What is also telling in the majority of historical and literary narratives about the 204 introduction of Cybele is that Scipio’s family was chosen as the most worthy for Rome to receive and revive the Cybele’s Idaean Mother Goddess link to Troy. In concert with his carefully cultivated public image of religious devotion and connections to the gods, Scipio himself would not have denied his family to be perceived as connected to a divine agent of salvation in Cybele’s cult coming to Rome. This divine association would enlarge his own persona to undertake bringing the war to Africa, which he could work into being part of prophetic fulfillment to rid Italy of Hannibal.
Like Hannibal, whom he seemed to emulate more and more, Scipio’s ability to read people was unusually adept from youth onward. But while Hannibal brooded in Bruttium with no battles to fight, his influence waned in the war by much the same degree as Scipio’s waxed. Even if details are tailored slightly by Polybius—and considerably by Livy—after the fact, only a few glimpses of Scipio’s tactical genius at Cartagena and the Battle of Ilipa and his diplomatic ease with old allies of Carthage such as Massinissa in Spain and Syphax in North Africa are enough to warrant respect for his constructed persona. Whether he cleverly manipulated his own people’s perceptions and superstitions is immaterial; his intellectual probity to plan for years ahead through complicated maneuvers, where the external circumstances were often beyond his control, evidences great intelligence and unusually deep confidence combined with the subtlest political shrewdness. As one military historian suggests, each time Scipio had a different opponent, “Scipio’s military motto would seem to have been, ‘every time a new stratagem’ ” as an artist of war,31 although many of his precedents were from Hannibal as a master teacher. Scipio had his focus fixed on Carthage and would not be turned away from Africa for long. He had the strongest conviction that the surest way to rid Italy of Hannibal was to take the war to Carthage. Hannibal may have been a caged lion, safe only from a distance, but he was still a lion.
Twenty-two
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ZAMA
Now that Spain was no longer important in the war theater for Carthage, mostly removed from the picture and providing no silver for its war efforts, and because Italy had so far survived two invasions from sons of Hamilcar, Rome concentrated in keeping Hannibal isolated in Bruttium during 205 and 204. There was growing perception, no doubt encouraged by Scipio, that Rome had survived the Carthaginian threat and should turn its eyes toward Africa, where Carthage’s original Numidian allies were fractious and less likely to support their old masters.
So much had changed in the landscape of war with increased Roman successes, the Romans could make some compelling arguments to divide the Numidians still further in questioning Carthage’s ongoing ability to wage war if it was so dependent on allies such as the Numidians and mercenaries. The Celts in the north of Italy—who had been Hannibal’s allies while the booty flowed and Rome was backing up—were now also wary because Hannibal’s old gains had been reduced to only a foothold in Italy, and his promises of returning their hegemony had turned sour.
SCIPIO FORCES THE SENATE TO BRING THE WAR TO CARTHAGE
With less threat than ever in the war from Punic armies or their allied forces, Scipio was eventually persuasive in 205 in making his case to the Senate that the war could be taken to Africa and thus force Carthage to recall Hannibal. This seemed reasonable to many Romans, but his overtures were not met without resistance and argument from some, including from the faction of Fabius Maximus, whether from some hidden jealousy at Scipio’s success or prudent fear of leaving Hannibal untended in Bruttium, or both. Scipio argued that there was a huge contrast between ruining an enemy land, as Hannibal had been aggressively doing, than seeing one’s own land ravaged by fire and sword. Italy had been devastated for almost two decades. Give it some rest and now let Africa be the theater of war; let Carthage see from its gates what Romans had witnessed for too long.1
Some in the Senate, such as Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, voiced that Scipio was merely sounding them out about his plans and would put his bill before the people, who were thought to be firmly under his spell. In order not to be circumvented in its authority and made to look weak, the Senate confirmed Scipio not only in his consulship with power over Sicily but also with the provision that he could go to Africa if needed. Scipio always seemed to carry himself with sufficient moral rectitude—living publicly with abstemious behavior and delaying most of his personal gratifications2—that the Senate found little ammunition to pillory or undermine his stated intentions.
