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by Strauss, Barry

  Our generals today do not try to excel at both, and that is a good thing. They bow to civilian authority. They do not decide whether to go to war, only how to fight a war, and even on that point they must yield to the politicians. They do not decide political strategy, only military strategy. It is a good thing not to put political and military power in the hands of one man.

  They do lose sleep over killing people. They don’t fight wars of aggression, only of defense. To be sure, sometimes defense requires attacking another state that is plotting against us or oppressing its own people or occupying land that is rightfully ours, but all that is a far cry from declaring someone else’s soil to be “spear-won” land, as Alexander did.

  The great commanders of the ancient world lacked the humility called for in great statesmen. They were great men but not benefactors of the human race; they came to destroy more than to fulfill. In many ways, their examples are to be honored in the breach. And yet, they do have something to teach us.

  No man has ever outdone Alexander’s feat of conquering such a large empire in such a short time at such a young age. No strategist has ever pulled off a more daring invasion than Hannibal’s march from Spain over the Pyrenees, the Rhône, and the Alps into Italy. No battlefield commander has ever won a more complete tactical victory than Hannibal’s at Cannae. No general has ever thrown the dice as boldly as Caesar did when he crossed the Adriatic Sea on the eve of winter without warships or supplies—and won the war.

  No one ever understood better than these three that war is politics. No conqueror has ever dared to co-opt the conquered as brilliantly as Alexander did when he declared himself to be the king of Asia—and acted the part. No invader has ever rallied the invaded as smoothly as Hannibal did when he entered Italy to the cry of “Italy for the Italians.” No soldier-statesman has ever combined the carrot—pardons—with the stick—military force—as deftly as Caesar.

  And then, at the moment of triumph, no one ever forgot the rule that war is politics as completely—or as disastrously—as they. Flush with victory and drunk with success, each man did the one thing that no successful general can ever dare do: he succumbed to his own vanity. Modern generals are not immune to excessive pride. But, in democracies, at any rate, laws prevent any one individual from doing too much damage. History tells a cautionary tale.

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  ATTACK

  A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Sat in the helmsman’s seat and steered the admiral’s flagship southward across the steel blue water of the Hellespont, the narrow channel separating Europe and Asia. As the boat neared its destination, he threw a spear from the ship and plunged it into the ground. Then, wearing a full suit of armor, he was the first man to jump off and step onto the Asian shore. The effect was to mark the land as “spear-won,” territory that the gods had given him to take by force. He had thirty-seven thousand men with him to make good on his claim that spring day in 334 B.C.

  About a hundred years later and a thousand miles away, a twenty-nine-year-old led an army. He slogged through some of the most forbidding terrain in the world, the snow-covered Alps, with forty thousand soldiers on foot and eight thousand on horseback. And to top it off—thirty-seven elephants! Only about half of the men would survive that brutal crossing, but on the November day in 218 B.C. when they walked out of the hills, they marched into Roman territory and upended Italy. Seventeen years of war and destruction would follow.

  A little more than 150 years later and three hundred miles to the south, a fifty-one-year-old with just five thousand men under his command crossed a river in the northern Italian plain. But that river—really little more than a stream—marked the boundary between his province, where he could legally lead an army, and Italy proper, where he could not. His short journey on a late autumn day signaled the start of nearly thirty years of civil war from one end of Rome’s Mediterranean empire to the other. It was January 12, 49 B.C., by the flawed Roman calendar then in use—about November 24, 50 B.C., by the solar calendar that we use today.

  Alexander the Great, in the first anecdote, Hannibal, in the second, and Julius Caesar, in the third, each illustrates a point: history often focuses on a frontier crossing as the start of a great war. Alexander’s Persian expedition began with the crossing of the Hellespont. The Second Punic War began when Hannibal left Spain, marched through southern Gaul, and crossed over the Alps into Italy. The Roman Civil War began when Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

  But frontier crossings are an anticlimax. They mark the outbreak of a war, not its cause. Caesar might have said, “The die is cast,” when he traversed the Rubicon, but the game had already begun. Five days earlier the Roman senate had declared Caesar an outlaw, thereby forcing him either to fight or give up his political and military career (and possibly his life). But the collision course between Caesar and the Senate had been obvious for months, if not a year earlier. At least a month before crossing the Rubicon, Caesar had ordered two legions in France to cross the Alps and join him in Italy. When Alexander navigated the Hellespont he was continuing a war begun three years earlier by his father. When Hannibal marched over the Alps he was pursuing a war with Rome that had broken out a year earlier in Spain. And if the ancient sources can be believed, Hannibal had been expecting to fight that war since he was a boy.

