Hannibal's Dynasty

by Dexter Hoyos

  bereft of their army, their allies, their resources, and hope. Arguably Scipio

  was concerned by then that if Carthage held out he might yet be superseded

  by another Roman commander, and so he ruled out demanding deditio again.

  But he would have had much the same worry just before Zama: so why put

  this harshest of all demands to his opponent—an opponent at the head of a

  fresh and sizeable army?

  The answer must be that he had no further interest in negotiation, that

  with Masinissa’s reinforcements he was totally sure of victory. He had come

  to the interview at Hannibal’s request and maybe because he too was inter-

  ested in meeting his famous foe, but what he wanted now was a military

  decision. This need not have been due purely to craving personal glory, agree-

  able though the glory would be. Hardheadedly he could also reckon that,

  given the recent negotiating fiasco, no lasting settlement could be relied on if

  the Carthaginians and Hannibal remained able to fight—least of all once the

  Romans evacuated North Africa, as inevitably they must. A decisive victory

  on the other hand would finish the war and secure the peace; and of victory

  Scipio was now so confident that he confronted his opponent deep in the

  Punic countryside, far from his coastal bridgehead and from any chance of

  rescue if he lost.20

  The battle of Zama was not a foregone conclusion, all the same. Rather

  surprisingly, both generals avoided complex manoeuvres such as had charac-

  terized so many of their previous victories: no doubt each was wary of

  exposing himself to some unforeseeable coup by the other. Scipio, who had

  beaten four previous Punic armies in four differently inventive ways,

  accepted a brutal slogging-match while letting Laelius and Masinissa rout

  Hannibal’s cavalry and gambling that they would then bring their horsemen

  back—the same kind of risk, though not using exactly the same tactics, that

  Hannibal had accepted at Cannae. Hannibal, deploying a large elephant corps

  for the first time, saw them neutralized by a simple tactical device of Scipio’s,

  and then committed each of his three infantry corps in turn against the

  enemy in static linear fashion. This sequence prolonged the fight to little tac-

  tical benefit when, arguably, he could have exploited the sacrifice of his first

  two lines (the mercenaries and the Carthaginian levies) to gain time for his

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  D E F E AT

  powerful third corps, the veterans of Italy, to swing out and fall on Scipio’s

  unprotected infantry flanks in a variant of Cannae or Ilipa.

  The veterans when their turn came fought long and hard but, unprotected

  on flanks and rear, suffered their own Cannae once Laelius, Masinissa and

  their cavalry returned. It is surprising that, after losing his own cavalry, Han-

  nibal had taken no steps at all to organize some sort of protective screen for

  his remaining troops—had all his elephants disappeared from the field

  entirely, not to mention all survivors of his first and second lines after each

  was cut up by the Romans? Scipio’s deliberate slowness in launching his

  attack on the veterans of Italy almost dared Hannibal to take such a step, and

  victory, or a draw, would still have been achievable had Hannibal been able to

  hold off Laelius and Masinissa.

  Maybe Hannibal knew he had met his match. He left the fighting to his

  men—Appian’s picture of the two generals fighting hand-to-hand is roman-

  tic fantasy—only to see the last army of Carthage cut to pieces by the

  survivors of Cannae. After defeat he galloped in two days and nights back to

  the coast at Hadrumetum, over 120 miles (200 kilometres) away, leaving the

  survivors of his army to the mercy of the countryside and the Romans. He

  obviously had no mind to imitate his brother Hasdrubal’s self-sacrifice at

  enemy hands. Nor indeed any wish to continue the war: though he reportedly

  pulled together what troops he could—6,500 according to Appian—even

  Appian admits he knew the war had to end.

  Within days of the disaster, without opposition from their beaten general,

  the authorities at Carthage once more sent 30 envoys to Scipio, and when the

  victor’s new peace-terms were brought back Hannibal himself—now at long

  last in the city he had not seen for nearly 36 years—pulled down from the

  senate’s rostrum a diehard named Gisco who spoke against them. It would be

  appropriate if this Gisco was brother (or father) to Hasdrubal son of Gisco

  whose own will to fight had never faltered, even if his ungrateful fellow-

  citizens had finally turned on him and driven him to suicide.21

  The silencing of Gisco was met by mutters of disapproval from other sen-

  ators and plainly none of approval, for Hannibal at once felt he had to

  apologize. After 36 years away from home, he said, he was unused to the ways

  of the senate but certain that it must accept the terms. This relatively graceful

  mea culpa was successful and was remembered; less noticed but more impor-

  tant is that Carthaginian senators, even now, were not so cowed by defeat as

  to share his impatience with someone who talked of fighting on.

  They had to recognize he was right in insisting on peace but they and the

  republic owed him nothing more. He was the leader under whom they had

  waged a losing war for 16 years, for whom they had recently thrown off

  Scipio’s peace, and who had then led their last army to destruction. Just as

  Hasdrubal son of Gisco’s influence had most likely collapsed after his defeat

  at the Great Plains, so too almost certainly did the Barcids’ in the weeks after

  Zama.22 The dice had been thrown, and the era of Barcid supremacy was over.

