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

by Robert L. O'Connell

  Once confronted by Romans, though, the Punic troops of the second line fought with what Polybius calls “frantic and extraordinary courage,” throwing the hastati into confusion and checking their forward momentum.89 At this point the officers of the principes began feeding their legionaries into the fight, which got the line moving again and ultimately broke the Carthaginians, Libyans, and the remaining mercenaries, all of whom began to flee, with the Romans in hot pursuit.

  But rather than break ranks, the veterans to the rear, on Hannibal’s orders, leveled their spears as the Punic fugitives approached, a sure sign they were not going to let them through. Those who were not cut down veered to either side of the Punic line, where they began to congregate and re-form.

  A critical moment had arrived. The space between the two forces was now covered with dead and dying men, the ground made slippery by their blood.90 On the Roman side the hastati were in complete disorder from the chase, and the maniples of principes were probably somewhat disheveled from their short fight. Only the triarii were fully ready to confront the much more numerous Carthaginian veterans, lined up in perfect battle array. It may well have crossed Scipio’s mind that he had been tricked by the master into committing too many units too soon, just another Roman commander led cluelessly into the abattoir. His horns sounded the retreat, and he set about attempting one of the most difficult of military maneuvers, reconstituting his formations in the midst of a battle. The ghosts were up to the task, reversing their field, reconnecting with their centurions, re-forming their maniples, and lining up again, this time along a single front, hastati in the center and the principes and triarii on either flank.

  For as long as it took, they were dangerously vulnerable. Yet Hannibal with his fresh veterans in perfect order simply watched as the Romans scurried about, brought their wounded to the rear, and above all rested. Opportunity beckoned, and the supreme opportunist marked time. Maybe he was worried about keeping good order while attacking across the corpse-strewn battlefield. Perhaps he was wary of one of Scipio’s flanking maneuvers. Whatever the reason, he waited and let the Romans come to him. It would be his undoing.

  If fate were a dramatist, there could not have been a better place for an intermission. The issue had been reduced to a fight of soldiers, not generals. The supreme rematch was at hand; after fourteen long years, the ghosts of Cannae would meet their vanquishers again in mortal combat. When they were ready, the Romans marched directly at the Carthaginians and the fight began. As far as we know there were no military sleights of hand, no feints, no hidden reserves, no centers extended or withheld. It was to be a straight-up clash between two supremely experienced hosts of murderously inclined experts with sharp instruments. Polybius (15.14.6) reports, “As they were nearly equal in numbers as well as in spirit and bravery, and were equally well armed, the contest was for long doubtful, the men falling where they stood out of determination.”

  But then when it seemed perhaps both forces would wear each other away into nothing, the tiebreaker arrived in the form of Laelius and Masinissa back from the chase. The combined Roman cavalry hit the Punic formation in the rear, and the slaughter was on. Most were killed in formation; those who bolted were run down by the horsemen, as the ground was flat and there was nowhere to go. Before it was over, twenty thousand Punic soldiers were killed—with most of the rest captured—at a cost of fifteen hundred Romans.91 But numbers barely tell the story of Zama. The ghosts of Cannae had achieved a revenge probably unmatched in all of military history. Perhaps the most victorious army in human memory essentially lay dead at their feet, and Hannibal, one of the greatest captains of all time, had hesitated and lost just about everything. He fled with just a few horsemen back to Hadrumetum. He would live almost two decades longer, occupying a place in Rome’s nightmares and a place on the fringes of high politics, but in reality it was now his turn to play the ghost.

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  The Second Punic War was over. Its instigator knew it. A military oxymoron—Hannibal without an army—he returned to Carthage thirty-six years after he had left on the summons of the council of elders, warily, no doubt, given that so many failed Punic commanders had ended up on the cross. But his reception was polite, and he stated frankly that there was no hope unless Carthage sued for peace.

  Later, when an elder named Gisgo (the same Gisgo who had marveled at the size of the Roman army at Cannae?) objected to Scipio’s preliminary demands, Hannibal knocked him off the rostrum and argued passionately that it was inconceivable that any citizen of Carthage did “not bless his stars that, now that he was at the mercy of the Romans, he has obtained such lenient terms.”92 Or so the terms seemed.

