FOUR

Citizen Soldiers

Cannae, August 2, 216 B.C.

Infantrymen of the polis think it is a disgraceful thing to run away, and they choose death over safety through flight. On the other hand, hired soldiers, who rely from the outset on superior strength, flee as soon as they find out they are outnumbered, fearing death more than dishonor.

—ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics (3.1116b16–23)

A SUMMER SLAUGHTER

BY LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of August 2, 216 B.C., no room remained to fight and little more in which to die. Given the crashing press of their exhausted fellow soldiers, the Roman legionaries could not retreat, advance, or even find much area to wield their swords. Frenzied Iberians in white tunics and half-naked Gauls were in their faces. Veteran African mercenaries suddenly appeared at the flanks. From their rear arose cries that Celtic, Iberian, and Numidian horsemen had cut off any hope of escape. Thousands of Hannibal’s hired men—a who’s who of the old tribal enemies of Rome—were everywhere. Nowhere were there enough Roman cavalry and reinforcements. A vast mass of 70,000 brave souls was encircled in a small plain in southwestern Italy by a poorly organized but brilliantly led invading army half its size.

Confusion and terror only grew greater as dusk neared, as each Roman pushed blindly and was shoved into the enemy at all sides. Stacked in rows to the depth of thirty-five and more, the size of the unwieldy mass began to ensure its destruction. A marvelous army designed for fluidity and flexibility was unaccustomedly caught fast in an immovable column. The men of Rome had never before marched out to a single battle in Italy in such huge numbers—and would never do so again. And not until a similar disaster at Adrianople (A.D. 378) six centuries later did the Roman army deploy itself to such an unwieldy depth, making it an easy target for missiles and preventing the great majority of its soldiers from ever reaching the enemy.

The sight of the mass fighting must have been as spectacular as it was soon sickening. Unlike the Romans, Hannibal’s men were a heterogeneous-looking bunch. In the center the backpedaling Celts and Gauls, as was their custom, fought stripped to the waist (“naked,” Polybius says), probably armed only with heavy wooden shields and clumsy swords that were virtually pointless and were only effective in sweeping, slashing blows that left the attacker wide open to quick counterjabs. A few may have had javelins or spears. Their white, muscular physiques and great size were favorite topics of Roman historians, who were quick to imply that smaller tanned Italian legionaries used training, order, and discipline to butcher such wild tribesmen in the thousands. For the next two centuries commanders like Marius and Caesar would wipe out entire armies of just such brave and physically superior warriors. We think of French slaughter in terms of Agincourt or Verdun, but the true holocaust occurred in the mostly unknown battles of the two-century encounter with the Romans, who cut down more Gauls than at any time before or after. Roman steel, not disease or hunger, doomed an autonomous ancient France, whose manhood was systematically destroyed in battle as no other people would be in the entire history of Western colonial subjugation. Caesar’s final annexation of Gaul made the nineteenth-century American fighting on the frontier look like child’s play—a million killed, a million enslaved, Plutarch recorded, in the last decades alone of that brutal two-century conquest.

Hannibal may have put these brave Gauls in the center to incur the Romans’ fury and thus draw them farther into the encirclement. Livy remarks that they were the most terrifying of all Hannibal’s troops to look upon. In the classical world the stereotype of utter uncivilized savagery was a white skin, long greasy blond—or worse, red—hair, and a flowing unkempt beard. Four thousand of them were sliced to pieces by the methodical Italians. Alongside them at the vortex marched hired Spaniards—ostentatious infantrymen with iron helmets, heavy javelins, and dazzling white cloaks bordered with crimson, which, like the nakedness of their pale Gallic allies, would soon only highlight the bloodletting. Unlike the Gauls, the Spanish also wielded the short double-edge sword—copied and improved upon by the Romans as the gladius—lethal as a slashing and stabbing weapon. Stationed next to the Gauls, they were cut down mercilessly—though Polybius says hundreds, not thousands, of these better-armed and protected warriors fell.

At the front of the oncoming Roman mass, the fighting soon degenerated into swordplay and hand-to-hand pushing, biting, and clawing. Only the steady feigned withdrawal of the Gauls and Spanish and the impending encirclement at the flanks saved these sacrificial tribal contingents from utter annihilation. Livy and Polybius both focus on the doom of the surrounded Roman legions, but more than 5,000 Spaniards and Gauls must have suffered ghastly wounds before being trampled to death by the legionary steamroller. How Hannibal and his brother Mago survived the slaughter we are not told; but both stood gallantly among the Gallic and Spanish front ranks, ensuring that their retreating pawns not break before the trap was set.

Hannibal’s best were his African mercenaries stationed on the flanks and ordered to turn about and hit the legionaries as they rushed by, heedless in their bloodlust. These were grim professional soldiers who had battled a score of North African tribes, fought Europeans during their march from Spain, and on occasion turned on their own Carthaginian masters when pay was not forthcoming. Centuries later their legendary toughness impressed the novelist Gustave Flaubert, whose novel Salammbô has as its backdrop one of their numerous bloody revolts. At Cannae they probably first pelted the outer ranks of the legions with javelins and then cut their way in through the Roman flanks, since legionaries could scarcely turn sideways on the run to meet this new and unexpected threat.

Although they were not used to the Roman equipment—the Africans more often fought Macedonian-style as phalangites with two-handed pikes—they were veteran killers, and far more experienced than the adolescents who filled the Roman ranks, which were depleted by the thousands butchered earlier at Trebia and Lake Trasimene. Moreover, the African heavy infantrymen on the flanks were stationary and fresh, the oncoming Romans exhausted from killing and pressing the Gauls and Spaniards. The former were staring intently on their prey, the latter oblivious to their danger. Within seconds the killers became the killed, and it is a wonder that even 1,000 Africans were lost during the entire afternoon— a mere fiftieth of the Roman total. The collision of African infantry with the Roman flanks must have been horrendous, as dense files of shuffling legionaries were suddenly hacked and ripped apart on their vulnerable sides, without opportunity or room to halt and face their attackers. Roman infantrymen were superbly protected at their front, and adequately from their rear; but their sides were relatively bare—exposed arms behind the shield, less body armor below the shoulder, and the ears, neck, and portions of the side of the head without cover.

Who could distinguish friend from foe, as Africans and Italians sliced away at each other, wearing similar breastplates, crested helmets, and oblong Roman shields? Polybius claimed that when the Africans hit the Romans broadside, order was lost for good and the mass rent beyond repair. The rear flanks and base of the Roman column were still unenclosed, and here the other great failure of the Roman army became manifest: besides its poor generalship, there were far too few Roman horsemen. Most of the mounted troops present were vastly inferior to the some 2,000 Numidian light cavalry on the right flank, men who had been on their horses since childhood, who could throw javelins with deadly accuracy at a gallop and slash away with swords and battle-axes at close quarters as easily mounted as on foot. On the Carthaginian left wing a horde of 8,000 Spanish and Gallic horsemen—with spears, swords, and heavy wooden shields—likewise tore apart the Roman cavalry. Hannibal had arrayed 10,000 skilled horsemen on the two wings against 6,000 poorly trained mounted Italians. After driving off the enemy cavalry, the Numidian and European horsemen turned to slaughtering the enclosed infantry from the rear.

The presence of some 10,000 fresh horsemen at the base of the Roman column, and 20,000 Africans on the flanks, with the dust in the Romans’ faces, the screaming of dying Gauls and Spaniards, and the sheer difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe, made the tiny summer battlefield a confused slaughterhouse. Three hours earlier the Roman army had marched out as a foreboding mass of iron, bronze, and wood, rank after rank of crested helmets, huge shields, and deadly javelins in a solemn procession of undisguised pride against Hannibal’s motley and outnumbered mercenaries. Now there was little left but a heap of broken weapons, oozing bodies, severed limbs, and thousands of the crawling half-dead.

The terror of battle seems not the mere killing of humankind, but the awful metamorphosis that turns on a massive scale flesh to pulp, clean to foul, the courageous to the weeping and defecating, in a matter of minutes. Just as Admiral Nagumo’s beautiful four carriers at Midway had been a showcase of power, grace, and undefeated energy at 10:22 A.M. on June 4, 1942, and six minutes later blazing infernos of charred bodies and melting steel, so the thousands of plumed swordsmen in perfect order were transformed nearly instantaneously from a majestic almost living organism into a gigantic lifeless mess of blood, entrails, crumpled bronze, bent iron, and cracked wood. Men and matériel that were the products of weeks of training and months at the forge were reduced in moments to flotsam and jetsam by the genius of a single man. Brilliant generalship in itself is a frightening thing—the very idea that the thought processes of a single brain of a Hannibal or Scipio can play themselves out in the destruction of thousands of young men in an afternoon.

