The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic
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But it was not enough. Talented he may have been, but taking on Rome was a far different proposition from Alexander taking on Persia. And had his strategic intellect matched his tactical wits, he would have grasped this critical point in an instant. Twenty-three years of the First Punic War was a stark monument to the magnitude of Rome’s determination and resources. Meanwhile, Carthage, militarily at least, was exhausted; realistically the best Hannibal could have hoped for from this quarter was lukewarm support bought with Spanish silver. At least at the beginning of the first contest, Carthaginians had had reason to hope that in a war fought for an island, their fleet might prove decisive over a state without one; but now Hannibal proposed to attack Rome literally on home turf, trying to overcome the source of the city’s greatest strength, land power. Hannibal had reason to believe in himself and his army, and he can be excused for underestimating the strength of Italy’s alliance structure, but this invasion had no logical end to it. We shall see that there was a single moment after Cannae when he might have seized victory, but he couldn’t have known about that prior to setting off across the Alps. Instead, the recent past should have told him not to try it.
It has been argued that the Romans never would have allowed Carthaginians to remain dominant in Spain, and would have continued interfering there until Hannibal had had no choice but to fight.11 Rome’s alliance with Saguntum (a locality well south of the Ebro line of 226 B.C.) and the Romans’ later ultimatum to Hannibal not to interfere there certainly point in this direction. Since it was only a matter of time, why not make war on their territory and not his? This does seem to be a reasonable projection of Rome’s strategic trajectory. Yet at this point Spain was far from Italy, and there were much more pressing problems closer to home. Hannibal could have waited, could have concentrated on further expanding and consolidating in Iberian areas not sensitive to the Romans, a resort to “salami tactics,” as it’s now sometimes called.12 But he gave little impression that he ever considered not going to war with Rome. An invasion of Italy was the best way of doing it, but that didn’t make it ultimately a good idea. So, rather than being guided by a cold assessment of his chances, it seems more likely that his vision was colored or even clouded by an Alexandrian dream of conquest for its own sake and for the great and still growing family grudge against Rome. And these motivations, in turn, led to some questionable choices in friends.
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If Romans harbored a national nightmare, it was the Gauls, their Celtic neighbors. Since the traumatic sacking of their capital in 390, the Gauls had persisted in their sudden spoils-driven incursions into Roman territory, a succession of predatory raids meticulously tallied by Polybius (2.18–21), who seems to have understood their traumatic cumulative effect.
For the Romans, the Gauls had come to symbolize irrationality, violence, and disorder in ways that would have given Freudians, had they had the opportunity to set up shop on the Tiber, a field day. Given the degree of significance they invested in individual military prepotency, it was no trivial matter that Romans obsessed over their short stature in comparison to Gallic warriors.13 And the Gauls’ size was compounded by a notably frightful appearance—lime-washed spiked hair, muscular torsos naked to the waist wielding elongated slashing swords—and demonic battlefield zeal, usually described in the most lurid terms. They rushed at their adversaries “like wild beasts,” full of “blind fury,” persisting in their attacks “even with arrows and javelins sticking through them.”14
While these were clearly stereotypes, there is little reason to doubt their basis in fact, or to doubt the head-hunting proclivities of Celtic warriors. The profile was accompanied by recognized and equivalently generic weaknesses—drunkenness, lack of endurance, sensitivity to heat, tendency toward panic, mindless indiscipline—but still adds up to a very frightening specter if it was bearing down on your legion or your homeland. At least that’s the way the Romans saw it, an ever-aggressive barbarian menace.
Actually, Rome had turned the tables on the tormentors. Gradually the victims had taken the offense, reprisals had morphed into conquest, and the Gauls had become convinced that, in the words of Polybius (2.21.9), “now the Romans no longer made war on them for the sake of supremacy and sovereignty, but with a view towards their total expulsion and extermination.”
