Hannibal

by Patrick N Hunt

  Imagine the shock of the Celts who returned excitedly early the next morning only to find the trapped army had escaped. They saw with acute disappointment the stripped bodies of the dead left behind along with the dead pack animals and useless food supplies scattered about the rocks and the streambed. The largest prize they had ever witnessed had slipped through their fingers, and they returned glumly to their villages after salvaging what they could of the supplies.

  These Celts realized the element of surprise was gone and knew the rest of Hannibal’s army had caught up. Hannibal was not yet out of danger, however, as he now had to confront the steepest part of the ascent. The spectacular alpine peaks towered above his men as they slowly climbed up a path alongside rushing streams and crashing waterfalls over huge rocks, and hemmed in by pine and larch trees. The newly wounded began to drop back behind the main body, gasping for breath as they climbed. Everyone in the shattered army could now see fresh snow on the heights above them, with huge expanses of ice on the highest peaks.

  But the greatest burden Hannibal now faced was how to feed his army after having lost almost all his food train and with so few pack animals left. Many of the remaining animals would probably have to be slaughtered soon, since they now carried next to nothing except firewood picked up through the forest along the way. Even the three dozen or so lumbering elephants would have voiced their hunger; their occasional trumpeting echoing in the ascending valley when they couldn’t find much grass between the rocks—what little that could grow in this cold place. Other historians have also posed the difficulty of elephants foraging in higher montane elevations, especially since they would need to consume a minimum of a hundred pounds per day to stay alive, a huge problem near an alpine summit if this sojourn took several days.12

  BAD ADVICE TO HAUNT HANNIBAL

  A gruesome tale fueled by some later Romans, although much debated and mostly dismissed, is that even before his alpine march, Hannibal was purportedly told to consider cannibalism of his soldiers who would die of starvation. This possibility was supposedly presented by a counselor named Hannibal Monomachos in the Carthaginian war council. The fact that Polybius discusses it13 gave it added credibility, but it seems almost certain that Hannibal never actually resorted to it, because Polybius never comments on its implementation, instead stating that Hannibal could never persuade himself to practice cannibalism. Given the later exaggerated reputation of Hannibal for cruelty, such Roman propaganda is not surprising.14

  Once Hannibal’s army hit the wind-swept tree line, where only a few blizzard-blasted scrub trees clung to the rocks, only thin air and the jagged stone of surrounding cliffs met the eye. The cold valley trail wound higher and higher. The tiring army gasped for breath, and the elephants, surely, nervous at such a different, barren landscape, could be answered by a different chilling sound: gathering Alpine wolves howling to one another as they sensed death coming for some of the falling stragglers being left farther behind. Everyone would soon know deep and debilitating hunger. Aware that his battered army could not last long in these circumstances, Hannibal pushed onward at the front of the beleaguered army as fast as possible to the snow-whitened summit ahead.

  Nine

  * * *

  SUMMIT OF THE ALPS

  Ascending the high valley where jagged peaks loomed above, Hannibal and his exhausted men arrived at the summit of the Alps, where tough inclement weather is the norm and where there would be little fodder for animals.1 Polybius said it was the highest pass of the Alps, which, of course, means the highest known to the Romans at the time, not the highest known today.2 In early November Hannibal’s army would have already crossed above that elevation where snow had covered the ground surface. Polybius writes:

  “After an ascent of nine days, Hannibal reached the summit, and encamping there remained for two days to rest the survivors of his army and wait for stragglers . . . As it was now close on the setting of the Pleiades, snow had already gathered on the summit.”3

  In recording the time of year by the “setting of the Pleiades,” a famous, highly visible cluster of seven stars marking the night calendar, Polybius refers to a time from late October though early November. In the deep shadow of overhanging peaks or facing north, where the sun barely reaches under high crags, the snow has already begun to drift and will often last year long above eight thousand feet. Streams shrunken by the gradual depletion of snowmelt at this time of year would have frozen over as water stopped flowing.

