by Dexter Hoyos
force. But not by Mago himself. He had died on the voyage from Italy,
another casualty of the disastrous war his eldest brother had launched in 218.
Of Hamilcar’s three warrior sons only Hannibal was left.10
Hannibal reached Africa before the Carthaginian envoys returned from
Rome with the Senate’s approval of the peace-terms. Scipio had thus effec-
tively lost his gamble that peace would have been ratified by now. For even
though Hannibal made no offensive move now or during the winter that fol-
lowed, his military preparations were a plain sign that he meant to fight on.
Scipio kept to his camp outside Utica, perhaps unwilling to act until he was
resupplied and still hoping that ratification would go through once Hannibal
had seen the state of affairs for himself.
As suggested earlier, Hannibal returned to a homeland still committed to
fighting on under the leadership of his family and its political supporters,
with peace-inclined Carthaginians a disregarded minority. Hasdrubal, son of
Gisco’s eclipse, may even have enlarged the Barcid group into a sort of coali-
tion of national resolve. As usual, though, other leading Barcid associates get
no mention in our records and even Hanno son of Bomilcar disappears, pre-
sumably becoming one of the returned general’s subordinates. But for the
Barcids this had to be the last throw of the dice. Hannibal had come home to
atone for six years of calamities, and had nothing to offer but hope. Many
leading men—even many long-established Barcid supporters—can have
been willing to continue their support only in return for victory over Scipio
and a tolerable peace. So the general was able to build up his forces by levying
troops locally and hiring mercenaries, which means he could draw supplies
and funds from Carthage and its territory (what he brought from Italy cannot
have been enough). But some strain in his relations with the ever more anx-
ious Carthaginians in the city can be glimpsed in their urgings to him to
confront Scipio, and his testy reply that he would do so when he and not they
judged it right.
Outside Punic territory, the Barcids’ old links with Numidian princes
remained valuable too. True, Masinissa was in the process of imposing his
rule over the whole country, nor is anything more heard of Hannibal’s
unnamed niece, Oezalces’ widow and Mazaetullus’ wife, but during 202 the
Carthaginian army was reinforced by cavalry under one Tychaeus, a relative
of Syphax. Appian names the reinforcer ‘Mesotylus’, probably another Appi-
anic confusion since the real Mazaetullus had surrendered to Masinissa and
earns no mention now in Polybius’ and Livy’s more detailed accounts—but
all the same this suggests a link between Tychaeus and Masinissa’s enemy.
The Barcid–Numidian tie that stretched back to the days of Naravas thus
revived, in modified form, for the last throw of the dice.11
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Before long the war began again. First of all, Roman cargo ships bearing
food-supplies were driven by contrary winds to shore, some on the western
coast of Cape Bon and others at the island of Aegimurus—now Zembra—a
few miles west of the cape and about 30 from Carthage. The hungry citizens
pressured the Punic senate to send out Hasdrubal the admiral (now back
from Italy) to seize the laden and deserted ships. Then when Scipio sent
envoys by sea to the city to complain, these not only were sent away unan-
swered and insulted but, on the return trip to his camp, were ambushed
offshore by some Punic warships and barely managed to reach safety. Scipio
marched into the countryside, capturing towns and ravaging fields, while the
harried authorities at Carthage sent messages to their returned but inactive
general imploring him to take the field.12
The timings of these events are not clear in our sources. Hannibal and pre-
sumably Mago’s forces arrived in autumn 203, but it is not likely that the
ensuing events happened soon afterwards. Most modern historians agree
that the provision fleet must have been sent in spring 202, and certainly for
the Romans to send a large supply-fleet during the treacherous winter
months from October to March would have been foolish and potentially dis-
astrous. Nor should it have been necessary, for Scipio’s army had been well
provisioned by the Carthaginians. By the start of spring, on the other hand,
he would be needing fresh supplies. That he had them sent from Italy means
in turn he could not replace them locally—another sign that relations with
the Carthaginians had turned chilly.
The picture is consistent, had always been predictable—we saw Laelius
warning against it—and Polybius makes it clear: once the armies from Italy
landed along with Carthage’s undefeated supreme commander, a further trial
of arms became preferable to a treaty that finished Carthage as a great power.
Polybius writes that most leading Carthaginians and senators saw the treaty
as too harsh. As noted earlier, they had surely felt this from the start: the
armies’ return cannot have wrought sudden enlightenment. Nor, as we also
noted, does anything suggest that at this point a ‘war’-faction wrested power
back from a ‘peace’-faction: rather, with the military situation restored the
Carthaginians’ real attitude could appear. Plainly enough, most ordinary citi-
zens felt this way—so much so that one tradition, in Diodorus and Appian
and with a hint in Livy too, could distort it into bellicose Punic commons
versus pacific senate. This tradition (not necessarily Roman-originated)
reminds us of Fabius Pictor’s anti-Barcid propaganda, which all but certainly
drew on anti-Barcid apologetics in postwar Carthage.
