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

by Robert L. O'Connell

  But physically the camps were far from invulnerable. Any palisade of posts and tree branches thrown up in a matter of hours was bound to be fairly flimsy and capable of stopping only small-scale assaults. This inherent weakness has caused some to question the worth of the whole enterprise. There are numerous examples of Roman camps being overrun; yet this almost always occurred after a debacle in the field.68 If an army was sufficiently degraded and demoralized, as happened at Cannae, no camp was likely to protect the survivors.

  Still, this misses the point. The camp was essentially a staging area and potential rallying point. This was why Roman commanders customarily accepted battle only a short distance from their base. Their army might take the field rested and in good order, and if worse came to worst they still had a place to escape to. Troops on the run are at their most vulnerable. Any means of cutting short this pursuit and providing time for regrouping was a potential lifesaver. Camps did fall, but many a Roman army reemerged to snatch victory from defeat.

  For our own army this is entirely premature. Dawn has broken. The sentries have remained alert beyond the perimeter, and there have been no attempts at harassment to disturb our sleep. Still, the enemy is near, and one glance at the consul’s tent and the red vexillum staked outside it makes it apparent this will not be a day of marching. Before sunrise the consul met with his military council (quaestor, tribunes, and the senior centurion—the primus pilus—of each legion, plus the prefects of the allied brigades),69 and the decision to do battle has been made and orders have been given. Almost immediately the shriek of the horns controlling the velites breaks the morning air as they filter out of camp to set up the screen behind which the heavy infantry will assemble. The cavalry follows almost immediately to join them.

  By this time the legionaries have finished their breakfast and are making last-minute preparations—sharpening the edges of their short swords, burnishing their helmets, dressing for battle. They join their centuries and find their place in the avenues between the tent rows, gradually building three great columns of hastati, principes, and triarii in the broad space behind the ramparts, each maniple, legion, and ala positioned where it will belong in the battle line. The individual columns then march out different gates and reassemble in parallel, proceeding lengthwise toward the planned battlefield until reaching a point foreseen to be the Roman left flank. At this juncture all three columns make a ninety-degree turn right, marching parallel to the enemy until the other flank is reached by the head of the respective columns, whereby the triplex acies is in place.

  The process sounds simple enough but was likely time-consuming and very difficult, with tribunes racing back and forth on horseback, attempting to keep the columns straight and marching at roughly the same speed. The process finished with the centurions redressing the maniples and attending to their vital spacing—geometry with a cast of thousands. Assuming all went according to plan, the velites would then withdraw through the gaps in the line and the cavalry would take up their positions on the extreme flanks, the allies on the left and the Romans on the right.70 What was left was approximately one mile of death-dealing potential stretching menacingly across the horizon, a serried barricade of sharp instruments, determination, and bad intent. Many armies who faced this spectacle would not live out the afternoon, unless of course you happened to be led by Hannibal. For him it spelled opportunity.

  The Roman army described here was like a modern vehicle we might take on a test drive in one more respect; it was replaceable. Should it be wrecked, another just like it could be ordered up and put together. This was at once its great strength and its weakness. Because both its leaders and its fighters were, if not amateurs, then at least temps, many more of roughly the same quality could always be found, promising a numbing succession of legions and near-endless Roman resistance. But when faced with a true virtuoso legion wrecker, about the best that could be achieved was more akin to a stalemate than victory. To rid itself of the succubus of Hannibal, Rome required a general as good as he, and a truly professional army. Both were to be found among Hannibal’s victims at Cannae, but in taking up the general and the professional army, the republic drove the first few miles down the road to republican ruin.

  * The Comitia Tributa was composed of citizens, including patricians, though membership was based on ancestry. It was presided over by a consul and sometimes by a praetor or curile aedile. This body elected curile aediles, quaestors, and special commissions, and also passed legislation.

  † Befitting of its name, the Concilium Plebis included only plebeians in its membership and was presided over by a tribune of the plebes. The council elected the ten plebeian tribunes, along with the aediles of the plebes and special commissions. It too voted on, but did not debate, legislation.

