The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic

by Robert L. O'Connell

  As the fortunes of war continued to spiral out of their control, the Romans demonstrated a willingness to go to practically any lengths to propitiate the gods, including, after the catastrophe at Cannae, human sacrifice and even outsourcing. Thus, as noted earlier, the historian and statesman Fabius Pictor was sent to Greece to consult with the Delphic oracle as to what had gone wrong with the gods and how specifically they might be appeased. The Romans were still attempting to divine the gods’ wishes fifteen years later, with Hannibal continuing to lurk in the south of Italy. When it was brought to the senate’s attention that a prophecy in the sacred Sibylline Books indicated that a foreign invader might be driven from the peninsula by bringing the image of the Idaean Mother from Asia Minor to Rome, a delegation was dispatched to King Attalus of Pergamum to arrange the transfer (Livy 29.10.4ff). Again following the advice of the Delphic oracle, the Romans chose “the best man in Rome,” Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to receive the cult figure. While his cousin Scipio Africanus likely played a greater role in ultimately getting rid of Hannibal, the Roman people were presumably reassured.

  If the sacred in Rome was soaked in blood and battle, so was the profane. This brings us to the controversial subject of gladiatorial combat. Introduced in 264 B.C. as part of funeral ceremonies, the contests quickly took on a life of their own, and are conventionally seen as exemplifying the cruelty and perversity of Roman social life.24 Disregarding the later excesses of the games, gladiators may well originally have had a more serious purpose. Tactically the Roman army fought as individual swordsmen, psychologically the most demanding kind of combat, in its essence sheer human butchery.25 Participation and success demanded extraordinary conditioning; training helped but it was also necessary to remove the veil of mystery from manslaughter. Gladiators showed Romans how to fight and die at close quarters, quite literally to confront mortality.26 To modern sensibilities this must seem cruel, unnecessary, and ultimately criminal; for at a certain level it is simply impossible to bridge the gap that separates us in time and psychology from the Romans. But it may help our understanding to suggest that gladiatorial combat was, at least initially, in part a matter of instruction and not just popular entertainment. What they were seeking to instill was virtus, or individual martial courage, the quality one scholar calls “the root value of the Romans of the middle Republic.”27

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  Accentuating the warlike stature of Rome may seem excessive or even irrelevant, since a number of other contemporary societies were also highly militarized. Yet most, particularly those dependent on irrigated agriculture, were basically tyrannies, and their armies were as much a mechanism of social control as they were implements of belligerence. Other societies, such as the Hellenic city-states, had sufficiently managed to enlist the loyalty of their citizenry to create effective and broad-based fighting formations. Yet the Greeks were forever fighting among themselves, and even the later Hellenistic coalitions forged by the more politically ecumenical Macedonians were brittle and ultimately transitory. The Romans were different.

  As a matter of policy the defeated were certainly subordinated, but they were not subjugated; in the ancient world this was revolutionary. Rome forged a uniquely sturdy confederation based on the twin principles of incorporation and alliance, always informed by the rubric of “divide and rule.”28 Most remarkably, for peoples in the first category (generally incorporated in central Italy) Rome proffered a complex array of enfranchisements that led up to full citizenship. The rest were allies, not of one another, but of Rome only—each city and state was bound by a separate treaty and granted a customized range of options. Only one provision was standardized: all peoples were required to provide troops to serve under Roman command.

  And to ensure they could and did, Romans attempted to literally cement their alliances with a remarkable network of highways, a web of paving stones. One day the empire would be interlinked by a system of more than fifty thousand miles of such roads, but at the time of Hannibal’s invasion this network was limited to the Italic peninsula and struck out in four key directions. The first, the Appian Way (roads were named after the censors who built them, in this case Appius Claudius Caecus), was begun in 312 B.C. and headed south, making the connection to Capua. Later, once the Romans had moved into Magna Graecia, they extended the road into Apulia all the way to Brundisium on the Adriatic at the top of the heel of Italy. To cover the northern flanks, in 241 they constructed the Via Aurelia to the key port of Pisae (modern Pisa) on the west coast facing the Ligurian Sea. Finally, Flaminius, seeking a quick means of reinforcing the northeast against Gallic intrusions, drove an eponymous highway all the way to Ariminum (modern Rimini) far up the peninsula on the Adriatic side.29

