The next day—June 21, 217 B.C.30—broke with a heavy ground fog hanging over the lake and its environs. It is unclear whether the Romans were already deployed into three parallel columns of hastati, principes, and triarii when they entered the defile, but they may have been, since they were expecting action in the near future. But they had no idea they were walking into what would be remembered as the biggest ambush in history, the only time an entire large army was effectively swallowed and destroyed by such a maneuver.31
With amazing self-control the Punic forces waited silently above as the Romans marched along the lakeshore, gradually filling the narrow plain until the Romans made contact with Hannibal’s stopper force of Africans and Spaniards, at which point Hannibal gave the signal for all his troops to come charging down the hill. Emerging out of the mist, they hit virtually the entire length of the Roman army simultaneously, completely surprising and quite probably freezing them into terrified passivity. There was no going back, the Carthaginian cavalry had sealed the defile. Livy (22.5–6) tries to make the case that many stood and fought bravely; some may have, but Polybius’s (3.84) pathetic description seems more in line with the circumstances.
Most of them were cut to pieces in marching order, as they were quite unable to protect themselves…. Those again who had been shut in between the hillside and the lake perished in a still more pitiable manner. For when they were forced into the lake in a mass, some of them quite lost their wits and trying to swim in their armor were drowned, but the greater number, wading into the lake as far as they could, stood there with only their heads out of the water, and when the cavalry approached them, and death stared them in the face, though lifting up their hands and entreating to be spared in the most piteous terms, they were finally dispatched either by the horsemen or in some cases by begging their comrades to do them this service.
Nor did Flaminius survive the attack. The Gauls who had long suffered at his hands went straight for him, easily recognizable by his splendid accoutrements and also, if you believe Silius Italicus (5.132), because he wore a Gallic scalp on the crest of his helmet. For a while his bodyguards fought the Gauls off, but then an Insubrian horseman, whom Livy names Ducarius, charged through the dense mass and first slew Flaminius’s armor bearer, and then, knowing the consul’s face, ran him through with a lance.
The killing spree continued for about three hours, a slaughter so intense that neither side was aware that they were fighting in the midst of a major earthquake that had shot across central Italy.32 According to Fabius Pictor, around fifteen thousand Romans joined their leader that morning in death.33 Another six thousand Romans, probably near the head of the column, seem to have brushed past those in front of them and headed for the hills. Polybius claims they could not see—possibly due to the fog—what had befallen the rest of the force until they reached higher ground, and by then it was too late to help. More likely they were simply demoralized, which better explains their taking refuge as a body in a local Etrurian village, and their abject surrender to Maharbal and his Spaniards and Numidians a little later. At that point they were added to the other prisoners, now totaling fifteen thousand, all of whom Hannibal assembled after the fighting had ceased. As at Trebia, he slapped the Romans in chains and sent the allies home without ransom, but with the same message that he was all about liberating them from the tyrants on the Tiber. Livy (22.7.2) says some ten thousand men were scattered and eventually made it back to Rome; whether this number included the allies Hannibal let go is impossible to say. One thing was and remains clear, however. In a matter of hours an entire consular army had simply vanished.
If ever a Barca lived up to the family appellation Thunderbolt, it was Hannibal at this moment. But it is unlikely that this brilliantly conceived trap materialized out of thin air. Hannibal would not have soon forgotten the two ambushes he’d suffered in the Alps, and it is plausible that they provided the seeds of his plan at Trasimene—the same scheme of assaulting a force on the march, hiding and then attacking from above, leaving no avenue of retreat, and setting a death trap to the side. Had the Romans made this connection, it might have further mortified them. Here was an adversary who not only learned from his mistakes, but found ways to leverage them to his own advantage. He was dangerous not only on the battlefield, but anywhere in his vicinity.
