by Dexter Hoyos
paid—to wit, Sardinia and 1,200 talents in cash.
This unconvincingly trivial allegation unveiled what the other side really
wanted. Why they wanted it they did not say. Ancient historians fail to tell us
too: Polybius simply denounces the affair as unjust while later writers, all of
them of course pro-Roman, either swallow the traders story or (even worse)
offer the fiction that Sardinia and its neighbour Corsica had been ceded with
Sicily in 241. It is easy but misleading to suppose that the Romans had
abruptly realized how strategically useful Sardinia could be to them—as
though it had not figured repeatedly in their old war with Carthage—or how
economically valuable its cornlands and metals, as though they had not had
trade relations with the island since the time of their earliest treaty with the
Carthaginians. If they wanted Sardinia now after turning it down two years
earlier, something had made the Romans change their minds.
The most obvious factor was not the Punic victory over their rebels at
home, for the Romans had actively supported this, but that they had done it
chiefly thanks to Hamilcar Barca; more disturbingly, under his leadership
they were already busying themselves with renewed expansionist projects.
Parts of Numidia, now Sardinia, and a bigger scheme stood behind that.
These preparations, involving ships, equipment, animals and stores (not to
mention the troops), were no doubt open to view: the Carthaginians had
nothing to hide. But even if Spain was mentioned as the major goal—and
even if the Romans believed this—all this activity sharply revealed that the
Punic state was not at death’s door after all.
The Romans, it would seem, put two and two together and got five. Hamil-
car, the new leader and their undefeated opponent in Sicily, stood for
rebuilding Punic power and plainly his city had the ships and men to start
doing it (it was easy enough for outsiders to overestimate the strength of
those forces). If Sardinia was the Carthaginians’ goal now, Sicily the former
jewel of their empire, where Roman rule was still recent and fairly light,
might well follow, with Sardinia serving as an extra strategic base for recon-
quest. They had no intention of losing a territory they had fought a 23-year
war over. Therefore they would prevent Sardinia from becoming Punic again
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even if they had to use specious pretexts—and only the Carthaginians and
Romans themselves, not the rest of the watching world, would know for cer-
tain how specious they were.
The Romans might overestimate Punic strength, but they could calculate
(rightly enough) that it was not as great now as it would be when recovery
had progressed. The time to strike therefore was now. The armament they
had been readying for Sardinia did not leave port: it waited, some or all of it
probably at Ostia for the Carthaginians’ envoys to view on arriving from
North Africa. To them the Senate presented the Roman republic’s demands,
that the Carthaginians not only abandon Sardinia but also pay over 1,200 tal-
ents—a bigger lump sum than had been paid in the peace of 241. The
finances to pay for any central Mediterranean ventures were being
confiscated.3
Whether the second Punic embassy was empowered to accept these terms
or whether it needed to take them back to Carthage for discussion, the out-
come was inevitable. A new war with the Romans was out of the question.
Hamilcar could see this as plainly as anyone. He would not be the only
Carthaginian to feel deep and lasting anger—though he was to dramatize it
more memorably than any of them—but he too had to accept submission to
the Romans’ terms. Peace was declared anew, and an extra clause annexed to
Lutatius’ treaty which summed up the Carthaginians’ capitulation in lapidary
simplicity: ‘the Carthaginians are to retire from Sardinia and pay a further
1,200 talents’.
The immediate loss was the money: there cannot have been much left in
the Punic treasury after it was paid. But more funds could be gathered in
time. A worse blow was to Punic maritime power. The prewar overseas
empire had now shrunk to a few small islands like Malta, and of the former
sphere of dominance only the western half remained—Ebusus, the trading
stations along the African coast, and the friendly cities of south Spain. Punic
prestige and self-confidence were injured, just at the moment when the
Carthaginians had begun to restore them. Alarming too must have been the
realization that the Romans, whatever their veneer of goodwill, could still
harbour suspicions deep enough to erupt without warning into ruthless con-
frontation—at least if they thought their ex-enemies would hesitate to fight
back.
The Spanish expedition was more vital than ever.4
II
Rather surprisingly Hamilcar took his son-in-law with him. Now, or less
probably later, Hasdrubal was appointed trierarch, naval commander, which
suggests Hamilcar was attentive to his communications with Carthage. But it
suggests too that Hasdrubal was not politically indispensable at home and
others could take over the job of nurturing Barca’s political position in the
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BA RC A S U P R E M E
city. They too may have been relatives by marriage or blood (these would be
the strongest bonds) but we know hardly anything of such people—nothing
for instance of brothers, sisters or cousins apart from a relative named Mago,
whom the Romans captured in Sardinia in 215.
