by Dexter Hoyos
H A N N I BA L’ S DY N A S T Y
H A N N I BA L’ S DY N A S T Y
Power and politics in the western
Mediterranean, 247–183 BC
Dexter Hoyos
First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 2003 Dexter Hoyos
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-41782-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-41929-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–29911–X (Print Edition)
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
vii
Plates
between pages viii and 1
Introduction
1
I The heights of Heircte and Eryx
7
II Carthage
21
III The revolt of Africa
34
IV Barca supreme
47
V Hamilcar in Spain
55
VI Hasdrubal’s consolidation
73
VII Hannibal in Spain
87
VIII The invasion of Italy
98
IX Three great victories
114
X Hannibal’s Italian league
122
XI Indecisive war
134
XII The defeat of Hasdrubal
141
v
C O N T E N T S
XIII Africa invaded
152
XIV Defeat
164
XV Postwar eclipse
179
XVI Hannibal sufete
190
XVII The end of the Barcids
203
XVIII Sources
212
Appendix: special notes
223
Time-line
233
Notes to the text
237
Bibliography
285
Index
296
vi
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
It is a pleasant task to acknowledge the people and institutions who have
helped to make this work possible. My earliest debt is to Richard Stoneman,
who expressed interest in the theme of Hannibal’s dynasty even before I
began writing; and his support since the book was completed has been just as
valued. The rest of his team at Routledge, and Frances Brown and Carole
Drummond at The Running Head Ltd, have been consistently helpful and
informative on every aspect of publication.
I should like to express my appreciation to the scholars, publishers and
archivists who made available several of the illustrations for this book. In
alphabetical order they are Archivi Alinari and Archivio Brogi of Florence,
Italy; CNRS Editions, Paris, and Prof. M. H. Fantar; and Dr Matthias Steinart
of the Archäologisches Institut at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
I am grateful too to Sydney University for its continuing commitment to
Greek and Roman studies, a rather endangered species in Australia, and its
aids to research through grants of study leave and travel funds. Invaluable
again have been the interest, courtesy and expertise of the University Library
staff at every level, for without these my research task would have been hard
indeed.
As always, it has been my wife Jann and our daughter Camilla who made it
both possible and worthwhile. Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal and his
brothers have not been the centre of their attention, but if Barcid family life
was at all similar they were fortunate men.
Dexter Hoyos
vii
1 Hannibal—bust found at Naples in 1667: identification not certain (reproduction
courtesy of Archivi Alinari, Firenze)
2 Carthage in Hannibal’s time: the ports region (reconstruction)
1 Naval port
2 The admiralty island
3 The admiralty pavilion
4 Merchant port
5 The ‘Fabre quadrilateral’ (ancient quay)
6 Lower city: artisans’ and commercial district
7Agora (central square)
8 Senate house
9 Public buildings
10 Coastline
11 City wall
From M. H. Fantar, Carthage: La cité punique (courtesy of CNRS Editions, Paris)
3 Carthage ( ca. 1890)—View from Byrsa hill towards the lagoons (the ancient
artificial ports); on the horizon, the Cape Bon peninsula
4 Carthage ( ca. 1990)—aerial view from the south: in the middle distance, Byrsa hill
(Colline de St-Louis) from M. H. Fantar, Carthage: La cité punique (courtesy of
CNRS Editions, Paris)
5 Antiochus III (l.) and Masinissa(?) (r.)—portraits (presumed) in the Louvre and
Capitoline Museums respectively
6 Gallic warrior (third century BC)—detail
of the famous statuary-group of a Gallic
warrior slaying his wife and himself to
avoid capture: from the Altar of Attalus I
of Pergamum
7 Marcellus—Hannibal’s vigorous opponent, killed in ambush in 208 BC: a late
Republican or early Imperial statue
8 Scipio—presumed portrait, in bronze (reproduced courtesy of Archivio
Brogi/Archivi Alinari, Firenze)
9 Philip V of Macedon—
two coin-portraits of the
king in his prime
10 Polybius—commemorative stele from
Kato Klitoria, in the Peloponnese, set up
by a first-century AD descendant
(reproduced courtesy of Dr Matthias
Steinhart, Archäologisches Institut, the
University of Freiburg)
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Hannibal is the only Carthaginian who is still a household name. As leader of
the Carthaginians and their empire in the Second Punic War from 218 to 201
BC, he made it touch and go whether they or the Romans would come to
dominate the Mediterranean west, and after that, more or less inevitably, the
east. He belonged to a remarkable family. Had the Carthaginians won the war
and changed the course of ancient history, the victory would have been due
in great part to Hannibal and his kinsmen, who had rebuilt Carthaginian
power after its catastrophic defeat in 241 at Roman hands.