For Hannibal it was an altogether felicitous encounter—after the Alps, the winter, and the swamp, his troops had been exhausted and probably capable of only a short, sharp action. His own losses were low, around fifteen hundred, most of them Celts, who’d likely seen at least some compensation in the opportunity to kill the hated Flaminius. And Hannibal’s good fortune was not at an end. There were scouting reports that the remaining consul, Geminus, had sent a large cavalry force down to support Flaminius and that it was now in the area, presumably unaware of what had happened. So Hannibal sent the enterprising Maharbal and the Numidians to deliver still another unpleasant surprise.
Back in Rome, the city was rife with foreboding. Days passed. Wives and mothers wandered the streets quizzing any and all on the fate of the army. As the frightening gossip clarified, a great crowd formed around the senate house, demanding solid information from the magistrates. Finally, a little before sunset the urban praetor Marcus Pomponius emerged to announce only: “We have been defeated in a great battle.” So the rumor mill ground on, with the women who were gathered at the city gates awaiting their men—or at least some word of them—gradually realizing a great many would not be coming home.34
Meanwhile, Pomponius kept the senate in constant session from sunrise to sunset, racking their collective brains as to how they might deal with a threat that over the course of seven months—punctuated by Ticinus, Trebia, and now Trasimene—had grown exponentially to the point where it was shaking the foundations of the state. For these disasters were palpably worse than those of the First Punic War, having fallen heavily upon the more prosperous elements, who served in and commanded the legions—not upon the poorer and less politically significant types, who rowed the warships that had been lost in the earlier contest. Existentially, the army was at the center of Rome’s conception of itself. Losing in this fashion and leaving an invader free to ravage the Italian countryside was humiliating almost beyond the capacity of words to describe.35
Then, after three days of deliberations, news arrived that Gaius Centenius, who’d been sent to help Flaminius with a force of four thousand horse—most of Rome’s remaining cavalry—had been surprised and surrounded by Maharbal probably somewhere near Assisi.36 Half of the men had been killed immediately, and the rest had surrendered the next day. Still another substantial Roman force had been obliterated. At this moment there was nothing left standing between Hannibal and Rome itself, except an easy hundred-mile march down the Via Flaminia. The situation seemed truly desperate, and the senate fell back on what was the system’s last bulwark in the face of disaster. For the first time since 249, when Rome’s navy had been wiped out off Sicily, a dictator was appointed.
[4]
He was Quintus Fabius Maximus, the same man Livy believed had told the Carthaginians that he held war or peace in his toga. It may not have been him, but he was the sort who could have said such a thing and been taken seriously. He was fifty-eight years old, had been twice consul and once censor, and was from an ancient clan, one that had already earned the title Maximus—“the greatest.” Owner of an impeccable pedigree, he was exactly the type Rome turned to in emergencies. Just the name Fabius sounds august, but actually it relates to what had once been the family business, bean farming. And symbolically, temperamentally, and strategically, he was the Beanman matched against the Thunderbolt. For like the hedgehog, Fabius Maximus understood one big thing—Hannibal’s never ending need to feed his army. To win, Rome did not have to defeat him in battle; they had to simply restrict his ability to provision his troops. Once the dictator took to the field, it became apparent that this involved two essential expedients: the removal or destructio
n of crops and livestock in the path of the Punic force, and the relentless interception and attrition of Carthaginian foraging parties.37 In the meantime, Fabius would scrupulously avoid a field engagement with Hannibal, electing instead to shadow his every step, but at a safe distance and always taking the high ground to avoid being brought unwillingly into battle.
It is important to realize that the Fabian strategy, from the outset, was seen by Romans not as a magic bean but as a bitter pill. Their entire orientation was offensive; they were acculturated to seek battle; they had been conditioned to believe their military system would triumph over any general, no matter how clever. They were also farmers, whose instincts were to protect, not burn, their fields. Everything Fabius proposed, while prudent in the face of military genius, went against the Roman grain.38 A later generation who benefited from his policies would apply to him the title Cunctator (“the Delayer”), and even this was not altogether positive.39 At the time, his countrymen employed less flattering sobriquets—Verrucosus for the wart that grew above his lip; Ovicula (“Lambykins”); and “Hannibal’s paedagogus,” after the slave who followed Roman schoolboys and carried their books.40 His countrymen also subverted and resisted his approach, undermining his authority even within the short space of his six-month term of office. It probably felt like the right thing to do, but it was a path that led directly to Cannae.
