Carthage Must Be Destroyed

  Tarentum had long been a target for Hannibal, but, although there were pro-Carthaginian sympathizers within its walls, they had never been strong enough to deliver the city. By 212, however, feelings were running high against Rome owing to an incident in which a number of Tarentine hostages had been executed by the Romans after trying to escape. Hannibal was at the time camped close to the city, when one evening a group of Tarentine young men left the town and approached the Carthaginian lines. Their leaders, Philemenus and Nicon, were brought before Hannibal and explained that they wished to surrender the city to him. After encouraging them and arranging a secret location for further meetings, Hannibal gave the Tarentine conspirators some cattle so that it would look as if they had successfully stolen them from his camp, thereby alleviating any suspicions on the part of the Roman guard. During a second rendezvous, an agreement was reached with the plotters that on the capture of the city the Carthaginians would respect all Tarentine rights and property.

  Now an elaborate plan to capture the city by stealth was set in motion. Over a number of nights Philemenus, who was a renowned hunter, left the city purportedly looking for game. By giving some of his catch to the Roman sentries, he gained their trust enough that they would open the gate at the sound of his whistle. An evening when the commander of the Roman garrison was hosting a party was chosen for the seizure of the city. First, an elite Carthaginian force of 10,000 men left their camp and covered three days’ march in one session. Hannibal then carefully disguised this troop movement by sending a squadron of Numidian cavalry ahead so that it appeared that this was nothing more than a raid. Meanwhile, some of the Tarentine conspirators had attended the Roman commander’s party and ensured that the celebrations had gone on late into the night. Other plotters gathered around the main gate of Tarentum, and when a fire signal was given from outside by Hannibal they rushed the guards stationed there and killed them before admitting the waiting Carthaginians. At the second gate, which Philemenus had used for his nocturnal forays, Hannibal’s troops burst in and killed the sentries while they were admiring Philemenus’ catch, a huge boar being carried on a stretcher. After ordering that all the citizens should be spared, Hannibal sent his troops to secure the city. Then at daybreak he summoned all the Tarentines to the marketplace and gave them assurances that they would not be harmed.49

  While the spectacular capture of Tarentum led to an immediate revival in Carthaginian fortunes,50 it was however salted by two major difficulties. First, much of the city’s Roman garrison, including its commander, had managed to take refuge in the citadel, which stood in an almost unassailable position with access to the sea. There they would remain while Tarentum was in Carthaginian hands.51 Second, and far more seriously, Capua was now under siege by four Roman legions with orders from the Senate to remain there until the city was taken.52 In spring 211, after he had failed to break through the Roman encirclement, Hannibal’s hand was finally forced. Only one course of action could now draw Roman troops away from Capua. He would march on Rome.53

  In order to ensure that the Latin cities understood that Rome could not now protect them, Hannibal left a trail of devastation as he marched north.54 In Rome, panic reigned as news of the Carthaginian advance reached the city, and Hannibal deliberately raised the level of hysteria by sending his Numidian horsemen to terrorize the refugees trying to flee there.55 Matters only got worse when a squadron of Numidian deserters who had been ordered by the Romans to mobilize against Hannibal’s force were mistaken for the enemy by the terrified citizens.56 Livy reported that ‘The wailing cry of the matrons was heard everywhere, not only in private houses but even in the temples. Here they knelt and swept the temple floors with their dishevelled hair and lifted up their hands to heaven in piteous entreaty to the gods that they would deliver the city of Rome out of the hands of the enemy and preserve its mothers and children from injury and outrage.’57 As a further indication of the seriousness of the situation, the Senate went into emergency sitting and troops were posted around the city.58