For the next 2,000 years armchair tacticians would squabble over the mechanics of the slaughter at Cannae—seduced by the idea that a numerically inferior invader in a few hours could exterminate its enemy through simple encirclement. Clausewitz (“Concentric activity against the enemy is not appropriate for the weaker side”) and Napoleon both felt Hannibal’s trap too risky and the product more of luck than genius. For the Prussian strategist Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Cannae was not the chance butchery of thousands, but a tactician’s dream come true that was “most wonderfully fought” and planned to the last detail—the essence of what military erudition combined with fighting spirit might accomplish. Schlieffen, who in his own time foresaw a Germany besieged by more numerous enemies, found it reassuring that the intellect of one man could nullify the training, expertise, and sheer numerical superiority of thousands. Indeed, Schlieffen would write an entire book, aptly entitled Cannae, on the Prussian army’s bold and repeated attempts to achieve Hannibalic encirclement on a massive scale. The great German invasion that ended at the Marne (September 1914) and the battle of Tannenberg (August 1914) were both efforts to entrap and surround entire armies, and thus invoked the mythical idea of Cannae—without real appreciation that tactical encirclement, ancient and modern, need not lead to strategic victory. Yet rarely does any great captain encounter an enemy deployed so absurdly as the legions in August 216 B.C. The Romans, who might have outflanked Hannibal’s outnumbered line by two miles, instead presented a front that was roughly the same size—and far more inflexible.

Many wounded had been hamstrung by marauding small bands, their writhing bodies left to be finished off by looters, the August sun, and Carthaginian cleanup crews the next day. Two centuries later Livy wrote that thousands of Romans were still alive on the morning of August 3, awakened from their sleep and agony by the morning cold, only to be “quickly finished off” by Hannibal’s plunderers. Roman corpses “were discovered with their heads buried in the earth. Apparently they had dug holes for themselves and then, by smothering their mouths in the dirt, had choked themselves to death” (22.51). A few thousand crawled about like crippled insects, baring their throats and begging to be put out of their misery. Livy goes on to record examples of extraordinary Roman courage discernible only through autopsy of the battlefield: a Numidian who had been brought alive out of the pile from beneath a dead Roman legionary, his ears and nose gnawed away by the raging Roman infantryman who had lost the use of everything but his teeth. The Italians, it seemed, fought desperately even when they knew their cause was hopeless—a realization that must have sunk in among most after the first minutes of battle.

Hannibal, in the ancient tradition of victorious military commanders, grandly inspected the battlefield dead. He was said to have been shocked at the carnage—even as he gave his surviving troops free rein to loot the corpses and execute the wounded. The August heat made it imperative to strip promptly the bloated bodies and torch the stinking flesh—a feat of logistics in itself just to hack away the armor from the torsos and haul away thousands of putrid corpses. No grave site near the battlefield has as yet been uncovered, nor any traces of the bones of the dead, so the bodies were probably left to rot.

The destruction of some 50,000 snared Italians in a single afternoon—more than 200 men were probably killed or wounded each minute—was in itself a vast physical challenge of slicing thousands with muscular power and iron in the age before the bullet and gas canister. Livy (22.49) remarks of the legionaries’ “refusal to budge,” and emphasizes their willingness “to die where they stood,” which only further “incensed the enemy.” There must have been at least 30,000 gallons of blood spilled on the battlefield alone; even three centuries later the satirist Juvenal dubbed Cannae the scene of “rivers of spilt blood.” The sea “turned red at Lepanto” from the blood of 30,000 butchered Turks, but the tide cleansed the site within minutes. The horrible carnage of some 50,000 to 100,000 at the final siege of Tenochtitlán was beside a lake, whose waters eventually might mitigate the stench. Given the deep columns of the Romans and Hannibal’s tactics of encirclement, Cannae became an unusually tiny battlefield, one of the smallest killing fields to have hosted such large numbers in the entire history of infantry battle. For the rest of the summer of 216 B.C. the plain of Cannae was a miasma of decaying entrails and putrid flesh and blood.

From our written sources—the Greek and Roman historians Appian, Plutarch, Polybius, and Livy—we know that the late afternoon of August 2 was one of the few ancient battles in which an entire army was destroyed after hitting the enemy head-on. In general, the complete slaughter of hoplites, phalangites, and legionaries was somewhat rare and accomplished only by flank attack, lengthy pursuit by cavalry, or ambush. At Cannae the entire Roman army advanced frontally as one unit and at the same time in unobstructed terrain, ensuring a magnificent collision of arms that would lead to either spectacular victory or horrendous defeat. Polybius called the daylight encirclement at Cannae a “murder.” Livy also thought it a slaughter, not a battle, and the ill-famed nature of the fighting explains why Cannae is one of the better-recorded battles—three detailed accounts survive—of the ancient world.

Never in the five-century history of Rome had so many infantrymen and their elected leaders been trapped on the battlefield with no certainty of escape. After the battle the thirty-one-year-old Hannibal would collect the gold rings of more than eighty consuls, ex-consuls, quaestors, tribunes, and scores of the equestrian class in a bushel. Military historians have praised Hannibal’s genius and blamed the Roman catastrophe on Rome’s bureaucratic system of electing and training its generals. In their eyes Cannae is a result of singular tactical brilliance pitted against institutionalized mediocrity. That analysis is scarcely half-true: if the Roman system of tactical leadership, with its commitment to civilian oversight and nonprofessional high command on the battlefield, was responsible for producing a succession of amateurish generals who would lose a string of battles during the Second Punic War (219–202 B.C.), it also deserves credit for ensuring that Cannae and the previous disasters at the Ticinus and Trebia Rivers and Lake Trasimene were not fatal to the Roman war effort. Cannae, like so many of these landmark battles, is the exception that proves the rule: even when Roman armies were poorly led, foolishly arranged, squabbling before battle over their proper deployment, and arrayed against a rare genius, the catastrophic outcome was not fatal to their conduct of the war. The reason for such astonishing Roman resilience— emblematic of Western armies throughout history—is the subject of this chapter.

HANNIBAL’S JAWS

The defeat of August 216 B.C. is usually attributed to three factors: the Romans were poorly commanded and deployed; they faced a military genius in Hannibal; and they were demoralized from a string of three defeats in the past twenty-four months that had cost them thousands of their fathers, sons, and brothers. All three explanations have merit. The Roman plan of battle at Cannae was poorly thought out. It made no sense for legions to mass on narrow, flat terrain where they might be trapped and squeezed between flanking enemy infantry pincers and rapidly moving mounted troops at their rear. In these natural or man-made valleys and canyons, infantry companies had no chance to flow independently but were prone to conglomerate and could thus be hacked at from all sides. With no room to maneuver to the side, individual legionaries lost open space and the crucial ability to use their swords with advantage. Like underpowered phalangites—who had wielded massive pikes, not short swords—they were to be funneled against columns of Hannibal’s heavily armed swordsmen and spearmen. Legionaries in dozens of columns to the rear were waiting in line, as it were, helpless to prevent their own predictable annihilation to come. The Roman army would go on in the next century to smash through columns at the battles at Cynoscephalae, Magnesia, and Pydna by outflanking and outmaneuvering far more clumsy Greek phalanxes. They would learn that the way to beat foreign armies of the Mediterranean was to fight in a manner opposite from their charge at Cannae.

Due to Hannibal’s string of unbroken successes during his descent through northern Italy (218–216 B.C.), the Senate had transferred command of the legions from its brilliant general Fabius Maximus—given pro tempore dictatorial powers in the field—back into the hands of its annually elected consuls, who for the year 216 B.C. were the aristocratic and careful L. Aemilius Paulus and the more adventuresome Terentius Varro, the latter purportedly a popular leader of the masses. Scholars have criticized Varro’s decision to march the army on the morning of August 2 across the Aufidus River into the flat, treeless plain of Cannae (command rotated between the consuls on alternating days). In fact, the Roman general had reason to initiate battle, since Hannibal’s mounted patrols were raiding his lines, devastating the surrounding countryside, and making it ever more difficult to keep such a huge force well supplied. The specter of such a huge army gave his men confidence that at last they could catch Hannibal in an open plain. Their superior numbers and organization might annihilate his mercenaries, who would have no chance for ambush or cover by darkness or fog. A year earlier Roman weight had almost crushed the Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene before being entrapped and outflanked in the mist. At Cannae the plain was relatively flat, the weather windy but reasonably good, and the Carthaginians seemingly deployed only in front of the legions, making the resort to deception unlikely.