His term actually began with a focus on what was perceived to be the immediate danger to the city. First he sought to explain Flaminius’s defeat in a way the people could understand—that is, Flaminius’s failure to perform the appropriate religious rites, and his ignoring obvious omens of the gods’ displeasure. Fabius had the senate consult the prophetic Sibylline Books and then charge a praetor with performing the prescribed rites to assuage the gods.
Fabius did have a deputy, Marcus Minucius Rufus, his master of horse. (The dictator himself had to get special permission to serve mounted.41) Together they looked to the defenses of the city, and it may be that Minucius was ordered to assemble the legiones urbanae by a certain date.42 It also seems that two additional legions were raised to replace those lost by Flaminius, and that these set out with Fabius up the Tiber valley to meet those of Geminus, who had been ordered to proceed down the Via Flaminia toward Rome. To make it absolutely clear who was in charge, when the consul’s army was spotted, a message was sent that Geminus should come into the dictator’s presence without lictors and as a private citizen. Rome now had a clear leader and a covering force, but by this time it must have been apparent that Hannibal had gone elsewhere.
Given the quality of his intelligence, the Punic commander may well have been aware that nothing stood between him and Rome after Trasimene; but he also would have known that his army was badly rundown and in no shape to besiege what was one of the most heavily fortified population centers in the Mediterranean world. So instead he headed east, crossing the Apennines again on a ten-day march to the rich Picenum district along the Adriatic coast. During this march, he allowed his men to plunder and abuse the local populations to their hearts’ content. They must have been a motley crew at this point, the men exhibiting symptoms of scurvy and the horses afflicted by mange—both the result of vitamin deficiencies.43 So Hannibal let the soldiers gorge themselves on the fresh produce of the area, and bathed the horses with sour wine until both man and beast gradually regained their health and vitality.
But with Hannibal, R & R seldom meant repose. Polybius (3.87.3) tells us that, while in Picenum, he rearmed his African troops with “select weapons” captured in very large quantities. This process, which the historian says began after Hannibal won the “first battle” with the Romans,44 raises some interesting questions. Were they being given the pilum and gladius? If so, this implies their transformation primarily into swordsmen,45 which seems to be contradicted by Plutarch, who says (Marcellus, 12.2) the Libyans “were not javelineers, but used short spears in hand-to-hand fighting.” This description likely eliminates the pilum as an add-on. Whether the Africans adopted the short sword is still at issue, but given the short sword’s lethality and compactness, the addition remains plausible, at least as a sidearm. It is fairly certain they did not carry long pikes and therefore fight as a phalanx. The only evidence that they did carry long pikes is an apparent mistranslation of the Greek word for “spear.”46
Livy (22.46.4) does say that the Libyans at Cannae could have been mistaken for Romans, since they were equipped with Romans’ captured gear. Probably he is referring to their defensive accoutrements, which is what an observer would have noticed. Since a lot of equipment had been captured, it stands to reason that the Africans, who were Hannibal’s key maneuver force, would have gotten the best of it—an oval scutum (a shield heavy enough to preclude using the long two-handed pike of the Macedonian phalanx), the best Montefortino helmet, a full set of greaves, and, most important, a ring-mail cuirass rather than simply a pectorale heart protector. These articles left them as a group considerably better protected than most of the Romans. They were now true heavy infantry, and this equipment upgrade serves to explain their impact at Cannae; when they closed the trap on the Romans, it could not be pried open.