  The final peace treaty was deceptively mild, largely along the lines of Scipio’s original armistice agreement. Carthage would continue to be self-governed following its own laws and customs, and would retain all prewar possessions in Africa. It would surrender its entire navy save ten triremes, and all its elephants, promising to train no more (arguably a benefit for Carthage). The war indemnity was raised to ten thousand talents, to be paid in annual installments over fifty years. This was a huge amount in the ancient world, equating to 572,000 pounds of silver worth more than $120,000,000 at today’s prices.93

  More onerous—sinister even—was the Carthaginians’ designation as “friends and allies” of Rome, the same terminology used to subordinate dependencies in Italy, a designation that prohibited Carthage from going to war with anyone unless it had the Roman senate’s permission. Appian even maintains they were specifically forbidden to wage war against Masinissa, an inveterate enemy.94 This proved to be a demon protocol, a pretext for future intervention by Rome, and ultimately the city’s doom.95 But the Carthaginians would try to make the best of it, and for a while it seemed that the new relationship was actually to their advantage.

  But beneath a cloak of legalism, Rome, and in particular conservative elements in the senate, remained traumatized by the events of the war and would pursue a course that must be interpreted as deeply vindictive toward those deemed responsible. This agenda of retribution would dominate Roman foreign policy in the opening decades of the second century and more subtly far beyond.

  Given their distinctive fear-scape, it was utterly in character for Romans to remember the Second Punic War as “the war against the Carthaginians and Gauls.” Now that the Barcid menace had been removed, it was the turn of the Celtic tribes inhabiting the Po basin to suffer the wrath of those along the Tiber. The assault was relentless; during the decade after the year 200, more legions and consuls were sent to Cisalpine Gaul than to anywhere else.96 Pincered by Roman forces moving both east and west from the coasts, the results were inevitable. The Boii in particular were singled out for a pounding, and by 191 they had been crushed, with half their lands expropriated. The other local tribes—Insubres and Cenomani—were treated better but with the understanding that, at last, they were now Rome’s subordinates. Nor had the Romans forgotten that the region’s other inhabitants, the Ligurians, had lined up with Mago Barca when he’d arrived in their vicinity. Though it took longer because of mountainous terrain, by 155 they too had been steamrolled.97

  Philip V of Macedon, whose alliance with Hannibal after Cannae had probably sealed his fate, was also marked for a payback. Philip would protest that he had done nothing to transgress the Peace of Phoinike, and the Roman people were plainly tired—Livy (31.6.3) claims that a motion for war was initially rejected by the Comitia Centuriata—but the senate was implacable and in the end had its way.

  Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, included in Rome’s military instrument of retribution was a substantial contingent from the legiones Cannenses. They were supposedly volunteers, but after a year, two thousand of them mutinied, bitterly maintaining that from Africa they had been transported back to Sicily and then put on ships to Macedonia contrary to their wishes.98 The consul P. Villius Tappulus persuaded them to remain under arms, and they were still serving two years later in 197, when un
der the thirty-year-old Titus Quinctius Flaminius they blundered into Philip’s army in the fog-enshrouded hills of Cynoscephalae. The armies seemed well matched, until an unnamed tribune, availing himself of the flexibility Scipio had engineered into his ghosts, peeled off twenty maniples and led them around to the flank and rear of the heretofore successful Macedonian right.99 Unable to turn to meet the Romans with their long pikes, the Macedonian phalangites were hacked to pieces by a buzz saw of Roman short swords.

  His army destroyed, Philip accepted peace terms very much like those that had been imposed on Carthage. Now he too was no longer permitted to wage war outside home territory without Rome’s blessing.100 In linking himself to Hannibal after Cannae, Philip had only been playing according to the rules of the Mediterranean basin’s “great game,” but now he learned that Rome played for keeps.

