by Dexter Hoyos
187
P O S T WA R E C L I P S E
encroachments on Punic lands, starting with an attempted grab of the
Emporia region in 193, this earliest one was very probably territorial too—
the king’s first tentative prodding to find vulnerable soil. Though it seems to
have fizzled out eventually (when Masinissa found Hannibal was the leader
he would have to deal with), any trouble with the Romans’ Numidian ally and
protégé could prove disastrous for the Carthaginians in their financially
harassed and militarily puny condition. These worries may have helped Han-
nibal on the hustings.
Moreover, during 197 the power of Philip V of Macedon in turn was shat-
tered at the battle of Cynoscephalae, and the ensuing peace, dictated by the
Romans, gave them the same implicit supremacy over Macedon and Greece
that they already held over North Africa. The Carthaginians could neither
afford to irritate their increasingly imperial ex-enemies nor risk their own state
limping along in increasing financial disarray: sober self-interest demanded
reform.16
Not only were these issues now prime concerns of Hannibal’s but he
probably made that clear when he sought office (for the clash was sparked by
the mulish attitude towards the new sufete of an official supported by the
‘judges’). In other words he was elected to the highest civil office by popular
vote, against the feelings of at least a sizeable section of the dominant élite.
His reforms then, according to Livy, made him wildly popular with the
common people though they put him at odds with many or most of his
fellow-grandees. In his early fifties, Hannibal had discovered democracy.
Or, at any rate, how to behave like a democrat. Barcid supremacy in its
golden days had been based, to be sure, on popular election—but not on civil
office or regular re-election. Instead it had relied on charismatic military com-
mand, while day-to-day government at Carthage had been carried on under
Barcid dominance by the established authorities. Now Hannibal relied
directly on the voters. The sufeteship was not normally noted for indepen-
dent policy-making, nor ever before for open challenges to the senate or
Hundred and Four. Using it in these ways was a move that needed sustained
and strong backing from his fellow-citizens, and plainly Hannibal had it.
Certainly he must have had some supporters among the aristocracy: those
who remained in the ‘Barcid faction’ as Livy calls it. The historian is careful to
note that ‘a great part’ of the élite opposed the sufete, in other words he does
not claim they all did (any more than he claims all were peculators). Some
grandees’ willingness to stick with him probably rested as much or more on
personal and family loyalty as on reformist conviction, for there had been a
Barcid group large or small at Carthage for nearly 50 years and—even after
Hannibal’s own exile—it endured under the same epithet (rather than being
called the ‘democratic’ or ‘popular’ faction) for some years more. Perhaps
one such supporter became the other sufete, for Hannibal met no obstruc-
tion from him.
But the only Carthaginian named in supposed association with Hannibal at
188
P O S T WA R E C L I P S E
this date is Mago his late brother—a fancy we owe to Nepos, who has him
alive and seeking to join Hannibal in exile in 193. If Nepos confused his
brother with some real Mago linked to Hannibal in the 190s, it may have been
the general’s old friend Mago the Samnite last heard of at Thurii in 208, or
just possibly the relative whom the Romans had captured in 215 and who by
now may have returned. Whoever it was, his rôle is unknown: he probably
was not the other sufete, for if Nepos imagined him to be Hannibal’s brother
he would surely have mentioned such a combination.17
The sufete’s enemies afterwards claimed that he had made early contact
with the Seleucid Great King, Antiochus III—self-styled ‘the Great’—and
the two of them had been plotting a new war against the Romans. Quite
likely various accusations were made against him before 196 too, but it seems
clear that his sufeteship produced a crescendo. The claims were surely lies. At
the most basic level, had Hannibal been in regular touch with the king he
ought to have known Antiochus’ whereabouts at particular seasons: but
when he fled from Carthage in summer 195 he journeyed to Syria unaware
that Antiochus had left there for the Aegean. Nor of course is there sound
evidence that as early as 198, 197 or 196 the king was looking for a Roman
war—quite the opposite, in fact. Even when the exiled Hannibal did join
him, it was only as Antiochus’ relations with the Romans worsened, by 193,
that the king treated him as a serious adviser.18
As one of the great men of Carthage, maybe still its foremost citizen (so
Livy describes him), Hannibal had connexions abroad as well as at home.