Varro’s real mistake lay in committing most of his forces at once— only 10,000 Roman reserves were left behind far from the battlefield in two camps on either side of the river—without keeping a third line ready to exploit success or prevent collapse. In any case, because Varro either worried about the quality of his new replacement recruits or desired to ensure that his army was not strung out too far, he reduced his battle line to about a mile. Out of an army of between 70,000 and 80,000, not more than 2,000 could engage the enemy at the front in the initial attack. The depth of the Roman mass in some places along the long line was well beyond thirty-five men, and as great as fifty—the deepest formation in the history of classical warfare since the great mass of the Theban army had obliterated the Spartans at Leuctra (371 B.C.). But at that earlier battle, the Theban column met few cavalry and a timid king, and was led by the gifted tactician Epaminondas.

There may have been only 40,000 Carthaginian infantrymen facing an army almost twice that size. Surely, most other enemies who faced such a huge force would have crumbled before the legionary onslaught. The difference was in large part due to the tactical genius of Hannibal, who adapted his battle plans precisely to facilitate the impatience of Roman tactics. As we have seen, Hannibal and his brother Mago stationed themselves with the less dependable Gauls and Spaniards right at the acme of the Roman attack, convinced that their presence could steady their unreliable troops long enough to conduct a gradual withdrawal, to backpedal slowly, sucking in the oncoming Roman weight. The Punic center was bowed out toward the Romans—Polybius called the curious formation a mēnoeides kurtōma, “a crescent-moon-shaped convexity”—both to hide somewhat the African pikemen on the wings and to give the impression that the line was deeper than it actually was. The bulge allowed a margin of retreat: the greater the distance the center backpedaled without collapse, the easier the wings might envelop the narrower Roman formations.

The key for Hannibal and his European allies was to survive until North African infantry on the wings—the elite of Hannibal’s army—and cavalry streaking to the rear and sides could enclose the enormous legionary mass, thereby deflating its forward pressure before it smashed the core of the Punic army. Livy noted in his history of Rome that the Punic center was far too thinly deployed “to withstand the pressure” (22.47). The problem was that there were not more than 2,000 to 3,000 legionaries at the front of the huge column who were actually fighting with drawn weapons; the others, more than 70,000, were pushing blindly ahead on the assumption that the cutting edge of their army was mowing down the enemy in front. The least trained were probably on the wings—and thus the first to confront the closing jaws of Hannibal’s superb African infantry. Whatever the estimation of our ancient sources concerning the Gauls and Spaniards, they fought bravely and in some sense saved the battle for the Carthaginians.

Just in time, the charges of African horsemen at the flanks and at the back, the ubiquitous barrage of missiles, and the sheer confusion of seeing enemies in all directions stalled the Roman advance. Hannibal, in broad daylight and without cover, had created an ambush by the sheer deployment and maneuver of his men—and he had done so while battling at the apex of the Roman assault, convinced that his physical presence in the maelstrom would allow his outnumbered and exhausted hired Iberians and Gauls to backpedal without collapsing. The envelopment was soon completed. A thin wall of Punic and European irregulars held tight a surging throng of Roman infantry. Had each legionary killed one man before dying, the battle would have been a decisive Roman victory. Had they known that their adversaries were only two or three ranks deep, the legions might have broken out. The wind, dust, noise, and panic brought on by rumors that the enemy was everywhere only added to the chaos. Because of the enormous losses during the prior two years at Trebia and Trasimene, the Romans at Cannae were fresh recruits without many veterans to calm their fears, and thus immediately became demoralized at the realization that for a third time an enormous Roman army was being led into a Punic trap from which few might escape alive. Many must have been adolescents and so have frantically thrown down their weapons the second they realized they were trapped. The great strategist Ardent du Picq believed that Hannibal had guessed right that the “terror” and “surprise” resulting from his encirclement would outweigh “the courage of despair in the masses.” In short, panic killed the legionaries at Cannae. Still, for a time the prominence of so many Roman luminaries on the field of battle—like the presence of doctors, lawyers, and other elites at the gates of Auschwitz—must have given some the false reassurance that total destruction was impossible. The army at Cannae was larger than the citizen population of every city in Italy except Rome, and contained enough aristocrats to have run most of the legislative and executive branches of the Italian republic.

Hannibal Barca (“Grace of Ba‘al Lightning”) had little respect for legionary repute. At nine he had sworn an oath of eternal hatred toward Rome—dramatically portrayed in Jacob Amigoni’s magnificent oil canvas—and was one of the few foreigners in the entire history of the ancient world who actually welcomed frontal assault against Western armies. The African desired to break Roman legions outright in the field, as part of his larger plan to discredit the entire notion of Roman military invincibility, and so systematically uncouple Rome’s allies in central and southern Italy.

Shattered and disgraced legions meant a weak and divided Italy, which would leave Carthage free to arrange its mercantile affairs in the western Mediterranean as it saw fit, and at the same time avenge the shame of defeat of the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.). From the time of his descent from the Alps in October 218 to the slaughter at Cannae on August 2, 216 B.C., Hannibal had killed or captured in battle somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 legionaries, along with hundreds of the senatorial and knightly classes, including two consuls at the head of their armies and numerous ex-consuls in the ranks. In the space of twenty-four months a third of Rome’s frontline troops of more than a third of a million men of military age were to be killed, wounded, or captured in the bloodbaths at Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. Cannae, then, was no fluke.

After the Roman massacre at Cannae, Hannibal did not march on Rome—to the great dismay of military pundits, from his contemporary subordinate Maharbal (“you know how to win a battle, Hannibal, but not how to use your victory” [Livy 22.51]) to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. For the next fourteen years Hannibal would experience a seesaw series of victories and defeats inside Italy that had little strategic effect upon the course of the Second Punic War, until he was recalled to Carthage to save his homeland from the invasion of Scipio Africanus. Not far from Carthage itself at Zama (202 B.C.), Scipio’s legions defeated Hannibal’s veterans, and Carthage submitted to harsh Roman terms that essentially ended its existence as a military power in the Mediterranean. The city’s ultimate destruction was only a half century away (146 B.C.).

Hannibal, who had left Carthage for Europe in 219, had unknowingly been on a fruitless odyssey of some twenty years, a vast circuit across the Mediterranean, Spain, the Alps, and Italy that came to a close thousands of dead later where it had all begun—and with a Roman army once again free to march on Carthage itself. As the historian Polybius concluded of the Roman recovery after Cannae and its effect on the Carthaginians: “Hannibal’s pleasure in his victory in the battle was not so great as his dejection, once he saw with amazement how steady and great-souled were the Romans in their deliberations” (6.58.13).

CARTHAGE AND THE WEST

What is remarkable about Cannae is not that thousands of Romans were so easily massacred in battle, but that they were massacred to such little strategic effect. Within a year after the battle the Romans could field legions nearly as good as those who fell in August—themselves fresh replacements for the previous thousands killed at Trebia and Trasimene— but now to be led by Senate-appointed commanders who had learned the lessons of past tactical imbecility. Scholars attribute this resilience of Rome to its government’s remarkable ability to reorganize its legions, mobilize its citizenry, and do so in legal, constitutional fashion that guaranteed the support of even the lowliest farmer. Hannibal would come to learn in Italy that the Roman army was not so much better equipped, better organized, more disciplined, and more spirited than his mercenary forces as far more insidious. It could be cloned and replicated at will even after the most abject of disasters, as recruits and their officers still willingly joined the army, mastered a hard course of training, and thus became linked to both their fathers, who were rotting in the soil at Cannae, and their sons to come, who would soon kill thousands of Africans outside Carthage itself.

Victory brought Hannibal few new troops, whereas defeat created entire new legions for Rome. A legionary in his fifties who was sliced to pieces at Cannae no doubt went to his death believing that his infant grandson, like himself a Roman citizen, would someday wear the same type of armor, undergo similar training—and in a battle to come avenge his fall and Rome’s disgrace in Africa, not Italy. And he would be right. The army that would massacre Hannibal’s mercenaries at Zama (202 B.C.) represented less than a tenth of the available infantry and naval manpower that Rome had at its disposal at the time. Throughout the entire nightmare of the Second Punic War, the Romans, as Livy pointed out, “breathed not a word of peace” (22.61). Hannibal’s success at Cannae resembled the Japanese surprise at Pearl Harbor—a brilliant tactical victory that had no strategic aftermath and tended to galvanize rather than unnerve the manpower of the defeated. The assemblies of Romans and Americans mobilized vast new armies after their embarrassments; the confident forces of the imperial war states of Carthage and Japan basked in their battle success and hardly grew.

It is difficult to attribute Rome’s success at making good such catastrophic losses entirely to their singular idea of a constitutional form of government, inasmuch as the Carthaginians themselves had also evolved beyond both monarchy and tyranny. Given their common Hellenic source, there is some superficial similarity between the constitutions of Carthage and Rome. In addition, Carthage’s Phoenician mother language had been the prototype of the Greek alphabet, while Punic literature— libri Punici— which was written in Punic and Greek, was well respected by Roman writers. That communality was natural given Carthage’s similar integration for the past century in the Hellenistic economy of the eastern Mediterranean, its sophisticated practice of viticulture and arboriculture, and its own prior three centuries of contact with the free Greek city-states through constant warring and colonization in Sicily.