  Well before they saw the Rubicon and the Alps and the Hellespont, Caesar and Hannibal and Alexander had each decided to go to war. That decision was the most important choice that each of them would ever make. Why did each man choose war?

  WHY WAR?

  Alexander: Like Father, Like Son

  Alexander’s war on the Persian empire was not a case of self-defense. Neither he nor his country had anything to fear from Persia. As the historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 B.C.) pointed out in ancient times, Alexander fought a war of conquest; in fact, the war was his legacy bequeathed to him by his father, King Philip II. Past Greek successes against the Persians had convinced Philip that the Persian empire was ripe for the taking; there was no doubt about “the splendor of the great prize to which the war promised.”

  Brainy and sophisticated, Philip was in touch with the Greek intellectuals of his day. One book might have interested him especially, The Education of Cyrus by the Athenian writer and soldier Xenophon. Xenophon offered a fictionalized but gripping account of how Cyrus, king of a small corner of southwestern Iran, founded the mighty Persian empire by force of arms. Xenophon’s Cyrus was a man of honor and courage who attracted the best men of his day by the force of his character. Whether or not Philip had read the book, he had probably heard of it. And if he had, he surely asked himself, “If Cyrus could do it, why can’t I?”

  When it came to ambition, Alexander was his father’s equal. He, too, aimed at conquering the Persian empire. It was a tall order but Alexander was a man of destiny. He was born to fight this war. Like his father, he had the personality of a conqueror, with a passionate conviction of his ability and even of his divinity. Philip hinted in public that the twelve Olympian gods should add him to their ranks. Alexander simply proclaimed himself a god.

  Alexander believed that he was descended from the mythical Greek hero Achilles. From childhood on, Alexander identified with him. Branding himself as a second Achilles was a two-edged sword. Achilles was not only Greece’s greatest warrior but also its most selfish. Compared to his own honor, he cared nothing for his country. He chose glory over long life. Achilles loved war and had little interest in hearth and home. For Alexander the parallels would prove all too fitting.

  He certainly had a knack for war. His courage and skill stood out in his adolescence. Even before Philip’s death, Alexander showed himself to be a great cavalry commander and a great leader of men. But even if he had been given to timidity or self-doubt, he would have had to squelch the emotions. The consequences of not going to war would have been dire. Alexander had to prove that he was his father’s son. At the age of twenty-two, he also had to show that he could carry out a grown man’s responsibilities.

/>   Alexander’s father, Philip, had survived twenty-three years on the notoriously unstable throne of Macedon by devoting nearly his entire reign to war. His successful expansion abroad underwrote his popularity at home, but in the end, he was assassinated. Philip’s last military act had been to start the long-planned invasion of Persian Anatolia by sending advance forces.

  One other thing: Philip had spent practically everything in the Macedonian treasury to pay for his military force. By the time Alexander invaded Persia, Macedon, the richest kingdom in Europe, was broke. Alexander had to fight his way to solvency or face ruin.

  Had Alexander not continued the war, he would have been branded a coward and would probably have ended up like his father—dead at the hands of one of his own hawkish countrymen.

  Hannibal: The Family Business

  Hannibal too sprang from a famous father. Hamilcar Barca emerged as a great general during the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), a struggle with Rome for control of Sicily. Although Carthage lost the war, Hamilcar won every battle. Afterward, he returned home and achieved even greater success by defeating a savage mercenaries’ revolt (239 B.C.). Under Hamilcar, the Barcas became Carthage’s first family of war.