With Numidian lords his family had ties of marriage and kinship; links with
Carthage’s mother-city Tyre are known and no doubt they existed with other
centres. Connexions like these were important for prestige, trade matters,
travel plans and up-to-date information. In the city Hannibal held regular
morning levees for large numbers of people, who must have included visitors
from elsewhere; like other Punic aristocrats he no doubt put on dinner-
parties and other social events. Dealings with visitors, even conversations
with them, could easily be misrepresented—and Phoenicia, including Tyre,
belonged to Antiochus’ empire. So once it became clear at Carthage that the
king and the Romans were bickering, Hannibal’s foes could set rumours
flying.19
189
X V I
H A N N I BA L S U F E T E
I
Our only account of Hannibal’s sufeteship is Livy’s, and like most other
episodes of Carthaginian history told by Greeks or Romans it is compressed
and some details are unclear. Even so, it is firmly pro-Hannibal in tone, which
suggests that though Livy probably drew on Polybius for it, Polybius himself
may well have used the account of someone like Sosylus or Silenus. Just
where Hannibal’s friends’ histories ended we do not know, but according to
Nepos the pair were by his side ‘as long as fortune permitted it’—and that
would likely have lasted until his sudden flight in 195. Nor of course did sep-
aration, whenever it happened, have to mean a loss of interest in his doings.
But if instead Polybius’ ultimate informant was Roman (admittedly it
seems a smaller possibility) we might think of Q. Terentius Culleo, one of the
three senatorial envoys sent over to Carthage that year. Culleo was acquainted
with the Carthaginians because, like the annalist Cincius Alimentus, he had
been their prisoner of war. Freed by Scipio in Africa in 201, his devotion to
him from then on was unbounded—and Scipio strongly opposed intervening
in the Carthaginians’ domestic affairs six years later, and was remembered as
an admirer of Hannibal. Culleo’s nomination as an envoy may have been an
effort by Sci
pio, then honorary first senator, to soften the impact of the mis-
sion, or a move by the interventionists to mollify him. Culleo himself was still
active enough a quarter of a century later to go on another African embassy,
so reminiscences of his could have reached Polybius, conceivably even at first
hand after the latter came to Italy in 167.1
The year of Hannibal’s sufeteship was probably 196, when at Rome
L. Furius Purpureo and M. Claudius Marcellus were consuls. The Roman
embassy that arrived soon after Hannibal laid down office, and prompted
him into self-exile, had Marcellus as one of its three members, a task he could
not have undertaken while holding office. Moreover, as mentioned earlier
Hannibal then travelled to Syria expecting to meet King Antiochus, who had
journeyed there from Ephesus in late 196. But early in 195 Antiochus
returned to Ephesus to pursue his difficulties with the Romans, and Hannibal
on reaching Syria had to follow him westwards.
190
H A N N I BA L S U F E T E
All this makes 196 the likeliest date for the sufeteship—admittedly we do
not know when the Punic official year began and ended—and 195 the year of
his flight. True, Nepos dates the flight to Marcellus’ and Purpureo’s consulate
and to ‘the year after his praetorship’, thus putting the latter in 197, but this is
less plausible. His account of the postwar years has other oddities as we have
seen, and after a few paragraphs he terms the year 193 ‘the third year’ after
the flight: more evidence of indecisive dating. Quite likely he has confused
Marcellus as envoy with Marcellus as consul. And though Appian too has 196
as the year the exiled general joined Antiochus, his own unreliabilities in mat-
ters and events Punic make this the reverse of encouraging. Still, Nepos may
be right in relative terms about Hannibal going into exile ‘the year after his
praetorship’. This detail again supports 196 and 195 as the years in question.2
II
The new magistrate’s first recorded move was to summon a ‘quaestor’, who
refused to come. This official may have been the republic’s chief of finances
(the usual assumption) or, rather likelier, one of its financial officials, the
mhsbm or ‘accountables’, attested on inscriptions. What Hannibal wanted to
discuss we do not know: maybe the financial situation overall, but Livy after-
wards records him tackling the much-abused finances of the republic
apparently as a separate matter. The dispute with the ‘quaestor’ may have had
a different cause, even if connected with finance.
The latter was defiant because he would become one of the iudices when
his magistracy ended; and Hannibal’s reaction (after having him arrested) was
to legislate to remove the iudices’ lifetime tenure. So the summons may have
been over some accusation of malfeasance—corruption, injustice or incom-
petence—which the ‘quaestor’ expected to be able to shrug off once he
exchanged office for entry into the One Hundred and Four.3
Livy is careful to specify too that this official belonged to the ‘opposite fac-
tion’. It is plausible enough that there was more to the clash than just a guilty
magistrate dodging investigation, for plainly the sufete found it politically
worthwhile to attack him. The rights and wrongs of the dispute were one
thing, but Hannibal wanted a justification for an assault on the iudices. No
doubt he chose his issue carefully, all the same: the offender had to be fairly
obviously (or plausibly) guilty, and unpopular as well. The sufete haled him
before a citizen-gathering—what became of him we are not told—and then
carried a law reforming recruitment to the One Hundred and Four.
