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

by Robert L. O'Connell

  Up north, for most of the nearly two years after he landed near Genoa in 205, Mago did little beyond recruiting Gauls and Ligurians. Finally, in the summer of 203 he felt strong enough to make his move, and advanced toward Milan, where he accepted battle with four Roman legions, under proconsul Marcus Cornelius Cethegus.58 While Livy’s description (30.18) has been questioned, it is clear that the Punic side was losing.59 Then Mago was badly wounded by a javelin in the thigh while trying to rally his troops, who, seeing him carried from the field, lost all resolve and bolted, turning a fighting retreat into a rout. But most seem to have made it back to camp, and Mago, despite injury, and ever the Barcid, managed to slip them away in the dead of night and reach the coast with the force largely intact.

  Here he met up with the delegation from Carthage summoning him to return to Africa and telling him that his brother was being given a similar order. Neither he nor his army was in any condition to object. Rumor had it that his Ligurian allies were changing sides, and at the very least a sea voyage would be easier on his hurt leg than constant jolting along the road.60 So, probably sometime in the autumn of 203, he packed up his force and set sail. He didn’t make it past Sardinia before the wound killed him, but most of his troops seem to have reached Africa alive and in some sort of fighting condition. But there would be only one Barcid brother left to lead them.

  Around the same time, the Carthaginian envoys reached Hannibal in Bruttium at Croton, a Greek town known for its beautiful women. He had settled into a kind of gentlemanly semi-retirement, at one point summering on the grounds of the famous temple of Hera, which he had been sorely tempted to plunder until the goddess had come to him in a dream and threatened to take his good eye if he tried it.61 He greeted the summons home with anything but enthusiasm. “Gnashing his teeth and groaning,” Livy reports (30.201ff), “and scarcely keeping back the tears, he listened to the words of the emissaries…. ‘I am being recalled by men who, in forbidding the sending of reinforcements and money, were long ago trying to drag me back. The conqueror of Hannibal is therefore not the Roman people … but the Carthaginian council of elders…. And over this inglorious return of mine it will not be Publius Scipio who wildly exults, so much as Hanno, who, unable to do so by any other means, has ruined our family by the downfall of Carthage.’”

  There could be no clearer statement of the divergent political agendas of the Barcids and the commercial classes of the metropolis. Hannibal’s statement was a virtual admission that the conflict in Italy was a familial enterprise—truly Hannibal’s fight—and that he did not appreciate being drawn away to save Carthage from the fight’s consequences. But he had been boxed in if not defeated by Rome’s armies; he had no future in Italy. So, nearly two years after Scipio had first landed in Africa, Hannibal began packing up his army to “defend” home turf.62 For he had become, in the words of modern historian Dexter Hoyos, “a Punic Micawber hoping something would turn up.”63 Once, Hannibal had dominated events; now the reverse was true.

  Before he left, however, he had a bronze tablet carved that recounted his exploits, and he had it placed in Hera’s temple. This was the tablet Polybius had seen and used to record the size of the force Hannibal had brought to Italy. The text has been lost, but we know it was inscribed not just in Punic but in Greek, the international language of the day, which implies that the tablet was carved less in the spirit of a general on a mission than in the spirit of a Hellenistic hegemon anxious to advertise his exploits.64 Appian reports that during Hannibal’s sixteen years in Italy, he destroyed four hundred towns and killed three hundred thousand of Italy’s men in battle—perhaps figures derived from Hannibal’s list of accomplishments.65 If so, this list would have been very much in character, for he left little in his wake besides destruction. Aboard ship, Livy tells us, “he repeatedly looked back upon the shores of Italy and, accusing gods and men, called down a curse upon himself … because he had not led his soldiers, bloodstained from the victory of Cannae, straight to Rome.”66 If Maharbal was within earshot, he would have been sorely tempted, but wise not to add, “I told you so.”