In taking his city to its most extensive and eventful level of power Hanni-
bal was the third, the greatest and the last of a republica
n ruling dynasty. His
father Hamilcar, nicknamed Barca (hence the convenient family sobriquet
Barcid) came to prominence in 247, the year Hannibal his eldest son was
born. Hamilcar and his son-in-law Hasdrubal preceded Hannibal between
237 and 221 as effective rulers of Carthage and creators of a land empire that
replaced—and outdid—the city’s lost island possessions. Hannibal built on
their base.
How the Barcids’ dominance was founded and how maintained, what each
leader in turn aimed to achieve with it, what they actually accomplished, and
how and why Barcid supremacy in the end collapsed—and then staged a brief
revival—are the themes of this study. The theme involves politics, inter-
national relations, strategy and geography, for the Barcid generals were not
only Carthage’s de facto leaders of government but her official commanders-
in-chief, and the two rôles were bound closely together.
The Carthaginian state had enjoyed success before, but never on the Barcid
scale or with the potential to change all of ancient history. This achievement
was the more remarkable as Hamilcar and his successors, uniquely in Punic
history, exercised decades of dominance not from their home city but from
hundreds of miles away, first in Spain and then in Italy. Hamilcar’s adroit
handling of the war against rebel mercenaries and subject Libyans in North
Africa, from 241 to 237, made him supreme in Punic affairs, and his successes
in Spain followed by Hasdrubal’s consolidation cemented the Barcid
supremacy. Yet they and then Hannibal were not military dictators: all three
1
I N T RO D U C T I O N
were elected to their commands by the citizens of Carthage as well as by their
armies, and all relied on a supporting network of kinsmen, friends and sup-
porters to sustain their political dominance at Carthage.
Barcid expansionism interestingly involved a measure—or at least a
show—of co-operation with their non-Punic subjects and dependants too.
Hasdrubal not only struck treaties and practised conciliation, but also
arranged to be chosen supreme leader by the peoples of Punic Spain—a sym-
bolic act, but one obviously judged worthwhile for building Spanish loyalty.
Marriage-alliances contributed too, in both Africa and Spain: Hamilcar mar-
ried daughters to Numidian princes, while both Hasdrubal and Hannibal took
wives from lordly families in Spain. Alexander the Great and his successor-
kings had acted similarly in the east. The Romans by contrast, when their turn
at world empire came, took much longer to make use of such methods.
The generals’ long-lasting control of home affairs depended on continuing
success abroad, which in turn required resources from Africa—officers, sol-
diers and war-elephants, colonists for new cities in Spain, and funds too at
times. The drive to continental empire moreover aimed at benefiting the
Carthaginian state, not solely the dominant family and their friends (other-
wise the generals could have set up a breakaway state in Spain, and the
Carthaginians at home could have ignored Hannibal’s later collision with the
Romans). The new cities, capped by Hasdrubal’s New Carthage, opened
handsome opportunities to Punic settlers. Wealth, as Hamilcar’s later Roman
biographer Nepos noted, flowed in turn from the new conquests to Africa.
Carthage’s famous enclosed harbours, naval and commercial, which the his-
torian Appian described and archaeologists have excavated, are very likely the
most enduring monuments to those Barcid-garnered riches.
The new imperial expansion kept Carthage as a great power on a par with
the others around the Mediterranean—most crucially of all with the Romans,
who not only had driven the Carthaginians from Sicily in the first war but
afterwards took advantage of their weakness to extract Sardinia too. Barcid
military activities interacted closely with Punic foreign relations. Both Hamil-
car and then Hasdrubal extended Punic control in Spain through treaties and
alliances as well as campaigns (though the conventional picture makes Hamil-
car do the fighting and Hasdrubal the negotiating). The Romans’ sporadic
attention to them was always expressed in strategic and territorial terms: the
seizure of Sardinia in 237, the Ebro accord 12 years later and, in Hannibal’s
time, the episode of Saguntum. Each Roman intervention confirmed Barcid
political dominance, even at the price finally of a new war with the old enemy.
