CHAPTER 31
DEXTER HOYOS
THE Second Punic War was the ancient Mediterranean’s first world war, fought on two continents from Spain and Africa to the Aegean, and distinguished by the generalship of the initially victorious Hannibal and the ultimately victorious Scipio Africanus. Begun because of lingering suspicions from the earlier war between Rome and Carthage, and shared miscalculations after Hannibal became Carthage’s de facto leader in 221, it was expected by both sides to be relatively short—more miscalculation—but endured for sixteen years, not as long as its predecessor but imposing far greater stress and damage.
After the extraordinary victory of Cannae, Hannibalic Carthage was the dominant power across the western Mediterranean for almost ten years, reducing the Roman Republic essentially to the northern half of the Italian peninsula and the province of Sicily, at war not only with the Carthaginians but their allies, the historically powerful states of Macedon and Syracuse. Yet the outcome—thanks to Roman stamina and the abilities of Scipio—was the reverse: Carthage a shrunken and disarmed North African satellite, the Romans dominant over first the western Mediterranean and before long also the eastern.
The sources for the war which effectively opened the way to the Roman Empire are strikingly varied. Polybius’s forty-book history of the Mediterranean from the outbreak of the First Punic War in 264 to his own eyewitness record of the sack of Carthage in 146, draws on firsthand accounts, including Hannibal’s own inscriptional memoir set up near Croton in southern Italy and the text of his treaty with Macedon; comments extensively (and, Hannibal’s apart, as a rule adversely) on the quality of those accounts; is written without much literary adornment, and, despite the historian’s admiration for the Romans and for Scipio, is relatively impartial, though he also assesses Hannibal highly. On the other hand, he is often selective in what he records (his near-total avoidance of place-names in Hannibal’s expedition to Italy and his march on Rome in 211 are examples), sometimes too concise or opaque (as in details of the campaign and battle of Ilipa in 206), and very little interested in the internal political and social events of either Rome or Carthage. Worst of all, and not Polybius’s fault, the History is incomplete, with only its first five books extant in full while the rest, on events from 216 to 146, survives in extracts of varying length.
The only extant large-scale source is books 21 to 30 of Livy’s history of Rome composed in Augustus’s time. In contrast to the politically active, much-traveled, and acerbic Polybius, Livy devoted most of an equally long, but deskbound, life to his history. This is distinctive for its artistically mature Latin style, vivid narrative and rhetorical power, and treatment of domestic and religious affairs as well as military and diplomatic events, but less so for its grasp of military and other technicalities or its depth of analysis; the analyses offered are often hampered by Livy’s limited skill in assessing the varied sources he used, and by his overt admiration for the Romans of old. For Hannibal’s war he drew on Polybius and on Roman authors going back to participants in its events, Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus: this allows useful comparisons between the Polybian and Livian version of episodes covered by both, such as Hannibal’s expedition and Scipio’s victory at Zama. Livy often adds valuable details to his basically Polybian account, but is also capable of misunderstanding this or of confusedly combining Polybius’s details with those from elsewhere. At times he shamelessly prefers a Roman version, as in his summary of the treaty of 215 with Philip V of Macedon.
There are other, less detailed sources, again of varied worth: notably Cornelius Nepos’s very short biography of Hannibal, Plutarch’s Lives of Fabius Cunctator and Claudius Marcellus, Appian’s narratives of Roman wars down the ages in different lands (including their Hannibalic War operations), and Dio’s Roman History or, rather, for this period, its Byzantine epitome. These even more than Livy are dependent on the sources they use—sources largely though not exclusively pro-Roman. The extra information they offer may be useful but needs careful evaluation (especially Appian’s, inclined as he is to the more romanticized or melodramatic version of an episode if he can find it). In a class by itself, and hardly useful as a source, is Silius Italicus’s epic poem Punica, based mainly on Livy, Vergil, and imagination. To assess the Second Punic War, Polybius and Livy remain fundamental (on sources see further Seibert 1993a: 1–57; Hoyos 2003: 212–22, both citing extensive earlier literature).
OPPOSING RESOURCES
The war has been seen as a conflict of Carthaginian David versus Roman Goliath. At first glance this looks undeniable. Polybius reports Roman, Latin, and allied military manpower in 225 as totaling 770,000; certainly it was a vast recruitment pool which the Romans’ war system was uniquely able to exploit. The Carthaginians meanwhile famously relied on mercenary soldiers and Libyan (North African) subject conscripts for their armies; estimates of their own male citizen population in 218 vary from 90,000 to 200,000. Yet this was not the whole story. The rest of Punic North Africa—Phoenician sister colonies and Libyan subjects—and the southern half of Spain cannot be left out of comparison. Rome’s ability to draw on three-quarters of a million, or more, fighting men implies a total Italian population of 3 to 3.5 million; Carthage and its dominions can be estimated at very roughly four million.1
Third-century Rome was not the simple agricultural community that later Roman generations liked to fancy, but also a busy mercantile center with Mediterranean-wide dealings (including with Carthage). Her economic, like her demographic, resources were extensive though not inexhaustible, and the two together explain how, even after the great battle losses of 218–216, the Romans were able not just to replace the destroyed armies but to increase them to a level never seen before. After levying the usual six legions in 218—two for each consul and one for each praetor—and then thirteen in 216, by 212 they had twenty-five in service from Italy to Spain.
