by Dexter Hoyos
ing as the Roman army marched eastwards along the narrow northern shore
of Lake Trasimene. In spite of desperate resistance by the strung-out
column, Flaminius and 15,000 of his men were killed, the bulk of the sur-
vivors taken prisoner. A few days later the cavalry commander Maharbal in
turn defeated and captured a powerful cavalry corps that the other consul,
Servilius, had sent over from Picenum to join Flaminius. In half a week the
Romans lost nearly 30,000 men dead or captive, much the same number as at
the Trebia half a year earlier. The Punic losses were under 2,000 men, mostly
Gauls again. With Servilius still in the north, nothing stood between Hanni-
bal and Rome.3
Earlier in the year he must have been able to send messengers off to
Carthage. It was important to let his countrymen know of his victories in
north Italy, to encourage morale; but his despatches probably dealt with
other matters too. Some time in June, a strong fleet of 70 warships sailed
from Carthage via Sardinia to the Etruscan coast at Pisae hoping to meet his
army, a rendezvous surely prearranged. If Polybius is right that Hannibal was
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able to communicate by sea with his home city only when he reached the
Adriatic coast after Trasimene, an earlier missive can have got there only via
the overland journey to Spain and then on by sea. If so it must have been sent
quite some time earlier, while he was planning his move southwards.
Polybius connects the launching of the fleet with Hasdrubal’s recent defeat
in Spain, but Spain was not its destination even after it left Italian waters. Nor
would it have known where to look for Hannibal without being instructed
beforehand. A scheme for the army to link up with a fleet suggests that his
original strategy for 217 was not just to invade the peninsula but, more
specifically, to do so in a combined operation. Such a bold course could have
only one goal: the city of Rome.
But when the fleet arrived off Pisae it found no sign of Hannibal. He had
marched east to the Adriatic instead of west to the Tyrrhenian coast. After
destroying Flaminius’ army, even though he soon rearmed his African
infantry with captured—and presumably superior—Roman weapons, yet
‘having become very confident about the total situation he decided’, Polybius
writes, ‘for the time being against marching towards Rome’.
Polybius neither explains why nor mentions the fleet in this context. His
phrasing is noteworthy all the same, for it implies both that a march on Rome
had been envisaged by Hannibal and that he was still leaving the option open
for the fairly near future. These are less likely to be just Polybius’ inferences
(for one thing, he knew that Hannibal did not actually march on Rome until
211, and then only as a feint) than to reflect one or more of his Hannibalic
sources. Whether Sosylus or Silenus was any more forthcoming about the
decision cannot be said. It would be interesting to know whether either of
them thought it sound.
If Hannibal had been able to link up with the fleet and move fast, while the
other consul’s army—shorn of cavalry and cut off from Rome—struggled
to find out what was going on, the Carthaginians could have blockaded the
city by land and sea. That would have severely hampered, if not prevented,
the Roman authorities from organizing fresh forces and concerting further
resistance and might have changed the direction of the war. But he may have
learned that the Romans had 110 ships available to oppose the Punic fleet, or
concluded that his army was too battered for a combined operation to suc-
ceed. Yet the substitute decision to march eastwards meant, arguably, a great
opportunity missed.4
Polybius certainly emphasizes the army’s battered state as well as its rapid
restoration to health, both men and horses, once they reached the prosperous
dales by the Adriatic. On the way there they plundered and ravaged the coun-
tryside, while ‘the order was issued to slaughter those of adult age who fell
into their hands’: plundering, and presumably killing, that continued when
they marched south to Apulia. This was normal practice for an invading army,
and besides Hannibal needed to reward his much-stressed troops and no
doubt replenish his own military treasury. He also aimed to provoke the
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Romans to battle again, confident, as Polybius implies, that a further decisive
defeat in battle would make them give in. Slaughtering all adults met with en
route, though, was an ill-judged policy even if limited to adult men. It was at
odds with his freeing of Italian allied prisoners of war, for he was moving
through not just Roman but also Italian allies’ lands and an essential ingredi-
ent of his war- and postwar plans was to win over as many Italians as possible.