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  X V

  P O S T WA R E C L I P S E

  I

  The authorities at Carthage sent 30 envoys to Scipio when he marched back

  to Tunes, not to negotiate but to listen to his terms and beg for mercy. As it

  turned out, Scipio’s second peace was not strikingly more vengeful than the

  first; but its immediate penalties were heavier. The war-indemnity was dou-

  bled to 10,000 talents—payable over 50 years but starting at once—and the

  entire Punic navy save for ten ships had to be surrendered, plus all the war-

  elephants. The Carthaginians also had to give compensation for ‘all the

  injustices’ committed during the previous truce: Scipio had not forgotten or

  forgiven the plunder of his supply-ships.

  Prisoners of war, and deserters, were of course to be given up. Other pro-

  visos confirmed Carthage’s demotion to geopolitical insignificance: the

  Carthaginians must never again wage war outside Africa, and could do so in

  Africa only if the Romans permitted; they must no longer recruit Celtic or

  Ligurian mercenaries; and they had to restore to Masinissa whatever property

  and territory he or his ancestors had once held in their lands—a requirement

  ominous for the future integrity of their state even if, at the time, meant as no

  more than a passing concession to the Romans’ new friend. But the city was

  not occupied, and the Punic republic kept its independence, its home terri-

  tories and its historic allies like Utica.

/>   It was pretty well the best settlement the Carthaginians could have hoped

  for in their helpless position. The alternative would have been a siege and star-

  vation, and probable destruction in the end. For the settlement they could

  thank not only Scipio’s concern, real as it was, about being replaced by

  another general (one of the new consuls of 201 was soon making strenuous

  efforts to take over) but no doubt too their own strong walls, which had frus-

  trated the besieging rebels four decades before and, half a century later,

  would hold the Romans themselves at bay for three years. One other factor

  may have deterred Scipio from trying a siege—Hannibal’s presence within the

  walls, the obvious leader of a desperate resistance. If so it was one final ser-

  vice the general rendered his homeland before laying down his command.1

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  Appian depicts the common people even now rejecting Scipio’s terms after

  days of debate, howling at their erstwhile hero Hannibal when he urged

  acceptance, and forcing many of the leading men to flee the city. But this

  lurid scenario is another in the sequence of foolishly fickle Punic mob versus

  wise, moderate and essentially peace-loving Punic aristocracy—with the gen-

  eral now conscripted into its ranks—which is probably Roman-inspired and

  has nothing to recommend it, even if it makes use of a genuine detail or two

  like Hannibal supporting peace.

  Once the terms were ratified at Rome, early in 201, Scipio towed the war-

  ships out to sea, 500 altogether, and burned them in sight of the city. We can

  well believe that the Carthaginians were heart-stricken, as Livy reports. They

  would stay free and self-governing, but the blazing hulks of their navy sink-

  ing beneath the waters symbolized the end of Punic seaborne power and of

  the greatest era in their history.2

  Before he left for Rome, Scipio also worked out the boundaries of Punic

  North Africa. Appian claims that he fixed them at ‘the Phoenician Trenches’

  (having put the same proviso into his version of the earlier peace) but he fails

  to explain this term and the claim is dubious. A surviving excerpt from

  Eumachus of Neapolis and a mention in the Elder Pliny might seem to con-

  firm that the ‘Trenches’ did exist, but no other writer has them in the peace

  and they certainly did not embrace the Emporia region in the south which

  still remained under Punic rule.

  In reality Pliny is writing about a boundary delimited in 146—by Scipio

  Aemilianus after his sack of Carthage—between the new Roman province

  and Numidia, and later called the ‘royal trench’, fossa regia. Eumachus mean-

  time, not in his Hannibalic history but in a geographical work, was telling a

  tale of the Carthaginians finding huge bodies in coffins ‘while digging a

  trench around their territory’, with no date or site: he might be referring to a

  much earlier, semi-legendary era and so to a trench much nearer to Carthage.

  Even if he did mean what Appian calls the ‘Phoenician Trenches’, the latter

  or his source quite conceivably inferred—wrongly if so—that these consti-

  tuted the fossa regia and that it was Scipio in 201 who made them the

  boundary. For even though the Third Punic War arose from later clashes

  between the Carthaginians and Masinissa, Appian mentions neither the

  ‘Trenches’ in his account of those events nor the younger Scipio’s delimita-

  tion afterwards. If these ‘Trenches’ did exist they most probably had no part

  in the treaty or Scipio Aemilianus’ ensuing delimitation.3

  Ten thousand talents’ indemnity over half a century amounted to 200 a

  year, a tidy sum (12 million asses or 1,200,000 denarii) but less than the 220 the

  Carthaginians had had to pay yearly under Lutatius’ treaty—and that after an

  initial lump sum of another 1,000. Livy tells another Hannibal-story: amid his

  fellow-senators’ loud laments over having to pay the first instalment he was

  seen to be laughing, and, reproved by his enemy Hasdrubal the Kid for laugh-

  ing at misery which he himself had caused, he in turn reproved the

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  P O S T WA R E C L I P S E

  Carthaginians. ‘Then was the proper time to weep, when our arms were taken

  from us, our ships burnt and foreign wars forbidden. Now because you have

  to collect payment from private resources, you mourn as though at a public

  funeral.’