  Now, in the actual conduct of the Second Punic War, the roads would prove something of a two-edged sword, since the Carthaginians could use them too. But these highways sent a psychological message to Rome’s junior partners that was hard to miss. Expensive and laborious to build, often straight as an arrow, the highways allowed armies to move quickly to trouble spots. (The roadbeds actually were primarily useful for logistics carts; soldiers generally marched along the shoulders.30) These highways made it clear the Romans were building their coalition to last. Once in Rome’s camp, always in Rome’s camp.

  Yet this merely diagrams the skeletal structure of the confederation. For as the Romans expanded, they very naturally and almost unconsciously transferred their domestic fixation on patron-client relationships to the dependencies they created through conquest. This was done not just as a matter of state policy, but also through networks of individual linkages between key Romans and their families with equivalents abroad, creating a vast web of personal loyalties and mutually beneficial relationships that resulted in a mass of social rituals and guest friendships.31 What emerged was far stronger and more resilient than the basically parasitic empires characteristic of the ancient Middle East. The confederacy was no commonwealth; Rome was very much the dominant partner. In typical Roman fashion there was an element of ambiguity to the entire scheme, but inclusiveness was not just a façade, and it generated real fidelity.

  However, not all were equally loyal and satisfied with their status. When Hannibal crossed into Italy, certain areas to the south of Rome—Samnium, the recently incorporated Greek cities, and Capua, the second city of the peninsula—were restive and prone to secession. But many localities here held firm, as did the Latin heartland and the regions to the north. Because the Carthaginian applied conventional standards of empire to the deceptive Romans, he thought that once he had thrashed them on the battlefield, their allies would fall away like ripe fruit. But in assuming this, he missed a great deal; his analysis was that of seeing an X-ray showing only bare bones, blind to much of the personal connective tissue that held the Roman body politic together.

  Hannibal also may not have fully understood what a large body it was. Rome’s wars, particularly the first one with Carthage, were very costly, and keeping so many men under arms would eventually lead to reproduction problems.32 But when Hannibal arrived, the situation was far from acute; quite the opposite. One of the key advantages of Rome’s alliance system—perhaps the key advantage, considering the huge number of casualties the Carthaginian would inflict—was the vast reserves of manpower it provided.33 Polybius (2.24.1–17), who gives us a detailed and plausible accounting, estimates “the total number of Romans and allies able to bear arms was more than seven hundred thousand foot and seventy thousand horse, while Hannibal invaded Italy with an army of less than twenty thousand men.” The historian neglects to add the Carthaginian’s six thousand cavalry, but his point still stands. Taking on such a behemoth, no matter what Hannibal’s fighting capabilities, was a Sisyphean task.

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  Empiricism, not originality, made Rome. The evolution of Rome’s institutions was ultimately driven by what worked; this helps explain the ramshackle cast of what emerged. Romans did not proceed from theory, nor were they too proud to learn f
rom others—even their enemies. They took what they saw, tried it out, and if it was successful, it became Roman. They also learned from their mistakes and their disasters, which brings us to what Romans themselves would have considered most important—the engine of their expansion, the backbone of the state … the legionary army.

  The force described in Polybius’s famous section on the Roman military system (6.19–42) was in many ways different from the one overwhelmed by the Gauls at the River Allia in 390 B.C. The Roman military would continue to evolve, and some even maintain that Polybius’s description is actually of the force as it existed in his own time and not at the time of the Second Punic War—although most don’t.34 But only the most radical reinterpretation would attempt to argue that by the time of Hannibal’s invasion one key aspect of the force had not already changed.35

  At the core of the army was now the individual foot soldier. This might seem to be a truism; but it is actually critical to understanding why the system was so lethally effective and also how it could be literally crushed at Cannae. That most Roman heavy infantrymen fought in the style of a single combatant has been alluded to earlier; now it is time to go into detail.

