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

by Robert L. O'Connell

  But he was unable to force a decisive engagement, and the two consuls moved away from the city in different directions, knowing he could follow only one and that the other could return. Hannibal decided to pursue Appius Claudius, but the Roman commander outfoxed the fox, leading him in circles, and both Roman armies ended up back at the distressed city, this time for good. Soon they were joined by a third army under Claudius Nero (not yet dispatched to Spain), and together their six legions set about constructing an encircling inner wall, a ditch, and an outer wall, a traitor’s noose around what had been Hannibal’s most prized spoil of Cannae. Strategically, the Romans had won hands down.

  There was more to the story. Roman armies kept disappearing. Livy, our sole source, records much of this, but ever the patriot, he may have put the best face on it. Most mysterious was the demise of the force of slaves (volones) that had been hastily organized after Cannae and subsequently employed to good effect by the able T. Sempronius Gracchus. Then abruptly the historian reports the death of Gracchus at the hands of treacherous Lucanians and the sudden dispersal of his army, causing one modern source to wonder if Livy was masking a defeat.71

  Next there was the odd tale of a senior centurion, M. Centenius Paenula, who had talked the senate into giving him an army of eight thousand Romans and allies (later supplemented by an equivalent number of local volunteers) on the grounds that he was intimately familiar with Lucanian territory and could succeed where other commanders had not. Unfortunately, according to Livy, Hannibal chanced upon Paenula having abandoned the chase after Appius Claudius, and annihilated the force—though the Romans were characterized as having fought bravely until their centurion was killed and they scattered. More probably, Hannibal knew exactly what he was doing, saw a chance to pick off an isolated Roman force, and slaughtered them with his usual efficiency, killing fifteen thousand out of the original sixteen thousand.72

  But Hannibal was not through. Before the year 212 was out, he returned to Apulia rather than Capua, and, like a fox on the move, began stalking another plump Roman prey. The praetor Cnaeus Fulvius Flaccus, brother of the consul, was there with an army of eighteen thousand, twisting arms and dragging a number of defector towns back into the Roman fold. According to Livy (25.20.6–7), success had eroded the caution of both Flaccus and his men, always a bad idea when Hannibal was in the neighborhood. In the vicinity of the town of Herdonea, the Carthaginian set his trap. Hiding three thousand light troops in the surrounding farms and woods and cutting off the avenues of flight with cavalry, he offered battle at dawn, and when the Romans accepted, Hannibal gobbled them up. Following the Terentius Varro precedent, Flaccus fled the field immediately with two hundred horsemen, but of those remaining, barely two thousand escaped with their lives. They apparently scattered in all directions since their camp had also been taken.73 This was Hannibal’s most decisive win since Cannae, and a drubbing Romans very apparently found humiliating. Unlike Varro, who was congratulated for not having given up on the republic, Flaccus was tried by the senate for high treason and barely escaped with his life.74 However, the same fate as the legiones Cannenses was accorded to the survivors of Herdonea, indefinite banishment to Sicily.75

  As if this were not bad enough, two years later, in 210, another Fulvius (proconsul Cnaeus Fulvius Centumalus) was caught and defeated by Hannibal, again at Herdonea. The Romans lost their camp and a consular army (two legions—the 5th and 6th—and two alae), as many as thirteen thousand men. This Fulvius would not be tried, since he fell in the field along with eleven military tribunes, but yet again the survivors were exiled to Sicily for the duration to join the ghosts of Cannae.76

  Quite plainly, at the operational and tactical levels of war Hannibal and his army had lost none of their edge, but that edge was nearly irrelevant strategically. Rome persevered and would persist in replacing armies lost; meanwhile, Rome’s relentless grasp would continue to narrow Hannibal’s playing field and circumscribe his future.