The Carthaginian coast was closer to the ancestral Hellenic cultures in Sicily and southern Italy than was Rome. Many Greeks by the fourth and third centuries would be more knowledgeable of the coastal North Africans than of Italians in the hills of central Italy. Despite lurid stories of child sacrifice at the sacred burial ground (the tophet)— a practice that seemed to flourish the more wealthy and urban Carthage became—the huge bureaucracy of priests and diviners of the bloodthirsty god Ba‘al, and the brutal record of the Magonid dynasty (whose kings were priests and supreme commanders in the field), the Carthaginians fielded armies not that different from other mercenaries of the eastern and largely Hellenic Mediterranean.

Carthage, like the Hellenistic monarchies of the era, recruited phalanxes of pikemen, incorporated elephants into its ranks, and employed professional Greek tacticians and generals to train and advise its paid soldiers. Though outnumbered, Hannibal’s men were not in the same predicament as the Aztecs or Zulus, who suffered from vast technological inferiority against their outnumbered Western enemies. In the military sense Carthage had also become a quasi-Western state through fighting Greek hoplite armies and hiring phalangite mercenaries since the era of its early-fifth-century invasions of Sicily. The Spartan mercenary Xanthippus was brought in to reorganize the entire Carthaginian army during the First Punic War. Our ancient sources also credit him with engineering the pivotal victory over Regulus’s Roman army that perished outside Carthage in 255 B.C. The Greek historian Sosylus accompanied Hannibal on his campaigns and served as a direct conduit of Hellenic military expertise and exempla. Hannibal himself sought to forge ties with King Philip V in Macedon in hopes that phalangites from the Greek mainland might land on the eastern coast of Italy to coordinate joint Punic-Macedonian attacks on Rome.

While its government was more aristocratic than the Roman constitution, Carthage by the time of the Second Punic War was also governed by two annually elected magistrates (suffetes), who worked in tandem with a deliberative body of thirty elders (gerousia)and a high court of 104 judges, all of whose decisions were ratified by a popular Assembly of a few thousand nobles. The historians Polybius and Livy were able to use, if clumsily so, Greek and Latin political nomenclature—ekklēsia, boulē, senatus,consul—to approximate Carthaginian offices and institutions in their descriptions of Hannibal’s civilian overseers. Even Aristotle in his Politics includes frequent mention of Carthaginian constitutional practice in a discussion of earlier forms of lawful oligarchies, praising its mixed government, which separated powers among judicial, executive, and legislative branches.

Carthage may have been a Phoenician colony founded in North Africa at the end of the ninth century B.C. by the mythical Elissa-Dido. In language, religion, and culture it was a Semitic people who had emigrated from its mother city of Tyre. Nevertheless, by the third century B.C. its political structure was quasi-Western in nature, and its economy was fully tied to the northern shore of the western Mediterranean.

Where Rome most fundamentally differed from its Punic neighbor to the south—besides in matters religious and linguistic—was in the notion of citizenship and the responsibilities and rights inherent in being a civis Romanus, a political idea that far transcended the legalistic aspects of a deliberative body merely following constitutional precepts. The early Western notion of consensual rule that arose in the eighth century B.C. in rural Greece was at its inception rife with contradictions, since the original discovery of politics meant not much more than a minority population of middling property banding together to decide on community policy. The radical concept that citizens should craft their own government raised an immediate paradox: who were to be the citizens and why?

If civic participation in early, broadly oligarchic Greek city-states originally marked a revolutionary invention of consent by the governed, such governments nevertheless often represented less than a fourth of the total resident population. Yet, as Plato lamented, there was a constant evolutionary trend toward egalitarianism and inclusion in the city-state. By the fifth century, especially in Boeotia and some states in the Peloponnese, the qualification for voting and office-holding was as small as a ten-acre farm or the cash equivalent.

The eventual result was that the clear majority of free adult male residents of the surrounding territory by the fifth century B.C. could participate fully in Hellenic government. At imperial Athens and among its democratic satellites every free male born to a male citizen, regardless of wealth or lineage, was eligible for full citizenship, giving rise to an enormous navy of free citizen rowers. Even more startling, the spread of Western democratic ideology evolved far beyond formal matters of voting, but lent an egalitarian aura to every aspect of the Greek city-state, from familiarity in speech and dress to a sameness in public appearance and behavior—a liberality in private life that would survive even under periods of monarchy and autocracy in the later West. Conservatives like the anonymous so-called Old Oligarch (ca. 440 B.C.) scoffed that slaves and the poor were treated no differently from men of substance at Athens. Plato felt that the logical evolution of democracy had no end: all hierarchies of merit would disappear as even deckhands would see themselves as captains, with a birthright to take their turn at the rudder whether or not they knew anything about seamanship. Even the animals at Athens, he jested, would eventually question why they, too, were not equal under an ideology whose aim was to lower all to a common level.

Although many of these Hellenic traditions of autonomy and freedom were eroded by the rise of the dynasts Philip and Alexander (359–323 B.C.) and their imperial Successors (323–31 B.C.) in the Hellenistic world, the ideals of the city-state were not entirely forgotten, but incorporated by states outside Greece itself. Italians, for example, learned more about constitutional rule from the old Greek colonies of southern Italy than from the contemporary Hellenistic kings across the Adriatic. So it was one of the great ironies of the Roman-Greek conflicts of the third and second centuries B.C. that the legions were more Hellenic than the Greek-speaking mercenaries they slaughtered at the battles at Cynoscephalae (197 B.C.) and Pydna (168 B.C.) inside Greece.

Unfortunately for purposes of mustering quality military manpower, Carthage, unlike Rome, had not evolved beyond the first phase of Hellenic-inspired consensual rule. Its government remained in the hands of a select body of aristocrats and landed executives, themselves chosen from that same elite cadre. Carthage was a vast empire run by a small deliberative clique of noble merchants and traders. In contrast, Rome borrowed and improved upon the Greek ideal of civic government through its unique idea of nationhood(natio) and its attendant corollary of allowing autonomy for its Latin-speaking allies, with both full (optimo iure) and partial citizenship (sine suffragio) to residents of other Italian communities—and in the centuries to come full citizenship to those of any race and language that might accept Roman law and pay taxes. What at its inception had nominally been a government of Latin-speaking aristocrats in Rome proper would logically evolve into a pluralistic state, in which local assemblies would weigh in against the Senate, and popular leaders would veto oligarchic legislation. Even consuls like Flaminius and Varro— the former killed at Trasimene, the latter in large part responsible for the catastrophe at Cannae—were purportedly “men of the people” voicing the poor’s desire for precipitate military action in opposition to aristocrats like Fabius Maximus, who favored patience and delay. They had no popular counterparts at Carthage.

LEGIONS OF ROME

The Roman army, especially when deployed in strength on Italian soil, was not expected to lose, much less to be annihilated. Already by the late third century B.C. Roman legionaries had become the world’s most deadly infantry precisely because of their mobility, superb equipment, singular discipline, and ingenious organization. The Epirote king and general Pyrrhus (280–275 B.C.), the Carthaginian commanders of the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), and the northern tribes in Gaul (222 B.C.) could attest to the slaughter when their best troops tried to confront the Roman way of war. The Romans had developed a mobile and flexible method of fighting that could hunt down and smash through loosely organized tribal forces in Gaul and Spain, yet could also disrupt columns of highly disciplined phalangites from the East in pitched battles through encirclement or the manipulation of terrain. The history of the Roman third and second centuries is a story of bloody legion deployment throughout the Mediterranean, first to the west and south against the Iberians and Africans (270–200 B.C.), then against the Hellenistic kingdoms in Greece and to the east (202–146 B.C.).

To indicate the scope of Roman campaigning and the wide-ranging experiences of the legionaries, Livy reports in his history of Rome the often quoted example of the Roman citizen soldier Spurius Ligustinus. In his thirty-two-year career in the army (200–168 B.C.) the fifty-year-old soldier, father of eight, fought against the phalanx of Philip V in Greece, battled in Spain, returned to Greece to fight Antiochus III and the Aetolians, then was back on duty in Italy, then off again to Spain. “Four times,” Spurius claimed in Livy’s highly rhetorical account, “within a few years I was chief centurion. Thirty-four times I was commended for bravery by my commanders; I received six civic crowns [for saving the life of a fellow soldier]” (42.34). Spurius might have added that he had collided against the pikes of Macedonian phalangites, faced the elephants of Hellenistic dynasts, and fought dirty wars against tribal skirmishers across the Pyrenees. Roman genius lay in finding a way to take an Italian farmer like Spurius and to make him fight more effectively than any mercenary soldier in the Mediterranean.

