Hannibal’s biggest worry was, as they said in the 1960s, what if they gave a war and nobody came? Or, more precisely, what if the Romans refused to fight a battle? What if, instead, they burned his food supplies and raided the edge of his army?
Hannibal’s other worry was whether Rome’s allies would really change sides. Unlike Alexander, who won many cities in Anatolia to his side, Hannibal had yet to find a base of supply. Without food and in a hostile country, how long would his men go on following him? What if the war in Italy turned from a glorious fight on the field of honor to a struggle against hunger and want?
A Crossing, a Trap, and a Road Not Taken
Hannibal had hard luck with crossings. The passage through the Alps in 218 B.C. nearly destroyed his army. The crossing of the Apennines from Emilia into Etruria (Tuscany) in spring 217 (perhaps in May) exacted a lesser price, but a heavy one even so. Several routes led over the Apennines into central Italy. Hannibal chose the shortest and least often used one, in order to surprise the Romans. They didn’t expect anyone to risk crossing the marshes of the Arno but Hannibal had the audacity to do just that. In 217, heavy flooding led to swampy and sometimes virtually impassable conditions, probably in the area north and west of Florence. It took four days to get through the miserable terrain.
Hannibal deployed his army so that the best troops would march first, before the tramp of tens of thousands of feet softened the ground. By the time the Celts passed through, the soil was so soggy that many drowned in the marshes. But Celtic soldiers were expendable in Hannibal’s mind. So were the pack animals, because he expected to get plenty more of them in the south; most of them died on the trek too. All but one of the few surviving elephants now died as well. So be it, Hannibal might have said. But he couldn’t have expected what happened next.
Hannibal came down with an eye infection that he refused to treat during the difficult crossing of the marshes, which left his right eye sightless or virtually sightless (the sources disagree). The damage was permanent.
As a soldier, Hannibal does not seem to have suffered much from the handicap. As a leader of men, he might even have benefited from it. His Celtic troops, like many ancient peoples, believed in the symbolic power of a single eye. The Celts worshiped as one of their chief gods Lugus, who closed one eye when he made war magic. So as a one-eyed man, Hannibal might have seemed to “see” things even better than before his injury. The Barca “brand” had just gotten stronger.
Except for their victories in northern Italy, Hannibal’s army had little to cheer about since taking the long road from Spain. Including the Celts, they now numbered about sixty thousand men. They were all bone-tired after the trek through the Arno swamp. Some of them had also suffered through the Alps and were unaccustomed to the cold of winter in northern Italy. Malnourished, most of them suffered from scurvy, which slowly weakened them. But the rich fields of Etruria beckoned, as Hannibal surely told them. Once again, he displayed leadership in a crisis. As they crossed the Apennines, the men might have noticed the vegetation change from continental to Mediterranean: first the pines and then, as they descended into the valley, the olive trees. The sun was stronger here than in the Po Valley. Hannibal had entered some of the wealthiest and most intensely cultivated territory in the Mediterranean. Hungry predators, the Carthaginians plundered the rich countryside between Arretium (Arezzo) and Cortona.
But the Romans were nearby. His scouts told Hannibal that a Roman army was camped at Arretium, with a second one less than a week’s march away at Ariminium (Rimini) on the Adriatic coast. Each army had about 25,000 men and each was led by a consul: Gnaeus Servilius at Ariminium and Gaius Flaminius at Arretium. Flaminius, a prominent general and politician, had played a key role in conquering northern Italy a decade earlier. Now his troops carried chains for imprisoning the enemies they were confident of defeating. Knowing this, Hannibal marched his men right past Flaminius in order to lure him into battle. It worked.
On the morning of June 21, 217 B.C., Flaminius followed Hannibal along the northern shore of Lake Trasimene, a large body of water in central Italy. The Roman may have felt triumphant. He probably thought that he had Hannibal trapped between his army and Servilius’s off to the northeast. A few years earlier, Flaminius had sprung a similar trap on a Celtic force. But as he entered a narrow pass on this misty morning, it was Flaminius who walked into a snare.
