Hannibal

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hannibal swore an oath as a boy that he would never be a friend of Rome. According to the tradition recorded by Polybius, his father Hamilcar held him over a roaring fire in a sacrificial chamber and made him pledge it as long as he lived. He was nine years old. The Carthaginian general would spend the rest of his life keeping that promise, and Rome would never forget him. For generations afterward, when catastrophe loomed, Romans cried out "Hannibal ad portas" - Hannibal is at the gates. Who was the man behind that terror? How did a commander from Carthage march war elephants across the Alps and crush Roman armies on their own soil for fifteen years? And why, after all his victories, did he die by his own hand in a foreign court, poisoning himself rather than be taken? The answers run from the snowfields of the western Alps to a tomb on the coast of the Sea of Marmara.

• 2. The Name And The Oath

  ›

  Hanno joined with Baal Hammon gives us Hannibal, a common Semitic Phoenician-Carthaginian name meaning something like "Baal has been gracious" or "the grace of Baal". Its precise vocalization remains debated, with suggested readings including Hannobaal and Hannibaal. Greek historians rendered it as Annibas. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not use hereditary surnames. They distinguished people who shared a name through patronymics or epithets, which is why he is sometimes called "Hannibal, son of Hamilcar" or "Hannibal the Barcid". His father carried the cognomen Barca, a Semitic word meaning "lightning" or "thunderbolt", earned for the swiftness and ferocity of his attacks. The same root for lightning appears among the Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Arameans, and other Asiatic Semitic peoples. Hamilcar's children are collectively known as the Barcids, though they never inherited the surname. Among them were Hannibal's two brothers, Hasdrubal and Mago, names so common in Carthage that modern historians sometimes attach Barca to tell them apart from the multitudes who shared them.

• 3. Rise In Hispania

  ›

  Hamilcar drowned in battle while conquering Hispania, leaving his command to Hasdrubal the Fair, with the eighteen-year-old Hannibal serving as an officer. Hasdrubal consolidated Carthage's Iberian holdings and even signed a treaty with Rome agreeing not to expand north of the Ebro so long as Rome stayed south of it. When Hasdrubal was assassinated in 221 BC, the army proclaimed Hannibal commander-in-chief at twenty-six, and the Carthaginian government confirmed him. The Roman historian Livy describes how the old soldiers fancied they saw Hamilcar's youth given back to them: the same bright look, the same fire in his eye, the same trick of countenance and features. Livy records that Hannibal married a woman from Castulo, a powerful Spanish city allied with Carthage, whom the poet Silius Italicus names as Imilce. He spent two years completing the conquest south of the Ebro, storming the Olcades' centre at Alithia and the Vaccaei strongholds of Helmantice and Arbucala. Returning home laden with spoils, he won his first major battlefield success against a coalition led by the Carpetani at the battle of the River Tagus. His tactical skill was already on display.

• 4. Crossing The Alps

  ›

  Saguntum fell after eight months of siege, sparking the Second Punic War. Rome had claimed the city as a protectorate despite its lying south of the Ebro, and Hannibal treated the alliance as a breach of treaty and his reason to begin the war. When a Roman delegation under Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus demanded that Carthage choose between war and peace, the reply came that Rome could choose. Fabius chose war. Hannibal departed New Carthage in late spring of 218 BC, fighting through the northern tribes to the Pyrenees, leaving a garrison of 20,000 and releasing 11,000 reluctant Iberians. He reportedly entered Gaul with 40,000 foot soldiers and 12,000 horsemen, reaching the Rhone by September with 38,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, and 38 elephants. His exact route over the Alps has been disputed ever since, a debate Polybius noted was already underway in his own day. Recent numismatic evidence suggests the army passed within sight of the Matterhorn. Analysis of peat bogs near the Col de la Traversette found soil heavily disturbed by thousands of animals and humans, with traces of Clostridia bacteria from the guts of horses and mules, radiocarbon dated to around 218 BC. By Livy's account Hannibal used vinegar and fire to break through a rockfall, though Polybius is silent on it. By the time he reached Italy he had perhaps 20,000 foot, 4,000 horse, and only a few elephants, having lost nearly half his force.

• 5. Victories In Italy

  ›

  Publius Cornelius Scipio, father of Scipio Africanus, never expected an Alpine crossing and had sent most of his forces to Iberia. At the Battle of Ticinus in November 218 BC, Hannibal's superior cavalry forced the Romans off the plain of Lombardy, and the wounded Scipio was saved only by the bravery of his son riding back onto the field. At the Trebia in December, Hannibal wore down the superior Roman infantry before cutting it to pieces with a surprise flank ambush, though the cold killed most of his remaining elephants. In the spring of 217 BC he took the difficult route through the marshes at the mouth of the Arno, his men marching four days and three nights through a land under water, and he lost his right eye to conjunctivitis crossing the Apennines. At Lake Trasimene he executed the first recorded turning movement in military history, marching around the consul Flaminius and catching him in a defile, destroying his army in the waters and on the slopes. It was the costliest ambush Rome ever sustained until Carrhae in 53 BC. The following spring at Cannae he drew the Romans into an envelopment, his weak centre falling back while his Libyan mercenaries and cavalry closed the trap. Depending on the source, 50,000 to 70,000 Romans were killed or captured in a single day, including the consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus, 29 of 48 military tribunes, and 80 senators. His cavalry commander Maharbal told him, "Hannibal, you know how to gain a victory, but not how to use one."