  The panic reached its climax when Hannibal himself–seven years after first entering Italy–finally approached the walls of Rome at the Colline Gate, accompanied by 2,000 Numidian horsemen.59 If we believe the accounts of Polybius and Livy, however, what transpired next was something of an anticlimax. The former claims (unconvincingly) that the victor of Cannae was dissuaded from attacking the city by the appearance of a legion of battle-ready new recruits.60 In Livy’s account of the episode, however, Hannibal was discouraged by the onset of a severe hailstorm on consecutive days, which he took to be an unfavourable divine omen. He was supposedly further demoralized by the news that the Romans took his challenge so lightly that they were diverting troops to fight in Spain, and that the very land on which his army was camped had been recently sold at auction, with no shortage of Roman buyers, such was the confidence in victory. According to Livy, Hannibal responded by ordering a herald to auction off all the financiers’ pitches around the Roman forum.61

  Both these accounts are based, however, on little more than wilful misunderstandings of Hannibal’s true motives. In terms of military strategy the march upon Rome had been a success, because 15,000 Roman troops, under the command of Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, had been summoned back from Capua to defend the city,62 even if neither Hannibal nor the Roman commanders expected an assault on it (Hannibal had, after all, left most of his heavy infantry and equipment behind at his base in Bruttium). More importantly, Hannibal’s presence at the walls of Rome served a crucial propagandistic function. One of the few references to have survived from the history of Silenus, Hannibal’s loyal chronicler, gives an extraordinary insight into the significance of the Carthaginian’s visit to the gates of Rome. In this fragment Silenus gives an account of Heracles’ sojourn in Rome which is markedly at variance with other tales of the hero’s visit.

  In the Silenian version, Rome’s famous Palatine Hill was named after Palantho, daughter of Hyperboreos, the eponymous leader of the Hyperboreans, a mythical northern people. She had enjoyed a romantic liaison with Heracles on that very spot, and hence the hill had gained its name.63 In another tale, also thought to have derived from Silenus, Latinus, first king and founder of the Latin people, was the product of that same union between Palantho and Heracles.64 In the charged atmosphere of the Hannibalic war, this seemingly obscure point of history had very serious propagandistic implications. Silenus’ version of the prehistory of Rome directly contradicted the generally accepted Roman version of events, which told that Latinus’ mother was Fauna, the wife of Faunus, the indigenous king of the region.65 In Silenus’ account, furthermore, the Hyperboreans appear as a metaphor for the Gauls, the barbarous people whom Heracles himself had supposedly tamed on his journey across the Alps. Now Hannibal had crossed that great mountain chain with an army full of Gauls. It therefore looked as if ‘history’ would repeat itself, as Heracles and his Hyperboreans returned to the Palatine to claim what was rightfully theirs.66 Part of that Heraclean patrimony included the Latins, the product of the ancient union between the hero and his Hyperborean lover. Silenus’ reconception of Roman prehistory and the display of power which the destructive march to Rome represented were therefore part of the same determined campaign to detach the Latins from Rome. It was no coincidence that, as he approached the walls of Rome, Hannibal had first stopped at the temple of Hercules by the Colline Gate.67 He wanted those who looked on to know that a new Heracles had also journeyed there, with a divine mandate to free the region’s people from the heirs of Cacus who had terrorized them for so long.68

  The decision taken by Fabius Maximus in 209/208 to have the temple of Hercules moved to the safety of the Capitol strongly suggests that Hannibal’s visit had been something of a propaganda coup.69 For all its ideological impact, however, the march on Rome had not achieved its major strategic aim, for at Capua in 211 the demoralized Senate had nonetheless surrendered to the Roman army, and paid a heavy price for its treachery. Anxious to make an example
of the city, the Romans rounded up the leaders of the pro-Carthaginian faction and then scourged and executed them. All the other citizens were sold into slavery. The city itself was not completely destroyed, but was allowed to carry on as a humble agricultural market town under the direct rule of Roman officials, a mere shadow of its former self.70 Indeed, the name of Capua was thereafter associated in the Roman imagination with the conceit of pride and the dangers of ambition.71