The northern shore of Lake Trasimene consists of a series of valleys, each surrounded by mountains ending at the water. It is lush and green territory, heavily planted today with olives as well as grass and alfalfa for hay. Camouflaged and hilly, it was, as the historian Livy writes, a land made for ambushes. Still, it was not easy to hide sixty thousand men, and it is a tribute to Hannibal that he did. At a signal, they descended from the surrounding heights. The Romans were shocked and unprepared.
It took only about three hours for the Carthaginians to cut down the Roman army. With few of the Romans able to line up in order, it was less a battle than a massacre. Some of the Romans sought safety in the marshes that still line the lakeshore, only to be slaughtered in the water. Hannibal’s men killed fifteen thousand Roman soldiers and captured ten thousand to fifteen thousand more. Flaminius was among the fallen; one account says that a Celt got his revenge by killing and decapitating the conqueror of northern Italy. Hannibal’s army suffered only one thousand five hundred losses, mainly Celts. When the other consul, Servilius, sent his four thousand cavalry from Ariminium to reconnoiter, Hannibal dispatched a mixed force of infantry and cavalry against them, led by his brilliant lieutenant Maharbal. The Carthaginians killed or captured all of Servilius’s cavalry.
In short order, Hannibal had destroyed one of Rome’s two consular armies and left the other virtually immobilized. It was a complete and utter humiliation for the Roman army. For Hannibal, it was a stunning display of good judgment on the part of a commander.
Rome now feared the worst. The road to the capital lay open, and yet Hannibal declined to take it. Why? Rome was only eighty-five miles away, a four days’ march down the via Flaminia, a road recently built by none other than Flaminius. Rome’s garrison probably numbered no more than ten thousand men. In addition to his army, Hannibal knew that a Carthaginian fleet lay off the coast at nearby Pisae (Pisa), where he had prearranged a rendezvous. Why not attack Rome by land and cut it off by sea?
The sources hint at a debate in the Carthaginian high command on this very question. But Hannibal’s forces were simply not up to it. They still hadn’t recovered from their exertions. Ringed by a massive wall, Rome might have required a long siege. Unless Rome fell quickly, there would be time enough for Servilius’s men and the legions in Sicily and Sardinia to come to Rome’s aid. Rome still had substantial manpower resources. Hannibal had achieved a great deal with small numbers, but he needed reinforcements.
He might have looked for them in Rome’s allied cities. South of Lake Trasimene lay the cities of the Etruscans. They included many opponents of Roman rule. By marching up to their walls, Hannibal might have emboldened them to open the gates and let him in.
But, like Rome, the Etruscan towns probably seemed like too big a challenge for Hannibal’s weakened army. So, instead, he turned east and marched toward the Adriatic coast. Along the way, he acquired so much booty “that his army could not drive or carry it all off.” About two weeks after the battle at Lake Trasimene, Hannibal’s army reached the Adriatic. There, “in a country abounding in all kinds of produce,” Hannibal finally gave his men and horses the rest they needed. Hannibal’s leadership style was to drive his men hard but then reward them generously.
Hannibal now sent a message to Carthage announcing his success; amazingly, this was the first word the city received from Hannibal since he had reached Italy. They were thrilled by his success but the Carthaginians wondered when their general would go for the enemy’s jugular.
Fabius the Delayer
Faced with disaster, the Romans did what people have done th
roughout the ages: they elected a dictator. The Romans originated our term “dictator”; to them, he was a special public official chosen to govern in an emergency. A dictator held supreme authority but only for six months at most. A dictator’s power wasn’t quite dictatorial: it could be challenged by his second-in-command, who was called the master of the horse. The Romans hadn’t elected a dictator for two generations, but now the time had come. For their dictator, the Romans turned in July 217 to an experienced leader, an aristocrat who had been consul and had conquered the Ligurian tribes of the northwest Apennines: Quintus Fabius Maximus. The ex-consul Marcus Minucius served as Fabius’s master of the horse.
Like Memnon of Rhodes, Fabius was a general worthy of his opponent. At the age of fifty-eight, he remained vigorous; he had a veteran commander’s cunning and the strategic insight and grandeur of vision to match Hannibal’s. Unlike his predecessors, Fabius decided not to go on the offensive. Instead, he followed a policy of attrition, aimed at wearing Hannibal down. It was a scorched-earth policy, much like the one that Memnon had called for and the Persians rejected. Fabius understood that Hannibal’s strength was his army and its forte was pitched battle. Hannibal’s weakness was the need to replenish supplies and numbers of men, both of which he lacked. Rome, by contrast, enjoyed “inexhaustible supplies of provisions and men.”