  The war’s end also meant that the Cannenses could get some rest. Although the two victorious legions remained in place, the military threat had passed, and presumably the oldest veterans could be shipped back to Italy relatively quickly.101 Then, two years after he had proclaimed “the freedom of the Greeks” at the Isthmian Games of 196, Flaminius, still in the process of arranging the new order, discovered as many as twelve hundred of the original Cannae prisoners in Greece. After the long-ago senatorial refusal to ransom them, Hannibal had sold the prisoners to Achaean owners, and they were now bought back and finally repatriated.102 Six years later, another substantial number of enslaved Cannenses would be found in Crete and sent home, fully twenty-eight years after the battle had occurred.103

  Meanwhile, at the insistence of Scipio the senate instructed the praetor urbanus to appoint a commission of ten to allocate some public lands in Samnium and Apulia for Africanus’s soldiers, at the rate of two jugera (about 1.3 acres) per year served in Spain or Africa. But this equation apparently did not account for the ghosts’ time in Sicily.104 If this was rehabilitation, it was not exactly generous, given the pain and humiliation these troops had endured before acquitting themselves so heroically at Zama, and then at Cynoscephalae. But at least the republic had taken some responsibility for their long-suffering soldiers and had not left it to the initiative of their commander, as would occur so frequently late in the republican era, with disastrous consequences for the stability of the state. In any age, countries that fight a lot of wars are well advised to take good care of their veterans.

  But just as the requital for the Cannenses seems grudging, so too did the “freedom of the Greeks” prove to be less than it had appeared. Even though Rome did eventually withdraw all forces from the Hellenic mainland, Greece’s implied status as a protectorate made it practically inevitable that Rome would intervene in order to prevent domination by any other element—from within or without. This relationship would ultimately draw the Greeks inescapably into Rome’s imperial orbit. For the moment, though, the question was simply whether “freedom of the Greeks” extended to Hellenes living in Asia Minor, and more particularly in Thrace, the European province next to Macedonia. Thrace was now being claimed by Antiochus, the Seleucid basileus and Hellenistic player of the first order. Things might have been worked out between him and the Romans, but in 195, as Hellenistic players were wont to do, he hired a military consultant. Regrettably, the consultant was Hannibal, and from this point Antiochus became a marked man along the Tiber.

  Back in Carthage, Hannibal had morphed temporarily into a politician, having been elected suffete in 196 by apparently leveraging a renascent Barcid faction with a program of popular reforms frankly aimed at the commercial oligarchy. It was not surprising that he made enemies, some of whom went to Rome, where they found a ready audience—though not with Scipio Africanus—for their accusations. Over Scipio’s objections, the senate decided to send three of their number to Carthage, really to indict Hannibal before the council of elders, but under the guise of settling a dispute between Carthage and Masinissa. Hannibal wasn’t fooled; he discreetly left town and made his way to a castle on the coast, where a boat waited to take him to Tyre. It was the beginning of a hegira that would last until his death. But the first sojourn was with Antiochus, and it would not prove an auspicious one for either man.105

  Had Antiochus really meant to turn his “cold war”106 with Rome into a winner-take-all contest for dominance of the Mediterranean basin, then the choice of Hannibal as strategist would have been brilliant. The Barcid knew exactly what was necessary for such an effort—an alliance with Philip of Macedon, an invasion of Italy, and if possible persuading Carthage to recommence hostilities.107 But Antiochus’s horizons were limited, and besides, he never trusted Hannibal (despite the latter relating to him the oath he’d taken as a child against Rome) nor took his advice seriously … the worst of both worlds—guilt by association without any of its benefits. So in temporizing—always a mistake against the Romans—Antiochus ended up having his army destroyed at Magnesia in 189, the culmination of a campaign orchestrated by Scipio Africanus. For their troubles, the Romans charged him a fifteen-thousand-talent war indemnity, half again more than they had charged the Carthaginians, and kicked him entirely out of Asia Minor.

  Hannibal continued his wandering, eventually ending up in Bithynia along the shores of today’s Sea of Marmara at the court of King Prusias, who employed him as a city planner, certainly one of his more constructive roles.108 Prusias also took advantage of the Carthaginian’s destructive talents. For Prusias was involved in a territorial dispute with Eumenes of Pergamum, which escalated into open warfare in 186. Since both were “friends of the Roman people,” the senate delayed its intervention until 183. In the interim, Hannibal took a turn as Prusias’s admiral, reportedly catapulting pots full of poisonous snakes onto Eumenes’s ships, and nearly capturing the king by sending him a message, seeing which ship accepted it, and then going after the royal vessel.109 Eumenes, “the oriental Masinissa,” sent his brother to complain to the Romans about Prusias’s conduct in general, and specifically that Prusias had used reinforcements sent by Philip of Macedon and also, presumably, had used the services of Hannibal.

