Hannibal’s cavalry descended downhill behind the Romans and cut off any escape by sealing off the Borghetto. Now the Romans were in a gauntlet: Hannibal’s army attacked on three sides, with the lake to the south, likely in a line that stretched at least full four miles of the Roman column.19 Here Hannibal used the marshy lake edge as part of his arsenal. Hannibal’s separate forces seemed to have hit the entire Roman column simultaneously,20 and the unready and totally surprised Romans had no time to change from marching formation to battle formation. A terrible onslaught came at them out of the fog with a roar—especially the Celts—and the thunder of horses. The Balearic slingshots pummeled the Romans, as did spears and other projectiles, appearing from nowhere, possibly before the Romans had their shields up.
The Romans fought bravely, and the fighting was fierce, but it was nearly a fait accompli. The sounds of battle came from everywhere in the fog, and the Romans would not have seen much of the enemy until it was upon them. No matter which way the Romans turned, death came from everywhere, and they were “cut down in their marching order,” Polybius claims.21
Due to the fog, the sounds of battle—with thuds of blows, metal on metal, shouts, screams, and groans—would have been more apparent than visual evidence. This would have been part of the ethos of chaos intended by Hannibal and would have been much harder on the regularized formations of Romans than on Hannibal’s army, especially his Celts, who championed individual hand-to-hand combat rather than close-knit organization. The fog hampered the efforts of Roman officers to turn rank and file into battle formation. It continued to stymie officers’ commands to regroup if they could barely see one another, let alone the enemy. Many Romans must have fought valiantly, especially the veterans, who were trained to fight to the death. Their tragedy is due mostly to Flaminius’ poor leadership, as Polybius says, “betrayed by their commander’s lack of judgment.”22 Livy claims nobly that their one hope of life rested in their swords, ultimately dependent not on their officers but on their individual will to fight, however futile, but he may have been only putting a good face on one of the biggest ambushes in ancient history.23
If Hannibal’s army had little visibility in the fog, at least it had the advantage of controlling the direction of the battle from the outset, whereas the Romans, individually and collectively, were caught in the vise of an attack that compressed them on all sides, with the only stationary force—the lake—being equally perilous. If the Romans backed too far into the water, some effects of hypothermia—such as the draining of body heat—would slow them down even more. Retreating up to their necks to escape, many Romans drowned in their heavy armor. Numidian cavalry were waiting wherever they might attempt to come ashore. Polybius says that many Romans surrendered in the lake, with only their heads above water, lifting their hands as they pitifully begged for mercy but were hacked down anyway.24 The slaughter of Romans was everywhere: on the road, in the plain, and in the lake, whose lapping shallows were tinted with the blood of the Roman dead.
The battle lasted most of the morning—“three long bloody hours” as Livy puts it.25 If there were an epicenter, it would have been around Flaminius. While Polybius denigrates Flaminius as being most dejected and filled with the “utmost dismay,”26 and possibly dread at finally seeing his folly, Livy claims instead that he was moving about trying to help any Roman with a core group of his best men, who were “as determined to save him as the enemies were to kill him.”27
But Flaminius was conspicuous in his ornate consular regalia and equipment, no doubt also surrounded by the glint and color of legionary standards, and this eventually was a magnet for enemy attention. At the heart of the battle, one Insubres Celt warrior on horseback, possibly a leader named Ducarius,28 recognized Flaminius and spurred his horse forward into the thickest battle frenzy, crying that he would sacrifice the consul to the Celts whom Romans had turned into ghosts. This was a normal Celtic action, looking to be a champion with a glorious kill of an enemy commander. He rode with furious abandon over Flaminius’ armor bearer and with great force impaled the consul with his lance, driving it through his body with his momentum. Flaminius dropped like a stone. His men surrounded him with shields to protect him as he lay dying, even as the Celtic lancer may have tried to take a trophy by stripping him of a piece of consular regalia such as his plumed helmet.
News of Flaminius’ death spread faster than an official command and sent the surviving Roman army into final panic. Such an important death invigorates one side in battle just as it fills the other with dread, a now-headless army. The panic was probably exacerbated by the fact that, as one historian points out, many of these soldiers had already witnessed Hannibal’s tactical surprise at the Trebia River in 218.29 They had witnessed one impetuous general in Sempronius and now likewise in Flaminius.