They also maintained powerful fleets which required several tens of thousands as crew, though details are obscure. At the height of the war effort in 212 Roman and Italian troops together totaled an estimated 160,000 in roughly equal proportions, and, with fleets included, up to 200,000. With much of southern Italy on Hannibal’s side by now and thus not supplying contingents, the stress on Rome and her loyal allies was gigantic—conceivably one man in three. Even in 201, after hostilities had ceased, there were still fourteen legions under arms.2
Carthage’s effort was hardly less but is often undervalued, with attention commonly focusing on Hannibal’s own fighting strength, itself often underestimated. He crossed the Pyrenees with (Polybius reports) fifty-nine thousand men, notoriously reduced, by the time he got them across the Alps, to twenty-six thousand; these figures came either from Hannibal’s own inscriptional memoir, or from sources close to him like his Greek friends Silenus and Sosylus. In Italy he received only a single body of reinforcements from Carthage: four thousand troops and forty elephants in 215. But the notion of Hannibal then somehow holding out in Italy for a dozen more years with steadily dwindling, yet invincible, African and Spanish veterans alone is misplaced; likewise that of Carthage disposing of only limited manpower or showing blinkered partisan stinginess.
In 215 substantial forces were sent from Africa to Spain under Hannibal’s brother Mago, to counter the Roman invasion, and to Sardinia to support a pro-Punic rebellion: about twenty-six thousand troops in all. Further forces went to Spain later, while the Punic fleet was built up afresh—a fleet 130-strong reported off Sicily in 212 would have needed nearly forty thousand crewmen, for instance. In Italy Hannibal for some years maintained two field armies, the smaller commanded by one Hanno (perhaps his nephew), and kept numerous garrisons in allied Italian towns: Arpi in Apulia, Tarentum, and Locri, for instance. Many of the troops on the Punic side in these years are recorded as Italian: Samnites, Lucanians, and particularly Bruttians. Their proportion surely rose as attrition wore down Hannibal’s original veterans.
In the year of crisis, 207, the Romans had twenty-three legions in arms, thirteen of them in Italy: a grand total, Italian allies included, of some 130,000 men even if many units were under normal strength. Hannibal now had only one army in being, but this must have been at least thirty thousand strong (he faced six legions), while Punic garrisons still held remaining allied cities like Locri, Thurii, and Metapontum. His brother Hasdrubal, in turn, arrived in Italy with another thirty thousand troops. In Spain the Carthaginian commanders were readying a powerful army to confront the younger Scipio: at the battle of Ilipa in 206, his four legions confronted 54,500 Punic troops, according to Livy (Polybius’s figure is 74,000). Other Punic military forces should not be ignored either: Carthage and North Africa had had protective garrisons since 218. On even the most cautious reckoning, Punic military strength still matched Rome’s. It ran down once the war contracted to Africa, yet thanks to their Numidian allies and to other levies the Carthaginians continued to field large (if disaster-prone) armies there down to Zama (Hannibal’s forces in 218: Polyb. 3.35.7, 56.4; reinforcements in 215: Livy 23.41.10; Roman forces in 207: Brunt: 418).
The Romans had to draw heavily on their economic and financial resources for the war effort. At times funds ran desperately short. In 214, wealthy citizens were required to pay for the upkeep of set numbers of naval crewmen that year out of their own pockets (at the most demanding level, each Senator had to provide eight sailors); some state contracts were let on the promise of future payment; and trust-fund administrators loaned fund moneys to the aerarium. Four years later more contributions were required for the fleet—provoking much popular annoyance—and in 209 a four-thousand-pound gold hoard reserved for emergencies had to be used for the armies. In 205 Scipio won support for his plan to invade Africa partly by engaging not to make the aerarium pay for the invasion fleet (it was provided instead through voluntary allied contributions), while to assist state finances land taken from Capua was sold off. War needs presumably influenced the launch of a new coinage system around 211, based on the silver denarius which replaced the older as system as the standard.3
Far less is known of Carthage’s finances, but our sources intermittently show her disposing of large sums. Hannibal, for instance, was sent not only reinforcements in 215 but also sizable funds, five hundred or even a thousand talents (Livy’s text is unfortunately corrupt). At the same time his brother Mago took another thousand talents, along with military forces, to Spain. Five years later a Roman raid on the African coast reported large numbers of troops again being levied for Spain and a great fleet being built to recover Sicily: a report perhaps exaggerated (no Sicilian expedition occurred), but any such activities called for significant funds. Carthage’s famous internal ports too—the outer commercial one and inner naval—were possibly constructed now or earlier in the war. Even later, in 205, Mago, operating in Liguria, was sent both reinforcements and large funds for recruiting and supplying extra forces, while reportedly Philip of Macedon was offered two hundred talents, without success, to keep him at war with Rome.4
How such funds were put together is not recorded, but methods matching those at Rome are likely enough: we have a glimpse of wealthy Carthaginians, after the peace of 201, complaining at having to contribute to paying the first indemnity installment. Carthage’s long-suffering Libyan subjects and, until 206, the variegated wealth of her Spanish province doubtless kept much of the war effort going. Nor is there evidence that trade was severely affected, although intermittent but brief Roman coastal raids would cause problems from time to time. The Carthaginians seem to have felt so little threatened from the sea, as a rule, that Scipio’s invasion in 204 took them by surprise.5
WAR AIMS
Neither power’s war aims were openly stated, and inferences must therefore be tentative. Roman aims in 218 were, very likely, limited (figure 31.1). Their interests since the 230s had been directed more to north Italy and across the Adriatic, whereas they had paid only sporadic attention to the Carthaginians—possibly three, more likely only two diplomatic missions before 218, and indifference to their “friends,” the Saguntines, until these became a convenient tool for disciplining Hannibal. If the peace of 201 could strip Carthage of her empire and fleet but still leave her intact in North Africa, in 218 the Romans would quite likely have been satisfied with forcing her out of her Spanish province (as well as surrendering Hannibal), exacting an indemnity, and limiting her freedom to make war. That the Romans would have annexed Punic Spain for themselves is not a foregone conclusion: returning the peninsula, with which they had long had trading relations, to its pre-Punic state was a conceivable enough option.