One of Hannibal’s oldest and most durable friends was the Mago nick-
named ‘the Samnite’. They enjoyed a friendly and military rivalry from their
earliest years, according to Polybius. This Mago was obviously then close to
the Barcid family though, to judge from Polybius’ silence, not a kinsman by
blood or marriage. His family must have been important among the support-
ers of the Barcid ascendancy in Punic politics.
In turn, speculation or imagination can play only with the Bomilcar who, if
Appian is right, must have married one of Hamilcar’s daughters and whom
Polybius calls ‘king’: his real political standing remains a guess. If the ancient
kingship still existed it may well have been limited to religious matters; equally
Polybius may use the word to mean sufete, and he or his source need only
have meant to convey that Bomilcar was sufete at the time his son is men-
tioned.
Apart from later officers in Punic armies or fleets like Mago the Samnite,
the famous cavalry general Maharbal son of Himilco and an admiral also
named Bomilcar (he may have been the brother-in-law for all we know), the
only high-ranking supporters of the Barcid faction who earn any mention are
a few senators. A Himilco, perhaps Maharbal’s father though Livy does not
say so, supposedly mocked old Hanno after news of the victory at Cannae,
and the inventive poet Silius credits an even more shadowy ‘Gestar’ with an
earlier outburst against the same target. Hanno in turn is found, in Zonaras,
rebuking a war-enthusiast named Hasdrubal in 218 who m
ay or may not have
been the later well-known general, Hasdrubal son of Gisco.
That Hamilcar had many and keen supporters at Carthage, both among
ordinary citizens and in the senate, can be assumed even if just who they
were cannot be said. Connexions between Africa and Spain were maintained
in various ways and at every level. The high officers in the army, like those
already mentioned, were Carthaginians; surely too some of the lesser ones,
and others might include citizens from allied states like Utica and Hippou
Acra (like an officer of Hannibal’s many years later). Carthaginians and
others from Africa helped populate the new cities founded by Hamilcar and
his successors. The Barcid generals themselves, to judge from a few items
again in Hannibal’s time, had senators from Carthage among their council-
lors. How they were chosen, whether they were rotated, and what positions
they held from time to time at Carthage and in the army we do not know: but
it makes sense to infer that they were important—arguably the most impor-
tant—links in Hamilcar’s and his successors’ relations with their homeland.5
According to one Roman historical tradition, though, Hamilcar did not
go to Spain with the ruling élite’s blessing. This claim might go back to
Fabius Pictor, the earliest Roman historian and a younger contemporary of
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BA RC A S U P R E M E
Hamilcar’s—who did find things to criticize in Barca’s successors—but more
likely it was invented later. Polybius tells us of Fabius’ strictures on Has-
drubal and Hannibal but not of any against Hamilcar. Livy, implicitly
rejecting Fabius’ version, presents a Barcid faction dominant in Punic affairs
from Hamilcar’s day till the last years of the second war with Rome. The
claims of opposition between generalissimo and home authorities turn up in
late writers, Appian and Zonaras. No trust can be put in them. Nor, for the
same reasons, can it be believed that Hamilcar and his successors set up a
Spanish principality or fiefdom virtually independent of the Carthaginian
state.
Obviously Hamilcar had to work hard to keep himself and his faction in
the ascendant. He and his closest collaborator, Hasdrubal, were far away, and
with them his two older sons. His domestic grip had to be fuelled with more
than victory bulletins, especially in a republic where money was a crucial
ingredient. His biographer Nepos notes that with the spoils of his victories
‘he enriched the whole of Africa’. Appian more precisely reports largesse to
political supporters.
So far as we can see, the method was a success. Others besides Barcid sup-
porters may have won offices from time to time, but not enough to upset the
dominance achieved by Hamilcar: a dominance he was able to pass on first to
his son-in-law and then to his eldest son. As time passed, the offices of state
and the senate will have taken on a more and more Barcid-friendly cast. For
the first time since the Magonid dynasty Carthage was firmly in the hands of
one family and its supporters.
It would be interesting to know whether Barca’s prospective son-in-law,
Naravas the Numidian, went to Spain too; but no ancient writer mentions
him after the African war. The marriage may well have taken place, for
Hamilcar’s family kept up a close connexion with Naravas’. During the next
war against Rome one of (it seems) his brothers fought for the Carthaginians
in Spain, and another married one of Hannibal’s nieces. Naravas, though,
quite likely preferred or needed to stay in Numidia, where rivalries between
tribes and chieftains, and pro- and anti-Punic groupings, kept the North
African uplands unstable; his energy and resourcefulness would be valuable
to his own people.6
III
With the general and trierarch went the general’s eldest son. Hannibal was
nine years old. Hamilcar must have been an absentee father for much of the
boy’s life—only during his retirement from public office from mid-241 to
mid-240 can he have lived at home—but his impact on his sons was deep. All
three followed in his footsteps to become generals and leaders, none of
course more memorably than the eldest.