The general soon found his confidence frustrated. The new Roman sup-
reme commander, the dictator Q. Fabius Maximus, refused to fight a pitched
battle and instead stalked the Punic army around southern Italy in the classic
style of harassment-warfare, cutting off stragglers and threatening the
Carthaginians’ gathering of supplies. Farmers in districts approached by the
Punic army were ordered to destroy their buildings and crops and then leave
the area. Unfamiliar and unpopular though this Fabian strategy was with many
Romans, including Fabius’ own deputy the master of horse Minucius, it can
only have alarmed Hannibal. If he could neither acquire Italian support nor
threaten Rome effectively with Fabius’ four legions constantly shadowing him,
nor secure reliable contact and replenishment from Africa or Spain, the expe-
dition was in a strategic and political limbo. To stay in it for long would be in
effect the kiss of death for him and for Punic prospects—all the more because
(as he probably had heard by now) things were not going well in Spain.5
His manoeuvrings in the second half of 217 sought to break this danger-
ous stalemate. To force on a battle, and at the same time sweep up fresh
plunder and provisions for the coming winter, he moved across the moun-
tains and valleys of Samnium and into northern Campania, where his vast
garnerings of booty suggest that the dictator’s edict had been poorly obeyed.
According to Livy he furthermore had the hope, from three aristocratic
Campanians captured and freed after Trasimene, that towns in the region
would defect to him. Such defections would have been the first in the pen-
insula, but none in fact happened.
Fabius followed along high ground, did not interfere, and then—when the
booty-laden Punic army moved to leave Campania for Apulia—so neatly
blocked its intended route through a pass in the hills that it could neither
advance nor safely retreat. For once the tables had been turned: but only for a
moment. Hannibal used a simple but well-executed night ruse (a herd of
cattle with burning faggots tied to their horns and shepherded by some light
troops) to divert the Romans’ attention in another direction and achieve an
unopposed exit. But he still could not shake off Fabius’ frustrating compan-
ionship on the march back to Apulia.
There, operations centred on the small town of Gerunium which Hanni-
bal took by storm in the usual style, massacring its uncompliant residents, and
for a while he seemed to have fresh opportunity to annihilate an enemy army.
Minucius the master of horse, buoyed by a skirmishing success that brought
him unprecedented codictatorial status because of Roman irritation with
Fabius’ delays, let his forces be enticed into a Hannibalic encirclement. But he
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got out of it thanks to Fabius’ prompt intervention with the rest of the
Roman army, after which the war settled into further stalemate.
III
Irritating as this again was to the Romans, potentially it was a disaster for the
invaders. That they had serious problems getting supplies during late 217 and
early 216 can be believed: the army stayed at Gerunium till mid-year, though
Hannibal then eased its discomforts by capturing a large Roman depôt at
Cannae, in Apulia. Had the Romans persisted in Fabius’ admittedly thankless
methods till the next winter, Hannibal could not have avoided crises in his
army—the Gauls would hardly have clung to him indefinitely and by mid-216
there were even rumours of the Spanish mercenaries plotting to desert—as
well as politically, at home and in Spain. It cannot have been easy to get word
out regularly to Carthage, nor would the word be very cheering if he did.
Besides, his brother Hasdrubal was roundly defeated at the Ebro’s mouth in
the spring by Cn. Scipio, so much so that the Romans were emboldened to
send Gnaeus’ brother P. Scipio thither with fresh forces. Not only critics of
the Barcids like old Hanno the Great, but any Carthaginians who doubted the
wisdom of a militarily unsupported expedition into Italy, would feel con-
firmed in their pessimism about the progress of the war.
The Romans came to his rescue. Confident in their manpower reserves,
angry and anxious at his menace in their midst, they created for the consuls
of 216, L. Aemilius Paullus and C. Terentius Varro, an army greater than any
seen before—over 80,000 strong—and sought battle. The Punic general
offered it in August with 40,000 foot and 10,000 horse, on an open plain
beside the river Aufidus in Apulia, near the hill-town of Cannae. The force
arrayed before them troubled some of his own men, and one senior officer
named Gisco pointed out its astonishing mass to him as they surveyed the
scene from a knoll before battle. Hannibal commented seriously that he had
missed something more astonishing still: ‘in all that many, not one of them is
called Gisco’. The Carthaginians went laughing into battle.
Facing foes lacking in virtually all tactical manoeuvrability except the for-
ward charge, he met their massive infantry centre with his Spaniards and
Gauls while on the wings his Spanish, Gallic and Numidian cavalry between
them fought and drove off the opposing horse. The enemy centre, over
50,000 men, pushed back the heavily outnumbered Spanish and Gallic
infantry for some distance and even broke their ranks; but then Hannibal’s
African infantry—stationed on either side of the Punic centre but till now
held back—swung in to take the Romans in flank. As the densely ranked
legionaries struggled to cope with this new assault, Hannibal’s Spanish and
Gallic cavalry in turn left pursuing the routed enemy horse to the Numidians
and closed in on the legions’ rear.