The Gauls were part of a broad band of Celtic-speaking tribal cultures stretching from central Europe into northern Italy through the Alps, north into the Low Countries, across France, and then into central and western Spain. The tribes were pre-state chiefdoms basically dependent on agriculture, and they appear to have been dominated by a distinct warrior class comprising both nobles and commoners who also existed as itinerant fighters. As such, these tribes were a floating body of potential mercenaries who could very quickly coalesce into large, if inchoate, force structures of the kind that had traditionally bedeviled the Romans. Militarily they represented a range of skills, with up to a third being noble equestrians, mostly heavy cavalry and some charioteers, and the remainder an undifferentiated mass of pedestrian swordsmen.15 All were very aggressive in combat, fighting essentially as individuals. The frenzied behavior—screams, wild gesticulations, and war dances—that so appalled the Romans would be recognized by modern anthropologists as rather typical of warrior cultures. Such fighters could be incorporated into the force structures of more advanced societies—the Carthaginians plainly did so during the First Punic War and after, but it remains unclear whether Carthage had been compelled to employ them fighting in their traditional manner or had been able to shape them into specialized units.16 Arguably, the transition from traditional fighters to specialized units enabled Hannibal to gain a key advantage at Cannae, but for the moment the Celts that most worried the Romans marched along a time-honored warpath.
After the Gauls’ attack in 390, serious unrest recommenced in 338 B.C., when the Boii stirred up local tribes and some Transalpine warriors to attack Ariminum (modern Rimini), settled three decades earlier as part of the Roman incursion on behalf of the land-hungry poor, into the fertile plains of northern Italy, which they called Cisalpine Gaul. Gallic bickering soon blunted this attempt, but two years later continuing problems with the Boii forced Rome to send an army to restore order.17 The trouble had just begun. In 232, Caius Flaminius, the farmers’ friend and Hannibal’s eventual victim at Lake Trasimene, pushed through a law as a tribune to parcel out captured Gallic lands to poor citizens in small plots rather than sending them out in concentrated colonies, thereby inviting a deluge of Romans.
Inevitably, the anger of the dispossessed Celts boiled over. In the spring of 225, Boii from around what is now Bologna, Insubres from the area of present-day Milan, and Taurini from the Piedmont were joined by a band of itinerant warriors from the Alps, the Gaesatae, to self-organize into a host seventy thousand strong, which then poured through the Apennine passes and fell upon Etruria, the rich area in the northeast high on Italy’s boot. Shades of the devastating attack on Rome in 390—the Gauls were laden with booty and were just three days’ march from the panic-struck city—only this time they chose to withdraw in the face of the four legions of consul L. Aemilius Papus that were heading north to intercept them. Unfortunately, the Gauls ran into another double consular army headed by C. Atilius Regulus, hastily recalled from Sardinia. At Telamon, trapped between the two jaws of what was the biggest force the Romans had ever accumulated prior to Cannae, the Gauls were forced to form lines back-to-back and fight for their lives. It was a desperate encounter that saw the severed head of Regulus delivered to one of the Celtic chiefs, but at the end of the day, forty thousand of the invaders lay dead and another ten thousand were taken prisoner by the Romans.18
The emergency was over, but Rome was far from finished with the Gauls. The next year both new consuls descended on the Boii with armies and forced their submission. In 224, it was more of the same, with now-consul Flaminius and his colleague Publius Furious both moving into the tribal territories of the Insubres and C
enomani. Here Flaminius won a great victory over a combined force of around forty-thousand Gauls, a victory featuring an on-the-spot tactical innovation that has recently stirred up some scholarly controversy. Being backed up against a river—a bad habit of Flaminius’s—his tribunes gave the maniples of the first line the spears of the triarii, the idea being to keep the Gauls and their long slashing swords at bay during their initial charge. It worked, and Polybius (2.33.1–6) is clear that the legionaries subsequently finished matters with their short swords. Modern historian Martin Samuels, however, arguing that the Greek historian was confused about the legionary’s equipment at this point, uses this passage to indicate that all fought primarily with long thrusting spears, both here and seven years later at Cannae.19 While Samuels’ points about the Roman army are interesting in other respects, this argument is just not convincing, given Polybius’s general reliability and knowledge of military detail. We can rest assured the Romans fought with the gladius at Cannae, and meanwhile would continue using them to kill Celts.
