When the Senate began to discharge soldiers and encourage a return to agriculture in the final years of the war, many of the owners of small properties lacked the wealth to restore their farms and begin to produce a viable crop once more. Most abandoned the countryside and migrated to the big cities, especially to Rome, where the profits of conquests were increasingly spent on lavish entertainments and public buildings. Their farms, along with large areas confiscated from the rebellious Italian communities and added to Rome's publicly owned land, were absorbed into large estates owned by the wealthy. Purchased with the profits of overseas expansion, these were worked by slaves captured during the same wars of conquest. Gradually these latifundia came to cover much of the most fertile land in Italy. Although there were fewer legions and alae in service in the second century these were recruited from the already reduced citizen and allied peasantry, and were now likely to spend even longer in distant service. Five to ten years on garrison duty in one of the Spanish provinces could well spell ruination for a small farmer whose land fell into neglect during his absence. In the long run this process swelled the urban poor, who were reliant on handouts and casual labour, frequently in debt and inclined to support any radical politician who offered them something better, whilst large parts of the countryside came to be worked by an almost exclusively servile population. Rioting in the city, disorder in the country and a widespread slave revolt were all to feature in the disturbances of the first century BC. The falling numbers of citizens eligible for military service set against the growing demand for long-term overseas garrisons eventually prompted fundamental change in the Roman army. In an extreme view, this process has been seen as a major factor not just in the end of the Republic, but in the later decline of the Roman Empire, and even in the poverty of southern Italy compared to the north still visible in the twentieth century AD.
Most of the longer-term claims for the impact of Hannibal's invasion have rightly been rejected. It is for instance highly questionable that it created factors prompting an inevitable collapse of the Roman Empire, more than six centuries later. Some have attempted to minimize the damage inflicted between 218 and 203, arguing that the literary accounts of widespread devastation are grossly exaggerated and even contradictory. In addition, the area of Italy which suffered most heavily from the depredations of both sides was the south, a region where the proportion of land owned by Roman citizens was relatively small. The consequences of the war should not as a result have had a major impact on the number of citizen farmers qualified for military service. In this view, the decline in the Roman peasantry was primarily a result of the increasing duration of legionary service resulting from overseas expansion in the second century BC. However, whilst it is probable that the extent of agrarian damage caused by the war in Italy is exaggerated by our sources, such exaggeration is entirely understandable and cannot be taken to mean that no significant hardship resulted. At least some areas farmed by Roman citizens had been directly affected by the campaigns against Hannibal and it must always be remembered that the decline in the free peasantry was also a problem for Rome's Latin and Italian allies. At least to some extent the Gracchi and later reformers attempted to relieve the plight of allied as well as citizen poor. It is more likely that a combination of the devastation caused by the Hannibalic invasion and the heavy demands of military service in the second century BC ruined many small farmers, and produced a shift in population away from the country to swell the urban poor. This was not universal. In some areas small farmers were able to survive and prosper for several centuries. Slave-worked latifundia were already in existence before the Romans intervened in Sicily, but the disturbances caused by the Hannibalic War and the wealth and slaves produced by subsequent conquests greatly encouraged their spread.7
The Punic Wars were not the sole cause of the major changes in Roman society in the mid to late Republic, but they were a highly important episode in Rome's history. During these conflicts the Romans mobilized massive human and economic resources to wage war with relentiess determination. In doing so they were drawn into close involvement all around the shores of the Mediterranean, so that much of the fighting in the second century was a direct result of this contact. Rome was already an active imperialist, warfare an inseparable part of her political system, before the struggle with Carthage, but this produced a permanent increase in the scale and intensity of Roman war-making. The Romans became accustomed to maintaining a large army and governing and exploiting overseas provinces. The Romans, and most especially their elite, had profited from expansion for many years, but as the rate of expansion quickened, so the scale of the spoils massively increased. Rome was flooded with wealth, luxuries and slaves, as well as new ideas and cultural influences. Most of the problems which beset the Republic in the century before its end - increasingly fierce aristocratic competition; the rapidly escalating costs of a political career; the decline of the rural population and the dramatic increase of slavery, urban poverty and debt; the difficulties of recruitment which led to the creation of a professional army - were all directly or indirectly the consequences of imperial expansion. Ultimately the Republic failed to cope with these problems and a monarchy was created. Some would argue that the Republican system relied too heavily on outmoded institutions, perfectly adequate for a city state but utterly incapable of ruling a massive empire. The weakness of this view is that the institutions of the Principate remained for many years essentially those of a city state. Perhaps the Republican system in the second and early first centuries BC had simply become too inflexible to adapt as it had in the past to changing circumstances. Maybe the changes produced by Rome's rapid overseas expansion simply occurred too quickly for the state to deal with effectively. If this was so, then the Punic Wars had played a part, for they had undoubtedly accelerated Roman expansion.