Fabius refused to fight another pitched battle with Hannibal. Instead, he ordered the Romans to follow and harass the Carthaginian while cutting his army off from potential sources of food. Fabius took various steps to protect his forces, such as always camping on high ground, where he was safe from Hannibal’s cavalry, and never letting his men go out foraging, where they might face danger. At the same time, he killed or captured numerous Carthaginian foragers.
Fabius threatened to starve out Hannibal. His plan, according to Plutarch, was “to send aid to their allies, to keep their subject cities well in hand, and to suffer the culminating vigor of Hannibal to sink and expire of itself, like a flame that flares up from scant and slight material.” He ordered civilians in Hannibal’s path to destroy their crops and buildings and to move to the safety of a fortified town.
Hannibal understood Fabius’s strategy very well. “He therefore made up his mind,” writes Plutarch, “that by every possible device and constraint his foe must be induced to fight . . . . ” At first Hannibal led out his army and approached the Roman camp in battle order. Later he marched from Apulia into Campania, hoping the Romans would fight for this fertile and strategic region. But Fabius refused to take the bait. He allowed Hannibal to raid Campania’s fields and farms.
The Carthaginians gathered a load of plunder, but to their frustration, not a single Italian city south of the Po Valley opened its gates to the self-proclaimed liberators. One more victory was all it would take, Hannibal hoped, to panic the allies into bolting from Rome. But Fabius frustrated him and the allies remained loyal.
Like Memnon, Fabius had strategic insight. Unfortunately for Rome, Fabius resembled Memnon in another way too: he had limited authority, as events showed. Fabius’s way of war made such a mark that, even today, we label a scorched-earth policy “Fabian strategy.” But in 217 B.C., Fabius was not popular. Roman culture worshiped the military offensive and looked down on defense. Fabius’s soldiers bristled at their commander’s passivity, and the Roman public nicknamed him “Hannibal’s manservant.” The final straw came at the end of Hannibal’s raids in Campania.
Loaded with loot, Hannibal hoped to retreat eastward to Apulia, but Fabius blocked off the mountain pass that Hannibal had to take. At the same time, Fabius threatened to attack if Hannibal tried to continue in Campania. It was a trap, but Hannibal wriggled free.
One night Hannibal had his men tie torches to two thousand oxen and drove them over a ridge to lure the Romans after them. The Romans guarding the pass followed on what amounted to a wild-goose chase, thinking they were chasing Hannibal’s army. Meanwhile, Hannibal and most of his army escaped with their loot into Apulia. To the Romans, it was humiliating—and bloody; the Carthaginians killed about one thousand Roman soldiers as a parting shot.
It was a prime example of Hannibal’s agility. A frustrated Roman author, Florus, called it the “art of Punic fraud.” Every time they took a step forward, the Romans found themselves tripping over one of Hannibal’s stratagems.
Fabius’s deputy, the Master of the Horse Marcus Minucius, opposed the dictator’s strategy of attrition. Minucius wanted to fight. The Carthaginian had captured the small city of Gerunium in northern Apulia, slaughtered the population, and used it to house his troops and supplies. When Fabius was temporarily back in Rome, Minucius used the opportunity to attack Hannibal’s men when they were out foraging. Minucius won a minor victory, which he trumpeted as a major success, but Hannibal struck back. He lured Minucius into an ambush. Only the last-minute arrival of Fabius with relief forces saved the day.
Spain: Rome’s Counterattack
By the end of 217 B.C. Hannibal faced frustration in Italy. But even worse news came from Spain. The Romans had sent an army there in spite of Hannibal’s threat to Italy. They defeated Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal on both land and sea. The Romans conquered Spain’s eastern seaboard and destroyed Carthaginian naval power off the Spanish coast.