The Carthaginians maybe reckoned that since peace had not yet been for-
mally ratified, by them anyway, they were not breaking faith: likely enough, as
the Polybian-era historical fragment implies, the requisite oaths were yet to be
exchanged. Scipio’s protest at the seizure of his supplies, that they had vio-
lated ‘the oaths and the agreement’, must have meant either the armistice, if
this was secured by oaths as the fragment implies, or else preliminary oaths
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sworn at Rome by the Punic ambassadors whom the Senate had heard.
Instead of acknowledging this, the Carthaginians refused to give his envoys a
reply and, as the fragment puts it, ‘sent out men bearing war instead of
peace’—quite likely an epitomised allusion to the attack on the Roman
envoys’ ship.13
That this attack was a fiction of Scipio’s, or of later Roman tradition, to
justify his renewing hostilities is implausible. There was no need. The seizure
of his supply ships and the Carthaginians’ refusal to answer his protest, still
less offer apology or compensation, amounted to unfriendly acts at the very
least and could reasonably be judged hostile ones. Not to mention Hannibal’s
armed presence in the south-east, the steps he was taking not to demobilize
but to build up his forces, and his continuing total silence about accepting or
even acknowledging the rece
nt peace. Attacking the envoys on the other
hand brought no gain to the Punic state itself: it was most likely a hotheaded
folly by the admiral Hasdrubal, with or without prompting from diehards in
the city.
Even without it, Scipio had little choice but to renew hostilities, and he had
the right. While Polybius stresses the anger he felt at the enemy’s recent
behaviour, and no doubt it was genuine, Scipio was not reacting merely out of
emotion. The Carthaginians might feel, as is sometimes suggested, that they
were entitled to seize Roman supply-ships because this was not expressly for-
bidden in the peace-terms: but merely to put the point shows its frivolity
(trying to sink ambassadors was not forbidden them either, but that scarcely
made it allowable).
Another suggestion is that they refused to answer his protest over the
seizure because they had not yet heard what their envoys returning from
Rome had to report—an odd line of argument in itself, and all the more if it is
taken to imply that Scipio was somehow obligated to grant them more time.
In any case the Carthaginians, having plundered his goods, were scarcely enti-
tled to expect him still to refrain from plundering theirs. Their action posed a
military threat too: it deprived Scipio of needed munitions and strengthened
the city of Carthage’s resources, just when Carthaginian forces were being
rebuilt by Hannibal—who, it bears reiterating, was not in practice a party to
the recent peace and yet was neither disciplined nor disavowed.14
Even now the Roman commander avoided confronting him. Instead he
traversed the countryside, spreading damage and terror widely. This might be
seen as an effort to draw his opponent away from the coast and onto ter-
rain—deep in the interior, as at the Great Plains earlier in 203—where Scipio
conceivably felt more comfortable about fighting and was closer to his ally
Masinissa. But in fact Hannibal did not react for months. The climactic battle
was not fought until autumn 202, seven or eight months after the supply-
ships affair and at the far end of the new campaigning season. Throughout
that time Scipio continued to avoid confrontation.15
He probably had other reasons for harrying the countryside. First, the
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Roman army needed further supplies since (thanks to the Carthaginians) less
than half those sent from Italy had come in, and the arrival of spring and
then summer made supplies available locally. Another calculation may have
been even weightier. Hannibal’s stillness and the Punic authorities’ silence
over the Roman protest were not friendly acts, but equally they did not close
off the possibility that the Carthaginians might yet steel themselves to peace.
What—arguably—was needed to bring them round was some unsubtle phys-
ical pressure. So the Romans looted and ravaged the hinterland and enslaved
all who fell into their hands. The more the destruction and disruption, the
clearer they made it to the Carthaginians and their general how bleak their
future was, and how unwise Hannibal was to keep the war going, for even if
he won a battle it would merely mean a new invasion and new wreckage.
This strategy was obviously risky. As summer wore on without any decisive
result, hindsight might suggest to Scipio that he would have done better to
attack Hannibal directly the latter arrived from Italy. Then the Punic forces
had been fewer, cavalry lacking and the Romans relatively fresh from their
dual triumphs over Hasdrubal son of Gisco and Syphax. Now, operating in
the interior, Scipio was leaving his bridgehead near Utica vulnerable to attack,
when a possible combined thrust by Hannibal and the Punic fleet (stationed
near Utica) might cut him off from Italy. This concern may be one reason
why his war-fleet was strengthened from 40 in 203 to 70 early in 202, and why
the Senate then authorized one of the new consuls to take 50 more to Africa
(though he never got there).