  Symbolically and actually, all of this was epitomized by the wretched fate of Capua. The year 211 found the Romans fully committed to the siege under Appius Claudius and Quintus Fulvius Flaccus (both now proconsuls), with about half of the legions that were stationed in Italy participating.77 A vast logistical structure had been emplaced to support them, and the surrounding territory had also been stripped of foodstuffs, while inside the city the population grew hungrier as the triple line of circumvallation was pushed to completion. For a while the Campanian horsemen were able to sally out with some success, but then a centurion named Quintus Naevius came up with the idea of using picked velites who would ride in tandem with the Roman cavalry and then support them on foot when they came upon a Capuan horseman. This plan effectively shut down the last remaining morale builder.78 The Capuans were sealed off.

  Realizing that the city would inevitably fall unless he did something, Hannibal marched up from Bruttium with only a picked force without baggage, looking to fight the Romans in the field. But the Romans refused to budge from behind their lines. Thwarted, Hannibal decided on a direct assault and coordinated with the Capuans, who were to attack from the inside while he sought to break through from the outside. The Capuans were quickly turned aside, but a cohort of Hannibal’s Spaniards led by three elephants broke through the Roman lines and threatened Flaccus’s camp. But then the Romans, rallied by the same Naevius, threw the Spaniards back, and the Carthaginians retreated with a considerable loss of precious troops.79 Worse perhaps for those inside the city, there was no way that Hannibal could stay, since the Romans, following the relentless logic of Fabius Maximus, had already removed virtually everything edible from the countryside.

  But if the republican hedgehog knew the value of his “scorched earth” policy, the Punic fox was never without a plan B. Hannibal decided to march on Rome. At this point Polybius briefly reenters the picture in a fragment and there are some discrepancies with Livy over which route Hannibal took, whether he was followed, and what transpired when he arrived.80 What remains clear is that Hannibal was waging psychological warfare, endeavoring to use his own terrifying image along the Tiber to induce the Romans to release their stranglehold around Capua and rush to the relief of their own capital. The days of Roman impulsiveness, credulously falling for Hannibal’s tricks, were largely over. Both historians agree that there was panic abroad within the city but not among the leadership. They called his bluff; the grip around Capua was not to be relaxed. Money also spoke. Livy tells us that the very land adjacent to Rome on which Hannibal was camped was sold at this time without a diminution in price; very apparently the purchaser considered the Barcid little more than a squatter.81

  Shortly before he retreated back to Bruttium, abandoning project Capua, Hannibal was heard to say that he had twice missed capturing Rome—once because he had lacked the will, the other because he had lacked the opportunity.82 He was right on both counts. Had he listened to Maharbal after Cannae, he might have overawed the distraught Romans. Now he had no chance.

  As Polybius (9.26.2–6) explains, after Capua’s fall it became clear to all that Hannibal could not watch over widespread allies; nor could he afford to subdivide his army and scatter garrisons among them, due to his numerical inferiority. Instead, he was obliged to abandon still more newly acquired friends in order to consolidate his forces and holdings in what would become a slowly diminishing domain in the south. The war was far from over, but its outcome in Italy was all but decided.

  As for the Capuans, their fate would instruct the others. Without hope they threw themselves upon the mercy of the Romans, frequently an oxymoron. Those city fathers who had not had the good sense to commit suicide were beaten with rods and beheaded; the rest of the population was sold into slavery—war paying for war, and fools paying with their lives.

  VIII

  THE AVENGERS

  [1]

  Young Publius, son and nephew of the Scipio brothers recently martyred in Spain, was barely twenty-five when he was invested with the
proconsular imperium to venture to Iberia as supreme Roman commander. It was without precedent in the republic’s constitutional history.1 Too young to have held either the consulship or praetorship, he was elevated through a special election of the Comitia Centuriata rather than being appointed by the senate, which was the norm. Even considering the deceptive nature of Roman politics, this was all pretty odd.

  Some modern historians find the roots of the assignment in factional and familial squabbles over war policy, and just how much emphasis to put on the Spanish theater,2 but Livy (26.18.5–6) provides a simpler explanation that makes a lot of sense—nobody of consequence much wanted the posting. Conventional wisdom found the real glory in Italy and in the prospect of getting rid of Hannibal. This was likely why the grim and gifted Caius Claudius Nero headed back to Italy after only a short, if successful, Iberian interlude.