WAR PREPARATIONS IN SICILY
Locri had been one of the last cities left to Hannibal in Italy but was betrayed to the Romans in late 205. Hannibal lost a valuable outpost and Ionian port—also famous for its Temple of Proserpina and its zephyrs—but a city that the Carthaginians had not found easy to rule, with customs that Polybius also came to know well later.3 Scipio sent a Roman force of three thousand to take it under tribunes and his legate Pleminius, who was ultimately so heavy-handed that many complaints of mistreatment—some confirmed by quaestor Marcus Porcius Cato—went to the Senate in 204, where Fabius Maximus was still seeking restraints on Scipio and looking for any ammunition to limit his power. When the Senate’s investigators came to Sicily, Scipio was busy preparing for his invasion of Africa. His camps and military exercises and training drills were so impressive, he was able to escape censure.
Scipio’s provisioning for Africa was well planned, properly inventoried, and commissioned on an expected two-year campaign for as many as twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand men, although the actual number is debated.4 One nerve center of Scipio’s Roman forces was a core of retrained survivors from Cannae eager to prove their worth by erasing the shame of that defeat as O’Connell has so ably argued. The invasion of Africa would be done with forty transport ships carrying soldiers, arms, siege machinery,5 and rations. Almost two months’ worth of fresh water and food were packed, some bread even already baked. Safe passage across from Sicily to Africa was invoked by requisite sacrifices at sea by the general himself, and although it was somewhat risky to invade across more than 120 miles of water, during the actual voyage there was no Carthaginian naval resistance, either due to lack of Carthage’s resources, depleted Carthaginian naval power, lack of preparation in Carthage, or some other unknown reason.
SCIPIO LANDS IN AFRICA
Although the Roman fleet may have intended to land at Cape Bon on the east wing of the Gulf of Tunis, it veered west and landed instead at Cape Farina, not far from the city of Utica, either delayed by seasonal fog or possibly by intent if trying to surprise Carthage. Sextus Julius Frontinus, a highly respected Roman senator and author of a first-century CE book of war stratagems, tells the anecdotal story, true or not, about Scipio’s adept use of omens and transforming negative into positive: “Scipio, having transported his army from Italy to Africa, stumbled as he was disembarking. When he saw the soldiers struck aghast at this, by his steadiness and loftiness of spirit he converted their cause of concern into one of encouragement, by saying: ‘Congratulate me, my men! I have hit Africa hard.’ ”6 While this tale of Frontinus is almost certainly spurious, it nonetheless conforms to Scipio’s recorded keen skills in manipulating perceptions.
SCIPIO LAYS SIEGE TO UTICA
Soon after the Roman fleet landed, the immediate coast cleared as local people fled to nearby Utica or even farther south to Carthage. The city-state sealed its gates perhaps for the first time in decades, considering this huge turn of events as a perceptibly great threat for the first time in this war. While Scipio set up camp on land a brief distance from Utica, the Roman fleet soon moved to blockade Utica from the sea where it anchored.
The fact that Utica—actually an older Phoenician colony than Carthage7—was well fortified thwarted Scipio’s hope of a quick victory to establish a more secure African base as the days wore on. Assault barrages from his siege towers (fortified wooden towers that were filled with sol
diers to attack city walls) were unable to make much headway from land, and attacks from the seaward side also proved ineffective against Utica. After forty-five days, another circumstance turned his attention elsewhere. A joint Carthaginian army of infantry and cavalry assembled by Hasdrubal Gisgo and the Numidian Syphax—larger than the invading Roman force—arrived to relieve Utica, and Scipio was forced to withdraw his army to a nearby walled camp for wintering on the headland.
Scipio now mulled a different approach: How could he disentangle Syphax from Carthage despite the king’s marriage to Sophonisba, his Carthaginian wife? Syphax was lured into private negotiations. For his part, Syphax demanded both a Roman exit from Africa to coincide with Hannibal’s exit from Italy. Typical for heated Numidian rivalries, Syphax seemingly wanted this so that he could try to get rid of his rival Massinissa himself and keep Rome out of Africa—better for his Numidians with a weakened Carthage than a surging Rome. Scipio knew this.