Of course Hannibal’s past military career showed that he could probably
be relied on not to think about a combined land and sea operation. Scipio
obviously felt he could risk striking inland. Even then, had Hannibal chosen
to force an early confrontation with the Roman army Scipio would have been
in a critical position again, for at some stage in 202 the Punic general was able
to win the already-mentioned support from the Numidian Tychaeus—2,000
cavalry reputed to be the best in Africa. Scipio was trying to coax Masinissa
to rejoin him with auxiliary horse and foot, but the king was busy imposing
his rule on recalcitrant parts of Syphax’s Numidia and delayed coming. It was
not until autumn that he at last arrived with 4,000 cavalry as well as 6,000
infantry to give Scipio confidence about fighting.16
Hannibal’s inaction was probably caused partly by his need to recruit and
train extra troops, both foreign mercenaries and Carthaginian levies, and
partly by caution. He was going to fight the one Roman who had won a series
of spectacular victories against the Carthaginians, each in a different way and
all of them with dazzling resourcefulness. Like Hannibal himself, Scipio had
never lost a battle. A too hasty move against him might only add the crown-
ing victory to his record. All the same this caution may have been excessive.
Had Hannibal managed to bring on a battle after Tychaeus’ arrival but before
Masinissa’s, a Roman disaster would have been much likelier.17
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VI
The conclusive battle of the Second Punic War, somewhere in the region of
Zama about 66 miles (110 kilometres) south-west of Carthage, was preceded
by a face-to-face meeting between the generals. This was sought by Hannibal,
reportedly after Scipio caught some spies of his and, instead of killing them,
showed them round his camp and then sent them back, an act of bravado that
prompted Hannibal’s admiration. In reality it was a stratagem in his own best
style. Masinissa, with his infantry and all-important cavalry, did not join the
Romans until two or three days later: in other words Scipio was hoping to
make these reinforcements an unpleasant surprise for his opponent when
battle came.18
Hannibal was not taken in so readily. His tactics at Zama a few days later
seemingly included sacrificing his own cavalry so as to draw the enemy’s off
the battlefield, and if so it implies that he realized Scipio’s cavalry was now
superior. But their interview meanwhile went ahead. There is no strong
reason for doubting it, unusual though it was for opposing commanders to
meet before battle. To suppose it was invented in imitation of other classic
encounters—Solon and Croesus, for instance, or Alexander the Great and
the philosopher Diogenes—overlooks that none of these involved two
opposing generals just before combat. Nor, in Polybius’ account especially,
do Hannibal and Scipio exchange pithy comments or one of them teach the
other some sententious lesson, as Solon famously does with Croesus. Instead
they discuss the immediately relevant issues of war and peace, even if the
/>
writers’ device of giving each man one fairly extensive speech is a literary
touch and the original interview probably took a more varied form.19
Hannibal in effect offered Scipio peace on the status quo. The Romans
should keep Spain and its attendant islands along with their old possessions
Sicily and Sardinia, with the implicit corollary that the Carthaginians would
keep their African territory. He said nothing about paying an indemnity or
giving up most of the navy (other provisos in Scipio’s now-nullified treaty),
but maybe he assumed such matters could be brought up once fresh talks
were agreed to. After all he made no reference to restoring Roman prisoners
and deserters either, yet this would be an expected proviso too as Scipio’s
original terms had shown. Scipio in his turn made it clear that he had not
come to Africa and won his victories simply to accept peace on anyone else’s
terms; rather, his opponent’s only hope of peace without a battle was to
accept the terms already agreed to, which of course were his terms.
Plainly Hannibal was not minded to do this, and the interview ended.
Did Hannibal seriously think they could achieve peace without a battle? It
might seem surprising, when he was facing an enemy whose homeland,
power and even existence he had menaced for a decade and a half. The bulk
of Scipio’s army was made up of the long-suffering survivors of Cannae,
who had their own score to settle. Yet, as it turned out, Scipio’s ultimate
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terms of peace would include virtually what Hannibal suggested: in essence
the Carthaginians would surrender their empire, becoming a purely North
African state, and the Romans would make no African annexations. If Han-
nibal was also prepared to negotiate on other matters, indemnity, fleet and so
on—he did not say so, but that does not rule it out—then Scipio might have
got his peace without the cost of 20,000-odd more lives, if also without the
glory of a victory over the greatest general of the age.
Scipio’s reply in effect demanded a deditio, an unconditional surrender:
‘either put yourselves and your country at our mercy or fight and conquer us’.
This was much more sweeping than his earlier terms or even those he would
offer after Zama: yet after Zama Hannibal and the Carthaginian state were
