Hannibal's Dynasty
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too large for one anyway, but a blockade was practicable enough. With one in
place, efforts by magistrates in the countryside (including the surviving
consul Varro in Apulia) to organize fresh resistance would have been ham-
pered by the sealing-off of the political centre. Nor is it certain that Rome
would have been immune to treachery, for along with the Roman population
there were other residents—Italians, foreigners and slaves (the dictator
recruited 8,000 of these for army service), not all of whom need have been
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totally committed to the Roman side. Late in 217 two dozen slaves had been
put to death for a plot of some sort: Livy does not state what sort, but their
comrade and betrayer was generously rewarded. It did not call for more than
a few resolute partners to betray a city gate, as 13 did at Tarentum only a few
years later.12
Blockading and starving out Rome would have been still more effective if
the Punic fleet joined in. That Hannibal, or at any rate his supporters at
Carthage, recognized the fleet’s value had been shown after Trasimene,
though to no great avail. It could have been summoned again: he was able to
send his brother Mago to Carthage by sea not long after Cannae, with his
bushel of Roman gold rings and a request for reinforcements and supplies.
With the Roman fleet at Ostia weakened by Marcellus despatching thousands
of its marines inland, it could have been worthwhile to try running its gaunt-
let to land the reinforcements and supplies somewhere on the Latin coast
(rather than at Locri as was finally done). Failing the fleet, Hannibal’s army
could have cut Rome off from waterborne help with some straightforward
barriers across the Tiber like chained booms or sunken barges.
In turn, Hannibal encamped around Rome and paralysing the Roman war-
effort would scarcely discourage wavering southern Italian allies from
defecting (as is sometimes argued) even if the city held out. More likely, even
more allies—in north and central Italy as well as in the south, and conceiv-
ably even some of the Latins—would have come over. In Spain the currently
successful brothers Scipio would have found themselves cut off and practi-
cally irrelevant. Nor is it likely that the Macedonian king Philip V’s interest in
a Punic alliance would have waned if Hannibal stood outside Rome instead
of in Apulia.
The result of a march on Rome would very probably have been a monu-
mental change to the history of the Mediterranean world. Livy’s verdict,
then, should stand. ‘That day’s delay is well judged to have been the salvation
of the city and its empire.’13
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I
After Cannae, some of the Romans’ south Italian allies at last thought the
time had come to change sides. Several Apulian towns declared for
Carthage—for instance Salapia, Arpi and Herdonea—then many of the
Lucanians. Some weeks later the Bruttians far to the south defected when
Hannibal’s brother Mago came among them with a division of the Punic
army. Hannibal himself marched into Samnium where two of the three can-
tons followed suit, the Hirpini and Caudini; only the Pentri stood firm for the
enemy. And on the Punic army’s advance into Campania in the autumn he
won the greatest prize of all: Capua, the second city of Italy.
Like other Campanian towns, Capua held a limited Roman citizenship. Its
leader in 216, Pacuvius Calavius, and many other aristocrats had formed links
of marriage or friendship with leading Roman families. But the disasters suf-
fered for the Roman cause since 218 and the prospect of taking over as
dominatrix of Italy were too much for Capua’s loyalty. The year before, Han-
nibal’s tentative hope of winning it over had failed but now the Capuans,
prompted by Calavius and another leading man, Vibius Virrius, welcomed
him in and struck a treaty with him.1
The terms were very good for the Capuans—and contrastingly of limited
value to the general. In effect he struck a friendship-agreement with no obli-
gations. The Capuans were guaranteed their self-government and freedom
from compulsory military or other services. It was obviously implicit that
they would support the Carthaginian side in the war, but nothing was speci-
fied, not even a proviso about aiding each other in peace and war (unlike the
Punic pact later on with Locri in the south). Nor were there any commit-
ments about supplying Hannibal with munitions or money gratis.
In effect what he gained was Capuan neutrality in the war, as likewise that
of satellite towns like Atella and Calatia. According to Livy he promptly
broke the treaty by arresting a Capuan critic of the city’s defection, Decius
Magius, and sending him off to Carthage. If true, it was probably a gesture of
intimidation and may not have gone down well. He never repeated it, and
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never got much voluntary help from Capua either. The city may have sup-
plied him with goods and provisions over the next few years (there is not
much evidence) but he no doubt had to pay good money for them.2
When the Greek city of Locri on the south coast of Italy came over in
summer 215, it struck a rather different pact. As at Capua, Locrian autonomy
was affirmed, but more explicit provisos were stated too: the Carthaginians
were assured of access to the town (in whose citadel they installed a garrison,
then or later), the Locrians kept control of the harbour (important for their
trade and their links with Greece), and each side was to help the other ‘in
peace and war’. With Roman-held Rhegium and Sicily uncomfortably close, it
was probably the Locrians who were keen to have this last proviso written in.