  DEARTH OF MATERIAL ARTIFACTS ALONG HANNIBAL’S ALPINE ROUTE

  One of the reasons that Hannibal’s exact route is so contentious is the lack of artifacts. But this dearth can be explained. Anyone who died en route over the worst part of the Alpine ascent would be stripped almost immediately after he fell for the last time. It is conceivable that some of the fallen army hovering at consciousness would have found their approaching deaths accelerated by the knives of desperate comrades needing clothes. Anything of the remotest value whatsoever would be taken quickly.

  Likewise, all coins, weapons, and traces of bronze or iron metal would have been taken from those too weak to defend themselves. There hardly would have been any attempt to bury the dead along these desolate paths, since the enormous effort required would have been too much in rocky, shallow soil. After Hannibal’s army had descended, any Celtic marauders who braved the winter and scavenged the remains would have collected whatever little remained. Wolves would have disarticulated and carried away any bones for marrow.4

  Even in remaining daylight, fires would be lit with the ever-present embers an army always carried in protected braziers, but at the altitude of probably no less than eight thousand feet,5 the wood and tinder would take forever to light in the cold. Dampness made it worse, and if men’s clothing were wet, the summit temperature that would now rarely rise above freezing could cloak their garments with ice even as they huddled in repeated paroxysms of chills around the many fires to survive. While moving, their metabolisms could stave off some of the cold, but when they finally arrived in the summit valley to camp, they would suddenly become painfully aware of the freezing temperature, most likely abysmally lower than many had ever faced.

  According to Polybius, Hannibal’s army camped at the summit under such trying conditions of cold, deprivation, and exhaustion that his men suffered severe depression. Polybius ascribes this collective state of mind and spirit to the enormous toll of the last two days following the second ambush, just as they were about to begin the final ascent at the most challenging part of the Alpine crossing.6

  THE DEBATED VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT INTO ITALY

  Hannibal made a concerted effort to raise the spirits of the army, leading his men to the dramatic precipice very close by at the edge of the summit camp possibly at the broad Clapier-Savine Coche saddle around 8,500 feet altitude with an immense vista when there are no clouds or fog to obscure the view. From this height, Italy opens up before the eyes of viewers, creating a spectacle of mountains dropping away in undulating waves to the plain of the Po Valley far below, especially from the south side of the Savine-Coche Valley, where humans have crossed since the Neolithic Age even with perennial snow traces here.

  Livy gives us the extended text of a famous speech by Hannibal, but it is most likely an invention. Polybius on the other hand, gives us no such speech.7 Livy even says that the hopelessness of utter exhaustion was written on the soldiers’ faces, which was probably true, although Polybius doesn’t record such an emotive detail. Polybius relates that Hannibal summoned his starving army to this meeting place at the summit in order to cheer them up. He showed them the plain of the Po below and reminded them of the friendly Celts who lived there, also pointing out the direction of Rome beyond the horizon. Polybius has Hannibal use a geographical simile, comparing a high acropolis fortress citadel (by the mountainous Alps) to a city on flatter ground below (Italy).8 Polybius suggests this wise motivational moment worked partly, since the exhausted men could now clearly see exactly what he
meant, and Hannibal’s encouragement may have been reinforced by some of the Boii Celts who had been with them on the march since the Pyrenees so many months before.

  THE DIFFICULT ALPINE DESCENT

  Having waited three abysmal days to rest his fitful army in the freezing weather and to regather as many stragglers among men and animals that survived the ascent to the summit, Hannibal broke the Alpine camp and began the slow descent. Now he encountered a different challenge. As the steep eastern scarp into Italy is so vertical in many places, his army would have met with drop-offs and loose fallen rocks that were immensely dangerous, especially when covered by snow. Because a climber leans into an ascent but pitches forward in a descent, gravity can be an enemy going down, as force propels one too quickly. The Alps have a more severe slope on the eastern scarp into Italy.