Thoroughly battered, in 222 the Gauls sued for peace. But the senate spurned their offer and instead sent both consuls with armies to throttle them still again. At Clastidium, one of the consuls, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, single-handedly killed and stripped the armor from the Gallic chief Britomarus, winning the spolia opima, immortality of the most Roman sort. His colleague, Cn. Cornelius Scipio, was also gainfully employed, successfully storming the site of modern Milan and the capital of the Insubres. Both were now made men, especially Marcellus, destined to play major roles and to die fighting in the Second Punic War. Yet again the tribes surrendered and were stripped of more land. Rome’s response was to push farther north, in 218 planting colonies of six thousand each at Placentia and Cremona on either side of the Po River, still further inflaming Gallic resentment.20
This anger would prove to be a magnet for Hannibal, providing a ready source of allies, supplies, and fresh bodies when he and his army spilled off the Alps, depleted and hungry. The potential for an amalgam with the restive tribes of Cisalpine Gaul was a brilliant insight and was the basis for his decision to invade Italy by land from the north. The Gauls were essentially the pot of gold at the end of his long journey.21 Yet no prize comes without its cost. It has been said that Hannibal’s objectives in Italy were limited, but an affiliation with the Gauls could only have served to convince the Romans of the opposite. These were not ordinary foes. The Gauls represented something altogether more frightening and dangerous to the Roman soul, and by joining them, Hannibal took on an onus that would serve to define the coming conflict in the starkest possible terms. So it was that what we refer to as the Second Punic War was frequently called by the Romans “the war against the Carthaginians and the Gauls.”22
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In the winter of 219, Hannibal arrived in New Carthage, awaited by envoys from Rome who warned him not to interfere in a dispute between their ally Saguntum and local tribes, and also reminded him not to cross the Ebro line of 226. The fact that the Romans had chosen to align themselves with a city well to the south of this line, and then had taken up for the city in a dispute with Carthage, not only echoed the Mamertine episode that had kicked off the First Punic War, but exemplified Rome’s characteristic pattern of defensive aggression.
Hannibal must have known what this implied. Most modern historians follow Polybius and Appian in saying that Hannibal thought it necessary to send home for instructions, though he prejudiced the case by presenting the situation as the Romans and Saguntines inciting Carthaginian Spain to revolt.23 Having apparently received permission to do what he saw fit, Hannibal attacked Saguntum, taking it after a brutal eight-month assault that left the adult population massacred and a good quantity of the copious loot in Carthage as a matter of public relations.
Yet the Roman historian and senior senator at the time, Fabius Pictor, disagreed completely. He argued that Hannibal began the war on his own initiative, and that not a single one of the notables in Carthage approved of his conduct toward Saguntum.24 If “notables” meant the traditional oligarchs, then Hanno’s impassioned speech against the war, cited by Livy (21.10), very probably represented more than a lonely voice in the political wilderness. “Is it your enemy you know not, or yourselves, or the fortunes of both peoples? … It is Carthage against which Hannibal is now bringing up his … towers; it is the walls of Carthage he is battering with his rams. Saguntum’s walls—may my prophecy prove false!—will fall upon our heads.”
But the delegation of high-ranking Romans sent to Carthage was demanding as the price of peace the surrender of Hannibal and his senior officers for trial as war criminals, a bribe that was at once infuriating and possibly beyond the Punic capacity to deliver. So when the most senior Roman—Livy (21.18.1) tells us it was Fabius Maximus—eventually announced that in the folds of his toga he held both war and peace and it was up to the Carthaginians to choose, the presiding suffete told him to do so instead. Fabius replied that war fell out, and a shout rang out in response: “We accept it!” From all appearances this was hardly what we might call a measured deliberation. Quite probably it was a decision also lubricated with Barcid silver and success with the popular faction, but the real story was that Carthage had not fully recovered from the first struggle with Rome and was unable and ultimately unwilling to throw its full weight behind a second.