One group of six thousand Romans at the front, however, had fought its way out, and when the soldiers could see nothing due to the fog, they climbed to a spur over the valley. But when the sun’s heat on this June day finally dispersed the fog, it was clear that the valley was filled with Roman bodies piled everywhere. Hannibal’s army was gathering groups of prisoners who had surrendered or were too wounded to fight. Reminders of the Roman bloodbath are still found today in relict names of local streams such as the Sanguineto (bloody place).
The isolated six thousand Roman soldiers who had escaped the slaughter were soon surrounded in a village where they had fled. Maharbal, Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry commander, and Spanish infantry and pikemen had noticed them fleeing and soon found them. The Romans surrendered, thinking that if they abandoned their weapons their lives would be spared. But Hannibal freed only the Romans’ Celtic allies, sending them to their homes with the astute propaganda of claiming their enemy was not him but Rome.
The number of Roman deaths at Trasimene is stated at 15,000, with an equal number of prisoners, including the wounded. This is as much as a 75 percent loss,30 a staggering quantity for an ancient battle. An entire Roman army of at least around 40,000 men was reduced to only the 6,000 soldiers who escaped in disorder as the broken fragments of several legions. One of the ironies of this battle is that Flaminius had brought hundreds of manacles and chains31 to carry off Hannibal’s army as slaves to Rome. Now their own chains must have bound them as they were taken captive prisoners of Hannibal. Hannibal lost a tenth of the number of Roman deaths—about 1,500, according to Polybius—although Livy claims 2,500 enemy dead,32 mostly the Celts who had been at the direct center of the Roman column that had fought first and probably last.33
The Romans protecting the body of Flaminius must have also soon perished because after the battle, Hannibal tried to give Flaminius a decent burial, but the body could not be identified on the battlefield. Flaminius’ corpse had been likely stripped of armor and regalia and maybe decapitated in Celtic fashion. This possible decapitation was eerily symbolic of the now-headless Roman army at Trasimene.
The disaster of Trasimene was followed immediately by another awful setback. Up north, Servilius had by now heard that Hannibal was in Etruria and had sent four thousand cavalry from Ariminum to help Flaminius. He planned to follow soon with his full army, hoping to intercept Hannibal, possibly to march south along the Via Flaminia34 so that he and Flaminius could bottle up Hannibal between them. Perhaps Servilius thought that together they could set up Hannibal in a trap, when it was the other way around.
Hannibal’s informants who had been watching Ariminum told him of the cavalry force, and Hannibal immediately sent out Maharbal with some Numidian cavalry and pikemen. The more mobile Punic force caught the Roman reinforcements unprepared, slaughtered half, and took the remainder prisoner the next day. Three days after the battle at Trasimene, this action added another two thousand Roman deaths and an equal number of Roman prisoners carried away, an unheard-of catastrophe for a standing Roman army.35
The dire double news of the Trasimene defeat and of Servilius’ reinforcements took Rome by utter surprise. The shock waves r
everberated throughout Italy. According to Livy,36 common citizens flocked en masse to the old Roman Forum, and the capital suddenly swelled with crowds who’d left their homes and gathered, filled with the dread of rumor. Wailing women waited at the city gates hoping to hear news of surviving loved ones. The crowds became so great that the Senate had to respond. The quaestor (a Roman magistrate, lower than praetor, involved in the treasury) Marcus Pomponius announced in the most laconic utterance, “We have been defeated in a great battle.” Other praetors (an elected high Roman magistrate, sometimes legionary commanders of past armies) of the Senate forced the whole assembly to sit for days from dawn to dusk and debate who would succeed to restore leadership to the legions.37 Trasimene was a true defeat, as the quaestor acknowledged before the assembled people of Rome; the most serious crisis possible.
Again, as at Trebia, Hannibal used nature—the lake and the fog—as a weapon of war, virtually as effective as a whole new army. Hannibal had achieved something unprecedented. He seems almost to have invented environmental warfare. Having incorporated it into his battle plan, he would be emboldened to use nature again.