Figure 31.1 Battles of the Second Punic War. Details provided by D. Hoyos.
Carthage’s war aims were of course misrepresented by Roman tradition, focusing largely on Hannibal’s childhood oath of (supposedly) lifelong hatred. Certainly his expedition to Italy implies ambitious aims. It would be futile to undertake the hazards of invading and campaigning in enemy territory simply to win a peace which (even if Sicily and Sardinia were taken back) left the Romans masters of Italy and free to expand their new dominance in north Italy and across the Adriatic. The treaty which Hannibal made in 215, thus in the aftermath of Cannae, with Philip V (its Greek version is preserved by Polybius) conceded Illyria to Macedon and promised each signatory aid from the other if a war with the Romans occurred. In other words, the signatories accepted that the Roman state would not just continue to exist but would be powerful.
Yet, as just noted, Hannibal could not envisage leaving Roman dominance over Italy intact. The only long-term outcome beneficial to the Carthaginians would be to replace it with their own. That would have demanded a permanent military presence (no doubt Hannibal’s), a sharp reduction in the territorial size of the Roman state, and the dissolution of its alliances. Whether any such system would have endured beyond Hannibal’s retirement or death may be doubted, but in the years when he held sway across the southern half of Italy and could yet hope to bring the Romans to terms, it may well have seemed worth aiming for (treaty of 215: Polyb. 7.9; cf. Livy 23.33.9–12 [highly tendentious]).
OPENING STRATEGIES
Roman wars had always begun with one or both consuls levying armies, while a praetor was available in case smaller extra forces were needed. The armies then proceeded to the theater of war; in the previous Punic War, this was usually Sicily. In 218 the situation already required these arrangements to be expanded. The consuls levied their two legions each, but two more were then recruited because of the Gallic rebellion in north Italy. At first, though, the Romans plainly expected grand strategy against Carthage to be straightforward and theirs to dictate: they would invade Spain to crush Hannibal, and North Africa to crush the Carthaginians on their home soil, while their powerful war fleet would control the seas against the much inferior Punic navy.
This basically traditional plan was disrupted by the Punic invasion of Italy. There followed two fateful decisions. One consul, P. Scipio the elder, sent his army on to Spain under his brother’s command, but himself returned to northern Italy to take over the legions there against Hannibal. The Senate recalled his colleague Sempronius Longus from Sicily, canceling the projected invasion of Africa, in order to unite both consular armies in the north. This inaugurated a revised grand strategy: to confront Hannibal in Italy and simultaneously operate in Punic Spain. Of course it was expected that Hannibal’s invasion would swiftly be liquidated, with the deferred invasion of Africa as the obvious follow up. Instead, the revised grand strategy would endure for over a dozen exacting years.
Carthaginian strategy did require an immediate invasion of Italy. First, Hannibal was the only outstanding Punic commander, as he himself surely realized, and he could not be everywhere (see below). If he stayed in Spain to meet one Roman offensive, he was gambling-against sensible odds- that a commander in North Africa would manage to beat off the other. If he went to North Africa, the danger was the same in reverse. In any case, passively awaiting attack was no way to win final victory. Even if the Roman offensives were crushed, it remained essential to move into Italy itself for a final blow.
Second, despite her naval traditions, Carthage—dominated from 238 on by Hannibal’s army-minded but not navy-minded family—had a risible navy in 218: the Punic fleets in Africa and Spain together totaled only 105 capital ships (quinqueremes), some of them unfit for action, against Rome’s 220. Until this could be rectified, the Romans had full freedom of choice in where and how to strike at their foes—unless (Hannibal surely reasoned) they were forced to focus on a threat to Italy itself. Moreover, Carthage suffered the geographic (or geostrategic) disadvantage of operating on exterior lines relative to Rome. Her African and Spanish territories formed a 1,200-mile arc across the western Mediterranean, impossible to protect unassailably yet requiring widely spread protecting forces. The Romans contrastingly enjoyed a concentrated position in Italy with its outer islands Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, from which they could strike out at Punic territories.
