Hannibal's Dynasty

by Dexter Hoyos

  is very unlikely that the Mighty Ones were dealing with so critical a strategic

  issue on their own. If they sent Hasdrubal orders to join his brother,

  almost certainly they were doing so at his brother’s behest; besides, it

  was much more practical for Hannibal in south Italy to communicate with

  Spain via Carthage than to try doing so direct. Livy or his source may

  not have appreciated these details—or else, conceivably, Hasdrubal’s ensuing

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  disastrous defeat at Hibera prompted writers like Sosylus and Silenus later to

  play down the ultimate origin of the marching orders.18

  VI

  By the end of 215 Hannibal had created an alliance-system covering the bulk

  of southern Italy. The only exclusions were the Greek cities along the south-

  eastern coast (save Croton, conquered by the Bruttians, and Locri), Rhegium

  at the straits, and the Latin colonies of Beneventum and Luceria in Samnium,

  Venusia in Apulia, and Brundisium and Paestum on the coasts. At the other

  end of the peninsula, Cisalpine Gaul was out of Roman control even if Han-

  nibal did not have regular contact with it. At the end of 216 the Roman army

  there and the newly elected consul who led it were wiped out in an ambush,

  yet another catastrophe for the enemy. If a fresh Punic army arrived from

  Spain—something he and his brother Hasdrubal were already thinking

  about—the region could serve as a resupply-base as it had in 218. With

  Macedon too on his side and Syracuse wavering, and even the Sardinians

  staging a rebellion, he had the Romans virtually surrounded. It was a situation

  all but unprecedented in their history. It was natural to expect that sooner

  rather than later they would ask for terms.19

  Yet his new alliance system was a flawed mosaic. Important members of it,

  and maybe some others, had to be won over by guarantees which made them

  only a passive asset—no longer in the Roman alliance but not contributing

  positively to the Punic one either. Hannibal in no way held the sort of com-

  manding leadership over his miscellany of allies that Philip II of Macedon

  and Alexander the Great, or the Athenian state before them, had held over

  theirs. To the Italians he was paradoxically both necessary and an irritant.

  Only he could preserve them in their new-found freedom, but he made

  demands on them (for supplies even if he paid for these, and for recruits

  even if these were for his own army) and their association with him brought

  Roman reprisals on their heads. Not surprisingly there is little evidence of

  real enthusiasm among the defecting Italians for their Punic alliance. At some

  places pro-Roman factions continued to exist—Arpi, for instance, and

  Salapia where the pro-Romans would take the city back into the Roman fold

  in 210.

  Hannibal found himself in a dilemma with the Italians rather similar to

  theirs with him. Passive or not, he needed them; but in turn he had to support

  them against their old hegemon—a disadvantage rather than an asset. The

  strategic situation would have been easier had the defectors formed a solid

  block of ground from coast to coast, but instead they were parcelled out over

  southern Italy with enemy strongholds scattered among them. The Romans

  continued to hold Nola, Neapolis, Puteoli and the strategic mountain-height

  of Castra Claudiana between Nola and Capua, Pentrian territory in Samnium,

  all the Latin colonies, and (till 212) many of the Greek cities on the coasts.

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  This meant that Hannibal’s alliance had little territorial cohesion and not

  much chance of—or interest in—concerted action or even mutual support.20

  By contrast, with all 30 Latin allies, the Etruscans, and the other central and

  north Italian states continuing to stand with them, the Romans kept a superi-

  ority in resources and a solid and productive mass of territory from which to

  fight. They reverted to Fabius Maximus’ strategy of avoiding pitched battles

  with Hannibal and concentrated instead on wearing down his allies. From

  215 on, Roman armies operating in several simultaneous theatres around

  southern Italy laid waste to croplands and villages, attacked towns and gener-

  ally made the defectors’ lives miserable—as the Samnites appealing to

  Hannibal pointed out. They even began winning back some centres, like

  Casilinum (which he had captured in 215) as early as 214 and in the following

  year Arpi, which had defected after Cannae.21

  Hannibal could neither intervene in every quarter nor divide up his forces

  into enough detachments to cope. Yet the success of his whole venture

  depended not only on protecting his new allies but, even more importantly,

  on nurturing their belief that they would do better under his leadership than

  they had under the Romans. This conundrum was to dog all his remaining

  years in Italy.

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  I N D E C I S I V E WA R

  I

  The ambitiously energetic Barcid strategy in the years after Cannae was on a

  scale greater than anything in past Punic history. It marked the zenith of

  Hannibal’s military and diplomatic power, with the Romans confronted not

  only in Italy but across the western Mediterranean—in Cisalpine Gaul, Spain,

  Sardinia, the Adriatic and finally Sicily. But an ever-widening ring of con-

  frontation could not by itself bring victory. The confrontations had to be

  pressed and be successful. At this crucial level, his and the Carthaginians’

  impetus stalled.