Fourteen
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FABIUS MAXIMUS AND ESCAPE
After the disaster of Trasimene, all of Rome was now wholly apprehensive, its confidence shattered. The Roman defeat with the death or capture of at least thirty thousand soldiers—adding in the defeat and capture of Servilius Geminus’ four thousand cavalry en route from Ariminum—was a catastrophe that sent terror through Roman Italy. The paralyzed Romans were now unsure how to deal with Hannibal. First Ticino, then Trebia, and now Trasimene undermined their confidence in their vaunted military. Sharing leadership in the two-general system—a veteran officer and a political appointee—was now considered ill-advised.
After some worried dithering, Rome’s primary response was to appoint a military dictator to coalesce military leadership. This decision was unusual because the last time a dictator had been appointed was in 249 during the First Punic War. While the surviving consul Servilius Geminus should have been involved in the appointment, he was still held up in Ariminum partly by wariness of Hannibal.
The Senate appointed the veteran Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator to deal with Hannibal. This position consolidated power into one leader. His second in command, mainly over the Roman cavalry, was the younger Marcus Minucius Rufus, appointed magister equitum, or master of horse. Minucius had been a consul in 221,1 and because Fabius could not choose his own cavalry officer, he had to accept Minucius, who was elected. Given their somewhat forced relationship and the complete contrasts between the two—Fabius being older, from a distinguished family, resolute and patient to a fault; Minucius being a proudly rising star, hyperactive and inclined to hot oratory—there was immediate friction between Fabius and Minucius.
QUINTUS FABIUS MAXIMUS
Hannibal had never encountered a Roman foe both so different from himself and other Roman generals and yet so cautious. Like the Scipios, Quintus Fabius Maximus (280–203 BCE) was a member of a prominent Roman military family, the Fabii. Fabius himself was a distinguished civil servant who had held the office of censor in 230 and was elected consul twice in 233 and 228 BCE, before his appointment as dictator. While everyone thought Fabius rigid, slow of mind, and inflexibly dull in his youth, Plutarch defended him as unwaveringly steadfast as an adult in military matters. Fabius was already much involved in this war because two years previously (219) he had been a member of the delegation that had gone to Carthage to complain about Saguntum, demand Hannibal’s surrender, and ascertain Carthage’s motives.
In the previous century, the family of Quintus Fabius had earned the right to style themselves Maximus as their final cognomen in the three-name system, identifying this branch of the Fabii as the “Greatest”.2 Fabius’ new title of dictator (a temporary office of exceptional power, not a modern-day autocrat) for this severe military crisis allowed him enormous power, or imperium.3 While he was old for this new office, around fifty-eight, Fabius was still the most respected survivor of the current Roman debacles, with considerable military experience.
Rome worried that Hannibal might be headed for the capital itself. Impromptu bulwarks of earthen berms were hastily reinforced, and farmers who feared Hannibal’s advance quickly harvested their crops and fled to Rome. The few survivors of the encounters with Hannibal, possibly mostly deserters, improvised even more dramatic tales of this diabolic adversary and made themselves out as honorable veterans to detract from their shame.
Many superstitious Romans even fell back on religious fervor to curry favor with any god who might better protect them, including extra sacrifices to Mars, god of war. A special and serious banquet to which all the major twelve gods were invited—a lectisternium—was conducted after almost a two-century hiatus.4 Added attention to omens was also important to make up for the apparent disregard of religion by Flaminius, who died at Trasimene, and Fabius made sure this neglect was corrected with massive public sacrifice and personal austerity.
After consolidating the city’s defenses, especially strengthening walls, forging new weapons, and conscripting soldiers to man these walls, Fabius and Minucius raised about forty thousand men in replenished legions, half of whom were inexperienced recruits from burnt farms in the ravaged North. The new dictator assembled his two new legions of conscripts, gathered the remnants of Servilius’ two legions, and then marched over the mountains east to Apulia to wait for Hannibal. Along the way, Fabius evacuated every town that he was glumly certain Hannibal would pillage. Fabius’ grim determination was countered by Minucius’ overambitious posturing—the master of horse convinced that Rome was superior.