Invading Italy would negate this advantage and take strategic pressure off Carthage; it did in fact reprieve her Libyan heartland for most of the war, apart from the occasional Roman seaborne raid. At the same time, any invasion of Italy by sea escorted by a flimsy war fleet risked disaster, especially as the Romans’ coastal colonies and possession of Sicily heightened the chances of interception, as raiding Punic squadrons soon discovered. Invasion via Gaul was thus dictated by Carthage’s and the Barcid family’s own recent policies.
This strategy did involve serious risks, as Hannibal no doubt recognized: not only the physical dangers along so lengthy a march—a thousand miles from New Carthage to north Italy—across such varied terrain, but the political uncertainty of how many (if any) Punic victories in Italy would transfer Italians’ loyalty from Rome to the invader and impel the Romans to seek terms. The Gauls of north Italy were ready to rebel and he encouraged them, but what encouraged him to reckon on Italian allied defections is unknown. Confident of winning impressive victories, perhaps he reckoned that these would prompt the Italians to change sides. He may also have intended to capitalize on the victories by marching on Rome itself. A rendezvous with a Punic fleet had been planned (it seems) for summer 217 on the Etruscan coast, where the city was less than a week’s march away; the likeliest purpose will have been to proceed to Rome by land and sea. After Cannae, according to Livy’s famous story, at least one senior officer, Maharbal the cavalryman, called on him to act. Maharbal, in reality, may first have done this after Trasimene. The Romans themselves, after both battles, fully expected it. As early as 217, though, Hannibal changed his priorities.6
HANNIBAL
Not many generals have lent their names to wars. Hannibal’s reputation, like Napoleon’s, combines military mastery with personal charisma—a reputation the more impressive because virtually everything known about him comes from Greek and Roman sources, who regarded Rome as the “good” side.
His father Hamilcar Barca and then his brother-in-law Hasdrubal—officially the commanders of Carthage’s armies—through leadership in war and their political astuteness had kept the Barcid family dominant in the city’s affairs since 238. Hannibal took over this de facto leadership to direct a war of variegated theaters: Spain and Italy first, expanding soon to Sardinia, Sicily, Illyria, and later Liguria. Necessarily, day-to-day strategies and tactics were left to the commanders in each theater, but Polybius emphasizes how the overall direction of warfare was Hannibal’s throughout (Polyb. 9.22.1–6). In fact, most commanders were kinsmen (like his brothers Hasdrubal and Mago, nephew Hanno, and perhaps the admiral Bomilcar) or close allies (most notably Hasdrubal son of Gisco).
Swift and unexpected movements were a notable Hannibalic trait, though less so as the years passed. He shook off Roman contact to arrive in Italy when and where he chose; moved into Etruria in 217 through the flooded Arno marshes; marched with alarming speed on Rome in 211 and then south against Rhegium (though both thrusts failed); took Fulvius Centumalus by surprise at Herdonea in 210; and ambushed the consuls Marcellus and Crispinus in a fatal skirmish two years later. His greatest skills, however, lay in tactics.
More than any general since Alexander the Great, Hannibal successfully used all the elements of an ancient army—cavalry, infantry, the light-armed, and elephants (his least successful arm, paradoxically)—in flexible combinations, along with methods that few other commanders exploited as regularly: rapid movement (another Alexandrine technique), ruses, and ambushes. The latter pair irritated his Roman opponents into excoriating them as “Punic deceit” (Punica fraus) without noting of course that Scipio Africanus became equally a master of them. An ambush against the Roman infantry’s rear at the Trebia helped decide that battle, while at Trasimene a year later the entire engagement was an ambush through heavy mist, followed up by able cavalry exploitation under Maharbal; later in 217, another Trebia-like ambush, planned against Minucius Rufus’s legions in Apulia, was frustrated only by the timely (for Minucius) intervention of Fabius Cunctator’s nearby army.
The basic Hannibalic method was to keep the enemy’s infantry in play until one of his more mobile corps—the cavalry, an ambush force, or (against Spaniards at the river Tagus in 220) elephants and cavalry together—could clear the way to strike that infantry decisively. It obviously helped him to have adversaries single-minded or unsophisticated enough to attack him straightforwardly or let him take them by surprise. The victory at Cannae was due to masterful collaboration between the several divisions of the Punic army: the Gallic and Spanish infantry forming the front line (which suffered badly) against the Roman infantry, the African columns behind which then struck the Romans on both flanks, and the Numidian and other cavalry on either wing whose partial return from pursuit sealed the destruction of Varro’s and Paullus’s encircled legions. A similar though simpler encirclement won the second battle of Herdonea, in Apulia in 210, when the proconsul Fulvius Flaccus and at least seven thousand Roman troops perished.