Back in Spain, Hannibal was not sitting on his hands awaiting a decision from Carthage. Instead, he was expecting word from the agents he had sent forward, possibly even before Saguntum’s fall, to explore the proposed route into Italy and to make contact with the tribes of Cisalpine Gaul.25 When the emissaries returned to assure him that the passage over the Alps, while difficult, was possible and that he would be welcomed upon arrival, the invasion was a go.
Meanwhile, he had been using the winter of 219–18 to make all the key decisions, not just planning for the expeditionary force, but seeing to the defense of Spain and even Africa. He was a man very much in charge of events. An early cross-baser—cross-basing being the means by which the Romans later successfully garrisoned their empire—Hannibal sent a force of nearly sixteen thousand Iberians to guard the vulnerable African home front, and brought an equivalent number of reliable Libyans, Numidians, and Liby-Phoenicians to Spain and placed them under brother Hasdrubal to keep watch over Barcid land.26
Yet most of his efforts must have been devoted to putting together his land armada, an apparently bloated entity of ninety thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, along with thirty-seven elephants—really a force within a force.27 This was probably deliberate. Most were likely to have been recently recruited Spaniards—Iberians, Lusitanians, and Celtiberians—raw but potentially good close order horse and foot soldiers; but at the core was the army initially forged by Hamilcar, veteran professionals—wickedly effective Numidian light cavalry and meticulously trained African heavy infantry, the centerpieces in all of Hannibal’s future tactical shenanigans. Italy was a long way off, and much as his father had done on the way to Spain, Hannibal it seems meant to use the trek to train and toughen his force into the steely instrument he would need to take on Rome. He must have foreseen that this would be a Darwinian exercise, with many falling by the wayside or off icy cliffs in the Alps, though he may have underestimated the wastage. His African troops in particular were not likely to be tolerant of the cold weather at altitude. Still we can assume from this initial force structure that he believed that most of his veterans would survive the journey and that the newbie Spaniards who remained from the expendable outer layer would arrive as tough as the rest.
Hannibal was already bound to his veterans in a way no prior Carthaginian general could claim; he had not only lived with them and fought with them, he had literally grown up with them. Yet the march to Italy would prove the first great test of his leadership. There were multiple initial challenges, but in the Alps there was a real possibility of total disintegration. He rose to the occasion, but it was a near thing, and h
e probably completed the journey also transformed, tempered by danger and driven by a new sense of ruthless desperation.
He was not alone, never alone. Relatively little is known about the officers and unit commanders who left with him on the great adventure, but as with many other illustrious captains, they appear to have been a close group of friends and family, and with few exceptions they appear to have stayed with him for the duration.28 As is appropriate for a “brotherhood of arms,” his youngest brother, Mago, acted as his right hand at Trebia and as his virtual co-commander at Cannae. Another Barcid, nephew Hanno—the son of the admiral Bomilcar and Hannibal’s sister—though barely an adult, may have led the Numidian cavalry at Cannae. Another Hasdrubal, not the brother Hasdrubal who was left in charge in Spain, was known to have headed the army service corps, and as commander of the Celtic and Spanish cavalry at Cannae, he closed the final escape route on the Romans. Then there was the cheeky critic of Hannibal’s strategic sense, the brilliantly opportunistic commander of horse, Maharbal, whom Plutarch calls a Barcid.29 Polybius (9.24.5–6; 9.25) identifies two other officers, Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the Samnite, as particularly good friends, and certainly as tough customers—the former advising his namesake to teach his men to eat human flesh to get through the Alps, and the latter so notoriously greedy that even Hannibal avoided disputes with him over spoils.