Over the next few years, Fabius would ultimately earn, mostly posthumously, the famous—or infamous—epithet of Cunctator, “the Delayer,” because of his cautious policies toward Hannibal, avoiding conflict wherever possible. As conservative as this strategy appeared, it was ultimately sound, given Hannibal’s ability to destroy whatever Roman army he faced at this time. Fabius also rightly believed he could slowly restore Roman confidence with harassing tactics where he could pick off the enemy one by one in skirmishes against small raiding parties. He regarded such small successes as positive signs after battle debacles.5 Whatever reservations might be held about Fabius relative to the more colorful Hannibal, it must be admitted that Fabius Maximus was the first to counter Hannibal’s onslaught of favorable battle propaganda. He was the first Roman general who knew how to safely avoid Hannibal whenever possible.
HANNIBAL’S DEPLOYMENT AFTER TRASIMENE
After Trasimene, Hannibal had gone east through what is now Umbria over the Apennines to the region of Picenum and begun a slow march down the Adriatic coast. His troops were weary and their horses mangy. Hannibal’s policy allowed as many foraging parties as necessary until the army regained strength, with seizure after seizure of autumn harvests. Once he learned how the Romans had filled the dearth of leadership after Trasimene, he used several ploys to sow Roman mistrust against their new dictator. He wanted to either provoke Fabius Maximus into a battle he could manipulate—as he had Sempronius and Flaminius, who were more experienced politically than militarily—or portray him as a weak coward.
Moving down the coast from Picenum to Apulia, Hannibal camped near the city of Arpi, where Fabius Maximus was camped nearby. Trying to draw out the Romans, Hannibal deployed his army for battle—but Fabius did not budge. Even though Roman officers such as Minucius were disgusted by Fabius’ unwillingness to engage, Hannibal knew that caution was a virtue. Still, Hannibal now attempted to shame Fabius by open pillaging and amassing farm booty from territory that Rome had claimed from old Samnite holdings. Hannibal must have begun to appreciate that unlike prior Roman generals, Fabius was hard to provoke.
Wherever Hannibal went in a wake of destruction, a column of smoke marked his progress. Fabius followed at a reasonable distance, visible but sufficiently out of reach. Other than a few scouting skirmishes wher
e he could take a few stray Carthaginian scouts, Fabius kept his mostly raw Roman soldiers out of harm’s way, instead skillfully maneuvering to limit Hannibal from revictualizing his army by foraging. Fabius commanded Roman farms to destroy their farms and crops and evacuate them. The Roman dictator harassed Hannibal’s flanks with small skirmishes whenever possible to execute without full engagement.6 Fabius also kept to higher ground because he recognized Hannibal’s military superiority, especially in cavalry,7 unlike some of his fellow military officers, such as Minucius. Polybius makes it clear that Fabius and the Romans had a distinct advantage over the invaders at this time: inexhaustible supplies of provisions and men.8 Historians have estimated the Roman free population at 300,000 adults from about 234 BCE, after the First Punic War, with Italian allies numbering about 600,000 and a slave population adding about another 2 million.9 The same scholars also comment on Rome’s extraordinary ability to levy resources for its military mobilization in the Second Punic War. Even if this total is divided in half to account for gender, there is no way Hannibal could compete for soldiery and personnel for agricultural production even after heavy Roman battle casualties. This may make his achievements with his veterans seem even more remarkable.
With the Romans following behind and above on higher hill ground, Hannibal marched west over the Apennines, through Benevento, and into Campania, the richest and most fertile of all Roman lands—the Ager Falernus, because it was a volcanic region with the best soil. Campania was a virtual cornucopia of Roman wealth. Hannibal had never seen such agricultural bounty, and he quickly acquired war booty, seemingly more than his army could consume. The irony of sacking Campania’s richest farmland would not have been lost on Hannibal, because it was the rich Campanian senators who had started the First Punic War when the Carthaginians had threatened to overwhelm Sicily, which was close to their Roman villas in Campania. One of Hannibal’s camps for several weeks was close to Capua, and the area was flooded with Hannibal’s spoils and thousands of stolen cattle.
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