Hannibal's Dynasty

by Dexter Hoyos

  was partial to such an individual focus. As for the envoys, blaming the absent

  general was a predictable rhetorical and diplomatic ploy which Scipio did not

  take seriously (his terms for peace said nothing about war-guilt). Later,

  though, some Romans were to prove credulous, like the historian Fabius

  Pictor.3

  What is noteworthy is Hannibal’s uninvolvement in the negotiations, both

  now and later at Rome. The sources narrate him and his doings as though

  these were an entirely separate affair, and none records him being consulted

  on the transactions or even being told of them. This is hard to believe, given

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  that the Romans were aware of his relevance and given that he was the

  generalissimo of Carthage. As suggested earlier, he must in fact have

  approved of negotiating to gain time. In turn, once negotiations began it was

  important for him and Mago to reach Africa as soon as possible.

  This left a critical contradiction at the heart of the ensuing peace agree-

  ment. As noted just now, it was obviously necessary for this to require the

  Barcid brothers to leave Italy but, no less obviously, the Romans expected

  them to take their armies back for demobilization. After all it would be non-

  sensical to make peace on condition that the enemy’s overseas forces be

  brought back but be allowed to continue making war. This inference surely

  seemed too obvious to need spelling out.

  But there was no formula in the agreement imposing demobilization. Very

  oddly, as noted above, our sources in practice treat Hannibal and his men,

  and Mago’s, as virtually outside the talks and the terms. Even Polybius (but

  his account does survive only in extracts) seems to view Hannibal as an

  autonomous player on his return. How this could legally have been so is hard

  to see, but in practical terms everyone seems to have viewed him as such.

  Scipio seems to have taken it for granted: he did not call on the Carthaginians

  or Hannibal himself to make the returned forces obey the terms, or complain

  that they were not doing so, but instead treated the war as under way once

  again. By then the Carthaginians had given him other, more overt grounds

  for doing this, but it was implicit from the moment Hannibal and his army

  landed from Italy and did not lay down their arms.

  When in mid-203 the dominant figures at Carthage—the Barcid group and

  whoever else now gave them support—sought to negotiate, they surely saw

  these possibilities. So could Scipio; for him the key to achieving peace was to

  achieve it quickly, so that Hannibal on returning would find a fait accompli. His

  terms were therefore clear-cut. They were along the lines of Lutatius’ in 241,

  but of course harsher: Roman prisoners, deserters and runaway slaves to be

  handed over; the Barcids to evacuate Italy; Spain and all the islands between

  Italy and Africa (essentially meaning the Balearics and Ebusus) to be

  renounced, an indemnity paid, and the Roman forces in Africa meanwhile

  provisioned with substantial quantities of wheat and barley. And, the starkest

  proof of all that Carthage was beaten and would stay beaten, the navy was to

  have no more than twenty warships. He gave the Carthaginians three days to

  accept or refuse his terms.

  Of course they accepted. An armistice was called, with (it seems) oaths

  being exchanged to observe it, and envoys were sent off to Rome under

  escort by a Roman officer.4

  III

  The Punic envoys arrived there some time after Laelius had presented the

  fallen Syphax to the Senate and news had come in of Mago’s and Hannibal’s

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  departures. As Syphax had been captured late in June, the envoys reached

  Rome probably in August or September 203.

  Both Polybius and a short papyrus fragment of another second-century

  Greek account make it clear that the Roman Senate and People approved

  Scipio’s terms. Livy by contrast turns the Punic envoys’ reception by the

  Senate into burlesque. They ask the Romans to renew the peace-terms of

  241, not to ratify Scipio’s—which nobody discusses at all—and are shouted

  down. Then, following other senators’ sharp comments, Laelius opines that

  the whole thing is a trick to buy time and that Scipio had counted on the

  Barcid brothers not leaving Italy; since in Livy’s account the brothers have

  already left, the plain implication is that Laelius now opposes peace. The

  Senate finally sends the envoys home empty-handed and authorizes Scipio to

  prosecute the war vigorously.

  This rejection is hardly believable, nor is it to be saved by drawing on

  Appian’s version of events. He has the Punic envoys go to Rome without any

  terms from Scipio at all, and so the Senate sends over senators to work out

  terms with him; then, once Scipio announces these—with some extra clauses

  not in either Polybius or Livy—the peace treaty is agreed. This account

  matches neither Livy’s nor Polybius’: like Livy it claims that the Senate did not

  at once ratify Scipio’s terms, but it gives this a different cause (no terms to

  ratify); from some other source it imports the otherwise unattested senatorial

  commission sent to Africa, and adds extra clauses to the ensuing terms; then

  it confirms, as Polybius does, that peace was ratified. Rather than an indepen-

  dently trustworthy narrative this is normal Appianic confusion, due to

  compiling a single narrative out of several incompatible (and imperfectly

  understood) sources—including ones used by Polybius and the historical

  fragment, plus another which added extra provisos to the peace-terms. Yet

  even Appian has a peace treaty agreed on, unlike Livy.