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  The truce held during the winter months despite Hannibal’s return, but then in the spring of 202 it collapsed.67 A Roman convoy of two hundred transports escorted by thirty war galleys was struck by adverse winds as it approached the African coast. The warships managed to row to their intended landfall, but the purely sail-driven merchant vessels were scattered, with many being blown into the bay directly overlooked by Carthage. Seeing the ships abandoned by their crews and knowing they were filled with grain, the Carthaginian people started something like a food riot, and the council of elders felt compelled to send Hasdrubal Gisgo out with fifty ships to salvage the tempting prizes. The vessels were towed back to the city and their contents were added to Carthage’s flagging grain supplies. To make matters worse, the three representatives Scipio sent to protest this confiscation apparently had to be rescued from a mob. (Appian says by Hanno the Great.68) The representatives were then dismissed without an answer by the assembly of the people and were attacked by ships from Hasdrubal’s fleet near Utica, which forced their vessel to be beached. For Scipio this was the last straw; the war was on again.69

  Why did the Punic side break the armistice? Had the peace negotiations really been just a stalling tactic to provide Hannibal time to return, as Livy maintains? If that was the case, why had the negotiations been necessary in the first place? The Carthaginians had already been secure behind their walls and could have waited. Now they were plainly hungry, so the armistice does not seem to have given them any better access to food. In fact, the original terms of the truce could be interpreted to imply that the Carthaginians had some obligation to supply Scipio’s army.

  Polybius (15.2.2–3) wants us to believe that it was Hannibal’s arrival that had caused a political shift in the city, and there were now few who any longer wanted to adhere to the treaty, placing their trust instead in the Barcid’s military skills. But if it was that simple, how are we to interpret Hannibal’s choice of landing points, not nearby, placing himself as a shield between Carthage and the Romans, but at Hadrumetum (modern Sousse), nearly 150 miles down the coast to the southeast.70 It should not be forgotten that our sources are all pro-Roman. We will never know exactly what went on inside Carthage at this critical juncture, but a case can be made that there had always been a sincere desire for peace but in a climate of hunger and desperation, events—possibly orchestrated by Hasdrubal Gisgo and his faction—simply got out of hand. In any case, Carthage made a bad mistake.

  Scipio now went after the countryside with a vengeance, sacking town after town in the interior—refusing offers of surrender and then enslaving the towns’ populations.71 Hannibal did nothing. When a delegation from Carthage, overwrought by the devastation, begged him to march on the enemy immediately, he told them to mind their own business, he would decide when the time was right.72 This hardly looks like Punic solidarity.

  Nevertheless, Hannibal did move soon, marching to a place five days southwest of Carthage known as Zama. There were at least three, maybe four, Zamas in ancient Tunisia, so this Zama’s exact location eludes us.73 The impetus for Hannibal’s move in this direction seems to have been all about cavalry—actually, a shortage of cavalry, and on both sides. Appian reports that before leaving Italy, Hannibal had been forced to slaughter four thousand of his horses for lack of transports.74 To make up for the shortfall, he had contacted a relative of Syphax named Tychaeus, who now brought him two thousand horsemen and also brought Syphax’s son Vermina, whom Hannibal may have hoped had been going to join him inland with still more horsemen.75 But most critically, Hannibal wanted to keep Masinissa away from Scipio.

  While Scipio was ravaging Carthaginian territory, the young prince was busy consolidating control over his own kingdom and as much of Syphax’s as he could gobble. Realizing a showdown was imminent, Scipio sent Masinissa a series of messages telling the prince to join him, and Scipio beg
an moving to shorten the distance between them, eventually ending up in the vicinity of Zama. It was this juncture that Hannibal wanted to prevent.

  Anxious to know if Masinissa and his Numidians were already at Zama, the Barcid sent out spies to reconnoiter the Roman camp, three of whom were captured. Rather than put them to the sword, Scipio gave them a guided tour, knowing they would see no Numidians, but also knowing that Masinissa was set to arrive the next day with six thousand foot soldiers and four thousand horse.76 After hearing from his spies and then witnessing Masinissa’s arrival the next day, Hannibal was so struck by the cleverness of the ruse that he conceived an urge to get to know the young Roman general, and sent a herald to arrange a meeting.