He was content to keep Syphax dangling, lulling the Numidian with a noncommittal exchange of envoys while playing his waiting game. Scipio sent trained officers as military spies under the guise of being lackeys or slaves to keenly observe the Numidian camp and the adjoining Carthaginian one. Scipio’s garnering intelligence assets was similar to what Hannibal had accomplished years before when he had resources among disaffected locals and Celts throughout Roman army camps in Italy.
The intelligence results Scipio learned in this way were useful in early 203: the enemy armies had an overly relaxed attitude, and morale was low, with both Carthage and Numidians eager for a treaty. Scipio concluded correctly that the enemy was ill-prepared for battle. Plus, the Carthaginian army was housed in wood huts, and the Numidians in reed shelters not always within the army camp stockade. Now Scipio acted far more like devious Hannibal than a methodical Roman, cleverly dissembling by pretending to reopen his siege of Utica with a renewed blockade and war engines. Since the enemy camps were made of highly flammable dry wood and reed, Scipio’s plan was to set fire to the two enemy camps simultaneously if needed and take advantage of the pandemonium to mow down the sleepy soldiers who fled their burning shelters. The enemy troops seven miles away went to bed thinking they were safely distant when Scipio sent a stealthy night force down to his enemies’ camps after the Roman night trumpets had sounded a pretend tattoo for bed in case any foe could hear.8
On arriving in the middle of the night under cover of darkness, Scipio quietly divided his forces, sending his adjutant Laelius with Massinissa to Syphax’s Numidian camp while he went to Hasdrubal Gisgo’s camp. Laelius and Massinissa with cavalry were easily able to quickly enter the camp of Syphax and his sleeping Numidians because much of it was outside the stockade; they set fire to it, and it was soon engulfed in flames as the Roman and allied forces rode through, cutting down any who stumbled around suddenly awake. Scipio in the same way took out the Carthaginian camp’s fighters when they were distracted by the neighboring conflagration. The outcome was that although their leaders Syphax and Gisgo escaped in time, the disastrous loss of both enemies, Numidian and Carthaginian, was almost complete, with many thousands dead or captured. If this act seemed treacherous on the part of Scipio—contra Livy, who repeatedly mentions “Punica fides” as the only fitting description of untrustworthy Carthaginians9—when Syphax and even Gisgo had expected peace as hinted, it was also brilliantly ruthless. A relentless Scipio pursued his enemies, who paid severely for their negligence as he mercilessly drove them away in slaughter before they had time to arm themselves. After his victory, Scipio swept through the region mopping up in North African towns before finally returning to Utica to renew his siege. But the inaction was temporary, as neither Scipio nor Carthage could afford to let an invasion simmer.
ANOTHER CARTHAGINIAN DISASTER AT THE BATTLE OF THE GREAT PLAIN
Carthage, with its still-deep pockets, quickly raised another mercenary army of thirty thousand within a few months, a portion of them reinforcements comprising the last four thousand mercenary Celtiberians from the south of Spain—those few remaining who still opposed Rome. This time the new Carthaginian army assembled on the Bagradas (Medjerda10) River southwest of Utica at a flat area called the Great Plain, again with King Syphax and whatever Numidians Hasdrubal could muster.