In its turn, Hannibal’s grand design of 218 required not only military
victory but ensuing diplomatic successes, and had an equally blended goal: an
Italian, or at any rate southern Italian, alliance system backed by Punic arms,
to keep the Romans in permanent check and guarantee hegemony over
the western Mediterranean to the Carthaginians. In both war and alliance
building he was impressively and yet incompletely successful. At the height of
2
I N T RO D U C T I O N
their success, between 216 and 209, the Carthaginians held sway over North
Africa, the rich southern half of Spain and most of the south of Italy, while
continental north Italy and much of Sicily were in revolt against the Romans.
Thanks to the Barcids’ qualities as generals, paradoxically Carthage the
quondam sea-power came close to overthrowing the Roman republic—long
dominant in land warfare—through war on land. As a result Roman victory
in the second war, even more than in the first, was not preordained or
predictable. Many observers reckoned on a Punic triumph. Two Greek states,
Macedon and Syracuse, thought it profitable to ally with the prospective
victors and share the coming spoils.
That the momentum of victory slowed and then reversed was due as much
to Barcid miscalculation—and overconfidence—as to the enemy’s dogged
perseverance. Another Barcid paradox was their lack of experience as admi-
rals: and as a result the Romans, comparatively new to naval warfare,
outclassed the veteran mistress of the seas on the water from start to finish,
with the innovative naval port at Carthage no help even if it was a Barcid (or
Barcid-approved) creation. Hannibal in his later years was to show a touch of
skill and resourcefulness as a naval commodore, but his lack of anything like
it during his own war contributed to his and his city’s failure in their greatest
enterprise.
Stalemate in Italy and a seesawing military situation in Spain, along with
inability to master the seas, forced Barcid kinsmen and supporters at home to
share supremacy (so it seems) for the first time with another political group,
centred on the non-Barcid general Hasdrubal son of Gisco. After Hannibal’s
return and final defeat, even shared pre-eminence was gone—though not to
the son of Gisco’s benefit. Still, enough glamour, wealth and nostalgia sur-
vived to bring Hannibal back to the helm in 196, and it took yet another
hamfisted Roman intervention to dislodge him for good. Even then the Bar-
cids left a legacy: no bloodshed or revolution, and a state and society
prosperous and stable enough to endure—at any rate until the Romans chos
e
to act one more time.
The Barcid style in government, exploiting the lustre of successful war and
conquest to focus authority on one vivid figure, well fitted the third century—
the zenith of the Hellenistic era in the eastern Mediterranean, where great
(and not so great) states likewise acknowledged long-term leaders with similar
claims to glory. Military command, rather than naval, typified them and equally
their Punic counterparts: as just noted, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal,
and Hannibal’s brothers too—all leaders or deputy leaders of the Mediter-
ranean’s oldest sea-power—were devoted land generals. All the same, unlike
the major eastern powers which were monarchies with Greek or Hellenized
élites, Carthage remained a republic and, while influenced by Hellenistic cul-
ture, kept a civilization and leaders that were distinctively home-grown.
Set up through military success, exploiting the charisma of victory and
conquest and the profits deriving from these, and relying at home on support
3
I N T RO D U C T I O N
from citizens as a whole as well as allied or opportunistic fellow-aristocrats,
Barcid dominance of the Punic world in some ways prefigured the supremacy
established two centuries later by Julius Caesar and Augustus over Rome—a
historical irony, since it was by defeating Barcid Carthage that the Romans
began to build their own continental empire which, in time, was to set in train
the transformation of Roman republic into Caesarian monarchy. It was
appropriate, in a way, that Rome and the Roman world should later come
under the rule of Caesars from North Africa and that the first of that dynasty,
Septimius Severus, should commemorate the last of the Barcids with a splen-
did monument on the spot where Hannibal died.
Once they had driven their old enemy to suicide in 183, the Romans chose
to remember him with tempered but genuine admiration, a compliment they
extended to his family. Hannibal’s war was enshrined in memory as the testing-
time of the Roman people and their victory as the warrant for world mastery.
The Barcids aroused admiration too among Greeks, whose many and frac-
tious states, in losing their own wars against the Romans, cost these nothing
like the effort they had needed against Barcid Carthage. The second-century