  That the conference actually took place few modern historians doubt. But what was said is another thing entirely, since Polybius and Livy—both of whom provide elaborate dialogues77—agree that the meeting was attended solely by the principals and their interpreters, which makes it highly unlikely that anything of the actual conversation was preserved.

  Supposedly they made a stab at negotiating peace terms, but in reality Scipio and Hannibal each must have realized that this was but a prelude to a sanguinary showdown. And on these grounds it is safe to say each valued the meeting as a means of sizing up the other as an opponent. Scipio cannot have forgotten an adolescence spent suffering at the other interlocutor’s hands—Ticinus, Trebia, and above all Cannae, when Hannibal’s tricks had nearly put an end to his young life, had killed his father-in-law, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, and had brought nearly fifteen years of shame down on the men with whom he now planned to even the score.

  Hannibal must have known something of Scipio’s biography, perhaps enough to have wished that he had killed the Roman when he had had the chance. Now Hannibal might well have wondered if he was facing his nemesis. He was forty-six years old, at a time when men aged fast. He had lived a hard life, knowing nothing but war since youth. The wily mind of the fox remained unimpaired, but the body must have been tired, no longer the “Thunderbolt” it had once been. Hannibal had always beaten the Romans, or at least slipped from their grasp. But it could well have crossed his mind that this time the opponent and the circumstances were different. Though he was technically in his own country, he was far from support or shelter; if he lost, he was finished.

  Back in their camps the respective armies must have been equivalently aware of the stakes and aware that combat, probably decisive combat, loomed. The Roman and Italian infantry contingent was relatively small—around twenty-three thousand (plus six thousand of Masinissa’s Numidians), compared to Hannibal’s thirty-six thousand to forty-six thousand. In cavalry, though, with the addition of the Numidians, the Roman and Italian force outnumbered its Punic equivalent perhaps about six thousand to four thousand.78 Although there must have been substitutes and other volunteers, the heart of the Roman force, its soul, was made up of survivors of Cannae and the two battles of Herdonea—all of them prior victims of Hannibal and his veterans. They must have understood that they were about to face these enemies one last time, that in all probability they would either die here at Zama still in disgrace or find redemption at last.

  They were in no sense losers; they could look back on a record of fighting well in Sicily, and now in Africa, where they had known nothing but victory. They also must have understood that their previous misfortunes had largely been due to the mistakes of their commanders and the unyielding stereotypical nature of their tactics. Now they had Publius Scipio, who not only had shown them how to exploit battlefield opportunities, but possessed the guile and ruthlessness to truly match wits with their Punic tormentor. Scipio must have been a god to them, by now the repository of all their faith. Still, as they restlessly awaited the final outcome—sharpening their weapons, polishing their armor, and searching for the forgetfulness of sleep—doubts surely remained. For most had reached—as had so many others on this battlefield—middle age and had long since shed the optimism of youth. Things did not have to turn out well; fate might not after all commute their sentence to live as ghosts.

  Certainly not if Hannibal had anything to say about it. But he was plainly operating under some unaccustomed constraints. Not only was he short on cavalry, his favorite arm for unhinging adversaries, but his camp contained really three armies, not one. First there were around twelve thousand Ligurians, Gauls, Balearic Islanders, and Moors, the remnants of Mago’s mercenary force that had continued on to Africa after he’d died of his wound.79 Next came a contingent of Libyans and Carthaginian citizens, probably consisting of survivors of the Great Plains and those recently recruited by the ever resilient Hasdrubal Gisgo. (Livy claims a “legion of Macedonians” was also among them, but most contemporary sources reject this.80) Finally, there were Hannibal’s own veterans, a force whose makeup constituted a virtual biography of their commander—Africans, Numidians, and Spaniards who had marched with him out of New Carthage and crossed the Alps; Gauls who had joined up in the Po valley; and numerous Bruttians from his later days in the south of Italy—a grizzled force of some of the most experienced soldiers in history. Through thick and thin they had remained steadfastly loyal, and he in turn had led them so cleverly and carefully that they had never yet tasted significant defeat. But they were now part of a composite force, two components of which were strangers not only to themselves and Hannibal, but to each other. Hannibal’s army was even more mismatched than the great Frankenstein of an army the Romans had cobbled together to fight at Cannae.81