The Punic Wars in Perspective
The world today would be a very different place if Carthage had won the struggle with Rome. The Romans would only have conceded defeat if their enemy had inflicted considerable real damage upon them; more, certainly, than they proved capable of doing. Defeat in such a large-scale conflict might have been enough to cause the collapse of Rome as a state. Roman expansion would have slowed for a very long time and perhaps never happened. The Graeco-Roman culture of the empire which covered much of Europe, North Africa and the Near East for more than 500 years had a profound influence on the subsequent development of the Western world in particular, and through this spread throughout most of the globe. A significant proportion of the world's countries now speak Latin-based languages, or languages heavily influenced by Latin, and use a version of the Latin alphabet. Many legal systems are based on Roman law. The existence of the Roman Empire, and the relative ease of travel it permitted, gready facilitated the spread of Christianity and of course the creation of a Roman Catholic Church. Would any of this happened in the same way if the Romans had lost?
The Romans came close - we will never know how close - to defeat on very few occasions in either the First or Second Punic Wars, and never in the Third War. They did not lose because they refused to admit defeat in spite of enormous losses, and won through sheer determination and the willingness to expend massive resources in their war effort. The solidarity of all classes at Rome was remarkable, especially in comparison to other ancient city states, and, more often than not, their allies, Latin, Italian and overseas, were also inclined to remain loyal. The entire Roman state went to war, mobilizing an exceptionally high proportion of its manpower, marshalling all of its wealth and resources to pay, feed, clothe and equip its armies, and to construct great fleets of warships. Once (and for whatever reasons) the Romans came into direct conflict with Carthage they did everything necessary to achieve victory, grimly building new fleets or raising fresh legions to replace the ones they had lost, private individuals assisting when the State's finances ran low. The Romans took great pride in their ability to learn from their enemies, copying weaponry and tactics from successive
opponents and often improving upon them. This characteristic was amply demonstrated in the Punic Wars by the speed with which Rome turned herself into a great naval power in the First War, or the steady improvement of her armies and generals during the Second.8
The Carthaginian war effort was never so wholehearted, and most of the State did not directly participate in the conflict until 149 when they were faced with the extinction of their city. This less determined approach to warfare was not because the Carthaginians remained at heart a nation of merchants, who viewed every enterprise in terms of profit and loss. It was the normal attitude towards warfare of every civilized state in the Mediterranean world. Only the Romans viewed every war as a life and death struggle, refusing to consider defeat whilst they had any means of carrying on the fight, and always pursuing total victory. The Carthaginians, and especially Hannibal, put the Romans under greater pressure than any other single foreign opponent. That they survived this ordeal confirmed their distinctive attitude towards warfare, until the changing conditions of late antiquity made it impossible to maintain. The Romans' relentless attitude to warfare was one of the most important factors in the creation of their Empire, combined with their remarkable talent for absorbing other peoples which gave it such stability. The same attitude to war tended to breed more conflict after an initial clash, and the differences between the Romans' and Carthaginians' expectation of how a beaten enemy should behave contributed in no small way to the renewal of war in 218 and 149.9
The historians of the twentieth century readily saw a parallel between the First and Second Punic Wars and the two World Wars of their own century. The struggle between Rome and Carthage was on an unprecedented scale and resulted in massive casualties just as the Great War shattered the European powers. The resentment of many on the losing side provoked the renewal of war and a wider, even more damaging conflict in both 218 BC and AD 1939. Some individual incidents seemed to have parallels between these conflicts separated in time by two millennia. In many respects the situation faced by Britain in the summer of AD 1940 was similar to that of Rome in late 216 BC. Both sides had suffered military disaster suddenly and unexpectedly, and it seemed only a matter of time before each would be overrun by the all-conquering victors. In each case the victors, intoxicated by the ease of their success, believed that all logic demanded that the other side admit defeat and come to a negotiated settlement. Yet Rome and Britain refused to seek peace and continued to fight, enduring further losses. Revisionists who have tried to argue that Hider's Germany was incapable of launching a successful invasion across the English Channel in 1940 miss the point as certainly as those who debate whether or not Hannibal could have taken Rome in 216. These operations would in practice have been extremely difficult and perhaps impossible with the resources at the Germans' and Carthaginians' disposal. What is far more important is that both the Romans in 216 and the British in 1940 believed that a direct attack upon them was perfectly possible and imminent, posing a real threat to their very existence. In spite of this each preferred to fight on rather than accept defeat and persisted in this resolve in the face of continued pressure from the enemy. For the Romans as much as the British the period was to become their 'Finest Hour', remembered as a time of great unity when all classes stuck together and endured great hardship for the common good. Perhaps the biggest difference is that whilst this occurred in the last days of the British Empire, for the Romans it marked the beginning of their rise to World Empire.
Successes on the battlefield do not automatically bring victory in the wider conflict. Unless one side was overwhelmingly strong, it was rarely possible in the pre-nuclear age to inflict so much damage that an enemy was incapable of fighting on. Wars ended when one side lost its will to continue the struggle and capitulated. Breaking the collective willingness of an enemy population to fight on was the ultimate goal of the theories of Strategic Air Power developed in the 1920s and 1930s AD. When these were put into practice in the Second World War, civilian populations proved far more resilient than the advocates of aerial bombing had anticipated. The bombing of cities did not cause the rapid demoralization of the population, leading to rioting and civil disorder which would force governments to seek peace. Supporters of Independent Air Power argued that the failure was not through any flaw in the concept, but due to a lack of resources, and ultimately such theories reached their culmination in the development of the nuclear arsenal.