  Hannibal’s army soon found itself stymied in one place by a fresh rock break-off and precipice, as mentioned in Polybius.9 Footing was so much in jeopardy that Polybius says a time-consuming path had to be cleared.

  LIVY’S FAMOUS BUT DUBIOUS VINEGAR ROCK-SPLITTING TALE

  Livy adds here a very famous and fascinating but undocumented story, dismissed as fiction by most commentators. Trying to work through the fallen rock blocking the narrow path (Livy’s later deviation from Polybius), the army engineers solved part of the problem with an “ingenious” method combining heat and liquid.10 Cut timber was stacked against the impassable rock cliff and lit with difficulty at this altitude but aided by a strong wind. Then the heated rocks were soaked with “sour wine” (vinegar), a common army ration that rendered the rock more friable in combination with the heat. This method could work on some rocks, especially carbonate or similar rock if the natural fractures were thus expanded. As unusual as it seems, Livy’s story is repeated after him by Ammianus Marcellinus and others, and has generated enormous speculation and comment for ages.11

  Polybius does not mention this intriguing anecdote, stating only that after trying to detour around the break-off, the soldiers were set to work “to build up a path along the cliff . . . a most toilsome task . . . so that [it took] with great difficulty three days to get the elephants across but in a wretched condition from hunger.”12 Livy states that large trees were felled—cut from where?—while Polybius makes it clear they were still above the tree line: in the Alps, generally just above 6,000 to 6,500 feet. Any trees growing at this elevation would have been stunted.13

  The terrible descent took three painful days14 for the long army column threading a narrow path, gradually leaving the boulder-strewn precipices of the rockiest landscape and finally dropping into forest again and then pasturage. The survivors likely couldn’t move for days as they rested and recouped strength from provisions in vegetation and hunted animals.

  Polybius says that the descent was as costly in life as the ascent, and more difficult.15 It is likely that more lives were lost in the Alpine campaign to natural dangers of mountainous precipices and slippery snow than to Celtic attack or ambush. Accordingly, after starting out on the Alpine approach with around thirty-eight thousand infantry and more than eight thousand horses or cavalry, Hannibal lost almost half his army in the Alps. Such loss of life would be unacceptable in modern warfare, seemingly so irresponsible that any leader who did this would be sacked by his government.

  But if Hannibal, far from any Carthaginian court of inquiry, was not callous to such loss of provisions and men, he certainly was well aware of what this meant in military terms. He knew that his task of attacking and humbling the Romans was now all the more difficult. He would have to rely heavily on allied Celts in Italy, a potential nightmare with their ever fickle and ambiguous tribal loyalties. How much he communicated this to his close circle of officers is unknown, but it is not unlikely this knowledge was shared with his tired veterans who knew how many soldiers had perished en route.

  THE WRETCHED STATE OF HANNIBAL’S ARMY

  Polybius also says gravely that at the end of their two weeks’ time in the Alps, these wretched human survivors of Hannibal’s army were more like animals than men in both appearance and condition, having been reduced to the bare minimum state of survival from starvation, frostbite, and utter exhaustion.16 Here is where difficulties of food supply in winter could haunt an army most. Victualizing from spring to autumn was hard enough on the move, but in winter the risks are compounded.17 Finally the army’s near delirium from starvation and fear of imminent death was replaced with sleep and food, their troubled dreams giving way to glimmers of hope.

  After restful days at the lower elevations, these soldiers would put their nightmare behind them as fast as they could. Now their feet were on soft flat turf again. Hannibal might have sacrificed in heartfelt thanks, possibly alone to his god Baal, the god of stormy mountains; perhaps even possibly wondering if the lives of his lost men were also sacrifices to this god who was as hard as the rock of his Alps.