  But unlike the earlier story of the silencing of Gisco, this one looks like a

  fiction. Likely enough, to be sure, the ravaging of the countryside carried out

  by Scipio had reduced both public and personal revenues. This anecdote,

  though, has a similar shape to the earlier one—Hannibal again upsetting his

  peers with unorthodox but realistic frankness and uttering truths they would

  prefer not to hear—while its moralizing and pro-Hannibalic message is much

  more gratuitous. Besides, though he tells it under the date 201 Livy later

  claims the first indemnity-payment was made in 199. More likely then the tale

  goes back to an imaginative Sosylus or Silenus.4

  II

  Hannibal’s position after peace returned is not entirely clear. With the war

  over and any Punic war-making improbable for the foreseeable future, there

  was no lasting place for the generalship or for him as its holder. Nepos all the

  same reports that after Zama he levied fresh forces and, even with peace

  made, continued to campaign—along with Mago—until in 200 the Romans

  complained about it to a fresh Carthaginian embassy and got him recalled to

  Carthage.

  This story is hardly believable as Nepos tells it. Not only was warfare even

  in Africa a breach of the new treaty unless the Romans gave prior consent,

  but there was effectively no one to war against: definitely not Masinissa, and

  to the south lay desert, to the east the Ptolemies. The late Roman writer

  Aurelius Victor’s story of Hannibal having his soldiers plant olive-trees all

  over Africa is no support for Nepos either, for Victor expressly states that it

  was done to keep the men busy in peacetime.

  In reality the Romans themselves sent an embassy over to Carthage in 200,

  to complain about a renegade officer in Cisalpine Gaul named Hamilcar—

  apparently a leftover from Hasdrubal’s expedition or Mago’s who was stirring

  up unrest in those parts—and the Carthaginians promptly declared him an

  outlaw and confiscated his property. This is very likely the origin of Nepos’

  story: a confusion between a little-known officer and well-known general,

  with resulting adjustments to details. The confusion in fact goes deeper, for

  Nepos’ Punic envoys also ask the Romans to release their Carthaginian cap-

  tives—a request actually made, at any rate for high-ranking prisoners and

  with success, by the Punic peace-envoys in 201.5

  Yet there could be a small nugget of fact behind Nepos’ tale, and one com-

  patible with Victor’s (who was North African himself and may draw on local

  tradition). Some troops escaped death or captivity at Zama, and there were

  other units still existing too—the stubborn garrison in Utica, for instance,

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O S T WA R E C L I P S E

  and no doubt others in Carthage and other cities—not to mention crews

  from the extinguished navy. The Carthaginians, Hannibal included, would

  have all too lively memories of the disastrous sequel to the previous war

  when the republic’s unpaid mercenaries revolted and incited the oppressed

  Libyans to do the same: now, with the Libyans already oppressed and restive

  even before Scipio in 202 spread fire and terror across their countryside, the

  danger of a new outbreak cannot have seemed negligible even if Punic forces

  were much smaller than the mercenary army in 241.6

  What was needed was to keep the surviving soldiers and crewmen busy

  (and with pay) at least until they could be safely discharged. No doubt too the

  disruption inflicted by the Roman invaders in the hinterland called for some

  sort of security force to restore order, and the authorities at Carthage may

  well have felt it necessary too to try ways of re-establishing productivity so as

  to placate the locals. It may have been Hannibal’s own idea (as Victor implies)

  to plant olive-groves; it might seem appropriate too for him to stay as general

  until his project was completed or at least well under way, so as to maintain

  discipline among the men. This would account for Nepos’ idea about him

  continuing in command, and suit Victor’s report that he carried out the plant-

  ings in peacetime.

  At least Nepos may get right the date for Hannibal laying down the gener-

  alship—the year 199. The biographer supposes that after 22 years of holding

  military command Hannibal moved straight from it to the sufeteship. In real-

  ity he became sufete 25 years after becoming general, but Nepos’ numeral

  need not be just a mistake or a later miscopying. After the visit of the Roman

  embassy in 200, silent though it was about the general, the Carthaginian

  authorities might understandably think it preferable that he lay down his offi-

  cial command, especially if his troops could now be safely discharged. In any

  case there was no war to fight and nothing in the republic’s political system

  required a general or generals in place at all times. Hannibal himself could

  hardly quarrel with that.7

  All the same, if he did continue as general for some time after peace was

  made he cannot have been shorn of political influence, despite the débâcle of