  This is not meant to imply that the infantryman was a loner, a tactical outlier. He was very much a constrained part of a larger formation, but his combat responsibilities were individualized.36 In Roman terms virtus was balanced by disciplina, which was seen primarily as a brake on excessively aggressive behavior. Together the two operated as the yin and yang of combat comportment for foot soldiers.37

  Romans had originally fought as part of a phalanx not much different from that of the Greeks. A densely packed mass protected by shields and armed with thrusting spears, the phalanx moved relentlessly forward seeking to break a rival formation through cumulative pressure and wounding. In other words, the violence it inflicted was that of the group. But as the Romans found at the River Allia, such a formation could be enveloped, and once penetrated from the flanks and rear, its inmates became utterly vulnerable. So over the space of time (the sequence is hard to pin down chronologically) the infantryman was transformed into something much more flexible; the phalangite became a legionary and his lethality was personalized.

  It was largely a matter of weapons, or at least how they were employed. Rather than using his spear as a pike, most infantrymen (roughly four out of five) now threw their spears as javelins and then acted primarily as swordsmen—the same sequence followed by Homer’s warriors in The Iliad. They were choreographed not as soloists but as a sanguinary corps de ballet across the forward edge of battle. But if the spirit was Homeric, the details were Roman, worked out mainly through observing their adversaries and figuring out what worked best.

  As his formation approached the enemy, for most legionaries the first offensive act was to cast his pilum, borrowed, some Roman historians believed, from the Samnites, among his most indefatigable enemies.38 Polybius maintains that an infantryman carried two types of pila, a thick and a thin version, one being lighter than the other. It may be that one was for longer ranges, but it is difficult to see how he could have held the spare while charging.39 Besides, penetrating power was maximized at around fifteen feet, which would have limited our rapidly closing Roman to one really effective throw. For the pilum was essentially a manually delivered armor-piercing projectile—a four-foot wooden shaft attached to a long slender iron shank tipped with a barbed pyramid-shaped point, which effectively concentrated all the weapon’s momentum at the point of impact. The target could be an exposed appendage or armored body but was more likely to be a shield, which says a good deal about the thought that went into the weapon and its use. Modern experiments have shown the pilum capable of penetrating about an inch of pine.40 If that happened to be your shield, you were instantly in deep trouble, since it would have been nearly impossible to remove the weapon quickly. Designed to bend on impact (so it couldn’t be thrown back), a protruding pilum was clumsy and heavy enough to marginalize your most important item of protection from the murderous infighting that was bound to follow.

  Once in close to an opponent, a legionary was doubly dangerous. First, he wielded the gladius hispaniensis, a hefty but well-balanced double-edged short sword something over two feet long, tipped with a long triangular point. Probably adopted from Spanish mercenaries serving with the Carthaginians during the First Punic War,41 the sword was easily capable of tearing away entire limbs with a single blow.42 Yet the gladius was most lethal when inflicting puncture wounds, the ever observant Romans having recognized that a penetration of but two inches anywhere on the trunk was generally fatal.43 Hence the legionary is often pictured in a slight crouch with his right or sword arm farthest from his opponent (the opposite of a modern fencer), poised to deliver an upward thrust at the belly or perhaps at an exposed thigh. But he had a basic problem. His short sword, while versatile and lethal, was still short, meaning that a determined thrust or slash could leave the legionary vulnerable to a devastating counterblow. This has led some to surmise that normally Romans attacked in a deliberate probing way, trying to score a number of lesser wounds.44 Given individual differences in courage and aggressiveness, this is plausible, but the legionary had another means of creating an opening that is often overlooked, his shield.

  All Roman heavy infantrymen carried a massive buckler, at the time of Cannae still oval-shaped and approximately four feet long and two feet wide. Also thought to be of Samnite origin, this scutum was carefully constructed of three layers of plywood, each lined up with the grain at right angles to the others for strength. Thicker in the center and flexible at the edges, it was highly resilient to blows but also very heavy. (Reconstructions appear to peg it at about twenty pounds).45 This was compounded by being carried in the left hand with a horizontal handgrip, which, when compared to a vertical handle, made it particularly difficult to wield on the defense. But with an overhand grip this arrangement did enable the user to exert the full force of his shoulder to deliver what amounted to a scutum punch likely to unbalance or even fell an opponent, which might leave the opponent open to a fatal short sword follow-up.