  The senate dispatched Flaminius, who was good with Greeks, to provide what the Romans probably thought of as adult supervision. Whether it was Flaminius who demanded Hannibal’s head, or Prusias who offered it to propitiate the Roman, is hard to tell. However, the Barcid, even at sixty-three, was alert enough to attempt an escape through an underground passage. Unfortunately, he ran into a detachment of the king’s guards and, realizing the game was over, took poison, remarking, “Let us now put an end to the great anxiety of the Romans, who have thought it too long and hard a task to wait for the death of a hated old man.”110

  So passed Hannibal into history and legend; nobody was better at winning battles, but not wars, which is what counts. He died much as he had lived, as a paladin and warlord whose natural environment was the ever shifting stage of Hellenistic personality-based power politics. Rome was emblematic of something much more robust, and that was why he had lost and the Romans could subsequently take over the Mediterranean basin so suddenly. Meanwhile, a case can be made that historians writing from the perspective of the modern monolithic nation-state have too closely equated Hannibal’s acts and those of his clan with the economic and political vector of Carthage. Certainly he was never an entirely independent actor; nor was Carthage an innocent bystander to the Second Punic War. But the pro-Roman sources, if read skeptically, seem to point to the Barcids as instigators and the city as just sort of tagging along. For Carthage too stood for something else, and that was making money.

  Poor Carthage—if you can say that about a place that burned its young alive. But if you are willing to overlook this unfortunate custom, the city certainly did seem to mend its ways after the Second Punic War. Most fundamentally it seems to have accepted a subordinate position to Rome, to have taken the term “friend and ally” seriously. Setting aside war and imperial ambition, Carthaginians turned to doing what they did best—not only recovering their former
prosperity but growing ever wealthier. After only ten years, they offered to pay off their entire war indemnity, which was supposed to have stretched across five decades, a proposal the Romans huffily rejected.111 Around the same time, envoys from the senate requested very large quantities of grain, including five hundred thousand bushels of barley destined for the army. The Punic side offered it gratis, but the senate insisted on paying.

  Factions continued in Carthaginian politics, but no element appears to have been hostile to Rome, and there is no indication that the city was anything but a loyal ally after 201.112 But they were foolish to flaunt their wealth in the face of the authorities on the Tiber, not so much because it provoked jealousy, but because the Romans were not equipped to understand it and were programmed to think of it in terms of a military threat.

  It is obviously impossible to say anything definitive about what ordinary Romans thought of Carthage and Carthaginians. The most revealing literary evidence is probably Plautus’s Poenulus (“The Carthaginian”). The leading character is a Punic merchant named—no surprise here—Hanno who exhibits some negative stereotypes (rings in his ears, a fondness for whores, pretending not to understand Latin when he really does). But Hanno is clearly a comic figure, and not a villain designed to draw upon the Roman audiences’ hatred of Carthage when the play was enacted around 190 B.C.113 Still, this was just one play, and Hannibal had killed a lot of Romans.

  Among Rome’s leadership class there was certainly still hostility toward Carthage, and although the Africans did have their defenders in the senate (Scipio Nasica, Africanus’s cousin, was one), increasingly the tide turned toward the archconservative Marcus Porcius Cato. In 153 he visited the city as part of a delegation sent to arbitrate a dispute between Carthage and Masinissa, and he returned deeply shaken by the obvious prosperity of the place. To a Roman, especially given Carthage’s penchant for hiring mercenaries, prosperity meant danger, and he took to ending each of his speeches with “Carthage must be destroyed.” At one point he let some fresh figs drop from his toga, maintaining that they had been picked in Carthage just three days earlier and implying that a war fleet could reach Rome just as quickly. Like Freud’s fabled cigar, sometimes a fig is just a fig, but apparently not to a Roman. Appian114 maintains that from the moment Cato’s delegation returned, the senate was resolved upon going to war and was simply waiting for a pretext.