  Ten

  * * *

  TICINUS

  After the fifteen days or so it took Hannibal and his army to cross the entire Alps from the foothills to the flat Po plain, time for much-needed recuperation was in order.1 The soldiers must have understood that this journey was a one-way epic march. As commentators have shown, Hannibal’s army would be unlikely ever to return. In Livy’s words, Hannibal’s speech to his men was blunt:

  “North and South, the sea hems you in. You have not a single ship even to escape in to save your lives. Facing you is the Po . . . Behind you is the Alpine barrier which even in the flower and freshness of your strength you almost failed to cross . . . You must conquer or die.”2

  Livy’s words do not make Hannibal look hard-hearted but merely pragmatic. The inability to turn back was intended to make the army renew its will to fight harder. The only option was to win in its invasion of Italy because any other outcome was death. The soldiers had to take responsibility for their own survival, and the only way this could happen was to fight as a ruthless, organized battle unit that could not afford to be soft or merciful toward the Roman enemy.3

  Polybius sums up the surviving forces after the Alps crossing as twelve thousand soldiers from Africa (Carthaginian, Libyan, Numidian, and so on) and eight thousand Spanish infantry along with six thousand cavalry, for a total of twenty-six thousand.4 Historians have pointed out how pitifully small this invading force was, woefully inadequate to challenge Rome.5 In order to bolster the size of his force, Hannibal would have to make a hugely favorable impression on the Celts, winning enough of them to confidently ally with him.

  Now in his camp east of the Alps where the Po plains began, Hannibal could reassess his reunited and somewhat rested army. All the surviving stragglers were now caught up, and if Hannibal and his officers counted total losses, they must have been concerned about current troop strength.

  Whether the survivors wondered about the fate of those who had dropped too far back—many falling victim to the skulking mountain Celts or the hungry wolves they had seen shadowing the gaunt stragglers—Hannibal’s army repaired its equipment and stitched up its ragged clothes. If the route is deducible here, they would have most likely camped somewhere near Segusio (modern Susa, Italy) along the deep Dora Riparia River Valley, at this point still surrounded by mountains and not yet in the Po plain. They no doubt fed on game such as wild boar from the nearby forests, polished the rust off their weapons, and began to train again for the inevitable journey eastward down into Italy.

  The Taurini tribe of Celts lived along the banks of the Po River on the edge of the plain in what is now Turin, which archaeology and textual history confirm.6 Here where it is still easy to be in the shadow of the darkly visible Alps, Taurini tribal settlements and farming territories were spread along the western Po Valley. Livy too asserts that Hannibal came down among the Taurini.7

  Hannibal’s army now gathered out of the foothills. Their scouts and spies had reported that the Taurini were quarreling with an enemy tribe, the Insubres, who apparently had sided with Hannibal. Just
south of the confluence of the Dora Riparia and the Po was the heaviest concentration of their farming tribe, the semiurban town of Taurasia, and west of here was where the Taurini decided to oppose Hannibal.

  Hannibal’s envoys had sought an alliance with the Taurini—“making overtures,” as Polybius says,8 and no doubt also playing up their anti-Roman sentiments—but the xenophobic and overoptimistic Taurini rejected any such friendship. Apparently no word had yet reached these Italian Celts of what happened to the Allobroges, as distant over the Alps as if on the far side of the moon. Hannibal now had to make a statement, a form of “psychological warfare,” as one historian notes.9 Others affirm that despite having granted relative clemency to captured enemies, Hannibal’s “attitude to those who resisted him was uncompromising.”10

  The Taurini were no match even for hardened soldiers who had recently endured so much and were still on the mend. Hannibal’s army surrounded Taurasia11 and in three days reduced it to a smoking ruin, as well as massacred the Taurini. Suddenly unified by being attuned to their common antagonist Rome, as Hannibal must have expressed to them, the western Padana tribes rapidly turned their allegiance to Hannibal, as Polybius tells us, well aware that resistance would yield the same result.12