  Dio in his turn has ‘the Romans’ (plainly meaning the Senate) refuse to

  receive the Punic envoys until the Barcid brothers leave Italy; wrangles then

  follow over whether or not to ratify Scipio’s terms—which Dio has not both-

  ered to detail—till finally their ratification is voted. The wrangling may be

  authentic (Scipio did not have only admirers among his fellow-senators), but

  Livy’s report that earlier the Senate ordered the consuls to keep the Barcid

  brothers from returning to Africa and that, according to Laelius, Scipio

  agreed with this, make more sense. It was not convincingly relevant, even if

  Dio thinks it is, that King Pyrrhus’ offer of talks 75 years earlier had been

  turned down because he was an enemy on Italian soil: the Romans had had

  no troops on Pyrrhus’ soil, so the strategic situations were quite different.

  Nothing suggests that the Senate in 203 would prefer upholding a recently

  minted ‘tradition’ to exploiting realities. Dio quite possibly took the claim

  from the source Livy was following, but otherwise his account basically con-

  forms with the dominant version of events—that the Romans ratified

  Scipio’s peace.5

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  Livy’s version of what happened at Rome can only be following a pecu-

  liarly tendentious narrative which would not accept that a peace had been

  agreed on as early as 203. But even if he was drawing on Coelius Antipater or

  Valerius
Antias, regular sources of his, it does not follow that this version was

  purely Roman-inspired. As often pointed out, it would have pleased Roman

  historical tradition much more if the Carthaginians did agree to peace-terms

  only to break them soon after (confirming the Roman image of ‘Punic faith’).

  By contrast, to claim that the Romans refused after all to make peace was a

  line more likely to appeal to pro-Carthaginian writers, for it would explain

  and justify Hannibal’s continuation of hostilities in Africa. Besides, pro-

  Carthaginian accounts did not cover up the armistice with Scipio and the

  Punic embassy to Rome—these are in all our surviving sources, with no hint

  of a different tradition—so they would certainly need to lay the alleged fail-

  ure of the peace at the Romans’ door.

  Livy’s claim may thus reach back to a pro-Carthaginian account, though he

  gives it a pro-Roman angle. On the other hand he surely acquired from a

  Roman writer the supposed details of how individual senior senators reacted

  to the Punic envoys. Yet what he reports of those senators’ comments, even

  Laelius’, is not totally hostile to the Carthaginians and not totally improbable.

  Quite possibly the acerbic Livius Salinator did complain about peace-terms

  being discussed in the absence of both consuls (he was ignored) and possibly

  too Scipio’s friend Q. Metellus did urge the Senate to accept what the procon-

  sul decided. Possibly again Valerius Laevinus did grumble that the envoys

  were just spies and ought to be deported; genuine or distorted, his comments

  in Livy provide a transition to Laelius’.

  Laelius avers that Scipio had expected Hannibal and Mago to stay in Italy,

  and that the Carthaginians would stoop to any trick to drag out talks until the

  brothers returned home to renew the war. This way of reporting him suits

  Livy’s claim that the brothers had already gone: in reality they had probably

  not yet left Italy and the alleged early departure may be another distortion to

  help along the notion of Punic ill-faith. But in any case it was natural enough

  for someone to warn against extended negotiations lest these tempt the

  Carthaginians into recalling the brothers and renewing the war—particularly

  if Scipio was keen for a swift peace. So Laelius might well state that ‘Scipio

  had placed his hope of peace on Hannibal and Mago not being recalled’ and

  obliquely warn the envoys against trying to prolong the talks (for instance by

  haggling over terms). Later on these comments could easily be turned into

  the form Livy gives them.6

  Similarly with the Punic envoys’ alleged demand for Lutatius’ treaty to be

  renewed. Quite possibly they did mention that treaty in their opening state-

  ment to the Senate, for it was after all the only previous peace settlement

  between the two republics and it had not curtailed Carthage’s great-power

  status. Besides, it had been followed by some years of friendly relations

  between the two, a useful point to put now. Later on, though, it would be an

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  easy and cheap ploy to represent any such remarks as just a demand for

  Lutatius’ treaty to be renewed.

  A Roman writer with access to details of the discussion in the Senate, but

  anxious to claim that the senators had rejected treacherous Punic overtures,

  would thus have little trouble adapting such items to the goal of claiming that

  the Senate had rejected peace. This was—it seems—a writer who could not

  believe that the wise Senate of those days would be taken in by Punic devi-

  ousness and judged his disbelief confirmed by the pro-Carthaginian source

  who denied (or ignored) Senate approval of Scipio’s terms. When the

  Carthaginians seized the Roman food convoy afterwards, the writer could

  report Scipio complaining that they had broken not the allegedly rejected

  peace but the armistice and the law of nations—as Livy does, in contrast to

  Polybius who reports the proconsul specifically referring to a violation of the

  newly ratified peace.