Of course this was not his sole technique. The Tagus battle uniquely involved enticing the Spanish warriors to start crossing the river, only for those who reached Hannibal’s side to be crushed by his forty elephants while those still in the water were shattered by the cavalry; complete rout of the Spaniards on the far bank followed. At Trasimene, the whole army ambushed Flaminius’s legions, and in 212 it initiated the assault on a disorganized Roman army at the first battle of Herdonea (if this fight is authentic).7
In two military arms Hannibal had deficiencies. His famed elephants played a minor part in reality: after all the effort in bringing thirty-seven to Italy via the Alps, they did contribute to the victory at the Trebia but then all perished save one. Nor did the forty brought over by Bomilcar in 215 achieve much. The largest body of elephants Hannibal ever commanded, eighty at Zama, proved worse than useless, being skilfully dispersed by Scipio’s light-armed—after causing enough disruption to the Punic cavalry to help Masinissa and Laelius rout these and thus, in the end, decide the battle. (The Punic elephants at Ilipa in Spain, four years before, had played a similar destructive role.) In sieges, too, Hannibal was generally mediocre. Capturing even small towns, starting with Saguntum in 219, took long effort or internal treachery. When in turn the Romans surrounded Capua, his chief Italian ally, with siegeworks from 212 on, he found it impossible—even using elephants—to break their lines or force them to battle. His only other expedient, the march on Rome, was a total failure (elephants at Zama: Polyb. 15.12.1–4; at Ilipa: Polyb. 11.24.1, Livy 28.15.5).
Hannibal was not simply an attractive and successful leader but a careful one. Like Marlborough, he looked after his men’s welfare. The march to Italy was conducted, contrary to legend, through territories that allowed frequent resupply; in the famous ruse of the oxen with blazing faggots tied to their horns, which he used later in 217 to elude Fabius’s blockade of the pass out of Campania, he also took care to extract safely the soldiers who carried out the feint. Although more and more of the original veterans were replaced over the years by Italian recruits, he kept the troops’ loyalty (as Polybius emphasizes) and maintained discipline: the seasoned third line of his army at Zama, the only one to hold Scipio’s men to a standstill when the rest had fled, was substantially Italian: Bruttians according to Livy.8
The Romans’ solution to Hannibal’s tactics was, for many years, to avoid battle entirely, instead shadowing his army as it marched and meanwhile molesting his Italian allies or Hanno’s secondary force. These grand tactics, first practiced by Fabius Cunctator during 217 (the proverbial “Fabian tactics”), became standard after Cannae, though not invariably so as the battles of Herdonea and then the combative Marcellus’s variant of them (below) attest. As a result, Hannibal’s operations after 216 boiled down to winning over, or capturing, as many Italian towns as possible and defending those won over—efforts decreasingly effective after 209 when Fabius recovered Tarentum.
After the fall of Capua in 211, Marcellus began a limited return to offensive tactics against Hannibal. This at any rate seems the right explanation for the repeated clashes in 210 which Livy reports between his forces and Hannibal’s. Undeterred by Fulvius’s defeat at Second Herdonea, Marcellus with his own consular army brought on a day-long, effectively drawn engagement at Numistro in Lucania, for Hannibal, technically the victor, evacuated the area during the ensuing night, with Marcellus pursuing the next day. Thereafter, in Apulia, indecisive fights and skirmishes marked the rest of 210 as the two armies stalked each other around the countryside. Marcellus took Hannibal on again in 209 and, despite defeat in a two-day clash near Canusium, kept his army in being and in continually close harassing contact.
Despite Marcellus’s death the year after, Hannibal found no effective answer to these techniques of harassment and attrition. In 207 the consul Claudius Nero caught and mauled him at Grumentum and then, like Marcellus, dogged his departing march until Hannibal came to a baffled stop at Canusium. Nero’s attentions crucially prevented him from making any serious effort to join forces—or even make contact—with his brother Hasdrubal who was marching down from north Italy: Hannibal remained inactive even after the consul marched northward with part of his own army to help defeat the newcomer (Marcellus’s and Nero’s activities: sources in Broughton 1951: 278, 287, 290, 294).
The practical, whether or not intentional, effect of “Marcellan” tactics was a constant cost to Hannibal in men, time, and prestige, all of them increasingly hard to recover as years wore on. He had no greater successes after 207 against later and lackluster Roman commanders, who by 203 were under orders to prevent him leaving Italy (Livy 30.21.1). His relative paralysis may reflect a less flexible army now that so many of the veterans of the march to Italy must have been replaced by southern Italian recruits. It may also reflect the waning of his own original élan and inventiveness: a decline (despite his enduring qualities as leader and organizer) which became still clearer when he returned in 203 to Africa to confront Scipio.
SCIPIO AFRICANUS
During the war the Romans produced a number of respectable generals—Fabius Cunctator, Gracchus, the elder brothers Scipio and Nero—and a very able one, Marcellus; to their good fortune, they then found in the younger Scipio a military genius (figure 31.2). In appointing him to Spain in 210, the year after his father and uncle perished there, they took a remarkable gamble, for he was just twenty-four and had held no independent command. (Another gamble, three years later, was to make two old enemies with a merely average war record—Nero and Livius Salinator—consuls against the invading Hasdrubal; this measure succeeded, too.)
Figure 31.2 Scipio Africanus, the victor over Hannibal. Vatican Museum, Rome. Photo Credit: L. Tritle.