The connexion between a recalcitrant magistrate and reform of the tri-
bunal is not obvious. On one interpretation the sufete overstepped (or was
accused of overstepping) his powers in summoning and then arresting the
recalcitrant ‘quaestor’, the latter appealed to the One Hundred and Four who
made their attitude clear in his favour, and Hannibal then took the issue
to the assembly. But Livy’s account does not suggest this line of events.
191
H A N N I BA L S U F E T E
Hannibal, when defied by the ‘quaestor’, brought the arrested man before the
citizens and criticized both him and the ordo iudicum; and when this met with a
favourable reception, ‘immediately’ brought forward and carried his reform
law. This must have been either at the same meeting—but Livy calls it a contio,
which at Rome anyway was a non-legislative though officially convoked gath-
ering of citizens—or at a legislative assembly convoked very soon after.4
More likely then Hannibal accused the ‘quaestor’ of specific offences, but
made it clear that there was no point in prosecuting him as things stood.
True, in this era sufetes themselves could hear at least some cases, but this
may not have been one of them—or else a sufete’s verdict could be
appealed—very probably meaning that any charge against the ‘quaestor’
would sooner or later go before the far from unbiased One Hundred and
Four. Although this is not certain, it seems the most plausible link between
Hannibal’s joint attack on the ‘quaestor’ and the ‘judges’; and as shown ear-
lier, there are some grounds for thinking that Hasdrubal had amended the
tribunal’s functions back in the 220s.5
The sufete’s tactics worked splendidly. The prospect of an arrogant
offender escaping justice thanks to his connexions aroused citizens’ enthusi-
asm for the proposal to replace lifetime membership of the One Hundred
and Four with a one-year appointment, and to ban membership of two years
in a row. It seems likely that the one-year judges were to be elected by the citi-
zen assembly, like the magistrates: the voters’ keenness would surely have
been dampened if the existing selection-process—the Boards of Five choos-
ing members of the senate for the tribunal—were merely to be modified into
an annual event, nor would that have brought much flexibility or freshness.
The senate, with its few hundred members, would have to start recycling
them for the tribunal after just a few years: not much of a blow against the
widely resented coterie-character of the Hundred and Four. Annual selection
points to popular election.
This was a momentous move. One obvious aim was to open judges to legal
scrutiny, for a judge or ex-judge accused of impropriety could no longer
count on being tried before entrenched and understanding colleagues. Again,
implicit in the change was a near-reversal of the relationship of tribunal to
senate. Instead of being recruited from the senate, the Hundred and Four
would more often than not be recruited from non-senators (though no doubt
senators could seek election too). Many of these, after a term or two as judge,
would surely use their improved repute to seek other offices, including magis-
tracies and a place in the senate.
Hannibal may have calculated on other improvements too. Judges’ hopes
of success in this new judicio-political scheme would force them to be more
&nb
sp; open in their work, and prevent them from favouring aristocratic special
interests too blatantly at ordinary citizens’ expense. The senate in its turn, the
Mighty Ones, would lose their too-easily-exploitable symbiosis with the high-
est court of the republic and, moreover, would have to be more accountable
192
H A N N I BA L S U F E T E
to the rest of the citizen-body: for if prosecuted on serious charges a senator
would find himself facing citizen-elected judges not at all guaranteed to be
friendly.6
Of course critics could point out more than one potential flaw in the new
system. Citizens freshly elected to the tribunal might have no, or very little,
judicial experience, for instance. But this objection would be of small weight
in a world where, for instance, major trials at Rome were held before the citi-
zen assembly and at Athens ordinary citizens regularly sat as juror-judges.
Arguably again, candidates might now win election on the basis of political
or personal attractiveness rather than any particular fitness for the rôle.
Indeed annual elections were almost guaranteed to take on factional over-
tones, at any rate in times when political stresses were high, and in turn this
could promote bribery and misbehaviour all over again. Still, Hannibal might
reply that a regular turnover of tribunal membership would at least make it
easier to bring blatant offenders to book; by contrast the old system had
made it almost impossible (as the clash with the ‘quaestor’ illustrated). Nor—
he could add—was it morally impressive for defenders of a system that
helped perpetuate aristocratic exploitation of public life to complain about
politics still playing a part in judicial affairs after the reform. In any case
money and bribes were a standard element in Punic politics, one that none of
the Barcids objected to and all had made use of. What mattered was to deter
or punish those who went too far and still expected to enjoy impunity.
At least it looked good in theory. And it was better than what had gone
before.
Nothing suggests that Hannibal included a qualification to ensure that
existing judges would be replaced under the new scheme only as each in turn
passed from life. On that basis it would have taken a generation (or an epi-
demic) before the last of the Hundred and Four was popularly elected, and