  In one region after another—Spain, then Sardinia, next the Adriatic and

  even Sicily—the Romans won the upper hand again. In Spain Cn. Scipio’s

  naval victory in 217 near the Ebro was followed two years later by the rout of

  Hasdrubal’s army at Hibera, again near the mouth of the Ebro, and then by

  years of stalemate which strategically was more in their favour than in the

  Carthaginians’. In Sardinia not only was the local revolt, encouraged from

  Carthage, a total failure in 215 but the army sent to help was delayed by

  storms and then met total defeat: even its commander was captured. The

  Macedonian intervention in the Adriatic fared ingloriously in its turn—Philip

  V’s operations in Illyria in 214 were wrecked when the Romans made a sur-

  prise attack on his camp and then forced him to burn his ships and retreat

  home. This was not the end of operations in Illyria but it was the end of

  Philip’s usefulness as an ally.

  In Sicily too, the Romans checked their enemies’ opening successes.

  Despite joining the Punic side twice, first under Hieronymus and later when

  Hippocrates and Epicydes won control, the Syracusans found themselves

  besieged by the unrelenting M. Claudius Marcellus. Nor did the powerful

  Punic army sent to their rescue manage to do anything but perish in an epi-

  demic along with its commander.1

  Hannibal’s own progress in Italy, apart from recruiting new allies, was hardly

  different. He spent 215 and 214 moving between Campania and Apulia, con-

  centrating most of his energies on trying to take enemy strongho
lds and ports

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  in Campania. He succeeded with Casilinum, Nuceria and Acerrae, but failed at

  the more important Neapolis, Nola, Cumae, Puteoli and Tarentum—and

  before long the Romans retook Casilinum. His various encounters with

  Roman armies outside Nola under the tireless Marcellus equally failed to

  repeat Trebia, Trasimene or Cannae (even if they were not the victories by

  Marcellus that Roman tradition later claimed). With the Romans grimly con-

  tinuing their resistance, the momentum built up by Cannae and its immediate

  aftermath was plainly running down. Indeed campaigning in the year 213 was

  more or less at a standstill: its one noteworthy event was Arpi in Apulia going

  back over to the Romans, a coup by Fabius’ son and namesake.

  By contrast, every now and then the Romans won successes where Hanni-

  bal was absent. Fabius Maximus the Delayer reconquered places in rebel

  Samnium in 214, including the important town of Compsa, then Aecae in

  Apulia. The energetic Ti. Sempronius Gracchus in 215 pounced on a Campa-

  nian force at Hamae near Cumae, and at the river Calor near Beneventum in

  214 he routed the strong secondary army of Bruttians and Lucanians march-

  ing under Hanno’s command to join Hannibal in Campania. Then in 213

  Arpi rejoined the Romans.

  Even the general’s own army was not immune from ennui: in 215 about

  300 Numidian and Spanish cavalry decamped to the enemy outside Nola, in

  213 nearly 1,000 Spaniards in the Arpi garrison did (on condition that the rest

  of the Punic force went free), and Bruttian deserters over time formed a size-

  able body that the Romans were to use in 209.2

  Still, even after these frustrations Hannibal was able to score some more

  successes. The most important was Tarentum defecting to him early in

  212—though the Romans kept hold of its citadel—quickly followed by

  Metapontum, Thurii and Heraclea. In the same year the rest of the Lucanian

  communities deserted the Roman side too. Now he controlled virtually all the

  coast of the Tarentine gulf and the Ionian Sea, with their hinterlands: this

  strengthened his grip on what supply-producing areas there were in southern

  Italy and also made communicating with Carthage easier than before.

  And he still won some successes in the field. In 212 if Livy’s report is cor-

  rect, and again in 210 more crushingly, he defeated Roman armies at

  Herdonea in Apulia. Smaller victories in the south were won—according to

  Livy again—by Hanno in 213 and Hannibal himself in 212, 209 and 208

  against various corps of Romans or Roman allies operating independently.

  His battle with Marcellus at Numistro in 210 was another victory or at least a

  draw, and the following year he dealt the same commander heavy losses in an

  indecisive tussle outside Canusium. There was even a small naval victory in

  210, when a Tarentine flotilla defeated a Roman squadron trying to bring

  supplies to the Roman-held citadel at Tarentum.3

  The half-decade after Cannae, in sum, brought both the high point of the

  expedition to Italy and yet a strategic stalemate. The Romans could not defeat

  him, but neither could he break them. Successes on the one side were matched

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  by successes on the other. He maintained the strength of his armies and gar-

  risons, but the Romans increased theirs until by 212 they had no fewer than 25

  legions under arms, four times as many as at the start of the war, and 14 of

  them in Italy where ten operated in Campania and the south.4

  II

  From 212, in fact, the tide began to turn in Italy, if slowly. Although that was

  the year Hannibal won over Tarentum and other south-coast cities, it was also

  the year when the Romans with six legions put Capua under siege and Mar-

  cellus in Sicily completed his siege of Syracuse by capturing the hitherto

  impregnable city. Nothing the Carthaginians did could deflect the besiegers

  at either place. In Sicily Himilco’s army, sent over from Carthage in 213, did

  no damage to them and in 212 perished thanks to an epidemic; and then a

  powerful fleet, the most powerful sent out by the Carthaginians during the

  war, managed to achieve nothing at all—in the end sailing away rather than

  battle an outnumbered Roman force off Cape Pachynus.