  Since there had been no time to fuse these elements into a whole, Hannibal would seek to fight them as three separate forces—plausible-sounding but basically a gimmick. There was also a camp full of elephants, more than eighty of them82—so many that it suggests that the bulk had been recently rounded up from the bush and were half-wild. In retrospect, the only thing on the ancient battlefield more dangerously unpredictable than a well-trained elephant was an ill-trained elephant. Yet Hannibal at Zama was all about making the best of the cards dealt to him, creating the illusion of strength, and employing tricks to cover his weaknesses. Unfortunately for him, his opponent held a better hand and was not easily fooled.

  At dawn the morning after their conference, both commanders marched their forces out of camp intent on battle. Hannibal placed his elephants out front, apparently hoping for a devastating charge. Next he lined up what had been Mago’s force, and in back of them he placed the Carthaginians and Libyans. Finally, several hundred yards to the rear, as a reserve and safeguard against what he probably knew was Scipio’s proclivity for flanking attacks, he deployed his own veterans.83 On his wings he placed his cavalry, Carthaginians on the right and Numidians to the left.

  For his part, Scipio had Masinissa’s riders covering his right, and the Italian horse under Laelius on the left, with his infantry deployed in the triplex acies—hastati, principes, and then triarii—but not in the normal checkerboard pattern. Instead the maniples were placed directly in back of one another, with corridors between the different units which would be filled with velites.84 Of all the elements of Scipio’s army, these light troops may have been the most improved since Cannae. Scipio’s experience in Spain with irregulars and these velites’ own exploits in taking down Syphax both indicate that these were now hardened veterans, capable of slinging missiles on equal terms with anybody that Hannibal had available at Zama, without—this was critical—panicking in the face of his elephants.

  The action opened with pachyderm pandemonium. Once the harangues were over (Polybius’s version [15.11.11], for what it’s worth, has Hannibal reminding his veterans that they were facing some of the “wretched remnants” of the legions they had smashed at Cannae), bugles sounded from all sides, freaking the elephants and causing them to attack prematurely. Those on the left veered off and stampeded back into the Punic Numidian cavalry. Seeing his opening, Masinissa charged and quickly chased them off the battlefield. The beasts in the middle did hit the Roman infantry formations, but chose to
follow the velites, who were enraging them with javelin fire, up the corridors, out the back, and also off the battlefield. It was much the same story with the behemoths on the right. They did swerve toward the Italian horse, but when greeted with a hail of javelins, they reversed field and crashed into the Carthaginian cavalry, prompting Laelius to charge in hot pursuit of this retreating wing.

  The battle had barely begun and Hannibal was without cavalry, but then again so were the Romans, which raises an interesting possibility. It has been suggested that it was a trick, that Hannibal, knowing he was weaker in this arm, had ordered his riders to give ground and draw their equivalents off the field.85 The plan may have been complicated by pachyderm panic, but the effect was the same…. It was now Hannibal’s infantry against Scipio’s, and crunch time for his ghosts.

  The foot soldiers on both sides moved forward, with the exception of Hannibal’s veterans, who stayed put. As the two sides closed, the Romans commenced banging their shields with pila, and let out a collective war whoop that eclipsed the discordant Babel of cries from the multiethnic Punic force.86 Nevertheless, Mago’s mercenaries fought bravely and aggressively, wounding many Romans among the hastati. But the legionaries were undeterred and moved relentlessly forward, driving their opponents back, Livy notes, with characteristic scutum punches.87 As the Punic front tired and looked to support in back of them, the Carthaginians and Libyans initially hesitated, untrained as they were to fight as a coordinated whole. And when Mago’s mercenaries eventually broke, fighting appears to have erupted between the two Punic groups, as the Carthaginians refused to let the refugees retreat through their ranks, perhaps on Hannibal’s orders, or, as one later historian sarcastically suggests, unconsciously emulating war elephants by turning on their own.88