  III

  CARTHAGE

  [1]

  He was waiting for them. His spies in Rome had told him of the great army’s formation, and over the last few days the interrogation of prisoners and deserters had kept him up-to-date as to its plans and progress.1 Despite having captured the Romans’ grain stores, he had supplies to feed his army for only about ten days. It didn’t matter; he was ready to make a stand. He meant to destroy them here at Cannae; afterward his men could forage unmolested. Hannibal was that kind of leader. Always cagey, but when the odds were with him, he never turned his back on a fight.

  His every instinct told him this was the moment and the place. He had been over the ground repeatedly, to the point of understanding that if he deployed with his back to the wind Vulturnus, the dust might blind them. (Livy 22.46.9) He knew the Romans, could read them like a book. He understood how they would line up and that their aim was to break through at the center. He would let them try, taking them on at the point of attack, distracting them so they would not realize he was deployed in depth on both flanks. When they had been lured far enough forward, he would spring the trap, clamping them in, like the jaws of a vise. It was the most audacious of battle plans. If the timing went awry and the Romans broke through prematurely, disaster would inevitably follow. Success, on the other hand, demanded not just a masterful general, but a veritable “band of brothers” as subordinates to carry out not just the substance of his plan but its intent. The final piece was an army so schooled and experienced in Hannibal’s way of fighting that it almost instinctively reacted to circumstance and opportunity.

  All of this was most un-Carthaginian. Hannibal had not set foot in the city since he was nine years old, and would not return for another fourteen years. He had grown up instead with the army, a force carefully crafted over a space of nearly twenty years in Spain, not Carthage. Arguably, the general, his forces, and his war in Italy were aberrations, products of his family’s desire for revenge against Rome, and a generalized image of the Alexandrian military hero, more than they were products of Carthage itself.

  Carthage was a different kind of place, one that initially stumbled (the First Punic War) and then was dragged (the Second Punic War) into a disastrous confrontation with a society built to fight and conquer. If Rome marched to the drumbeat of the god Mars, Carthage was beguiled by mammon. If Rome fed on blood and iron, Carthage took sustenance at the table of commerce. If Rome made war, Carthage made money. It was that simple and that elusive.

  What is there to say of a people whose legacy was recorded by enemies? A victim of the most thoroughgoing sort of genocide, Carthage is barely mourned even today. Consider these words, quoted with apparent approval by one of the modern world’s leading ancient historians: “Bearded Orientals in loose robes, covered with gaudy trinkets, often with great rings of gold hanging from their nostrils, dripping with perfumes, cringing and salaaming, the Carthaginians inspired disgust as much by their personal appearance as by their sensual appetites, their treacherous cruelty, their bloodstained religion. To the end they remained hucksters, intent on personal gain, careless or incapable of winning the good will of their subjects.”2 Granted, the source is a historian of Rome, but even thos
e devoted to understanding their lives conclude: “On the whole Plutarch was probably right to describe the Carthaginians as a stern people, hostile to pleasures and amusements…. The melancholy and barbaric temperament which made the Carthaginians so odious in the eyes of other nations was the result not of avarice alone, but of another feeling which appears to have dominated their entire being, namely, superstition.”3 Rest assured that whatever they were in actuality, posterity knows them from the perspective of a chronically bad press.

  As such, much is made of what they were not. They were not very artistic. Their aesthetic, such as it was, remained steadfastly derivative, first of the Egyptians and then of their longtime enemies, the Greeks. They have left almost nothing in the way of literature. With the exception of one brilliant text by Mago on agronomy that the Romans thought to translate, the rest was burned or lost. Besides, their written language remained a consonantal skeleton devoid of vowels and really best at recording transactions, not thoughts. In the ways that we value, they do not appear to have been very spontaneous or interesting. Theater and sports were missing from their lives, their products were poorly designed and cheaply made, and their inscriptions were repetitive and ritualistic. They were hardly stylish, especially the men, inevitably clad in long straight woolen robes lampooned by the Roman dramatist Plautus. “Hey, you without a belt!” Their very names lacked variety. No binomial nomenclature for Carthaginians, just a single appellation, and many so tongue twisting to Latin speakers that for Livy, everyone was reduced to Hanno or Hannibal, Hamilcar or Mago.4