  Livy himself probably did not originate the alleged non-ratification, for

  that would mean he found all his sources—Greek and Roman, pro- and anti-

  Carthaginian—unanimous that the terms had been ratified and yet he

  decided to contradict them. Such a procedure would be unique in his history

  and it is hard to see why he would want to do it here. By contrast, if he found

  the story in a respected enough predecessor (or predecessors) he could feel

  that he was justified in preferring this version to the one in Polybius.

  At least one of his Roman predecessors is known to have consulted a pro-

  Carthaginian source, Hannibal’s friend Silenus in fact, as well as Roman ones.

  This was Coelius Antipater, an author happy to invent dramatic details else-

  where in his history of the war. But he was not the only pre-Livian historian

  prone at times to distortion and invention (Valerius Antias was the notorious

  example), and other Roman historians too may have consulted non-Roman

  sources. If Livy himself chose to look up such non-Roman sources, he might

  feel further reassured about the Senate rejecting Scipio’s terms. But wherever

  the story came from, it is not one to believe.7

  IV

  By the time the Punic envoys returned from Rome, Hannibal and his army

  had sailed from Italy and landed in Africa (Polybius makes this clear). Accord-

  ing to Livy and Appian he had built transports in anticipation of recall, while

  a naval escort was provided by a squadron under Hasdrubal the admiral. Most

  of the veterans cannot have been very good as shipwrights, but men from

  Croton and other coastal towns could have done the work once the soldiers

  had felled enough trees. All the same, this would mean that the Roman armies

  were content to look on, throughout the year, while Hannibal’s men went

  about obviously readying themselves for departure—a move the Roman

  commanders were under orders to prevent, and one too that would make a

  Roman offensive harder for him and his preoccupied troops to resist.

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  Nor did the Romans make naval efforts to raid or harass his ports while a

  transport-fleet was supposedly taking shape. On balance it is likelier that,

  even if Hannibal gathered or built some craft locally, most of the transports

  were sent over with the escort from Carthage, taking the Romans enough by

  surprise to prevent them interfering with the evacuation.

  Even so, it may have taken the Carthaginians some time to collect the nec-

  essary shipping. The recall to Hannibal was sent soon after they had news of

  Syphax’s capture, thus probably at the end of May; but he crossed to Africa

  only in autumn, late September or early October at the earliest. How many

  ships he needed is not known, but if he took 10,000–15,000 men to Africa he

  would have to have a fair number. Scipio with about 30,000 troops, plus

  2,000-odd horses, had needed 400 transports the year before. After years of

  war-spending and ship-losses, with shipping and trade surely damaged by

  Roman raids and Scipio’s devastations, and with Mago’s forces to bring back

  as well, the Car
thaginians cannot have found it easy or cheap to gather the

  craft needed.

  Hannibal also had to take care not to provoke the Roman armies around

  him into trying to throw his evacuation into chaos. That may have meant

  waiting for word that the Senate and People had agreed to the peace-terms,

  which required the brothers to depart. If Livy is right that the Senate was dis-

  pleased when he did sail, the reason quite likely was that he had not made

  clear that he accepted the peace.8

  Anti-Barcid tradition told lurid stories about his departure: how he sent

  Hasdrubal the admiral around the towns he still controlled to loot them, and

  massacred soldiers unwilling to serve in Africa. For Diodorus these num-

  bered no fewer than 20,000, while Livy does not state a figure but puts the

  slaughter in the hallowed temple of Hera at Cape Lacinium. The town-

  lootings may be genuine (Appian adds the detail that Hasdrubal let the

  inhabitants leave first) for the general himself might see them as legitimate

  plunder for his troops: if they did not take it the incoming Romans would.

  He also may have wanted to gather whatever proceeds he could for the

  coming campaign in Africa, to lighten the impact on Carthage’s own dimin-

  ished resources. The alleged massacre is another matter.

  The tale’s genesis seems to have been the reportedly large number of ani-

  mals slaughtered, including 3,000 horses according to Diodorus, on the eve

  of departure because there was no room for them aboard ship—an item sup-

  ported by the fact that Hannibal had to look for fresh cavalry when he

  reached Africa. Maybe, too, some troops did mutiny at the prospect of leav-

  ing Italy and were duly punished with death: hardly a large number all the

  same, since the rest of his troops (mostly Italians as we saw earlier) would

  remain the most solidly loyal corps in his army at Zama. Besides, Polybius

  insists that throughout the Italian years Hannibal never had to face a mutiny,

  polyglot though his army was. A major mutiny would have made this claim

  ridiculous, but the historian might ignore a small one.9

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  V

  The army of Italy landed at Leptis Minor near Hadrumetum a good way

  south-east of Carthage, and at some stage was joined by Mago’s returned