Comprising anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 infantrymen, the legion was, by the end of the third century B.C., in reality a loose conglomeration of thirty companies called maniples (“fingers”), each composed of two smaller “centuries” of between sixty and one hundred soldiers, each led by a professional, battle-toughened centurion who mastered the Roman system of advance and assault in unison. When a Roman legion marched out to the battlefield, its sixty centuries did so in three vast lines, each wave itself able to coalesce into a mass or disperse into smaller contingents depending on the terrain and the nature of the enemy. The entire tactical design of the Roman army was intended precisely not to enter into clumsy, massed collisions with hostile columns, where it might either fall prey to encirclement or be broken apart by the greater depth of enemy formations.

Unlike the Greek phalanx from which it had evolved, Roman legionaries advanced in a fluid formation, as neat lines of soldiers cast their javelins, or pila, and ran to meet the enemy head-on with their deadly short sword, the infamous double-edged gladiusforged of Spanish steel— a far more lethal and versatile weapon than the Macedonian pike. Rectangular shields often themselves served as offensive weapons, as legionaries banged their metal bosses against the flesh of the enemy. In their combined use of javelin, massive shield, and double-bladed sword, the Romans had solved the age-old dilemma of choosing between missile and hand-to-hand attack, and fluidity versus shock, by combining the advantages of both. Legionaries hurling their javelins matched the offensive punch of Asiatic missile troops; yet with their large body shields and razor-sharp swords might also serve as a shock corps in the manner of Greek phalangites. Unlike the phalanx, however, the three lines of successive advance allowed both for reserves and for concentration of force upon particular weak spots in the enemy line.

Against a Macedonian phalanx, Roman missile attacks might stun and wound pikemen, even as individual maniples rushed ahead for face-to-face battle at weak points in the enemy’s tattered columns. Similarly, when facing northern European tribesmen, the legions might advance wall-like to present a disciplined solid front of shield and sword that would plow through the poorly organized skirmishers of tribal armies who had little chance against disciplined shock troops. Against both such adversaries two lines of maniples to the rear (the principes and triari) watched the initial engagement of the front lines (the hastati), eager to exploit success or prevent collapse.

What was it like to face the three lines of an oncoming Roman army? Most classical historians of Roman battle—Caesar, Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus especially—view the collision through Roman eyes. Their ethnocentric and lurid accounts portray shaggy six-foot Germans making queer sounds, deep resonating war cries (the barritus), and beating their equipment; screaming half-naked Gauls with their hair greased and piled high to increase their apparent height; or robed and painted Asians in vast droves, whose chatter and garishness give way to the disciplined advance of grim professionals—intelligence and civilization offsetting greater numbers, barbarism, and brute strength every time. War paint, tattoos, bare-breasted women, ululation, and an assortment of iron collars, chains, spiked hair, and occasional human heads and body parts hanging from the war belt are the usual requisites in any Western description, from Roman legions to the Spanish conquistadors, of fighting the Other.

Yet it was not the “barbarian” advance but the Roman that was truly inhuman and chilling. The legions, as the Christians did at Lepanto and the British at Rorke’s Drift, fought in silence; they walked until the last thirty yards of no-man’s-land. At a predetermined distance the first line threw their seven-foot pila, for the first time yelling in cadence as they unleashed the volley. Immediately and without warning, hundreds of the enemy were impaled, or their shields rendered useless by the rain of projectiles. Now with the lethal short swords unsheathed, the first rank crashed into the stunned enemy mass. The oblong shields had iron bosses in the centers, and the Romans used them as battering rams to shock the enemy, as the well-protected legionaries hacked off arms, legs, and heads during the confusion. Individual soldiers pushed in to exploit gaps where the dead and wounded had fallen. Almost immediately, an entire second army, the succeeding line of principi, surged in to widen the tears in the enemy line, hurling their pila over their friends’ heads in the melee, the entire process of charging, casting, and slicing now beginning anew— with yet a third wave ready at the rear.

The terror of war does not lie in the entirely human reaction of tribal cultures to bloodletting—screaming and madness in giving and receiving death, fury of the hunt in pursuit of the defeated, near hysterical fear in flight—but rather in the studied coolness of the Roman advance, the predictability of the javelin cast, and the learned art of swordsmanship, the synchronization of maniple with maniple in carefully monitored assaults. The real horror is the entire business of unpredictable human passion and terror turned into a predictability of business, a cold science of killing as many humans as possible, given the limitations of muscular power and handheld steel. The Jewish historian Josephus later captured that professionalism in his chilling summation of legionary prowess: “One would not be wrong in saying that their training maneuvers are battles without bloodshed, and their battles maneuvers with bloodshed” (Jewish War 3.102–7).

The utter hatred for this manner of such studied Roman fighting surely explains why, when Roman legions were on occasion caught vastly outnumbered, poorly led, and ill deployed in Parthia, the forests of Germany, or the hills of Gaul, their victors not only killed these professionals but continued their rage against their corpses—beheading, mutilating, and parading the remains of an enemy who so often in the past could kill without dying. The Aztecs also mutilated the Spanish—and often ate the captives and corpses; and while this was purportedly to satisfy the bloodlust of their hungry gods, much of the barbarity derived from their rage at the mailed conquistadors, with their Toledo blades, cannon, crossbows, and disciplined ranks, who had systematically and coolly butchered thousands of the defenders of Tenochtitlán. In the aftermath of the British defeat at Isandhlwana, the Zulus decapitated many of the British and arranged their heads in a semicircle, in part because so many of their own kinsmen had minutes earlier been blown apart by the steady firing of Martini-Henry rifles.

The Roman republican army was not merely a machine. Its real strength lay in the natural élan of the tough yeoman infantry of Italy, the hard-nosed rustics who voted in the local assemblies of the towns and demes of Italy and were every bit as ferocious as the more threatening-looking and larger Europeans to the north. In the tradition of constitutional governance—the Greek Polybius marveled at the Roman Republic, whose separation of powers, he felt, had improved upon the more popular consensual rule of the Hellenic city-state—the Romans had marshaled a nation of free citizens-in-arms.

Like most of the Greeks at Salamis, Roman yeomen in vast numbers had voluntarily imposed civic musters, voted through their local assemblies for war, and marched to Cannae under elected generals, determined to rid Carthaginian invaders from Italian soil. Like the phalangites of Alexander the Great, and influenced by the earlier Greek tradition of decisive warfare, the Romans put little faith in ruse or ambush, let alone archers, horsemen, or skirmishers. Would that they had listened to the warnings of Fabius Maximus and continued to wage a war of attrition, not annihilation, against a brilliant opponent like Hannibal.

Better yet, would that Roman armies had developed, as Philip and Alexander had, a shock force of heavy cavalry that could have been integrated with the advance of the maniples and thus nullified the superb mobility and dash of Hannibal’s horsemen. The tactics of delay and scorched earth, along with the culture of the mounted grandee, went against the Roman tradition of frontal infantry shock assault. For a variety of cultural, military, and political reasons, the horseman was rarely the mainstay of classical armies—either in his incarnation as a mounted and gaudy seignior or as an impoverished nomadic raider. The use of cavalry by Philip and Alexander was exceptional rather than representative of Greek and Roman military practice, and Greco-Roman armies would pay in blood on numerous occasions for that critical shortcoming.

Despite the simplicity of Roman advance and the occasional inexperience of the recruits, the discipline of the legions was unmatched, and the strength and courage of Italian infantry unquestioned. The Roman Senate, like the earlier Greek Assembly and the caucuses of the royal Macedonian elite, was nurtured in a tradition that sought to send its armies against the enemy head-on, and thus through the hammerblows of decisive infantry battle destroy him in a matter of hours. Few Roman commanders were ever prosecuted in the wake of defeat for their incompetence—only for cowardice in failing to engage the enemy in decisive battle. When Varro, the surviving consul at Cannae, returned to Rome after the debacle, he was greeted with enthusiasm: apparently his tactical blunders that resulted in thousands killed were overshadowed by his proven desire to lead inexperienced young Roman yeomen headlong to their deaths against Hannibal.

The infantrymen who marched into the death trap at Cannae were probably better armed and equipped than their enemies: their shields, breastplates, helmets, and swords were the fruits of a scientific tradition that incorporated and improved upon the military practice found elsewhere. The West, unlike most other cultures, has always freely borrowed and incorporated from others, without worries over either national chauvinism or renunciation of native customs and traditions. When married with a rational tradition of scientific inquiry and research, this flexibility has guaranteed superior weapons in the hands of Europeans. Thus, most of Hannibal’s European and African mercenaries had reequipped themselves with superior Roman arms and armor plundered from the booty of the previous Italian disasters at Trebia and Trasimene. Nearly all of Rome’s enemies stripped its dead for weapons, whereas few legionaries sought to wear the equipment of dead Gauls or Africans.