What at daybreak had been the most confident and impressive Roman
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army ever to take the field was by evening a massacred wreck. The garrison
left in its nearby camp surrendered. Whether the dead numbered over 70,000
as Polybius claims, or Livy’s more plausible 47,200 (with 19,000 or so
survivors taken prisoner), the army had ceased to exist except for some thou-
sands of fugitives scattered over the Apulian countryside. One of the
consuls, L. Aemilius Paullus, was dead and so were 29 of the army’s 48 mili-
tary tribunes, its senior officers; 80 senators and ex-magistrates; and enough
Roman cavalrymen, distinguished by their gold rings, to give Hannibal’s
brother Mago a bushelful of rings to pour out over the floor of the Punic
senate-house at Carthage a few weeks later. Punic losses were under 6,000,
4,000 of them Gauls.7
Once again nothing, or almost nothing, stood between Hannibal and
Rome. When the news reached the city, the people there expected him to
march directly against it. But he was 250 miles (400 kilometres) away—
further away than at Trasimene—a march of three weeks even if unopposed;
the army was weary from its strenuous fighting and colossal slaughtering;
Rome was massively fortified, and he knew or could surmise that it would be
defended—it had a potential reserve in the fleet based at Ostia and could
raise levies from its own and nearby residents. He decided not to march.
IV
Like the Romans, some of his men expected otherwise. Livy tells of Maharbal
the cavalry commander urging him on: let Maharbal go ahead with the cavalry,
follow behind and ‘in five days you shall banquet on the Capitol’—then, when
the general insisted on putting off a decision, a biting comment, ‘You know
how to win a victory, Hannibal; not how to make use of one.’ Maharbal’s pro-
posal, though not the pithy epigram, goes back at least to their contemporary
Cato the Elder, writing 50 years or so later, who may have got it from a pro-
Carthaginian source. It may not be strictly true as told: for one thing,
Hannibal could not march from Apulia to Rome in five days (though he might
have from Trasimene). But it illustrates a point of view that at least some of
his officers surely held. Even if Maharbal actually said his say after Trasimene,
the point was still more relevant after Cannae and it need be no surprise if
Maharbal or others put it to the general once again.8
Modern as opposed to ancient historians mostly commend Hannibal’s
decision. Various justifications are mentioned: he could not provision his
army along the way; it lacked siege equipment and anyway he and it were not
adept at sieges; he realized that once in place before the city he would risk
being trapped between it and fresh Roman forces raised outside; he expected
that the southern Italian allies would defect more readily if he stayed in their
midst.9
Yet all such points, impressive at first glance, fail to convince. True, Mahar-
bal’s proposal might sound overenthusiastic: how could a cavalry corps hope
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to capture a major fortified city? But Maharbal cannot have proposed using
his troopers’ weaponry or siege-skill. Cavalry’s strategic virtue lay in speed—
and therefore surprise. The idea clearly was to reach Rome ahead of or along
with any friendlier messengers, and seize the city as disbelief and panic boiled
up inside as well as outside.
Thirteen years later this
happened at Cirta, capital of the Numidian king
Syphax, following his defeat and capture by his rival Masinissa and the
Roman commander Laelius. Masinissa galloped ahead with his own Numid-
ian cavalry, appeared outside the walls with his prisoner and achieved instant
surrender, though Cirta stood on one of the most defensible natural sites in
the ancient world. Rome’s residents had been frightened enough at the
thought of Hannibal coming down after Trasimene, and five years on he pro-
duced great alarm when he did make a march from Campania to its
outskirts—even though there were troops within the walls, more on the way,
and other Roman armies all over Italy. On the day after Cannae there was no
regular army at all left in the peninsula except for the troops with the fleet at
Ostia and (maybe) two legions of new recruits at Rome. The only other army
nearer than Spain was in north Italy where the Gauls would annihilate it later
in the year.10
Nor did sending Maharbal on ahead have to be Hannibal’s only option for
approaching Rome. If it seemed safer to keep the cavalry with the rest of the
army, nevertheless the army could have reached the city in three weeks or—
given that this could be the most vital move of the whole war—even sooner
by forced marches. It was high summer and the necessary supplies in Italy’s
heartland were available to his foragers, as in 217. Certainly the Romans
would have had some time to launch defence measures: at the news of
Cannae the praetor Marcellus, commanding the fleet at Ostia, sent 1,500
naval troops up to the city and a legion of them to Teanum in Campania (to
try to bar the routes from there northward), and then the new dictator
M. Junius Pera began levying fresh recruits. Yet this was no complete answer.
Siege equipment could have been manufactured from the woodlands of
Latium and Etruria, the extensive city walls could not have been strongly
manned, the legion at Teanum was perilously isolated over 90 miles (150 kilo-
metres) to the south-east, and the advance of 40,000-odd enemy troops
would have driven refugees from all around its path into Rome—cramming
extra mouths to feed into a besieged town was a standard method of war.11
Hannibal may not have been good at sieges and Rome may have been far
