between fortune’s spokes, Mark Twain seemed to have gotten it about right when he concluded that although history doesn’t repeat itself, it does sometimes rhyme.

  There is much about the clash between Rome and Carthage that seems hauntingly familiar. The physical magnitude, the very scale and duration of the Punic Wars—particularly the first two—remind us of our own recent past. Like World Wars I and II, the Punic Wars were conflicts waged overseas and on a giant scale. The showdown between the Roman and Carthaginian fleets off Cape Economus, for instance, remains in terms of the number of participants the largest naval battle ever fought.16 Similarly, the loss of life in these two ancient conflicts was proportionately as massive and unprecedented as their equivalents in our own era.

  And as with the great wars of the twentieth century, the outbreak of the Second Punic War followed logically from the unfinished business of the first. More to the point, perhaps, is that in both cases the loser of the first conflict seems to have been dragged into the second largely by the actions of a single man, Carthage by Hannibal and Germany by Hitler. And both men enjoyed an initial string of stunning victories that drove their opponents to the very brink of collapse; yet neither Britain in 1940 nor Rome after Cannae succumbed. They stared down the odds and somehow retrieved victory from the ashes of disaster.

  There was, of course, a Third Punic War, fueled by revenge and waged with the calculated intent of Carthage’s utter destruction—genocide by any other name. We have avoided such a fate, but had there been such a thing as World War III, there is little doubt that much of what we call our civilization would now lie in ruins. At last we may have learned there is and must be a limit to war.

  We can also detect the reflection of these ancient conflicts in matters far more personal. The conscience of a nation is often revealed by the fate of its veterans, particularly veterans of defeat. Belatedly we Americans have done what we can to rehabilitate our Vietnam vets and expunge the memory of their lonely return, vowing it will not happen again to those coming back from Iraq. Rome’s example argues that this is not simply a matter of compassion but a matter of prudence.

  After Cannae the senate didn’t just turn its back on its survivors; it stigmatized them, banishing them to Sicily for more than a decade. These soldiers were joined only by the refugees of other armies similarly pulverized by Hannibal. Those more fortunate in battle would, for the most part, be deactivated and allowed to rejoin their families and farms after a campaign or so. Life was hard in the countryside, and a family’s survival demanded the soldier’s presence. But the notorious victims, known collectively as the legiones Cannenses, were left in limbo as their lives at home disappeared. They became quite literally the ghosts of Cannae, and in large part their story will be the story of this book. For now it is necessary to know only that while commanders came and commanders went, only one man was willing to give the survivors of Cannae a shot at redemption, and he was Scipio Africanus. They would follow him to Africa and wreak terrible vengeance on their original tormentors, and being human likely underwent a very fundamental transition in their loyalties. Scipio and the senate had set a dangerous precedent. Soon enough, Roman armies would look to their commanders and not the state to ensure their future. And should the commander choose to march on Rome, they would follow him. This is a lesson that should never be forgotten.

  The lethal brilliance of Cannae was of such an order that the encounter became one of the most studied and emulated battles, casting a long shadow over military history and the profession of arms even to this day. Yet the battle’s true place in mind and memory turns as much on the paradox it poses for the basic premises of what we call the Western way of war—that armed conflict is fundamentally about massing great armies to contest and achieve crushing victories, which in turn will reliably lead to the infliction of defeat and successful conclusions overall. A good case can be made that as long as Hannibal was on the Italic peninsula, he never suffered a significant tactical defeat. In 216 B.C., after Cannae and the string of drubbings that preceded it, Hannibal had all but destroyed Rome’s field forces. Subsequent to that, though less famously, he persisted in exterminating entire Roman armies. Yet overall victory continued to elude him.

  “It is in Italy, our home-land, that we are fighting,” Fabius Maximus had advised the doomed Lucius Aemilius Paullus shortly before Cannae. “Hannibal, on the contrary, is in an alien and hostile country…. Can you doubt then that if we sit still we must gain the victory over one who is growing weaker every day?” (Livy, 22.39.11ff) Time was Rome’s ally, and what the crafty stalwart was proposing was something akin to a national insurgency—small war, harassment of Hannibal’s sources of supply, and savage reprisals against those misguided enough to throw in their lot with him. The Romans, being Romans, were never satisfied with such a strategy. But until they could come up with someone capable of beating Hannibal at his own game, this strategy sufficed to keep them in the war, gradually restricting his freedom of movement and eventually isolating him in the t
oe of the boot of Italy. In the end he was forced to leave, having proverbially won all the battles but lost the war.

  Today Americans face an analogous situation, both specifically in conflicts with Islamic extremists and more generally. We have reason to question whether our very violent and sudden way of war matches the military problems we now face, whether our views of what organized violence can accomplish should be supplemented or replaced by strategic alternatives, the most developed being the Eastern approach exemplified by the writings of Sun Tzu. It can be argued that along with the Battle of Trafalgar, Cannae provided the template for tactical success in the corpse-ridden first half of the twentieth century. Now in the twenty-first, who is willing to face us in open battle when they can do us more harm at less cost by attacking asymmetrically? Perhaps some, but many will choose insurgency.

  The Romans did. But it is important to remember that it was not a matter of preference. They leveraged their weakness into strength because it worked—until they could land a crushing blow. At best, the past only rhymes. The Romans and Carthaginians fought as they did because of who they were and where they came from. Their assumptions, not our own, ultimately engendered reality during the Second Punic War.