  Still, even if Spain was a dirty job, strategic considerations demanded that somebody had to do it, and making young Scipio that somebody was an attractive if unorthodox solution. The very name Scipio was a known quantity in Iberia, not only among the legionaries remaining there, but also among those tribes who might still be inclined to take the Roman part in the struggle. Then there was the poetic justice of sending a highly motivated young Scipio to avenge other dead Scipios. But most compelling perhaps was the nature of this particular Scipio.

  It is pretty apparent that the young man destined to become Africanus was already an impressive figure. Livy himself, who could look back on a succession of late republican demagogues, found Scipio even at this stage astonishingly preoccupied with his own public persona. This was a young man who did little to discourage rumors that his very birth was the result of a congress between his mother and a rather large serpent, that he reached decisions within sacred confines presumably in consultation with Jupiter himself, and that he acted on the basis of divinely inspired dreams.3 Potent stuff for the very superstitious Romans, but this image also required the personal gravitas to pull it off without looking ridiculous.

  This he had—the ancient equivalent of “the right stuff.” As was the case with Hannibal, the obvious comparison was between the young Publius Scipio and Alexander, the Mediterranean basin’s beacon of imperial ambition. Livy was frank to admit it—the same youth, good looks, cultural literacy, and penchant toward Pan-Hellenism, an ornate façade beneath which beat the heart of a born soldier—decisive, opportunistic, and ruthless. Of course, Alexander really was a Greek, seemed convinced of his divinity, and was probably crazy; Scipio was a Roman and, as far as we can tell, entirely more down to earth.

  In this regard Polybius helps to complete the picture. He declared that if his readers looked beneath the glamour and good fortune, they would find a calculating spirit grounded in careful preparation and attention to detail, a person whose supposed magnanimity masked a shrewd and even cynical eye for the main chance.4 Scipio was a young man capable of the most brutal sort of retribution; yet when it suited his purposes, he would befriend the very Numidian prince, Masinissa, who was so instrumental in the deaths of his father and uncle.

  And it was this sort of pragmatism that enabled him to reshape the Roman triplex acies from a serried battering ram into a dynamic battlefield instrument capable of attacking and winning from several directions. This spark of creative genius would prove to be what Rome ultimately needed in a commander to defeat Hannibal.

  But it came at a price. From beginning to end Scipio’s career betrayed a restlessness with the norms and constraints imposed by Roman politics and senatorial domination. When confronted, he inevitably—if grudgingly—acceded, but in establishing this pattern he set a precedent of personal ambition that led eventually to Caesar and the collapse of the republic. So, it seems that in order to save the state from Hannibal it was necessary to generate the very type of individual who would ultimately destroy it. This was the true Barcid curse upon Rome.

  For the moment, however, Scipio was exactly the commanding presence the situation demanded, particularly in Spain, where he acted with extraordinary self-assurance and sagacity from the moment he arrived in the summer of 210 with approximately eleven thousand fresh troops.5 At Tarraco (modern Tarragona), on safe ground north of the Ebro, he called together local tribal leaders and gave them an enthusiastic pep talk. Then he continued touring the areas under Roman control, congratulating the troops for holding on, and singling out the commander they had elected, L. Marcius Septimus, for special praise, thereby cementing the troops’ loyalty.

  The legionaries having settled down into their winter quarters, Scipio began reorganizing them, blending his reinforcements with the various elements remaining from his father’s and uncle’s armies. He was intent on forging them into a homogenous whole, now numbering around twenty-eight thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry.6 Meanwhile, he was incubating an amazingly audacious scheme for the coming campaigning season. We have a good idea what he was thinking, since Polybius bases his account on a letter detailing the plan Scipio wrote once the war was over.7 Even before arriving in Spain, Scipio understood that his relatives’ defeats had resulted from splitting their forces, and from the treachery of the Celtiberians they had hired. Yet by this time he had learned that the Carthaginians were on similarly shaky ground with the tribes to the south, and that they too had divided their forces—Mago was somewhere beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, Hasdrubal Gisgo was far west in Lusitania, and Hasdrubal Barca was around the headwaters of the Tagus River in the vicinity of today’s Toledo. All of them being more than ten days’ march from Barca central, the vital city of New Carthage.8 This was to be Scipio’s target of opportunity.