  The impact of the loss of Capua was felt across the region, with a number of other Carthaginian-held towns falling to the Romans. Hannibal continued to enjoy some military success, however, most notably the defeat of a Roman army at Herdonea in 210, which resulted in the death of its general the proconsul Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus, many of his senior officers and thousands of troops.72 But by 209 even Tarentum had been lost, and the enormous amount of war booty captured from the city helped rescue Rome from the financial crisis in which it had been embroiled.73

  The Romans now fought back in other ways. Fabius Maximus, the victorious Roman general, placed a colossal statue of Heracles captured at Tarentum on the Capitol, near to a bronze equestrian statue of himself.74 The relocation of the statue not only played to Fabius’ much trumpeted family connections to the hero, but also reclaimed Heracles for the Roman cause.

  It was another member of the Fabii clan, Fabius Pictor, the senator who had been sent to Delphi in 216, who completed the first history of Rome by a Roman historian–his celebrated Annales (which has unfortunately not survived). Following the literary conventions of the day, Pictor wrote his opus in Greek. It is clear that he had read the western-Greek historians, such as Timaeus and Philinus, and had accepted the theory that the Romans were the descendants of the Trojans. Yet at the same time Pictor construed his work as a radical departure from the Greek-authored works that had preceded it. This was unashamedly a Roman history.75 As well as highlighting his use of Roman documentary sources for his research, Pictor also provided careful explanations of archaic Roman customs.76 The strong emphasis on traditional Roman culture was further underlined by the presentation of the work in the form of annals, a kind of official record traditionally used by the Romans to set down election results, religious ceremonies and other official notices.77 Despite the Romanocentric hue of his work, however, Pictor, who was a committed philhellene, wrote with a Greek as well as an educated Roman audience in mind.78 Indeed, one of the major aims of his project was to remind the inhabitants of mainland Greece and Magna Graecia that Rome had a distinguished past which represented far more than a pale reflection of the Hellenic world.79

  The statement of Rome’s cultural equality to Greece was, however, only one part of Fabius Pictor’s agenda. He wrote his history during some of the most difficult moments of the war against Hannibal, probably finishing it around 210.80 The first Roman history was thus written at a time when the Romans were bearing the brunt of a moralesapping assault not only on the battlefield, but also on their collective identity. Their relationships with their gods, their allies and the wider Mediterranean world had all been called into question by potent Carthaginian propaganda. Indeed, it is probably the Hannibalic context which explains Polybius’ complaint that Pictor showed too much of a pro-Roman bias in his work.81 In this time of crisis, Pictor attempted to show both Rome and its allies just how spectacularly successful the Romans had been.82

  After relating the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy, Pictor’s Annales described their first foundation at Alba Longa, the eventual establishment of Rome just to the north of this, and other traditional stories such as the rape of the Sabine women.83 Those stories stressed not only Rome’s antiquity but also its historic and deep-seated ties with the other cities of Latium, key allies in the fight against Hannibal. Furthermore, the cultural links between southern Greeks and Romans were consolidated by reference to Evander, the leader of the Arcadian Greeks who had first settled the site of Rome.84 Most significantly of all, Pictor is accredited with having given a detailed description of the activities of Hercules, presumably in Italy and specifically at the site of Rome.85 Within the context of Hannibal’s own particular claims to the Heraclean mantle, that description represented an attempt to resituate the legend firmly within Roman foundational history.

  A NEW SCIPIO IN SPAIN

  In Spain there had been some hope of a revival in Carthaginian fortunes with the defeat and deaths of both Publius and Gnaeus Scipio in 211.86 The leaderless Roman forces, however, had rallied strongly under Lucius Marcius Septimus, irregularly proclaimed as leader by the troops. Furthermore, the capture of Capua had meant that many of the troops that had been involved in its siege could now be reassigned to Spain, and a new commander to oversee Roman forces in Spain was subsequently elected. The selection was controversial for a number of reasons. The consuls, unusually, brought their nomination before the Popular Assembly for validation, and their candidate should have been disbarred because he had not previously held the requisite senior senatorial post. Indeed, it appears that the powerful Cornelii clan had arranged things so that no one else would stand against Publius Cornelius Scipio, the 25-year-old son and nephew of the two dead generals. Although this may appear little more than nepotism, Scipio’s appointment was a shrewd move, for there was no doubt that the Roman armies in Spain would welcome a Scipio as their new commander. It was also apparent, even at this early stage of his career, that the young Scipio was an exceptional man.87