Some of Hannibal’s other pacts may well have had such a clause too, to
judge from scattered but suggestive items. In 215 his new Samnite allies com-
plained that he was not protecting them against Roman attacks even though
he had taken their young men to serve in his army. The pro-Punic Bruttians
and Lucanians figured in operations outside as well as in their own terri-
tories—for instance in 214 an army mostly of their troops, under a Punic
general, was marching to join Hannibal when defeated by the Romans at the
river Calor near Beneventum, and in 209 a Bruttian force was the main part
of the garrison at Tarentum. On the whole, though, separate allied forces fig-
ured little in major operations, and Italian manpower—we shall see—was
mainly useful to Hannibal as recruits into his own army.3
According to Livy and some others, Hannibal’s appeal to some sections of
the Italian population was not just as a champion of freedom from Roman
mastery but as a champion of democracy against local oligarchies. ‘A single
disease so to speak had overtaken all the states of Italy’, Livy comments with
obvious distate, ‘so that the common people were at odds with the aristo-
crats, the [local] senate sided with the Romans, the commons moved over to
&nb
sp; the Carthaginians.’ In fact his own narrative contradicts his facile generaliza-
tion over and over: Capua’s defection, though instigated by the popular boss
Pacuvius Calavius (an aristocrat himself), had plenty of aristocrats whole-
heartedly behind it, something still truer at Locri where—according to Livy
himself—‘the masses were betrayed [to Punic control] by the leading men’,
and at Tarentum whose defection in 212 was engineered by a baker’s dozen
of young noblemen. At Arpi when the Romans broke in once again, in 213,
the ordinary citizens were quickly able to convince them that it was local aris-
tocrats who had sold them out to Hannibal. Indeed practically no recorded
defection took place without one or more local notables leading it, and
would-be defectors who cropped up unsuccessfully, in places like Nola or
(late in the war) Etruria, were the same.
Nothing suggests, either, that the general was democratically inclined. At
home Barcid dominance did rest on a carefully cosseted popularity, but as
noted earlier there was no democratic revolution at Carthage under Hamilcar
or Hasdrubal—still less any coup against the aristocracy, to which the Barcids
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themselves belonged. In Spain Punic and Barcid rule was authoritarian,
indeed military. What mattered in Italy, in turn, was having a city or canton as
an ally: how that was brought about and how it was maintained were practical
questions, not ideological ones.4
II
Hannibal needed to spread defection as widely as he could and, where defec-
tion did not occur, he tried force or guile—starving out towns like Petelia in
Bruttium and Casilinum, Nuceria and Acerrae in Campania, subduing Con-
sentia in Bruttium, using his agents at Syracuse to steer first its ruler
Hieronymus and then (after the boy-king’s murder) the new Syracusan repub-
lic into the Punic camp. The strategic and economic importance of
Campania led him to make repeated but thwarted efforts to subdue its other
leading centres like Naples, Cumae, Puteoli—all of them seaports—and the
stronghold of Nola. Likewise he sought to win over Tarentum, first in late
214 and then successfully early in 212, a success that brought over other
Greek cities on that coast—Metapontum, Thurii and Heraclea.5
The stir aroused by his invasion and victories had spread abroad too. In
217 a peace conference in Greece was warned by a delegate that those ‘clouds
gathering in the west’ might one day settle on Greece; and the young King
Philip V of Macedon, one of the conference-participants, was already taking
an interest since he had ambitions coveting the Roman-dominated coastlands
of Illyria. Cannae prompted him to the friendliest feelings for Hannibal.
Though his envoys were afterwards captured by the Romans, the king and the
general struck a treaty in summer 215.
At Syracuse too Cannae was an earthquake. Though the 90-year-old Hiero
II remained loyal to the Roman alliance, dissatisfaction with it had reportedly
spread even to his son and heir Gelo. Gelo and then his father died in the
months after Cannae but Hiero’s 15-year-old grandson Hieronymus, on the
throne early in 215, quickly made it clear that Syracuse was changing its align-
ment to what it saw as the winning side. Like Philip V, this was in the hope of
direct profit: control over the eastern half of Sicily, if not the whole island.