  In Italy, the hapless Hanno, trying to get provisions into Capua before the

  legions closed in, lost his camp (again near Beneventum) and all the provi-

  sions to a Roman assault. Hannibal’s foray later in 212 into Apulia and victory

  at First Herdonea did nothing for the Capuans, though he had probably

  hoped otherwise; in 211 he tried to break the siege and failed, then led his

  troops on the famous—and again fruitless—march to the outskirts of Rome

  itself, provoking much alarm but no wavering either there or among Capua’s

  besiegers; and just as ineffectual was his extraordinary return march, not back

  to Capua but down the entire length of southern Italy to Rhegium in the

  (predictably futile) hope of capturing that.5

  These strange manoeuvres virtually symbolize the general’s activity from

  212 on: bold and risky moves, impressive-looking coups, even some victories,

  yet little impact on how the war was really developing. His successes in these

  years were very different from those that had climaxed at Cannae. The value

  of Tarentum was impaired by the continuing Roman occupation of its

  citadel, which dominated the city’s harbour. And with several enemy armies

  operating in Italy at the same time, beating one or other had a distinctly lim-

  ited impact—even when, as at the two Herdonea battles, he smashed his

  opponents. Once Capua surrendered and the Campanian front collapsed, his

  war-effort was effectively confined to the regions further south, and after the

  Samnites in their turn gave up the fight in 210 and 209 only Lucania, Apulia

  and Bruttium remained for campaigning.

  All his campaigning was now defensive, as indeed it had been since Capua

  went under siege. His approach to the walls of Rome in 211 (even if it left the

  Romans with an imperishable memory of danger and alarm, and the prover-

  bial cry ‘Hannibal at the gates!’) would remain the only time he ever sighted

  his enemies’ city, a futile gesture five, if not six, years too late.

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  More and more the Romans were waging the war as though Hannibal was

  not really there, or was there only as a nuisance—like a buzzing wasp—to be

  ignored or deflected. It still cost them dearly at times, notably in the battles

  fought in 210, 209 and 208; and yet Hannibal failed to capitalize on the

  momentary advantages he thus won. Second Herdonea and the death of the

  proconsul Fulvius Centumalus simply prevented the Romans from taking

  that town as they had hoped, while the ensuing drawn battle of Numistro

  against Marcellus merely gave Hannibal the opportunity to retreat out of

  Lucania into Apulia.

  These battles were really defensive and reactive: it was the enemy who were

  now usually taking the initiative and the Carthaginian general who largely had

&n
bsp; to stand on guard to repel their unending thrusts and slashes at what was left

  of pro-Punic allied Italy. Likewise his semi-success at Canusium in 209,

  against Marcellus again, merely gave him the opportunity to march from

  there into Bruttium to save Caulonia from attack by the Sicilian and Bruttian

  irregulars—and the upshot was that Fabius the Delayer meantime retook

  Tarentum. Intentionally or not, the Romans had diverted the general from

  the main game: he had not been so outmanoeuvred since Fabius had trapped

  him in Campania in 217. Nor did success attend his ruse to entice the Delayer

  into moving out from Tarentum against Metapontum or, as we shall see, his

  stratagem in 208 to recover Salapia nearby.6

  Ironically (and he may have been aware of the irony) the man who had

  effectively launched the entire war was in danger of becoming irrelevant to it.

  By the end of 208 his one hope of regaining the upper hand in Italy, and with

  it a last chance for overall victory, rested on his brother Hasdrubal’s long-

  delayed but now-begun march to Italy with a new army.

  III

  Hasdrubal had become the general in command of the Spanish territories

  once Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees. He stayed in command for ten years,

  until leaving for Italy at the end of 208, the longest Spanish tenure of any of

  the Barcids. The other generals operating with him—Hanno in 218, and later

  his brother Mago and Hasdrubal son of Gisco—must then have been subor-

  dinate to him even though in practice they sometimes acted separately.

  Polybius offers a glowing assessment of the middle Barcid brother: brave,

  resourceful, prudent, and throughout his life worthy of his father. But in vari-

  ous situations he emerges less ideally. Notably, he was not good at imposing

  his supposedly superior authority on his lieutenants. Some years later he

  reached the point where he could not get on even with his own younger

  brother Mago (and in his final battle he was completely unable to control his

  contingent of Gauls). And already in 218 strategic liaison with Hanno, the

  officer in charge north of the Ebro, was unsatisfactory.

  When Cn. Scipio arrived with the army sent on by his brother the consul,

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  the Romans were able to land at Emporiae, make their presence felt as far as