The Roman army at Cannae marked the zenith of the Western military tradition in the late third century B.C. Yet it was slaughtered by a Carthaginian army that enjoyed none of Rome’s cultural advantages. Hannibal’s men made use of inferior weapons and technology. They were a mercenary rather than a citizen militia. Much less did the Punic state recruit from a free citizenry of patriotic small farmers. Carthaginians lacked any abstract concept of individual political freedom or civic militarism. Aristotle tells us that they gave rewards to their warriors for individual kills—far different from classical armies that stressed staying in rank and keeping formation, avoidance of flight, and the protection of one’s comrade. Spurius Ligustinus was decorated with civic crowns for saving his comrades, not for piling up kills or collecting scalps. Cannae was an abject reversal of the usual military paradigm of the ancient world: a Western army that outnumbered its foe, fought at home, and relied on an unintelligently deployed but savage power was defeated by an enemy seeking victory for its outnumbered expeditionary forces through the coordination of its contingents and the organizational brilliance of its generals.

THE IDEA OF A NATION-IN-ARMS

Individual Greek city-states in the past had occasionally enrolled new citizens, but such grants were honorific and rare. Much of the commerce of the Hellenic polis remained in the hands of noncitizen resident aliens, the brilliant and industrious metics who might own more capital than any citizen but nevertheless lacked the ability to vote in Assembly. The Greeks were too jealous of their autonomy and freedom and too chauvinistic about their surrounding countryside to grant on any wide scale foreigners and immigrants—or even Greeks from different city-states—the same citizenship rights as hardy farmers who worked their ancestral plots.

Although a few Greek thinkers as diverse as Herodotus and Isocrates came to envision Greekness, to Hellenikon, as an ideal rather than a prerequisite of language or race—open to any foreigners who might share the culture and political premises of the polis—the rise of Macedonian monarchy cut short the evolution of the consensual and independent city-state. Military manpower was always the chief bane of classical Greek armies—a shortage of infantrymen brought about by the blinkered prerequisite that all soldiers should be citizens, but not all residents should be citizens. Even the poor who rowed for their freedom at Salamis were matched in number by slaves and foreigners who had—and would have— no say in the government of Athens. This narrow conception of citizenship would soon doom the independent Greek city-state.

In contrast, the culture that Hannibal fought in Italy was in the midst of a revolutionary transformation in the idea of what Rome was. The irony of the Second Punic War was that Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome, did much to make Rome’s social and military foundations even stronger by incorporating the once “outsider” into the Roman commonwealth. By his invasion, he helped accelerate a second evolution in the history of Western republican government that would go well beyond the parochial constitutions of the Greek city-states. The creation of a true nation-state would have military ramifications that would shake the entire Mediterranean world to its core—and help explain much of the frightening military dynamism of the West today. In the crisis after Cannae, the property qualification for infantry service—itself a borrowed idea from the Greeks’ concept of the hoplite census—was halved, and thereafter continually further lowered throughout the second century until ended altogether by Marius.

The population of Italy—Samnites, Etrurians, and the Greek-speakers of the south—was allied in varying degrees to Rome. Even the distrust of things Roman by Italian confederates was the result not so much of fear and hatred of foreign domination as of envy and resentment to the degree that they had not yet become Roman citizens with full rights to hold office and vote. The Other in the ancient world often migrated to Hellenic and Italian cities to find economic opportunity and greater freedom. Under the Greeks they found on occasion tolerance, indifference, or prosperity; among the Romans eventually citizenship. The Italian musters to oppose Hannibal’s presence were, in short, further catalysts in an ongoing evolution toward parity between Rome and Italy.

Already by the third century there were many visionaries in Rome calling for Italian-wide full citizenship—the matter would not be resolved until the Social Wars of the early first century B.C.—or recognition that whole communities akin in ideology and material circumstances to Rome should be in theory eventually incorporated into the Roman commonwealth. By the time of Hannibal’s invasion, Italian communities that were not Latin-speaking were nevertheless often comprised of Roman citizens, who were protected under Roman law even if they were not full voting members of the republic. The need to galvanize Italian support, man the legions, and prevent defections to Hannibal accelerated concessions from Rome to its allies. Under the late republic and empire to follow, freed slaves and non-Italian Mediterranean peoples would find themselves nearly as equal under the law as Roman blue bloods.

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for the growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. In the centuries of empire to follow, the legionaries of a frontier garrison in northern England or northern Africa would look and speak differently from the men who died at Cannae. They would on occasion experience cultural prejudice from native Italians; nevertheless, they would also be equipped and organized in the same fashion as traditional Roman soldiers, and as citizens they would see their military service as a contractual agreement rather than ad hoc impressment.

Even as early as the Punic Wars slaves in real numbers were on occasion freed and, depending on their military contributions, given Roman citizenship. The aftermath of Cannae would see their military participation and emancipation in the thousands. The Romans, in short, had taken the idea of a polis and turned it into the concept of natio: Romanness would soon not be defined concretely and forever by race, geography, or even free birth. Rather, citizenship in theory could be acquired someday by those who did not speak Latin, who were born even into servitude, and who lived outside Italy—if they could convince the relevant deliberative bodies that they were Roman in spirit and possessed a willingness to take on Roman military service and pay taxes in exchange for the protection of Roman law and security brought on by a free and mercantile economy.

Juvenal three centuries after Cannae would ridicule the “hungry Greeklings” that bustled about Rome, but such men ran the commercial life of Rome and would prove to be, along with thousands of other foreigners like them, as good citizen legionaries as any Italians. Rome, not classical Greece, created the modern expansive idea of Western citizenship and the notion of plutocratic values that thrive in a growing and free economy. Money, not necessarily birth, ancestry, or occupation, would soon bring a Roman status. The ex-slave Trimalchio and his nouveau riche freedmen dinner guests, lounging in splendor in Petronius’s firstcentury-A.D. novel, the Satyricon, were the logical fruition of the entire Roman evolution in civic inclusiveness—social, economic, and cultural— that went on even as political liberty at the national level was further extinguished under the empire. It is no accident that some of the most Roman and chauvinistic of Latin authors—Terence, Horace, Publius Syrus, Polybius, and Josephus—were themselves the children of freedmen, ex-slaves, Africans, Asians, Greeks, or Jews. By the second century A.D. it was not common to find a Roman emperor who had been born at Rome. What effect did this vast difference in the respective ideas of citizenship of the antagonists have on the fighting in August 216 B.C.? Quite a lot—very few trained mercenary replacements available to Hannibal in the exuberance of victory, a multitude of raw militiamen recruits for Rome in the dejection of defeat.

The earlier Greeks had invented the idea of civic militarism, the notion that those who vote must also fight to protect the commonwealth, which in the exchange had granted them rights. The result was that the classical city-states came to field infantries made up of almost half their male resident population. At the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.) perhaps 70,000 free Greek citizens annihilated a Persian army of 250,000 forced conscripts. This was a good start in mobilizing the manpower reserves of the tiny Hellenic landed republics well beyond the old aristocratic elite. Nevertheless, the potential of civic militarism was never fully appreciated by the classical Greeks due to their jealously guarded notion of citizenship that was not extended to all residents of the polis. The Greeks had kept Hellas free from Persian occupation in part through the revolutionary idea that all the citizens must serve in the battle, but by the same token lost their autonomy a century and a half later to the Macedonians through a shortage of just those citizen warriors.

The consequence of this blinkered vision of war making was the rise of the royal army of Philip and Alexander, who cared little which men fought, only whether they fought well and in service to their paymasters. The Macedonians and their Successors were not democrats. Yet their readiness to welcome all Macedonians and Greeks alike into their multicultural professional armies with a common wage—the desperate united by a shared desire for loot and glory, rather than divided by language, locale, and ethnic pride—was in some ways perversely egalitarian in a fashion undreamed of by the classical city-states. This rise of huge Greek-inspired mercenary armies in the Hellenistic period (323–31 B.C.) for a time solved the traditional problem of manpower, but it did so in a manner that often forfeited the past civic élan of the city-state. That dilemma earlier had bothered Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, who saw their ideal of large armies of citizen soldiers vanishing in their own lifetimes. Greeks could field either sizable armies or patriotic and dutiful ones, but no longer any that were both sufficiently large and spirited. Every Greek who died at the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) in a failed effort to preserve his liberty had voted to do so. Not a single one of Philip II’s Macedonians who killed them had a direct say in where, how, or why he fought. That the former—poorly led, less well equipped, and haphazardly organized—nearly beat back Philip’s immense royal army is a tribute to the spirit of civic government.