  Scipio was a member of a younger generation of junior Roman senators who had gained their experience solely against an enemy whose sophisticated use of military and propagandistic strategies was a clear advance on previous opposition. Much of Scipio’s genius came from his capacity to borrow and even improve upon many of the strategies that Hannibal himself had deployed to such great effect. This included not only military but also ideological tactics, for Scipio appears to have believed that the most effective way to counter the widely held belief in Hannibal’s divine sanction was to encourage the idea that he himself enjoyed heroic status and divine favour.88 Stories thus went into circulation which connected Scipio’s conception and subsequent life with the gods:

  Scipio was believed to be the son of Jupiter; for before he was conceived a serpent appeared in his mother’s bed, and a snake crawled over him when he was an infant without doing him any harm. When he went back late to the Capitol, the [temple] dogs never barked at him. He never started out on any course of action without first having sat for a long time in the shrine of Jupiter, as if to receive the god’s instruction.89

  It is, of course, not difficult to see that these stories, which appear in a number of different ancient authors, were designed to create an association both with Alexander the Great and, primarily, with Heracles/Hercules (himself the son of Zeus/Jupiter). This constituted a direct challenge to a Hannibalic campaign that cast the Carthaginian general in the same light.90

  Another story reported that when his elder brother Lucius stood for the aedileship, Scipio managed to secure election both for his sibling and himself by telling his mother that he had twice dreamt that this would come about, prompting Polybius to comment that ‘people now believed that he communed with the gods not only in reality and by day, but still more in his sleep.’91 Scipio’s rumoured quasi-divinity demonstrates the extent to which the Roman people linked political and military success with divine favour (as in the case of Hannibal). While sceptical historians in the mould of Livy or Polybius might dismiss such associations as nothing more than gossip or superstition, it nonetheless seems clear that Scipio himself actively encouraged them.92 Certainly Livy, despite condemning the tales about Scipio’s miraculous birth as nothing more than gossip, strongly suggests that the Roman general did not discourage the impression that he enjoyed divine favour:

  He himself never made light of men’s belief in these marvels; on the contrary it was rather promoted by a certain studied practice of neither denying such a thing nor openly asserting it. Many other things of the same s
ort, some true, some pretended, had passed the limits of admiration for a mere man in the case of this youth. Such were things upon which the citizens relied when they entrusted to any age far from mature the great responsibility of so great a command.93

  Scipio’s strategic manipulation of his heroic reputation is aptly demonstrated by events at the siege of New Carthage in 209. After learning that none of the Carthaginian armies operating on the Iberian peninsula was within ten days’ march of the city, Scipio decided to attack. It was a bold but clever move, because if he were successful it would rob the Carthaginian commanders of a strategically important base and, furthermore, seriously weaken the Barcid reputation in Spain. Stationing his fleet opposite New Carthage, Scipio encouraged its defenders to think that an attack was to be mounted from the eastern, landward, side of the city by throwing up earthworks there. In fact the attack would come from the west, for he had learned from local fishermen that the lagoon which bordered that side of the city was fairly shallow, and further that during the ebb of the tide, towards evening, it emptied out through a narrow channel that connected it to the sea.94 Scipio nevertheless told his troops a very different story, for he related how Neptune, the Roman sea god, had appeared to him in a dream and promised his assistance in capturing the city. The next day, after first launching a fierce assault on the city from the east in order to divert the attention of the Carthaginian defenders, Scipio ordered 500 of his men to cross the lagoon with ladders. After wading through the now shallow waters, the men quickly scaled the unguarded western walls. With Roman troops inside the city itself, New Carthage soon fell.95