  As good a politician as he was a general, Hamilcar championed the common people in a city dominated by a wealthy elite. He rode a wave of popular support to get a commission to fight in Spain. There, Hamilcar won a new empire, in southern Spain, as a replacement for the empire that Carthage had lost in Sicily. Spain had gold and silver mines and a plentiful supply of soldiers, and Carthage now controlled them. The city regained its power.

  Hamilcar brought his nine-year-old son Hannibal with him to Spain. The boy grew up in an armed camp, guided by two brilliant soldiers—his father and his uncle—and gifted with the genetic endowment of his family. Hannibal had two brothers: Hasdrubal and Mago. Hamilcar called his sons “the lion’s brood”—and Hannibal was the alpha male of the pride. Raised to be the consummate commander, he did not disappoint when he reached manhood.

  “He was by his very nature truly a marvelous man,” says Polybius of Hannibal, “with a personality suited by its original constitution to carry out anything that lies within human affairs.” He was a man of extremes. His mind was quick and astute but his body was indifferent to pain. He had a sense of humor and a violent temper. He was a man of honor but his critics said he ignored his promises when it suited him and that he had a weakness for money.

  Hannibal’s bold and courageous heart yearned to carry out ambitious deeds. Physically imposing, he looked every inch the commander. He was born to be a leader of men, and won the love and loyalty of his troops.

  Heroic, expansionist, and blessed by Carthage’s gods—that’s how the Barca family advertised their “brand.” They paid special attention to Melqart, a god of heroism and history. The royal god of Tyre—mother city of Carthage—Melqart made Carthaginians proud of their past. In Spain, Melqart’s temple stood on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, off Gades (modern Cadiz), and symbolized the courage to face the vast unknown. Greeks associated Melqart with their hero, Heracles, and the Barcas advertised the connection on their coins. Displayed in profile, Melqart-Heracles is a tough-looking customer, bull-necked and bearded, with a victory wreath on his head and a club over his shoulder. The reverse side of the coin adds to the image of ferocity by depicting a war elephant.

  Hannibal’s ambition shone as brightly as the Barca silver coins. As a young man, Hannibal studied with a Greek tutor. I suspect that of all the heroes of Greece, Alexander the Great was Hannibal’s favorite. As an adult, he certainly imitated the Macedonian—he walked in Alexander’s footsteps by invading a great empire with a small but elite army, and by proclaiming himself a liberator on a divine mission.

  But Hannibal was a son of Carthage. Like his country, he was dynamic, expansionist—and hard for us to reconstruct. Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C., in an act of utter annihilation that many scholars today consider to be genocide. Thanks to archaeology, some of Carthage’s material culture has been unearthed, but very little Carthaginian writing survives.

  The real Carthage was wealthy, dynamic, and cruel. Its economy rested on commerce and on agricultural wealth. Its armies and navies fought from Spain to Libya, while its seafarers voyaged as far as Ireland and West Africa. Its elite admired Greek culture and couldn’t get enough of it. Its politicians punished defeated generals by crucifixion. Its parents sacrificed their own children as gifts to the angry gods in times of crisis—archaeology demonstrates that the testimony of Greek writers on this point was no myth.

  Hannibal was Carthage’s most famous son, but no Carthaginian records about him survive. Our sources for Caesar are excellent and those for Alexander are not bad, but for knowledge of Hannibal, we depend almost exclusively on Greek and Roman writers, especially Polybius and Livy. We simply know less about Hannibal than the other two commanders. Historians’ conclusions about Hannibal contain an element of guesswork.

  To return to Hamilcar: he was a loyal citizen of Carthage but he enjoyed almost absolute power in Spain. Although he had political enemies in the Council of Elders that dominated Carthaginian politics, he had far more supporters. The Barca faction believed in national greatness through war and empire. And it was determined to stand up to Rome.

  Rome disappointed Carthage by taking Sicily in the First Punic War, but it added humiliation shortly afterward by seizing another Carthaginian island—Sardinia. It was a clear treaty violation but Carthage was too weak to do anything about it at the time. But that changed. Between Spain’s resources and the Barcas’ talent for war, Carthage could say “never again!” Indeed, the Greek and Roman sources claim, the Barcas actively planned a war of revenge.