With Massinissa’s cavalry as his most mobile wing, Scipio formed three other Roman lines of battle: the faster light infantry (hastati) as the front line; the intermediate, better-protected infantry ( principes) forming the second line; and his heavy infantry (triarii) as his rear line. Scipio sent Massinissa and his cavalry into a furious charge driving forcefully into the Carthaginian line—almost like the flying wedge Alexander had used successfully against the Persians of King Darius III—which buckled the Carthaginian line. Most of the Carthaginian infantry fled in scattered retreat along with the modest Carthaginian cavalry, and the Numidians of Scipio chased most of the Carthaginians from the battle. This left only the veteran Spanish mercenary infantry fighting fiercely to hold the line against Scipio’s light infantry hastati, whose number they equaled. Scipio then sent in his second and third lines of heavier infantry from behind to move right and left along both flanks—the old Hannibal tactic of envelopment—and the Celtiberians were surrounded by battle on three sides with great loss. Only a few Celtiberian mercenaries escaped along with scattered troops led by Hasdrubal and Syphax, who again were able to flee. Hasdrubal fled back to Carthage and Syphax trying to reach the Numidian city of Cirta. As soon as Carthage found out it was such a clear victory for Scipio, the Carthaginian elders met in council to decide the safest salvage plan.
THE TRAGEDY OF SOPHONISBA
Massinissa and Laelius maneuvered southwest to Numidia, where Massinissa aimed to recapture Cirta, which had once belonged to his tribe before Syphax usurped it. Massinissa also hoped to take the king’s beautiful wife captive because Sophonisba had once been promised to him. This kind of “wife stealing” was not unprecedented in the ways the hotheaded Numidians conducted romance, given how history has portrayed Numidians—however barbaric in Roman eyes.11 The complete defeat of Syphax—thrown from his horse—was a coup for Massinissa and Laelius, who captured him alive en route to Cirta. Massinissa asked Laelius to let him go to Cirta without any accompanying Romans, where he was also temporarily successful in claiming Sophonisba, making her his wife in a hasty ceremony to keep her from Roman hands.
But this proud Carthaginian woman knew her fate—even begging for death as she clung to his knees—when Scipio instead demanded her as part of the Roman spoils, not for himself but for Rome. Regardless of Massinissa’s hopes that she would accept both marriage and captivity, she refused as a Carthaginian to go to Rome as a spectacle of triumph and committed suicide by taking poison. Apparently the poison had been provided by Massinissa, according to Appian12 (a variant on the idea that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could). As historical tragedy, her story has been adapted to many artistic genres more than a few times by sympathetic masters such as Petrarch and Voltaire in epic poetry or drama, Mantegna and Rembrandt in painting, and Henry Purcell and Christoph Gluck in opera. Although he had lost Sophonisba, Massinissa quickly took over the Numidian kingdom of the humbled Syphax, who would soon go as a prisoner to Rome, unlike his lost wife. Despite the mercurial way the besotted Numidian victor had tried to save Sophonisba but also allowed her poison, Scipio saluted Massinissa with the scepter of Numidian kingship, and Carthage had almost no remaining Numidian allies.
After this disaster of two Carthaginian forces defeated at the hands of Scipio and his Numidian allies close to home, a worried Carthage sued for terms of peace. This was most likely in part a delaying tactic while it also played the one card it had left: recall Hannibal from Italy to save Africa. Although cooped up in Bruttium with his military intelligence resources now far less extensive, Hannibal could have even guessed this last-gasp gambit if he had been following the events unfolding in Africa. Certainly the war that Hannibal’s original strategy must have
envisioned and hoped would be short13—for the sake of his invasion and resources—had dragged on interminably and drained his military campaign coffers as well as Carthage’s patience—however stingy the homeland had been.
HANNIBAL’S RECALL TO CARTHAGE
Hannibal would now have to abandon the extensive field of his many victories—where he had first roamed almost at will—but which had now shrunk to a mere wild peninsula at the extreme southwestern end of Italy. He first had to make sure to send home all his useless Italian allied forces; those unable to be counted on away from Italy and their own homes. Then Hannibal had to do something that must have been even more difficult: he was forced to slaughter all the horses he could not transport14 so that the Romans would not capture them and use them against Carthage. It must have been awful for a general to destroy such valuable assets, and if the screams of horses dying not in battle but in useless death were not utterly heart-wrenching to anyone who heard—despite the assertions of Diodorus Siculus and Appian, even one as tough as Hannibal would probably not want to be around for the destruction—the report of this slaughter does underscore the brutality of war and how ruthless a hardened general like Hannibal could be.
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