  The scheme he hatched was virtually a mirror of its architect—breathtakingly daring. Yet hedged by meticulous planning and good intelligence. While still in winter quarters, he not only obtained a plan of the city, but had been told by some fishermen that it might be approached from several angles through a shallow lagoon that could be forded at low tide. This was critical, since Scipio had also learned that the city was guarded only by approximately one thousand troops, who could not be everywhere at once. His window of opportunity was a narrow one, defined by the ten or so days it would take for the scattered Carthaginian forces to converge on the city. Polybius tells us that Scipio also understood that in the case of failure he could evacuate his men by ship, since Romans controlled the seas, and if he succeeded, the Romans already would be behind New Carthage’s fortifications.9 His bets were covered.

  Just in case, before he crossed the Ebro and headed south in the spring of 209, Scipio left three thousand foot soldiers and five hundred horse with an experienced subordinate to keep an eye on the Tarraco locals, and he told only Gaius Laelius, his boyhood friend and career right-hand man, of his plans. The arrival of Scipio and his army came as an unwelcome surprise to the New Carthaginians, who reacted with an uncharacteristic and ultimately unwise verve for defending the place. Two thousand of them joined the commander—yet another Mago—and his mercenaries with the intent of meeting the Romans outside the city walls. For his part Scipio had gathered the troops and given them the usual exhortations (i.e., “the first one over the wall gets the gold crown”), but with a characteristically Scipionic twist. He told them that the entire plan had been given to him in a dream by the god Neptune, whose help they could all count on.10

  The operation might as well have been scripted by divine intervention. The eagerest locals initially sallied out and fought bravely, until they were overwhelmed by Roman reinforcements, thereby culling the most audacious of the defenders as they retreated through the city gates. Still, the locals rallied and were able to throw back the first Roman assault with scaling ladders, and probably took heart that they could hold out until relieved by one of the scattered Carthaginian field forces.

  But they hadn’t counted on Scipio’s determination … or his guile. Rather than allowing the normal several days of rest after a failed attack, Scipio waited only until late in the afternoon before throwing
his force again at the portion of the wall where the main gate was located; but not before leading a picked contingent around to the other side of the fortifications, the side bordered by the lagoon. Just as the onslaught in front was cresting, the ocean tide turned and began emptying the shallows, giving the legionaries here every reason to believe Neptune himself was busy with his trident, literally bailing them out. The Romans waded across with their ladders and easily mounted the wall there, which was now drained of defenders, who had moved off to meet the primary attack. Racing along the top to the main gate, the Romans forced it open just as their comrades in front gained a foothold on the battlements.11 After that it was a deluge of mayhem, with Scipio ordering his troops to kill anything that moved, before beginning the more methodical pillaging.12

  But Scipio was far too practical to simply let his legionaries gorge themselves on a prize this valuable. Rather than merely shatter what was the Barcid piggy bank, the central emporium/treasury/arsenal of the entire enterprise, he would make it work for himself and Rome. The next day he assembled the ten thousand surviving inhabitants and told them of his plans for them. Full citizens were sent home free; artisans were made slaves of the Roman state, to pursue their trades in public workshops on the promise of eventual freedom; and the rest, presumably slaves, Scipio used to man the eighteen ships captured in the harbor and to supplement his own crews.13 Mago the commander, two members of Carthage’s council of elders, and fifteen other captive Carthaginian legislators would be packed on a quinquereme and sent to Rome, along with Laelius and the good news of Scipio’s victory.14