  The story goes that when Hannibal was a boy in 237 B.C., Hamilcar made him swear a solemn oath of eternal enmity toward Rome. Whether this story is true, Hannibal’s actions on the eve of war show how little he trusted Rome.

  When Hamilcar died in 228 B.C., his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Handsome, replaced him. Hasdrubal the Handsome gave Carthaginian Spain a capital at a town he named Carthage (modern-day Cartagena), a great harbor in southeastern Spain. (The Romans later called it New Carthage and, to avoid confusion, so shall we.) If Hasdrubal too planned war with Rome, he was assassinated in 221 before he could act on it. The army in Spain chose a successor by acclamation, and the Carthaginian people confirmed it. Their man was Hannibal, now twenty-six and commander of the Spanish empire that his father had founded. Hannibal quickly displayed his aptitude for war by storming through much of central Spain and expanding Carthage’s empire.

  Rome had watched the rise of Carthaginian power in Spain with admiration and fear. Hannibal and his father (and uncle) had put into effect a revolution. When they began, Carthage lay prostrate at the feet of Rome. Now Rome began to fear that it might end up prostrate at the feet of Carthage.

  So Rome used the Spanish city of Saguntum (modern Sagunto) as a wedge into Carthaginian Spain. Saguntum had been stirring up Spanish tribes against Hannibal. When the Carthaginians insisted on counterattacking Saguntum, Rome threatened retaliation. Hannibal would not budge. He was, writes Polybius, “young, full of martial ardor, encouraged by the success of his enterprises, and spurred on by his long-standing enmity to Rome.”

  Rome claimed that Carthage had violated its treaty obligations by attacking Saguntum, a Roman ally, as guaranteed by a treaty between Rome and Hasdrubal, when he had commanded in Spain. But Carthage challenged Rome on legal grounds while modern scholars question whether Saguntum was Rome’s ally or merely its “friend”—a status that allowed Rome to champion Saguntum without committing to its defense.

  By refusing to stand down, Hannibal faced certain war with Rome. The alternative, however, would have meant letting Rome begin expanding in Spain. No one with any knowledge of Roman history could doubt where that would eventually lead: an ever-tightening grip on Carthage’s Spanish empire. The question was, how could Carthage stop it?
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  One possibility was appeasement. Accept Rome’s superiority, make concessions, and settle down to being a second-rate power in Rome’s orbit. Another possibility was to fight but to stand on the defensive. Let Rome exhaust itself trying to beat Carthaginian armies on their home ground in Spain and probably also in North Africa. With a brilliant general like Hannibal on their side, eventually the Carthaginians would wear out the Romans.

  The third possibility, and the one that Hannibal chose, was audacity. He would attack and shock the enemy by invading Italy—an extension of his father Hamilcar’s raids. Hannibal reasoned that his victories in Italy would make Rome’s allies defect to him, and that would force Rome to sue for peace. Never again would Carthage have to worry about Roman aggression. Attack Rome—that was the Barca way.

  Like Alexander, then, Hannibal took up with gusto the family business and the military offensive that it demanded.

  Caesar: No Chance for Peace

  Caesar’s is a more complicated story. Unlike Alexander or Hannibal, Caesar was not the son of a great general. Although he came from an old, patrician Roman family, Caesar was a self-made warrior. Nor had he risen to the top at an early age, like the other two generals. But Caesar did not suffer from an inferiority complex. His family claimed descent from Rome’s legendary ancestor Aeneas, and through Aeneas, the goddess Venus. At age sixteen, Caesar was a priest of Jupiter and, late in life, he allowed the Senate to grant him divine honors.

  He was a man of immense ambition. As success mounted upon success, Caesar wanted to become the most powerful Roman of all—or, as he put it bluntly, to be first man in Rome.

  A superb soldier, the ambitious Caesar climbed the military ladder steadily. By the time he crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C., at age fifty, he had gone to the greatest school of all: he had conquered Gaul. It was one of the most brutal, thorough, and profitable victories in Rome’s long history.