Hannibal's Dynasty

by Dexter Hoyos

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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

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  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