  This routine would not have looked much like fencing or the frenzied hacking of cinematic reconstructions, but more like a lethal sword dance, the adversaries darting and executed from multiple angles of attack. It is important to understand that unlike the closely packed phalangites, legionaries were given a considerable patch of personal space to exploit and defend. Sources disagree as to spacing, with Polybius (18.28–30) giving each legionary a six-foot-by-six-foot box, while Vegetius (3.14, 15) reduces his frontage to three feet and adds slightly to the depth; possibly it varied with circumstances. But in any case these dimensions affirm that the legionary was basically on his own, and that he needed room to fight. When robbed of this space in which to maneuver, as happened at Cannae, he was in trouble. This was a demanding form of combat, but with sufficient training, and when operating within the tactical and strategic schemes the Romans devised, it turned legionaries into extraordinarily deadly warriors.

  But by the time of the Second Punic War the system was still in transition. Eventually, all legionaries would be armed alike, but at this point the methodical Romans still kept an element of the phalanx in their formations. The oldest and presumably the steadiest one fifth of the heavy infantry, the triarii, brought up the rear and retained the thrusting spear—the idea being to form a barrier of last resort should things not go well with the others.

  There were also some variations in defensive equipment, but these were primarily reflective of differences in wealth, not tactical roles. Most important was the differential in upper-body protection, with common soldiers wearing a small nine-inch-square heart protector, or pectorale, while the richer could afford a Celtic-style ring-mail cuirass, likely worn over some sort of padding. Also, Polybius (6.23.12–5) tells us that legionaries employed a single greave, but richer ones might have added a second. Line infantry uniformly appear to have had good helmets, most co
mmonly adaptations of a Gallic design, or Montefortino-type, basically a hemispheric bowl with a neck protector and often equipped with cheek pieces—all topped with an eighteen-inch-tall crest of feathers.46

  All told—pilum, gladius, scutum, helmet, greave, chest protection—this adds up to a lot of stuff. The legionary was a heavy infantryman in fact as well as in name. At the high end—if mail was worn—his arms and accoutrements would have amounted to a nearly eighty-pound burden, around fifty pounds if only a pectorale was included.47 This is of some significance to our story; not only did the trapped legionaries who attempted to swim for it at Lake Trasimene sink like stones, but Cannae was fought in the south of Italy in the middle of summer. Heat prostration was bound to have played a role in the slaughter, with, ironically enough, the best-protected Romans suffering the most. Nevertheless, the legionary of the Second Punic War was still very well equipped to do his job, a judgment endorsed by no less of an authority than Hannibal himself, who outfitted his best troops with Roman accoutrements captured at the Battle of the River Trebia and at Lake Trasimene.48

  When it came to heavy infantry, the Romans took good care of their soldiers and closely attended to their needs. This is further illustrated when we take the individual legionary and place him in formation. As we saw earlier with the triarii, the Roman military’s transition from the phalanx was only partially complete, and the tactical scheme at Cannae plainly needed further development. Still, the infantry fighting formations that the Romans had evolved—as best as we can figure them out—appear to reflect considerable insight into how fighting49 among large groups of men really took place.

  Basically the phalanx was meant for the flat battlefields. Its central problem was keeping together as it moved forward. Unless the men slowed virtually to a crawl, even slight terrain irregularities bent and eventually broke it, as some phalangites got out ahead and others fell behind, leaving fatal gaps for an enemy to plunge into. When the Romans moved into hill country in their attempts to conquer the upland tribes, they solved the problem, as Hans Delbrück famously stated, by giving the phalanx “joints.”50 In essence they sliced and diced it, breaking the formation into small groups or maniples (handfuls), formed by stacking two of the basic administrative units, or centuries (each made up of seventy-two men and led by a centurion), one behind the other. Between the maniples a space was left exactly the width of a century. This way the units could be detoured around obstructions, and confusion within the ranks contained within the maniple.