The solution to this classical paradox was to field spirited citizen armies that were nevertheless huge, combining the classical Greek discovery of civic militarism with the Hellenistic dynasts’ willingness to recruit infantrymen from all segments of society. The Roman nation and its radical idea of an expansive citizenship would eventually do both brilliantly—in the process ensuring that its armies were larger than those of the classical Greeks and yet far more patriotic than the mercenaries who enrolled in the thousands in service to the Hellenistic monarchs.

This idea of a vast nation-in-arms—by the outbreak of the war in 218 B.C. there were more than 325,000 adult male Roman citizens scattered throughout Italy, nearly a quarter million of them eligible for frontline military service—was incomprehensible to the Carthaginians, who restricted citizenship to a small group of Punic-speakers in and around Carthage. Worse still in a military sense, citizenship to Carthaginians never fully embraced the Hellenic tradition of civic levies—citizens who enjoy rights are required to fight for their maintenance. Carthage also had no concept of the Roman idea of nationhood transcending locale, race, and language. Local nearby African tribes, and even Carthage’s own mercenaries, were as likely to fight the Punic state as were the Romans. Aside from the veneer of a few elite representatives, upon examination there was little Western at all in Carthage’s approach to politics and war. Unlike the Greeks, Carthage failed to insist that its own citizens fight their own battles. Unlike the Romans, it lacked any mechanism of incorporating North African or western European allies, conquered peoples, or serfs into rough political equality with native-born Carthaginians—hence the constant and often barbarous wars with its own rebellious mercenary armies. Nor was there even the pretense that the Carthaginian Assembly voiced the wishes of a nonelite. Carthage seems to have been a society mostly of two, not three, classes—a commercial and aristocratic privileged few served by a disenfranchised body of serfs and laborers.

The Roman Senate was probably as aristocratic as the Carthaginian, but there were no corresponding Punic assemblies that could check aristocratic power, and little tradition of a popular reformer—a Licinius, Hortensius, or Gracchus—who sought to broaden the franchise, allow the middling classes and “new men” to obtain high office, and agitate for agrarian reform and a redistribution of land. In a military sense the result was chronic shortages of Punic soldiers and a complete reliance on mercenary recruitment. Both phenomena would mean that however brilliantly led Carthaginian armies were, and despite their battle experience acquired from nonstop warring, they would find it nearly impossible for long to field troops as numerous or as patriotic as the legions. Centuries after Cannae, Romans continued to create enormous armies even during the darkest hours of the Civil Wars; in the seventeen years of fighting after Caesar crossed the Rubicon (49–32 B.C.) 420,000 Italians alone were conscripted into the military.

In contrast, for Hannibal to succeed, he had to do far more than defeat the Romans at Cannae; he needed to win four or five such battles in succession that would eliminate a pool of well over a quarter million farmers throughout Italy, men between the ages of seventeen and sixty who fought for either the retention or the promise of Roman citizenship. Hannibal had to accomplish such slaughter with an army that probably did not contain a single voting Carthaginian citizen, but was made up of African mercenaries and European tribesmen. Both groups fought not for the expectation of Carthaginian citizenship, or for the freedom to govern their own affairs, but mostly either out of hatred for Rome or for the money and plunder that their strong leader might continue to provide— strong incentives both, but in the end no match for farmers who had voted to replace their fallen comrades at Cannae and press on to the bitter end to ensure the safety of the populus Romanus, the preservation of the res publica, and the honor of their ancestral culture, mos maiorum. Most Italian farmers rightly surmised that their children would have a better future under Roman republicanism than allied to an aristocratic, foreign, and mercantile state like Carthage.

“RULERS OF THE ENTIRE WORLD”— THE LEGACY OF CIVIC MILITARISM

The Manpower of Rome

Non-Romans and Greeks of the ancient world could always mobilize enormous numbers of warriors—Gauls, Spaniards, Persians, Africans, and others—but in no sense did these tribal musterings and mercenary armies constitute a nation of arms. Not a single one of Rome’s formidable adversaries in the centuries to come would ever grasp this Western dual idea of free citizen/soldier. Jugurtha’s impressive Numidians (112–104 B.C.), the hundreds of thousands of Germans under Ariovistus (58 B.C.), the quarter million who joined the Gallic tribal leader Vercingetorix (52 B.C.), and the multitude of Goths who crossed the Danube to kill thousands of Romans at Adrianople (A.D. 378) were formidable fighters and they were often multitudinous. Many of such adversaries enjoyed a rich tribal history and crafted complicated methods of military organization. Nevertheless, they remained at heart armies of a season—migratory and ad hoc musters whose conditions of service depended solely on pay, plunder, and the magnetism and skill of a particular battle commander or regime. When such forces were satiated, they receded; when defeated, they disbanded; and when victorious, they were often effective for no more than another battlefield victory.

The advantages of the republican system were immediately apparent in the days after the disaster at Cannae. The government and culture of Rome were shaken to their foundations. Livy confessed in his description of Cannae’s aftermath that “never, except when Rome itself had once been captured, was there so much terror and confusion within the walls. I shall therefore confess that I am unequal to the task of narration, and will not attempt to provide a full description, which would only fall short of the truth” (22.54). Much of southern Italy began to defect or for a time stopped sending men and matériel to Rome. The rich city of Capua went over to Hannibal. Others in Campania and Apulia followed. A Roman army in Spain, under the leadership of Postumius, consul-elect for 215 B.C., was annihilated and the consul killed; Livy says that more than 20,000 legionaries died and that Postumius’s skull was hollowed out to be used as a Gallic drinking cup. The Carthaginian fleet was off the coast of Sicily, raiding at will. Half of the consuls elected between 218 and 215 had been killed in battle—Flaminius, Servilius, Paulus, and Postumius. The others were disgraced.

Rome’s reaction to these national catastrophes? After calm was restored in the streets and panic averted, the Senate met and systematically issued a series of decrees, reminiscent of the far-reaching decisions made by the Athenians after the catastrophe at Thermopylae, the Byzantines in the sixth century A.D. following the collapse of the Western Empire, the Venetians after the fall of Cyprus in 1571, and the Americans after Pearl Harbor. Marcellus was to be dispatched to Sicily to restore the situation. The bridges and roads to Rome were to be garrisoned. Every able-bodied man in the city was to be drafted into the home militia to defend the walls. Marcus Junius was appointed dictator, with formal directives to raise armies in any manner possible. He did so magnificently. More than 20,000 were recruited into four new legions. Some legionaries were not yet seventeen. Eight thousand slaves were purchased at public expense and given arms, with a proviso that courage in battle for Rome might lead to freedom. Junius himself freed 6,000 prisoners and took direct command of this novel legion of felons. Demands were made upon the Italian allies to muster an additional 80,000 troops within the year. For the duration of the war, the equivalent of nearly two legions was created each year to ensure a steady replacement for battle losses. Weapons were in short supply: Hannibal’s men now possessed most of the abandoned arms that had been fabricated in Italy during the previous decade. For new equipment to be manufactured, temples and public buildings were to be stripped of their ancestral military votives.

Within a year after the defeat, the Roman navy was on the offensive in Sicily, all the losses of Cannae had been replaced, and the thrice-defeated legions were twice the size of Hannibal’s victorious force lounging in winter quarters in southern Italy. The contrast with Hannibal’s army is striking: while Rome drafted emergency legislation to raise new legions, Hannibal’s veterans spent days scavenging the battlefield as their ingenious commander pleaded with his wary aristocratic overseers in Carthage to send more men.

The Continuity of Citizen Soldiers

In the next five centuries Roman armies would be confronted by an array of tactical geniuses, more Pyrrhuses and Hannibals, whose brilliance led to the annihilation of poorly led Roman armies: the one-eyed Sertorius and his tough Roman-Iberian renegades, the brave Spartacus and his enormous throng of seasoned gladiators, the canny Jugurtha of Numidia, the astute Mithridates of Pontus, Vercingetorix at the head of an enormous horde of Celts and Gauls, and the Parthians who exterminated the triumvir Crassus and most of his army. Together, these enemies of Rome slaughtered nearly a half million legionaries on the battlefield. In the end, all that glorious fighting was for naught. Nearly all of these would-be conquerors ended up dead or in chains, their armies butchered, enslaved, crucified, or in retreat. They were, after all, fighting a frightening system and an idea, not a mere army. The most stunning victories of these enemies of Rome meant yet another Roman army on the horizon, while their own armies melted away with a single defeat.