• 6. The War Of Attrition

  ›

  Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus earned the name Cunctator, the Delayer, for refusing to meet Hannibal in open battle. Departing from Roman military tradition, he shadowed the Carthaginian with several armies, watching and limiting his movements while declining the pitched fight. The strategy was unpopular among Romans who saw it as cowardice, but it proved the only feasible means of defeating Hannibal. At the night Battle of Ager Falernus, trapped in Campania with the exit passes blocked, Hannibal tied burning torches to the horns of a herd of cattle and drove them up the heights. The Romans, seeing a column of moving lights, chased the decoy while Hannibal slipped his whole army in silence through an unguarded pass. The historian Adrian Goldsworthy calls the escape a classic of ancient generalship that found its way into nearly every narrative of the war and into later military manuals. Carthage offered little help. Real power lay with the inner Council of 30 Nobles and the board known as the Hundred and Four. The peace party, led by Hanno II the Great, relied on trade with Rome and resented Hannibal's unauthorized attack on Saguntum. They delayed or ignored his requests for supplies and siege equipment, and soldiers in North Africa were never sent to reinforce him.

• 7. Decline And Return

  ›

  Hasdrubal's severed head was tossed over the palisade of Hannibal's camp, carried across Italy after his defeat and death at the Battle of the Metaurus. Hannibal had been waiting in Apulia in 207 BC to combine forces with his brother for a march on Rome. On hearing the news he retired to Calabria. He still won notable victories late in the war, destroying two Roman armies in 212 BC, slaying the famed Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 208 BC, and crushing forces at the Silarus and at Herdonia. But with the loss of Tarentum in 209 BC and the reconquest of Samnium and Lucania, his hold on southern Italy was almost gone. In 203 BC, after nearly fifteen years of fighting, he was recalled to Carthage to face a Roman invasion under Scipio Africanus. Before sailing he left a record of his expedition engraved in Punic and Greek on bronze tablets in the Temple of Juno Lacinia at Crotona. At Zama in 202 BC the usual balance was reversed: the Romans held the edge in cavalry thanks to the defection of King Masinissa of Numidia, while Carthage relied on 80 war elephants. The Romans frightened the elephants with trumpets, drove them into their own lines, and Scipio's cavalry struck the Carthaginian rear. Carthage lost roughly 20,000 troops with 15,000 wounded, the Romans only 2,500. The defeat cost Hannibal the respect of his fellow Carthaginians and ended Carthage's bid for Mediterranean supremacy.

• 8. Statesman And Exile

  ›

  Hannibal was 46 when the Second Punic War ended in 201 BC, and he proved he could be a statesman as well as a soldier. Elected suffete, the chief magistrate of Carthage, he ordered an audit that confirmed the state could pay its indemnity of ten thousand talents without raising taxes, then reorganized the finances to root out corruption and recover embezzled funds. To break the power of the oligarchs of the Hundred and Four, he passed a law making them subject to direct election rather than co-option, and changed their term from life to a single year. Seven years after Zama, alarmed by Carthage's renewed prosperity and suspicious of his contact with Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire, Rome sent a delegation alleging he aided their enemy. Hannibal fled into voluntary exile, journeying to Tyre, then Antioch, then Ephesus, where Antiochus received him. According to Cicero, after hearing the philosopher Phormio lecture on the duties of a general, Hannibal said he had seen many old fools in his life but this one beat them all. He built a fleet for Antiochus in Cilicia and fought the Rhodian navy at the Battle of Side, where faster Rhodian ships damaged half his warships through the diekplous manoeuvre. After Antiochus lost at Magnesia and agreed to surrender him, Hannibal fled again. Strabo and Plutarch say he was received at the Armenian court of Artaxias I, with an apocryphal tale that he planned the new capital of Artaxata. He finally took refuge with Prusias I of Bithynia, once winning a naval battle against Eumenes II of Pergamon by hurling clay pots filled with venomous snakes onto his ships.

  Threatened by Rome, Prusias of Bithynia agreed to give Hannibal up, but Hannibal was determined not to fall into his enemy's hands. The precise year and cause of his death are unknown. Cornelius Nepos and Livy say that when the ex-consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus surrounded the castle where he lived, he took poison. Appian writes that Prusias himself poisoned him, while Pausanias tells of a wounded finger and a fatal fever three days later. He is said to have left a letter declaring, "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death." Sources place his death between 183 and 181 BC, with Polybius giving 182 BC. His tomb stood at Libyssa on the coast of the Sea of Marmara, and in the Severan period a tomb of white marble was reportedly built there for him. Military academies still study his double envelopment at Cannae, the technique that shaped Count Alfred von Schlieffen's plan before the First World War. The Greek scholar Polybius left a remarkable verdict: across seventeen years in the field, among men of many nations and languages, no one ever dreamt of conspiring against Hannibal nor deserted him once they had joined him. In modern Tunisia he is revered as a national hero, his likeness printed on the five-dinar bill, with plans for a 17 metre colossus on the Byrsa, the highest point of Carthage overlooking Tunis.