It is not always easy to discover which events will trigger the collapse of the collective fighting spirit of any state or people. In AD 1991 the United Nations waged a brief and highly successful campaign against Iraq, but this failed to result in the removal from power by his own people of Saddam Hussein, a prospect eagerly anticipated by politicians and much of the media in the West. In the same way, NATO operations in the Balkans later in the same decade failed to destroy the hold on power of the leaders of Serbia. Battlefield success did not produce the political results widely broadcast in the public debate, although this outcome came as little surprise to most military analysts. Military defeat did not persuade the population of a country to realize the inequalities and unfairness inherent in their political system - at least by Western standards - and turn against their oppressive leaders. Instead the threat from outside tended to bring far greater unity to each country. In our eyes the Roman system of government might seem deeply unfair, concentrating power in the hands of a tiny elite, whilst the system of alliances through which the city controlled Italy was surely oppressive and deeply resented by Latins and Italians. Hannibal may have believed this to be the case when he marched to Italy in 218, although it is difficult to know just how well he understood the peculiarities of the Roman system. Yet his appeal to Rome's allies to throw off the oppressor's yoke fell overwhelmingly on deaf ears. No Latins joined him and the bulk of the Italians also remained loyal. Fear of reprisals played a part, as perhaps did suspicion of Carthage's motives, but on the whole we are forced to conclude that most of the Italian communities felt that it was in their best interest to support Rome. In the same way, even the poorer classes at Rome felt a strong enough bond to the community to sacrifice their lives for it.
In the Introduction I stated that it was not my intention in this book to seek in the Punic Wars military lessons of direct relevance to modern warfare. Others are far better qualified to discuss modern strategy and tactics. The aim of this book has been to set the conflict between Rome and Carthage firmly within the context of warfare in the third and second centuries BC. If we are to learn from the past then history must first be understood on its own terms. One general point is worth emphasizing, namely that each society and culture tends to have a unique view of warfare which affects how they fight and as a result how they may be beaten. This can be seen in most periods of history, but the difference between two philosophies of war has rarely been as clearly illustrated as it was during the Punic Wars.
Notes to the Text
Introduction
1.
For Cannae see chapter 8; Napoleon's belief that much could be learned from the study of ancient commanders, see D. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 1966), pp. 137-139; for twentieth-century studies of the Punic Wars see B. Liddell Hart, A Greater than Napoleon - Scipio Africanus (Edinburgh, 1930), J. Fuller, The Decisive Battles of the Western World (London, 1954).
2.
For relatively recent studies see T. Dorey & D. Dudley, Rome against Carthage (London, 1971), B. Caven, The Punic Wars (London, 1980), N. Bagnall, The Punic Wars (London, 1990) and Y. Le Bohec, Histoire militaire des guerres puniques (Paris, 1996) which cover the entire conflict; J. Lazenby, Hannibal's War (Warminster, 1978, reprinted with new preface: Oklahoma, 1998), and The First Punic War (London, 1996), J. Peddie, Hannibal's War (Stroud, 1997), and S. Lancel (trans. A. Nevill), Hannibal (Oxford, 1998) deal with individual wars, and in 1993 there was also a reprint of T. Dodge, Hannibal (1891); there is also the stimulating collection of papers in
T. Cornell, B.
Rankov & P. Sabin (edd.), The Second Punic War: A Reappraisal British Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 67 (London, 1996). All of these works include bibliographies mentioning many more books and articles published within recent years on aspects of the subject.
3 Bagnall (1990) and Peddie (1997), both of whom were highly experienced soldiers, comment perceptively on some of the practical aspects of the campaign. Peddie pays more attention to the problems of supply than most other authors. For a general treatment of the differences between different cultures' concepts and practice of war, see
J. Keegan, A History of Warfare (London, 1993).
1.
Silenus and Sosylus, see Nepos, Hannibal 13. 3.
1.
For Polybius see F. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius 1 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 1-37.
2.
See P. Walsh, Livy (Cambridge, 1961), and T. J. Luce, Livy, the Composition of his History (Princeton, 1977); Cynoscephalae, Polybius 18. 24. 8-9, Livy 34. 8. 13.
3.
See Walbank 1 (1970), pp. 26-35; Polybius' criticism of the partisan nature of Philinus and Fabius Pictor, 1. 14-15.
Chapter 1
1 For a useful survey of the Mediterranean world in the third century BC see A. Toynbee, Hannibal's Legacy. Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 20-83.
1.
Origins of Carthage, see G. Picard & C. Picard, Carthage (rev. ed.: London, 1987), pp. 15-35, S. Lancel, Carthage (Oxford, 1995), pp. 1-34; Tarshish, Ezekiel 27. 12; Spain, Lancel (1995), pp. 9-14.
2.
Sacrifice to Melquart, Polybius 31. 12; religion and culture, Picard & Picard (1987), pp. 35-50, Lancel (1995), pp. 193-256, esp. 245-56.
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