Scipio ended Punic rule in Spain with three brilliant victories between 209 and 206: the lightning capture of New Carthage and the battles of Baecula and Ilipa (thus outdoing Hannibal, whose three great victories a decade before had in the end led nowhere). He admired Hannibal, whom he later tried to shield from political persecution, but how much he owed to studying the Carthaginian’s methods is unclear. Speed of movement perhaps, as in the swoop on New Carthage—but a bold leader scarcely needed to be taught the importance of that. The night destruction of the Punic and Numidian camps near Utica in 203 was an ambush barely short of outright treachery, for negotiations had been taking place: again it hardly required Hannibal (who never took so brazen a step) as a role model. At Baecula, Ilipa, and the Great Plains in Africa in 203, Scipio’s cavalry got rid of the enemy’s—an essential start—but daring infantry maneuvers then achieved victory.
Scipio took risks as extreme as Hannibal’s, and not only in Spain. As consul in 205 he crossed from Sicily to help capture Locri: this meant confronting Hannibal himself, who came on the scene with a stronger force which Scipio promptly attacked. Instead of a counterstroke (which might have annihilated Scipio and changed history), Hannibal withdrew, leaving Locri to its fate—surely one of the war’s lost opportunities. In 203 Scipio marched far inland from his coastal bridgehead near Utica to fight at the Great Plains, and again in 202 pressed still further west until he met Hannibal at “Zama” (a battle, it seems, actually fought near Sicca). This was akin to the latter’s invasion of Italy: had the Romans lost either battle, they would have been stranded far from hope of aid or rescue, with destruction or surrender their only alternatives.
Scipio was plainly an innovative general in his own right. He was a charismatic leader to his men and to allies like Masinissa of Numidia, and this helped him to train his forces to levels of skill and commitment previously unknown to Roman, and most other, armies (Hannibal’s excepted). Each victory was gained through bold strategies and different tactics, notably the thrust to New Carthage, the complex (and not easy to understand) infantry evolutions at Ilipa, and his dangerous inland marches in 203/202. After the war, indeed, no Roman army for a century or more achieved the sophistication of his legions.
ERRORS AND MISCALCULATIONS
Most wars are marred by mistakes and miscalculations, Napoleon’s “Spanish ulcer” and Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa being two modern examples. The Second Punic War suffered a notable number, even apart from the misjudgments on both sides which arguably sparked it (see further Hoyos 1998, with discussion of earlier literature; Barceló 2004: 83–95, 108–18).
On the Roman side, their revised grand strategy in 218 was surely mistaken. Had the invasion of Africa gone ahead and that to Spain been recalled, pressure would have been put on Carthage on her own ground, immediately and severely. Hannibal might still have won his great victories in 218–216, and might even have been reinforced from Spain, but nothing suggests that the Romans would have been any readier to seek terms. By contrast, the examples of other invaders of Punic Africa—Agathocles of Syracuse in 310–308, Regulus in 256/255, and Scipio later—suggest the opposite for the Carthaginians. At the very least, Hannibal would have been recalled to save his city, transferring the war of attrition and land devastation from Italy a dozen years sooner.
Hannibal’s father had fought in the previous war, and Hannibal himself admired an earlier invader of Italy, Pyrrhus of Epirus. In both wars the Romans had consistently refused to give in to defeats (admittedly, they nearly did so with Pyrrhus) and battled on to final victory. Hannibal plainly believed that he could do what Pyrrhus and Hamilcar’s generation had failed to do: force the Romans to take his terms. He plainly did not expect or plan for a fifteen-year war of attrition in which, basically, he would march to and fro around central and southern Italy, harassed by Roman forces which he could no longer decisively defeat. Nor indeed did the Romans expect this in 218–216: their strategy for Italy (save during Fabius’s six-month dictatorship in 217) was to gather powerful armies and throw them at the invader for a swift annihilation. That a war of maneuver and attrition did develop after 216 was the outcome of these varied miscalculations.
It still proved ultimately unsatisfactory for Carthage. The Italian allies were hard to prise away from Rome: despite his propaganda claims about coming to liberate them from Roman rule, none changed sides until the thunderclap of Cannae. Even then, only southern and central Italian states defected, and not all of them. Naples and Rhegium, for instance, never did, nor did the Pentri in Samnium. Many other important centers took their time (Tarentum not until 212, after foolishly high-handed Roman treatment).
The Romans, moreover, refused to negotiate, despite his offer of talks after Cannae. Hannibal’s strategy now had to be rethought but, given the circumstances, the rethinking was broadly predictable. Extra pressure on the enemy was needed. Thus as well as seeking to win over or subdue non-Roman Italy (apart from the south, he had hopes of the Etruscans), he sought to widen the war—a policy of no interest to him earlier. Macedon and Syracuse, both aggrieved against Rome and territorially ambitious, became allies of Carthage in 215/214. The Romans now had to operate in other theaters too: Illyria, Greece, and Sicily. But the rest of the calculation failed to work out. Philip of Macedon was soon reduced to a mere nuisance, Syracuse was captured by the implacable Marcellus and, ironically indeed, Roman pressure on Hannibal’s own theater did not lessen.