What Memnon had wanted but failed to do in Greece, Rome pulled off in Spain. That is, the Romans sent substantial forces to attack the enemy’s base. Rome’s offensive began in fall 218. The ex-consul Gnaeus Scipio (uncle of Scipio Africanus) and his army landed in northeastern Spain. Unlike Hannibal, they had a friendly base, the coastal city of Emporiae (northeast of Barcelona). Hannibal had left Spain under the command of his younger brother. Hasdrubal was renowned for bravery, grit, and dignity, but not for strategic acumen. By the time he marched northward to fight the Romans, Gnaeus Scipio had defeated Carthaginian forces near Tarraco and captured the Carthaginian commander Hanno. Rome now controlled most of northeastern Spain.
The following year, 217, Hasdrubal made a bad situation worse. That summer, he fought a naval battle with Gnaeus Scipio off the mouth of the Ebro—and lost. The Senate was so encouraged that it sent twenty more warships and eight thousand soldiers to Spain under Gnaeus’s brother Publius Scipio—the consul of 218 who fought Hannibal at the Ticinus and Trebbia. Together, the two brothers crossed the Ebro and marched as far as Saguntum, where they freed hostages taken by Hannibal. Various Spanish tribes cast aside their allegiance to Carthage and switched to Rome—or so Roman sources claim.
One thing is certain: the Scipio brothers’ offensive had hemmed in Hasdrubal south of the Ebro. Worse still, from Hannibal’s point of view, Hasdrubal was in no position to send reinforcements. Hannibal’s army was too small to conquer Italy. His plan had always foreseen the need for reinforcements, either from winning new allies in Italy or by getting help from Spain or even Carthage. Except for his Celtic troops from the Po Valley, Hannibal had made no progress in solving his manpower problem.
• • •
All in all, Hannibal responded to resistance with mixed results. He was able to brush off the rough crossing of the Apennines with a smashing victory at Trasimene. He humiliated a Roman army and lifted his status among his Celtic allies. When a window of opportunity opened for him to attack the city of Rome, Hannibal knew that his army was too tired and hungry to exploit it. He solved the crisis of his men’s suffering, but only temporarily. Ominously, he had no solution at all to the challenge of the Scipios in Spain. That, in turn, left him without the reinforcements that he desperately needed.
Hasdrubal personified another of Hannibal’s problems: he had no general good enough to entrust with control of another front. Hannibal had no Parmenio, whom Alexander had sent off to Gordium, and no Antigonus, who had skillfully defeated the Persians’ counteroffensive in Anatolia. The Carthaginians lacked bench strength, to use a sports analogy. Hannibal could not be in two places at once, and that problem would bedevil their armies throughout the war.
; The lack of a first-rate subordinate in Spain was, so to speak, a weakness in Hannibal’s infrastructure, and it wasn’t the only one. At the end of 217, after more than a year in Italy, Hannibal didn’t have a base. Small and depopulated, Gerunium was no solution. Unless Hannibal got a major city to welcome him, his army would break apart soon enough. But no city would accept Hannibal unless he won another victory.
Hannibal had not broken Rome and he remained far from his goal of bringing Rome to the negotiating table.
We might argue that with the Scipios advancing in Spain and Fabius blunting the edge of Hannibal’s offensive in Italy, Rome was winning. Yet Carthage would strike back in Spain and Fabius left office in Rome by the end of 217. Luckily for Hannibal, Minucius represented Rome better than did Fabius.
CAESAR
Unlike Darius, Pompey had no intention of giving his enemy pitched battle. Pompey had no illusions about his chances against Caesar’s veteran legions. Instead, he would make Caesar dance to his tune. At least, he would try.
The Dunkirk of Italy
For Pompey, Brundisium was where the real war began. Brundisium was his Dunkirk. Dunkirk, of course, symbolizes British resistance to Nazi Germany. When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, they cut off Britain’s huge army and threatened to destroy it. But the British retreated to a French city on the English Channel: Dunkirk. From there the British evacuated most of their army by ship to England. It was a brilliant operation, the first step on the road back to victory.
Brundisium (modern Brindisi) was an Italian city on the Adriatic Sea to which Pompey’s men retreated from Caesar. Located at the southern end of the Appian Way, Brundisium was the main port for sailing to Greece. From there, in March 49 (by the Roman calendar, January 49 by the solar calendar), Pompey evacuated about 27,000 men in two sailings. It was the nucleus of the new army that he was building in Greece.
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