Even at nine Hannibal was strongly attached to his father, for whom no
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BA RC A S U P R E M E
doubt he felt a blend of love, admiration and awe. A famous episode took
place just before Hamilcar set out for Spain. He performed sacrifice to Ba’al
Hammon (or Ba’al Shamim) for divine favour, and when the omens proved
favourable ‘he ordered the others who were attending the sacrifice to with-
draw to a slight distance and calling Hannibal to him asked him kindly if he
wished to accompany him on the expedition’. The boy accepted eagerly:
whereupon his father made him lay his hand on the sacrificial victim and
swear an oath ‘never to bear goodwill to the Romans’. Hamilcar himself told
the story to King Antiochus III 44 years later, as an assurance that his attitude
was unchanged.
It has been disbelieved from time to time, on the arguments that it smells
of a historical novel rather than history, or comes from supposedly tainted
sources—Hannibal himself, anxious to win the royal trust with an inventive
lie, or imaginative Roman writers prone to dramatize everything they could
about his life—or because it would make sense only if Hamilcar were seeking
to bind a son he was leaving behind. But the story has no blatantly false fea-
tures. The oath as Hannibal reported it, ‘never to bear goodwill to the
Romans’, was so limited that later Roman tradition had to sharpen it for
drama’s sake and make him swear to become their enemy. Hannibal himself,
if he were inventing it, might well have phrased it the same way—after all
King Antiochus was at the time close to war with the Romans, and the exile
from Carthage was trying to win his favour.7
The story as he told it did convince Antiochus, an experienced and suc-
cessful ruler. Nor does it require a parting between father and son to be
convincing. Whichever Punic god was involved, he was one of the city’s prin-
cipal deities (Nepos translates him into ‘Jupiter best and greatest’, the
supreme one at Rome) and it was during a peculiarly meaningful rite, initiat-
ing a wholly new venture by Carthage and its general. And the venture was
made all the more necessary by the Romans’ sudden and opportunistic
betrayal of the goodwill they had previously shown.
If true, the episode casts light on both father and son. Hamilcar had the
Romans much on his mind at this time, and the oath he made his son swear
reflects his bitterness. As his city’s supreme general he had shared personally
in the frustration and humiliation of the Sardinia crisis. The Romans had
shown that their seeming goodwill of recent times had been a sham: beneath
it still lurked the ill-will of the war years, now compounded by treacherous
amorality. No Carthaginian could ever again feel well disposed towards them.
To bind his eldest son by such an oath, in turn, was a public as well as personal
gesture. Hamilcar
was telling his family, followers and fellow-countrymen
both of his own present feelings and also that the price of renewing
Carthaginian greatness was perpetual watchfulness against their former (who
might seek to become their future) enemies.
Obviously the oath made a lasting psychological impact on the boy who
took it: it would still be meaningful to him more than four decades later. He
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BA RC A S U P R E M E
was already devoted to his father, as his keenness to go with him shows. The
oath (negative and limited though it was) strengthened the bond between
them—no doubt more because of its solemnity and the trust being ceremo-
niously placed on him, than because Hannibal at nine could have any clear
idea of who or where the Romans were. Ancient writers emphasize his last-
ing enthusiasm and loyalty to his father’s guidance. From that day on he was
never far from Hamilcar’s side.8
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V
H A M I L C A R I N S PA I N
I
The army Hamilcar took to Spain cannot have been very large. For one thing,
given the costs of the African war and the new indemnity over Sardinia, the
Carthaginians could hardly afford to keep under arms all the 30,000–40,000
troops they probably had in the field by late 238. For another, Hamilcar had
to leave some forces at home to maintain order and security: not all Numidi-
ans were allies or subjects, and there was no certainty what the Romans might
try next. When facing a war with them two decades later, his son would sta-
tion some 16,000 troops in Africa. In a season of peace, guarded though it
was, 10,000 or so might do.
In Spain ten years later, after economic recovery and much power-building,
Punic forces totalled 56,000 according to Diodorus. On a reasonable esti-
mate Hamilcar’s expeditionary force in 237 can be put at around 20,000,
2,000 or 3,000 of them cavalry, and no doubt a corps of elephants. This was
sizeable enough for the purpose, and he could expect to recruit Spanish mer-
cenaries and allies before long.
As soon as the crisis over Sardinia ended he embarked for Spain, as
Diodorus reports, sailing along the African coast to the straits of Gibraltar
and then crossing to Gades. The transport ships were available—especially as
there was now to be no expedition to Sardinia—and the trading-stations