Before leaving Picenum, Hannibal also belatedly reestablished contact with Carthage, informing the city by seaborne messengers of what had transpired since he’d left Spain. Polybius notes that this is the first time Hannibal had touched the coast since reaching Italy, but still he had left the city without word for more than a year. Had he really wanted or needed instructions from Punic central, it seems he would have made a more concerted effort to contact them earlier. Instead, he waited until he had good news, especially for the Barcid faction at home. And apparently it elicited the responses he wanted—rejoicing and promises to support in every possible way the two campaigns in Spain and Italy. Perhaps as public relations, it worked, but in the case of the latter theater the results proved negligible.47
[5]
Refreshed, rearmed, and likely remembering his dream of the serpent tearing up the Italian countryside, Hannibal headed south to begin the next more overtly political phase of his campaign. He applied the sinuous column of his army—in hopes of weaning away his enemy’s allies, of provoking further Roman action in their defense, or of simply demonstrating that the Romans could not protect their allies. Advancing down the Adriatic coastal plain into Apulia, foraging as he went, he turned southwest about two thirds of the way down the Italian boot and headed toward Aecae,48 probably on intelligence that Romans were in the vicinity. He found Fabius Maximus camped nearby with an army of forty thousand—four legions and their allied equivalents—having reached this spot after an extremely cautious journey guided by constant reconnoitering. Hannibal immediately marched up, deployed, and offered battle. But Fabius would have none of it, leaving the Punic commander to withdraw and lecture his troops on the newfound timidity of Romans.49
There ensued a cat-and-mouse, or rather a fox-and-hedgehog game—with Hannibal employing all manner of artifice to incite his opponent, and Fabius clinging to his one big thing, avoiding a showdown. The Punic force was like a shark, to survive it had to keep moving, sending out between one half and two thirds of its numbers to forage.50 To make this more difficult, Fabius had earlier tried to impose a “scorched earth” policy, ordering all those in the Carthaginian path to take shelter in fortified places, but only after destroying all structures and supplies. Given the amount of booty the Carthaginians managed to cart off, this policy was probably honored more in the breach than in the observance, but even partial implementation must have had the effect of dispersing the foragers and leaving them more vulnerable to attack. This was Fabius’s opening. Keeping his own men concentrated and fed from local supply dumps, he sent out hunter-killer teams to prey on isolated Carthaginians, and in the process he rebuilt the confidence of what must have been a demoralized and inexperienced force.
Almost from the outset it seems Minucius, Fabius’s master of horse, objected to the inevita
ble rural destruction, calling it craven, and champing at the bit for a more aggressive approach. It must have been hard for any Roman to take, especially since, as Minucius noted, the dictator’s habit of camping on high ground created “beautiful theaters for their spectacle of Italy laid waste with fire and sword.”51
Keeping the pressure on, Hannibal pillaged his way west across the Apennines into Samnium, heading toward Campania and the most fertile agricultural district in Italy, the fabled plain of Capua or ager Falernus. On unfamiliar ground, he apparently had some trouble reaching his destination; here is where he crucified one or perhaps several guides when they misunderstood his badly pronounced Latin and took him in the wrong direction.52 Meanwhile, Fabius, following Hannibal’s eventual path down the Volturnus River valley, a day or two’s march behind, realized that the steep narrow pass at the valley’s head was the only viable entrance and exit from the plain. All he had to do was occupy this defile—which he did with four thousand men, stationing the rest of his army in a camp high on a nearby hill—and he had the Carthaginian trapped. Hannibal could plunder to his heart’s content, but the odds were on his returning only to find his path blocked, which is exactly what happened. Laden with loot he would need for the coming months, and faced with the necessity of establishing his winter quarters in a more defensible locality, Hannibal was left to consider his options.
The fox is most unpredictable after dark, and so was the Carthaginian. Appian (Han.14) claims it was here that a desperate Hannibal had his Roman captives slaughtered, but this seems unlikely, since at this point prisoners were still being ransomed and Hannibal needed the money. Besides, he had other beings to sacrifice.
The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic Page 16