Second Punic War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Punic War began with a siege. In 219 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal surrounded the pro-Roman city of Saguntum on the eastern coast of Iberia. After eight months of resistance, the city fell. Rome sent an embassy to Carthage demanding satisfaction, headed by Quintus Fabius Maximus. When the Carthaginian senate rejected the demands, Rome declared war in the spring of 218 BC. What followed was seventeen years of fighting across four continents that would determine which of the two great powers of the western Mediterranean would survive.

  The war raised questions that Romans would argue about for generations. How did Hannibal manage to march an army over the Alps and then defeat the greatest military force Rome had ever assembled? Why, after winning battle after battle on Italian soil, did he ultimately lose the war? And what became of Carthage, the ancient city that dared to challenge Rome not once but three times?

• 2. The Road to War

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  Rome and Carthage had fought before. The First Punic War lasted twenty-three years and ended in 241 BC with a Roman victory. Under the Treaty of Lutatius, Carthage surrendered Sicily. Then, while Carthage was fighting the Truceless War against its own rebellious mercenaries, Rome seized Sardinia and Corsica as well, in clear violation of the peace.

  Hamilcar Barca, who had led Carthage through the mercenary revolt, drew the lesson that his city needed a new economic and military foundation. He took his army to Iberia in 237 BC and carved out what the sources describe as a quasi-monarchical, autonomous state in the south and east of the peninsula. The silver mines, agricultural wealth, manpower, and shipyards there gave Carthage the resources to stand up to Rome again. Hamilcar ruled as a viceroy. He was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal in 229 BC, and then by his son Hannibal in 221 BC.

  In 226 BC the two powers had agreed that the Ebro River would mark the northern boundary of Carthaginian influence in Iberia. Saguntum sat well south of that line, yet Rome had made a separate agreement with the city. When Hannibal besieged it, he was acting within the letter of the Ebro Treaty, but Rome saw it as a provocation it could not ignore. The classicist Richard Miles wrote that the two powers stumbled into their first war more by accident than design; by the time of the second, the antagonism was deliberate and deep.

• 3. Hannibal's Crossing

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  Hannibal assembled his army at New Carthage, the city the Romans knew as Cartagena, in the spring of 218 BC and marched north along the Iberian coast in May or June. His route took an inland track through Gaul to avoid Roman-allied cities on the coast. At the Rhone Crossing he defeated a force of local Gauls who tried to bar his path. A Roman fleet had landed nearby at Massalia, the city now called Marseille, but Hannibal evaded contact and pressed on.

  The Carthaginians reached the Alps in late autumn and crossed in fifteen days. The passage was brutal: altitude, cold, the difficult terrain of the high passes, and constant guerrilla harassment by Ligurian tribespeople. Hannibal arrived in Cisalpine Gaul, the broad Po valley of what is now northern Italy, some time in November with 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry. He had set out from Iberia with 37 elephants; how many survived the crossing the sources do not record with precision.

  His appearance in Italy was a complete strategic surprise. Rome had been planning to send one army to Iberia to fight Hannibal there and another to Africa to strike at Carthage directly. Both plans were cancelled. The Gallic tribes of the Po valley, who resented Roman colonization and the appropriation of their farmland, declared for the new arrival and swelled his army to more than 40,000 men.

• 4. Three Great Calamities

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  In late November 218 BC, near the River Ticinus, Carthaginian cavalry routed the Roman horsemen and light infantry in a skirmish that signaled what was coming. The consul Sempronius Longus was lured into giving battle on ground of Hannibal's choosing at the Trebia. The Carthaginians encircled the Romans. Of some 40,000 Roman soldiers engaged, only 10,000 cut their way free.

  In the spring of 217 BC, Hannibal crossed the Apennines through a route so difficult and so unexpected that the Roman armies had left it unguarded. Near Lake Trasimene in Etruria, he set an ambush for the Roman army under the consul Gaius Flaminius. The entire force was caught on a narrow lakeside road, unable to deploy. Fifteen thousand Romans died in the battle, including Flaminius himself. Another four thousand from a separate cavalry force were surrounded at Umbrian Lake and annihilated. The modern historian Brian Carey has written that these defeats and the one that followed brought Rome to the brink of collapse.

  The third blow fell at Cannae in 216 BC. The Roman Senate had authorized an army of 86,000 men, the largest in Roman history to that point, under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. Hannibal accepted battle on the open plain. His centre was deliberately weak; as the Roman legions pushed through it, Libyan heavy infantry on the wings wheeled inward and the Carthaginian cavalry swept around the Roman rear. The legionaries found themselves enclosed with no room to fight. At least 67,500 Romans were killed or captured. The historian Miles describes Cannae as Rome's greatest military disaster.

  The Romans who escaped Cannae included Toni Ñaco del Hoyo's accounting of a final catastrophe: within weeks a Roman army of 25,000 was ambushed by Boii Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul at the battle of Silva Litana and annihilated. In less than three years Rome had lost more than 120,000 soldiers.

• 5. The War of Attrition

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  After Cannae, several major cities of southern Italy defected to Hannibal, among them Capua, the second-largest city in Italy, and the port of Tarentum. Syracuse and the kingdom of Macedonia also entered the war on the Carthaginian side. Hannibal appeared to control much of the south of the peninsula.

  Rome's response was a transformation of its own military. The Senate enrolled slaves, criminals, and men who fell below the standard property qualification. By early 215 BC Rome was fielding at least twelve legions; by 214 BC, eighteen; by 213 BC, twenty-two. By 212 BC the total force exceeded 100,000 men, with a similar number of allied troops alongside them. The majority were deployed in southern Italy in field armies of roughly 20,000 each.

  Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had headed the Roman embassy to Carthage before the war, was elected dictator after Trasimene and adopted what became known as the Fabian strategy: avoiding pitched battle, relying instead on constant low-level harassment. The Roman public derided him as "the Delayer," or in Latin, Cunctator, and in 216 BC they elected consuls who wanted a more aggressive approach. Cannae was the result.

  After Cannae, Fabius became consul again in 215 BC and was re-elected in 214 BC. Hannibal could win battles, but he could not take strongly fortified cities and he could not force Rome's central Italian allies to defect. Carthage reinforced him only once, when the port of Locri defected to Carthage in the summer of 215 BC. A second force under his youngest brother Mago was diverted to Iberia after a major defeat there and never arrived. Hannibal was fighting Rome with the army he had, and no more.

• 6. Scipio Transforms the Spanish War

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  Publius Cornelius Scipio arrived in Iberia in 210 BC with reinforcements and a different approach. In a carefully planned assault in 209 BC he captured Carthago Nova, the main Carthaginian base on the peninsula. He seized what the sources describe as a vast booty of gold, silver, and siege artillery. He then released the local population and freed the Iberian hostages the Carthaginians had held there, attempting to secure the loyalty of the local tribes.

  Hasdrubal Barca, Hannibal's younger brother and the Carthaginian commander in Iberia, moved to engage Scipio at the battle of Baecula in 208 BC. The Carthaginians were defeated but Hasdrubal managed to withdraw the bulk of his army and march west through the Pyrenees into Gaul, then recruit heavily, and cross the Alps into Italy in the spring of 207 BC with 35,000 men. His plan was to join Hannibal. He never did.

  The Romans facing Hannibal in the south deceived him into believing the entire Roman force was still in camp while a substantial portion marched north under the consul Claudius Nero. The combined Roman army attacked Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus. Hasdrubal was killed and his army destroyed. The Romans reportedly threw Hasdrubal's severed head into Hannibal's camp so that Hannibal would know his reinforcement had failed.

  The decisive blow in Iberia came the following year. At the battle of Ilipa in 206 BC, Scipio with 48,000 men defeated a Carthaginian army of 54,500 men and 32 elephants. The last Carthaginian-held city in Iberia, Gades, defected to the Romans. Carthage had lost the province that had funded and supplied its war effort.

• 7. Zama and the Peace

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  Scipio invaded North Africa in 204 BC, landing with legions and immediately receiving the support of Masinissa, a Numidian prince who had been driven from his kingdom when Carthage divided Numidian territories in 206 BC. Scipio defeated two Carthaginian armies in succession. The Numidian king Syphax, who had allied with Carthage, was captured by Masinissa himself at the battle of Cirta.

  Carthage sued for peace and both Hannibal and Mago were recalled from Italy. Hannibal sailed from Croton and landed at Carthage with between 15,000 and 20,000 veterans. Mago died of wounds during the voyage, though 12,000 of his troops reached home. Rome and Carthage negotiated a draft treaty, and the Roman Senate ratified it. Then, with Hannibal's army present and confidence restored, Carthage repudiated the agreement.

  The decisive battle took place at Zama in October 202 BC. For once the cavalry advantage was Roman rather than Carthaginian. Hannibal deployed 80 elephants to break through the Roman infantry, but the Romans parted their ranks and the elephants charged harmlessly through gaps or were turned back. The Roman and Numidian cavalry drove the Carthaginian horse from the field, then returned to strike the Carthaginian infantry from behind. Hannibal was among the few who escaped.

  The peace terms Rome imposed were severe. Carthage surrendered all overseas territory and some of its African lands. An indemnity of 10,000 silver talents was to be paid over fifty years. The Carthaginian fleet was reduced to ten warships. Carthage was forbidden to possess war elephants and could not wage war outside Africa, or within Africa, without Roman permission. Many Carthaginian leaders wanted to reject the terms. Hannibal argued strongly for acceptance, and in the spring of 201 BC the treaty was ratified. Scipio received a triumph at Rome and took the agnomen Africanus.

• 8. What Polybius Recorded

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  Polybius, a Greek who was sent to Rome as a hostage in 167 BC, wrote the closest thing to a contemporary account of the war that survives. He is best known for The Histories, completed sometime after 146 BC. Modern historians regard his work as broadly objective and largely neutral between the Roman and Carthaginian perspectives. He was an analytical historian who, wherever he could, interviewed participants from both sides. The modern historian Andrew Curry describes Polybius as fairly reliable; the scholar Craige Champion calls him a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian.

  Polybius's account breaks off or exists only in fragments after 216 BC, which means the Roman historian Livy becomes the main source for the second half of the war. Livy relied heavily on Polybius but was openly pro-Roman and gave fuller accounts of Roman political life. The classicist Adrian Goldsworthy writes that Livy's reliability is often suspect, and the historian Phillip Sabin refers to Livy's military ignorance. Diodorus Siculus and Cassius Dio, two Greek writers of the Roman era, are described by the scholar John Lazenby as clearly far inferior to Livy, though fragments of Polybius can sometimes be recovered from their texts.

  The gap in the sources is not merely academic. Decisions made in the middle years of the war, the political negotiations between Hannibal and cities like Capua, the precise terms of Syracuse's defection, the internal debates within Carthage about whether to reinforce Hannibal, are known to us only through the pro-Roman filter of Livy. Fifty years after Zama, Masinissa of Numidia, Rome's ally, used the prohibition on Carthaginian warfare to raid and seize Carthaginian territory with impunity. When Carthage finally sent an army against him in 149 BC, the campaign ended in disaster at the battle of Oroscopa, and Rome used the breach of treaty as the pretext for the Third Punic War. In 146 BC the Romans stormed Carthage, killed most of its inhabitants, sold the surviving 50,000 into slavery, and demolished the city entirely. It was a century before anyone built on the site again.