There were other self-imposed setbacks. As mentioned earlier, Polybius reports only twenty-six thousand men reaching north Italy with Hannibal, an astounding 56 percent loss after the Pyrenees—all the more astounding as Hasdrubal, crossing the Alps a decade later, sustained no losses worth recording. Counterfactual writers can play with scenarios of how the war might have proceeded had twice as many Punic professionals reached Italy in 218, there to be joined by thousands of Gauls (figure 31.3). But, plainly enough, losing over half his army even before fighting began seriously compromised Hannibal’s military potential from the outset; this alone conceivably lost him the war.
Figure 31.3 A Spanish infantryman of the era of the Punic Wars. Osuna, Spain. National Archaeological Museum of Spain. Photo Credit: Luis García.
Troops were available as reinforcements later, but repeatedly were sent elsewhere: for instance twenty-six thousand to Spain and Sardinia in 215, twenty-eight thousand to Sicily again in 213, and twenty-one thousand in all to Mago in Liguria in 205. These expeditions can hardly be blamed on a home government supposedly unsympathetic to the Barcids, for Mago commanded two and a kinsman (another Mago) was involved in the Sardinia venture. Polybius indeed, as noted above, asserts that Hannibal decided all such dispositions. He may well have been confident of maintaining his own forces with Italian recruits and perhaps also mercenaries. But the Sardinia expedition and, a decade later, Mago’s to Liguria, look like wasted resources. The Romans were not seriously impeded in their Italian theaters by sending troops to Sardinia; and for Mago to go to the northwestern corner of Italy, 1,100 km from his brother in the southeastern, seems mere folly; their armies, combined, could have totalled some fifty thousand troops and made a real difference to the war, whereas any victories in Liguria would barely have troubled Roman momentum.
Perhaps the most regularly debated of all Hannibalic questions is whether he was right not to march on Rome after Cannae, or even earlier. While his decision is almost universally condoned—Rome being heavily fortified, the Punic army lacking siege equipment and exhausted after Cannae, and southern Italy supposedly showing signs at last of changing sides—yet from the standpoint of his own and Carthage’s interests it deserves to be condemned. After Trasimene, when Maharbal’s famous advice may originally have been offered, Rome lay five days’ march south; even if defended, its residents were panic-stricken and the city could have been cut off from the rest of Italy. But Hannibal, rather than linking up on the Etruscan coast with a Punic fleet (as previously arranged), instead marched east to the Adriatic and then south into Apulia. After Cannae he would again have found a panic-stricken population and could have sealed the city off—not only from relieving forces (and the scattered and demoralized Roman forces left in Italy could have brought little relief), but also from food. Nothing could have impressed the Italians, as well as Philip V and the Mediterranean world, more. Instead he put off a march until 211, in entirely changed circumstances, and by then—despite fresh popular panic within the walls—the Roman authorities had his measure and stared him down.
A critical and ultimately crippling factor in Carthage’s war making was that there were no other first-class Punic generals (not to mention admirals). Hannibal may well have been aware of this, but his hope may have been that the Romans lacked imaginative field commanders too. So they did, save Scipio Africanus and maybe Marcellus, but during the war Roman generals still regularly overbore their non-Hannibalic opponents. Hannibal’s brothers and Hasdrubal son of Gisco did score crushing victories in Spain over the elder Scipio brothers in 211, annihilating both, but achieved this with significant help from the Scipios’ own mistakes, and then incomprehensibly failed to follow up their success. Disaster therefore ensued once the younger P. Scipio came to Spain a year later. Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal repeatedly suffered defeats before 211, then in 208 was beaten at Baecula by the younger Scipio, and finally and fatally at the Metaurus by Nero and Livius, generals of medium merit at best. Hannibal’s other brother, Mago, shared in the disaster of Ilipa with the son of Gisco, then was fatally worsted in 203 in Liguria by two even less scintillating commanders, Varus and Cethegus.
Hasdrubal son of Gisco, a major figure at Carthage in his own right and father of the famous Sophoniba, was brave, tireless, and resilient, yet his one victory in 211 was outdone by repeated catastrophes at the younger Scipio’s hands. The prowess of many officers when under Hannibal’s own command—Mago, the Hanno already mentioned, the cavalry leader Maharbal, and Hasdrubal (quartermaster-general in 216)—veils a larger reality. Even able subordinates failed to shine as independent commanders: not only Mago but Hanno too, the latter beaten by both Sempronius Gracchus in 214 and Fulvius Flaccus in 212. Another general, Himilco (in Sicily during 213/212), and Bomilcar the admiral made virtually no impact on the war despite opportunities.
As for the Punic navy, for all its old renown, it performed miserably. From eighty-seven seaworthy quinqueremes in 218 it was built up to 130 by 212; to accommodate the new navy and protect commercial ships from Roman raiders, the internal ports may have been constructed in those years; yet throughout the war Punic fleets were defeated by Roman, or dispersed in storms, or simply turned tail when a smaller enemy fleet appeared (thus Bomilcar in 212). Some level of resolution and risk taking at sea could have contributed materially to Carthage’s fortunes, but these qualities now lay with Roman fleet commanders. The Carthaginians wept in 201 as Scipio had their ships burned at sea, but it was a lament the fleet scarcely deserved.