  One thing they were was religious—obsessively and, as it turned out, murderously so. Possibly more than any other society in the Mediterranean world at the time, Carthaginians were enthralled and bound together by a pantheon of somber, rapacious, and ultimately bloodthirsty gods. Practically everything we have left of them, including their very names (“Hannibal,” “he who enjoys Baal’s favor;” “Hasdrubal,” “Baal is my help,” etc.) reeks of their devotion, one and all, rich and poor. Theirs was a cosmology, it seems, forever threatening to implode, presided over by gods demanding propitiation in the face of misfortune. In both myth and history the story of Carthage is one punctuated with flaming self-immolations, beginning on the pyre of the founder, Elissa, and ending on the city’s final day in 146 B.C. with the fiery suicide of the wife of its last ruler, Hasdrubal.5 But there was another more ominous legacy, one apparently missed by Polybius and Livy, though not by the more flamboyant and less reliable Diodorus, and that was infanticide. This was verified in 1921, when the excavation of some of the first truly Carthaginian sites unearthed urn after urn containing the charred bones of newborn children. Not only has further investigation revealed that the practice continued until the city’s destruction, but the substitution of other animals for children apparently decreased over time.6 While there are likely to have been underlying causes having to do with population control, in the minds of the participants, bad times and angry gods demanded the most extreme sort of sacrifice. One thing is certain: this grisly backdrop has not encouraged the rehabilitation of Carthage and its inhabitants in the modern historical consciousness.

  So the image propagated by their enemies the Greeks and Romans persists, and that image for the most part views Hannibal as an agent of Carthage. Certainly there are undertones of discord, particularly in Livy’s portrayal of the Barcid’s political rival Hanno “the Great,” but in the main the ancients saw the Second Punic War as a conflict between Carthage and Rome and not between Hannibal and Rome. Arguably this is because Carthage remained not simply alien and mysterious to them, but virtually unfathomable. History in the ancients’ eyes was fundamentally heroic, but Carthage was not heroic. Had the ancients understood this, they might have grasped why the motives of Hannibal, a figure virtually carved out of the epic tradition, were so profoundly incompatible with those of his homeland. But this requires further explanation.

  [2]

  The Romans called them “Poeni,” and with reason. Carthaginians were at heart Phoenicians. We might even call them Phoenicians on steroids—not in the muscular sense but in terms of their effectiveness. Traditionally thought to have been settled in 814 B.C. by Tyre, Carthage (or Kart-Hadasht, Phoenician for “new city”) differed from entrepôts established by Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean by having an elaborate foundation myth featuring Elissa escaping from her evil husband-slaying brother, King Pygmalion of Tyre, with a group of fellow citizens, recruiting more settlers in Cyprus, and then landing on the North African coast on a promontory on the eastern side of Lake Tunis. Upon arrival she supposedly bought from the reluctant natives a plot of land that could be covered by the hide of a bull, and then promptly cut it into strips so fine that it encompassed a neck of land about two and a half miles in circumference. Besides earning them a reputation for driving a hard bargain, this myth also implied something very un-Tyrian, a hunger for land.

  Carthage’s initial development was what might be expected from Phoenicians, a reliance on seaborne trade and a resort to value added, so that the archaeology of the eighth and seventh century B.C. time horizons clearly reflects the presence of industrial and artisanal quarters.7 Meanwhile, Carthaginians looked beyond their own confines for food and for an outlet for their surplus population, setting up for business on the wheat-growing Syrtic coast near Tripoli in Libya and sending out the first colony to Ibiza in 654 B.C.8 Others would follow.