Envoys were sent over to Hannibal, who naturally spoke encouraging words
and sent them home in the company of an officer of his—Polybius terms
him the general’s trierarch—also named Hannibal (quite possibly his friend
Monomachus), along with two Syracusan brothers of part-Carthaginian
ancestry. A Syracusan embassy to Carthage then resulted in a treaty of
alliance against the Romans.6
Hannibal had probably not planned such broad international activity back
in 218. His strategy then had been to strike into Italy, shatter the Romans’ mil-
itary effort and their alliance, and establish peace on Carthage’s (and Barcid)
terms. Though he had sent envoys into Cisalpine Gaul before he marched, he
had sent none to Macedon. But when Cannae brought victory seemingly
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within his reach and attracted new friends, he readily expanded the scope of
his thinking. As we have seen, he was pretty clearly looking ahead to the post-
war containment of the Roman republic as much as to its early capitulation.
III
Immediately after Cannae he did expect a fairly prompt peace. As well as
releasing all his Italian prisoners once again, he spoke amicably to the Roman
ones for the first time (those from earlier battles he had simply sold as slaves),
assuring them, Livy writes, that this was a war not to the death but for honour
and power. More mundanely, he allowed them to send delegates to Rome to
ask for ransom, and they were accompanied by an envoy of his own, an aris-
tocrat named Carthalo, to see if the Romans were now disposed to peace and
to offer terms if they were. There is little point in supposing Carthalo’s mis-
sion a later Roman fiction to illustrate the Senate’s firmness in the face of
disaster. His brief was not to make peace-overtures but to put his general’s
terms if the Romans made them.
Hannibal’s battle-methods were original but he relied on his opponents to
be conventional, and not only in war. Crushing victories normally led to the
losers asking for terms or being forced to ask. Alexander the Great’s father
had become master of Greece with his triumph at Chaeronea five generations
earlier; Alexander had become lord of Asia with his three victories over the
Persians; the ambitions of his most powerful successors Antigonus and
Demetrius had been shattered at Ipsus. Carthaginian war-efforts had some-
times suffered the same fate, as in Sicily both in 480 at Himera and again in
341 at the river Crimisus—not to mention the naval catastrophe off the
Aegates islands that lost them the First Punic War. Now it was surely the
Romans’ turn.7
True, Hannibal very likely knew that they had seldom obeyed this conven-
tion. Repeated disasters against Pyrrhus and in the First Punic War had not
brought them to terms. After Cannae they repeated this inflexibility. They
refused to let Carthalo stay in Roman territory, far less talk of terms; refused
even to ransom their captive citizens. On the other hand, as Hannibal also
may have known, they had actually negotiated with Pyrrhus after two heavy
defeats, and he could reckon that their situation now was unprecedentedly
desperate—massive human losses, ally after ally defecting, nearby foreign
states wavering or hostile. Many or most outside observers probably gave
them little chance of holding out for long. His own treaty with Philip V
shows that in 215 he was expecting them to come to terms: his terms.
Polybius’ verbatim quotation of this treaty-text, with the oath to it sworn by
Hannibal and his Carthaginian councillors and troops, is the one piece of writ-
ing by the general that survives, a
t any rate in a Greek version. The treaty
bound not just the expeditionary army in Italy but the Punic state and its allies,
with a matching obligation on Philip, the Macedonians and their allies. It
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declared mutual friendship and enmities, stipulated that Philip would give mili-
tary aid to the Carthaginians if asked, laid down that ‘if the Romans ask us to
come to terms of peace’ specific territorial benefits in the Illyrian region would
flow Philip’s way, and promised that ‘if ever the Romans make war on you or
on us, we will help each other in the war as may be required on either side’.
In practice the treaty was never more than a paper statement, for Philip
was never asked for help and peace on Punic terms was never signed. Mace-
don was to pay heavily in a later age for this empty flirtation with the invader
of Italy. What was really significant was that it occurred at all. The king’s ten-
tative naval intervention in Illyrian waters the previous year had dissolved in
panic at the arrival of just ten Roman warships: now he was ready to declare
himself their enemy’s ally and make military promises against them. More
vividly even than the defection of half southern Italy and Campania, his
move shows how convincing was the impression after Cannae that the power
of Rome was broken and the time of Carthage had arrived.8
The treaty also hints how its makers envisaged the postwar position of the
Roman republic. It would have to give up its area of hegemony across the
Adriatic but, far from being destroyed, would remain able to make war
against a major foreign state. This chimes with the attitude Hannibal showed
to the Romans after Cannae: he was fighting them not to the death but ‘for
honour and power’, in other words the honour and prestige of the
Carthaginian state—not to mention its Barcid leadership—and its hegemony
over the lands at issue. Both aims were perfectly acceptable to the Mediter-
ranean world of his time, just as in other eras.9
But if the Roman republic stayed in being, and especially if it stayed capa-
ble of fresh war-making, it had to be constrained. Otherwise the whole
expedition, the Alps and the Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae, would have been
for nothing.