OUTCOMES
Demographically the war hit Rome hard. Even if losses at Cannae, for instance, are corrected downward (not quite convincingly) to thirty thousand killed besides the ten thousand captured, and Appian’s claim—sometimes mistaken as Hannibal’s—of four hundred Italian cities sacked and three hundred thousand enemy slain merits skepticism, still Romans and Italians of fighting age suffered heavily in fifteen years of war, as did Italy’s cities and countryside, especially the southern half of the peninsula. Roman territory itself, save Campania, was not seriously ravaged after 217, yet the census of 203, carried out with particular care, returned only 214,000 civium capita (though this did leave out some thousands of disfranchised Campanians). The impact on the loyal Italian population must have been as harsh or harsher, while those who had defected not only suffered assaults, captures, and enslavements during the war but were then severely punished, including territorial confiscations. Archaeology indicates that much of southern Italy suffered long-lasting economic damage: Tarentum, for instance, could not recover its third-century prosperity.9
Even so, signs of Roman recovery did begin to appear. As early as 206, the consuls encouraged farmers to return to their homes; Livy mentions no funding assistance but his silence hardly proves that the measure failed. Sicilian farmers and taxpayers had been similarly and successfully encouraged after operations ended there in 210, according to the consul who had been in charge—a claim supported by the quantities of cheap grain sent to Rome from Sicily as well as Sardinia by 202. In 200 land grants for Scipio’s Zama veterans in Samnium and Apulia (where much rebel Italian land had been confiscated) were authorized.
The census in 193 registered 243,700 citizens (still without the disfranchised Campanians); recorded figures then rose steadily to well over 300,000 by 164, and thereafter never fell below that total. In the 190s and 180s, several new Latin colonies in peninsular and northern Italy offering generous land grants had trouble attracting all the desired recruits, not a sign of continuous land hunger among Romans and Latins.10
The war brought southern and eastern Spain more territory in fact than just the old Punic province, under Roman rule. It ended forever Carthage’s capacity to be a major Mediterranean power. Equally significantly, it gave the Romans fresh confidence to intervene in affairs beyond the Adriatic, a process they had started thirty years before. The results stunned the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, accustomed for centuries to make war, peace, alliances, and realignments with one another and with the lesser states around them: within fourteen years after Zama, the Romans had imposed an effective though not regularly exercised hegemony over them all. Forty years later they began to turn them into provinces.
The war’s impact on Carthage was not as horrific as Hannibal and his fellow-citizens might have feared. Empire and great-power status were lost, but the peace treaty did not penalize commerce or her home territories. Since Punic armies had consisted of non-Carthaginian conscripts and mercenaries, and Punic fleets had rarely fought big battles (in marked contrast to the previous war), manpower losses fell largely on Libyans, Spaniards, Gauls, and others. North Africa did suffer Roman coastal raids and then Scipio’s cross-country ravaging, yet the damage inflicted was probably less than the havoc wrought in southern Italy over thirteen years. It is noteworthy that, unlike so many Italian cities, no Libyan community is reported as defecting to the enemy despite Scipio’s harrying.
Remedial measures began early, if a story about Hannibal having his idle troops plant vineyards (after the peace?) rests on some fact. When in turn he took on one of the two chief offices of state (sufes) in 196, he carried through important reforms both of Carthage’s public finances—which peculation had crippled—and of her political structure, making this more open and competitive. Partly thanks to such reforms, and also no doubt to the return of peace and the enforced absence of a sizable (and expensive) navy and army, renewed prosperity soon developed.
There is varied evidence for this. During the Romans’ wars of the 190s against Philip V and Antiochus III, Carthage provided large quantities of grain and other supplies as gifts to their forces in Greece (vineyards: Aur. Vict. Caes. 37.2–3; Livy 31.19.2; 36.4.5). In 191 they offered to pay out the remaining forty years of the war indemnity—eight thousand talents, a massive sum—immediately (Livy 36.4.5–7, 9). Unlike the munitions, this offer was rejected, for reasons political and diplomatic. The high quality of agriculture in Punic North Africa impressed the Romans enough for them to arrange, after destroying Carthage, to have the encyclopedic works of the agronomist Mago translated (supposedly the only Punic work they cared about; see Columella, Rust. 1.1.13, Plin. HN 18.22–3.). Excavations of the city’s internal ports, commercial and naval, show no materials datable earlier than the mid-second century, but it is hardly credible that in those years, with Roman ill will already sharpening, the Carthaginians would choose to build a haven for two hundred warships and the warships to go into it. More likely both ports were refurbished to accommodate Carthage’s busy maritime trade.
Ironically, the peaceful prosperity which accrued with, it seems, Hannibal’s help, in the half-century after 201, while Carthage acted as an innocuous and obedient satellite of Rome, fueled the decision by her hegemon to end the city’s existence. In a real sense it was the Romans’ long-deferred and dismal payback for the battlefield of Cannae.
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