  A century later Carthage was plainly thriving. Colonies and emporiums had been established along much of the coast of North Africa, southeastern Spain, Sardinia, and in western Sicily. The mother city, Tyre, had fallen on hard times at the hands of the Assyrians; so whatever control it might have exerted was no longer a factor. Also, Carthage had broken out of its original confines and now occupied the hinterlands of modern Cape Bon, an area of around twenty thousand square miles.9 This was highly significant, because it set up the beginnings of a rural economy based on great estates and intensive cultivation.

  All the while, Carthage’s expansion was observed by its enemies from essentially an agrarian-imperial perspective. Hence it was remembered in almost exclusively military terms. At the core of Carthaginian power, according to this view, was its navy, and this perspective is accurate enough as far as it goes. In 535 B.C., Carthage in alliance with the Etruscans won an apparently decisive fleet action over the Phocaeans off Alalia in Sardinia, thereby establishing the reputation of maintaining a thalassocracy dominant in the western Mediterranean. Granted, the Carthaginians did build a substantial navy with excellent ships and crews renowned for their seamanship. But its purpose was primarily to protect Carthage’s merchant marine from piracy, for which the Phocaeans were notorious. In fact, with the exception of a few references by Diodorus (13.54.1; 80) to actions off Sicily, and the defeat of Pyrrhus in 276 B.C., Alalia was the only fleet engagement the Carthaginians are known to have fought prior to the First Punic War. Naval vessels of the period were oar-propelled rams, requiring large crews and retaining relatively little space for food or water—more like racing shells than battleships. Their strategic range was very limited, in part because they normally had to be beached each night, and also because they were unable to ride out a heavy sea. At best this was a fragile asset, vulnerable to land attack and even more susceptible to getting swamped in a sudden storm. Carthage’s navy served the city well in scaring off marauders—far less well as a tool of war. But to Carthage’s enemies the force was intimidating, at least until the Romans built a fleet.

  Then there was the memory of Carthage as a terrestrial aggressor, mostly defined by a two-hundred-year-long back-and-forth struggle for control of Sicily. By Greek accounting this was a hegemonic soap opera featuring the Carthaginian barbarian repeatedly at the gates, endless Punic perfidy, and sudden dramatic reverses, all epitomized by the Battle of Himera in 480, when the generalissimo Hamilcar, seeing the rout of his army of three hundred thousand (an absurdly inflated figure), cast himself onto the proverbial sacrifi
cial fire. For an adversary supposedly bent on steamrolling the Sicilian Greeks, Carthaginian behavior has impressed some modern historians as suspiciously quixotic.10 At the moment of imminent victory they seem to have stepped back. Rather than the Greek explanations—cowardice, plagues, and Pyrrhic fecklessness—it has been suggested that the Carthaginians marched to the beat of a different drummer, and at least initially fought in league with other Phoenician entities simply to maintain themselves and their commercial presence. Later, when they do seem more aggressive and anxious to formalize power relationships, it appears to be largely in reaction to the rise of Syracuse and its obvious ambition to consolidate the island under its own rule. In all cases, the basic instruments of Carthaginian assertiveness were mercenary armies, which appeared and disappeared with startling rapidity. Disposable force-structures-for-hire were emblematic of Carthaginian land power, at least until Hannibal and his father created something entirely more permanent and professional.

  [3]

  The best explanation for the paradox of Carthaginian power is economics. Unlike in Rome, where military power and glory lay at the root of everything, it was money that mattered in Carthage. This is understandable in the modern context; it was lost on the ancients. So they persisted in misjudging the Carthaginians, and the Carthaginians reciprocated—a fatal error, as it turned out. For they all lived in a world where war trumped commerce, a time when, if things got bad enough, you could not strike a deal. But if that was their fate, they made remarkable progress right up until the end.

  Carthage was famously rich, but the nature and degree of that wealth remains obscure. In part this is because in a traditional business environment, concepts such as diminishing returns are buried beneath personal and political relationships. But this does not mean that they cease to operate, or that through a gradual accumulation of empirically derived information they can be implicitly understood and used to advantage. As far as we know, there was no abstract understanding of economics among the ancients, but they knew what worked and what didn’t—especially the Carthaginians.