With the transition to empire and Rome’s subsequent collapse (31 B.C.–A.D. 476), republicanism for a time would all but disappear from Europe. Western armies would at times become every bit as mercenary as their adversaries and often in some areas as tribal. Nevertheless, the idea of a voting citizen as warrior and the tradition of an entire culture freely taking the field of battle under constitutional directive with elected generals were too entrenched to be entirely forgotten. In the dark days of the late empire and the chaos that followed, there remained the ideal that men who fought should be citizens, with legal—and sometimes extra-legal—rights and responsibilities to their community.

Even with the apparent end of civic militarism, the so-called professional soldiers of imperial Rome, like their republican counterparts of centuries past, still found in the army of the empire a continuance of five centuries of codified law. That meant to the average recruit freedom from arbitrary conscription, steady wages, contractual protections concerning service, and a fixed retirement—not press-gangs, ad hoc musters, and arbitrary punishments. If anything, the rights of the individual soldier expanded under the empire, to such a degree that his self-interested demands for greater pay and freedom tended to make provincial generals more receptive to his complaints than had been the elected republican leaders of the past. Just as the thriving empire and its Mediterranean economy benefited ex-slaves, the poor, and foreigners to a degree unimagined under the more democratic agrarian republic of central Italy, so, too, thousands of professional legionaries on the frontier found imperial bureaucrats more attuned to their needs even as their ability to vote for state officials was eroded and lost.

Civic militarism would be kept alive even when republicanism was on the wane, in a direct line of transmission from classical antiquity by elites in government and religion, as well as in popular folk traditions among the people. It was an entirely Western phenomenon. The warrior as citizen, and the army as assembly of warriors with legal rights and civic responsibilities, were ideas found in no other culture outside of Europe. Asia, Africa, and the Americas shared no intellectual or cultural heritage with Rome and Greece and thus possessed no source from which to adopt fully the peculiar Roman republican notion of voting assemblies and formal citizen soldiers.

Even during the so-called Dark Ages in “barbaric” Europe (A.D. 500–1000), civic armies like the Merovingians in western Europe, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Lombards in Italy would, like the Byzantines to the east, adopt Roman military nomenclature and organization to defend theircivitates through the use of levies of citizen soldiers. Northern European skill at fortifications, road-building, and military science that kept Islam at bay was handed down directly from the old Roman imperial administration; exercitus, legio, regnum, imperium, and other Latin military and political terminology—or in the East their Greek counterparts— continued to be the language of war from the fifth century A.D. on into the medieval period. The stratagems of Frontinus and Valerius Maximus concerning the use of civic armies would be carefully studied in the late Middle Ages. The patristic writers of the late empire, Dark Ages, and medieval Christendom—from Ambrose and Augustine to Gratian in his Decretum (1140) and Thomas Aquinas in theSumma Theologiae—outlined the conditions under which the Christian commonwealth could wage a just and legal war (ius in bello), one that would be attuned to the values of a mobilized citizenry.

During the Renaissance the military precepts of thinkers as diverse as Xenophon and Vegetius—the most widely cited Latin author of the ancient world between the fifth and seventeenth centuries A.D.—would be adopted by Italians like Leonardo Brunni and Machiavelli. Pocket-sized manuscripts of Vegetius, translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, were published in book form to be used by medieval generals in the field. Even the conquistadors of Charles V’s autocratic reign were imbued with the notion that they were a tiny nation-in-arms as they marched on Tenochtitlán, each soldier enjoying particular rights and protections as a Spanish subject that were unknown among their Mexica adversaries.

Constitutional government itself would eventually reappear and expand among the pikemen of Switzerland during the Middle Ages, again in fifteenth-century Italy, and in a manner of sorts never forgotten even in monarchial Byzantine Greece, before becoming firmly entrenched with the rise of the modern nation-state in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. In all such instances the best exemplar for those like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Guibert who called for a return to “a nation-in-arms” was the classical state, and the authors of emulation Sallust, Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, with their stories of the great levies of the Roman Republic.

Citizens as Killers

Civic militarism itself would not always ensure numerical superiority for Western armies—the manpower pool of Europe and its colonies would often turn out to be inferior to that of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Nor would a nation-in-arms always be guaranteed victory through greater morale. At times Christianity would prove that the Sermon on the Mount is a less effective incentive for warriors than jihad. Moreover, Western armies that ventured abroad and across the sea would often be small, professional, and on occasion mercenary. Nevertheless, the ideal of a collective defense by its free citizenry—the musters of the Franks, the pikes of Switzerland, sailors of Venice, or yeomen of England and France—would help to ensure that for most of the time post-Roman Europe itself was safe from invasion, and its overseas expeditionary troops trained, organized, and led with a zeal that emanated from beyond a narrow aristocratic caste—and were thereby more than a match for the numbers and the skill of their non-Western adversaries.

Again, the latter were sometimes braver men. On occasion they fought for a better cause than the Westerners who invaded their country, ruthlessly enslaved their people, slaughtered women and children, and looted their treasure. The study of military dynamism is not necessarily an investigation into morality—armies of the caliber of Rome’s were often able to do what they should not have. Civic militarism ensured large and spirited armies, not necessarily forces that would respect the cultural and national aspirations of others and the sanctity of human life in general. In that narrow regard of military efficacy, no other people on a single occasion—not Persians, Chinese, Carthaginians, Indians, Turks, Arabs, Africans, or Native Americans—would ever march as free citizens with abstract conceptions of civic rights, and at the formal direction of an elected assembly, but were more commonly paid, frightened, or mesmerized into service to a chief, sultan, emperor, or god. In the end, that fact in and of itself often proved a disadvantage on the battlefield. Sadly, the Western method of creating public armies and legal terms of service was not necessarily a question of good or evil, fairness or injustice, right versus wrong, but one of military skill.

The significance of Cannae? The worst single-day defeat in the history of any Western military force altered not at all the final course of the war. Sheer stupidity in the form of incompetent generals and bad tactics had thrown away the intrinsic advantage of Western armies: superior discipline, excellence in and preference for shock engagement, technology, and the readiness to turn out en masse for decisive battle. Poor planning had also nullified the natural advantages that accrued to the embattled Romans: fighting at home, in greater numbers, and on the defensive. Bad luck (fighting a military genius in his prime) and inexperienced soldiers (fresh recruits pitted against a veteran mercenary army) had guaranteed the Romans untold problems. In the end, all that made little difference at all.

The real lessons of Cannae are not the arts of encirclement or Hannibal’s secret of tactical genius, and so they have for too long been ignored by military historians. Students of war must never be content to learn merely how men fight a battle, but must always ask why soldiers fight as they do, and what ultimately their battle is for. The tragic paradox of warfare is that so often courage, audacity, and heroism on the battlefield—what brave warriors can do, see, hear, and feel in the heat of killing—are overshadowed by elements far larger, abstract, and often insidious. Technology, capital, the nature of government, how men are mustered and paid, not merely muscular strength and the multitude of flesh, are the great levelers in conflicts between disparate cultures, and so far more often determine which side wins and which loses—and which men are to die and which to live on.

Naïve Hannibal—who led thousands of tough warriors into Italy in the belief that his genius was to be matched against other generals and warriors similar to his own, rather than pitted against the faceless and anonymous institutions of republicanism and civic militarism itself. Naïve Hannibal—who believed that this war could be decided by his men’s ephemeral heroism and cunning at Cannae rather than by the lasting power of an idea. Citizens, it turns out, are history’s deadliest killers.

Contemporary scholars and general students often display a natural empathy toward Hannibal. It is easy to champion an underdog as courageous as Hannibal, and easier still for us moderns to find Roman aggression and imperialism of the third through first centuries B.C. loathsome—their tally of slaughtered Spaniards, Gauls, Greeks, Africans, and Asians finally overwhelms the moral sense. But if we ask what are the military wages of constitutional government and the resulting battle dividends of citizenship, the answer is not found with a Juvenal’s “one-eyed commander perched on his monstrous beast,” but with the nameless and silent men who were gutted and left to rot under the August sun of Cannae.

Polybius, who witnessed firsthand the later barbaric destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. and wrote of Cannae seventy years after the Roman defeat, rightly attributed Rome’s resurgence after the catastrophe to its constitution and the rare harmony between civilian and military affairs under consensual government. The aftermath of the slaughter on August 2, 216 B.C., affected the Greek historian as no other event in Roman history. He used the occasion to present a long analysis of the Roman constitution and the legions—nearly all of book 6 in his history—which remains the clearest and most concise account of those institutions to this day. Polybius ended his excursus about Rome’s remarkable constitutional and military system with a final thought on the aftermath of Cannae:

For although the Romans had clearly been defeated in the field, and their reputation in arms ruined, yet because of the singularity of their constitution, and by wisdom of their deliberative counsel, they not only reclaimed the sovereignty of Italy, and went on to conquer the Carthaginians, but in just a few years themselves became rulers of the entire world. (3.118.7–9)