Hannibal’s army had certain advantages of command and experience. He had a fine corps of supporting generals. In Italy officers like Maharbal, son of Himilco; Hanno, son of Bomilcar; and one Hasdrubal (not Hannibal’s brother) would rip Roman armies to pieces. But Hannibal’s generals did not do well on their own without his guiding hand, starting with his two brothers, Mago and Hasdrubal. The one exception, Mottones, Hannibal’s hand-picked cavalry commander in Sicily, shone in battle but fell afoul of Carthaginian political in-fighting. He turned traitor and became a Roman citizen—and general!
As for the Carthaginian army, Polybius describes Hannibal’s men thus: they “had been trained in actual warfare constantly from their earliest youth, they had a general who had been brought up together with them and was accustomed from childhood to operations in the field, they had won many battles in Spain . . . . ”
Not that Hannibal could afford to ignore the deadly cohesion and steadfastness of the Roman legions! Unlike most of Rome’s opponents, however, he had a chance of beating Rome. A tactical giant, Hannibal reckoned that his superior generalship could defeat the Romans in battle and cause them enormous casualties. But he would have to move with devastating speed and overwhelming force. Otherwise, he might end up like Pyrrhus.
King Pyrrhus of Epirus invaded southern Italy in 280 B.C. A charismatic general like Hannibal, Pyrrhus too had a small but experienced army complete with cavalry and elephants. Unlike Hannibal, he even had many Italian allies. Pyrrhus won two major pitched battles against Rome but suffered such severe losses as to render them “Pyrrhic victories”—the term we still use today. More important, Rome refused to concede. Rome’s central Italian allies held steadfast and provided new troops, but Pyrrhus’s manpower was running out.
Furthermore, Rome won the support of a key ally from outside Italy. Ironically, it was Carthage that feared that Pyrrhus would invade its territory in Sicily. That indeed happened, but Pyrrhus did no better in Sicily than in Italy. Meanwhile, Rome pummeled his Italian allies, so Pyrrhus returned to help them, only to be defeated in battle. In 275, Pyrrhus went home, having accomplished nothing.
Hannibal risked a similar fate. In fact, he risked worse, because in Pyrrhus’s day, Rome had no fleet. Now it had a great navy, which meant that it could counterattack in Spain. Carthage did not have much of a navy of its own, having lost its fleet in the First Punic War.
In 218 B.C., Rome had 220 warships, while Carthage had only one hundred. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Since winning the First Punic War, Rome’s sailors had developed expertise and guts. Carthage’s sailors had stagnated. In 218 Carthage needed not only more ships but also a new and bolder naval culture. Its admirals included no Hannibals.
Geography was another problem. Rome controlled the vital ports in Sicily and Sardinia. Ancient navies needed to make frequent stops on shore, so whoever controlled the harbors of these central Mediterranean islands controlled the sea-lanes.
For all these reasons, Hannibal could not ship his forces to Italy. He had no other invasion route but a grueling, thousand-mile overland march from southern Spain to northern Italy. And that might cost him vital manpower.
The key to Rome’s strength was its confederacy. Between 350 and 270 B.C. Rome had conquered all of the communities of Italy south of the Po and Rubicon rivers. It was a large area to control and Rome used various strategies to do so, from annexing territory, building roads, and planting colonies to intervening as needed in order to install friendly politicians in power.
But two Roman policies stand out in importance. First, Rome turned itself into a population giant by granting Roman citizenship to many of the conquered peoples. By 225 B.C. Rome’s population, in the city of Rome and Roman territory all over Italy, was close to one million free people, of whom 300,000 were adult males and so therefore, liable for military service. Second, Rome required its allies to contribute soldiers to the Roman army. In 225, allied troops amounted to 460,000 men. So Rome had a total of 760,000 potential soldiers.
This was a staggering number, especially considering Hannibal’s forces, about 60,000 men when he first left Spain but a mere 26,000 men when he reached northern Italy after his devastating march. How, then, did he plan to defeat Rome?
The answer was to crack the Roman confederacy. Hannibal planned to shock Italy by handing Rome such big defeats in battle that the allies would start defecting to him, first in a trickle and then a flood. Their actions would add to Hannibal’s manpower and subtract from Rome’s. Rome might hold out at first, but eventually Hannibal would win away so many of Rome’s allied troops that Rome would come to the bargaining table.
To make his task slightly easier, Hannibal didn’t plan to destroy Rome, merely to defang it. He was fighting, he said, only for “honor and empire.” He wanted to protect Carthage’s empire in Spain and to get back Sardinia, and probably Sicily as well.
For Hannibal, then, victory depended on two things: battle victories and allied defections. Could he achieve his goal?
Polybius didn’t think so. The historian criticized Hannibal for going to war on emotional grounds rather than rational analysis: Hannibal was “wholly under the influence of unreasoning and violent anger.” Rome was just too strong and Hannibal should never have invaded Italy, according to Polybius.
Polybius is a formidable historian, but he doesn’t give audacity its due. It would be fairer to say this: Hannibal had a well-thought-out if highly risky plan. It began with a long and dangerous march followed by a rapid series of hammer blows to Rome’s homeland, so hard and fast that Rome’s Italian confederacy would crack. It also called for diplomatic finesse in dealing with Rome’s Italian allies and political shrewdness in managing the home government in Carthage.
Not since Alexander had any general displayed so much offensive ability. If anyone could do it, Hannibal could, but was Rome too strong?
Caesar: Speed Kills
As he made his plans on the far side of the Rubicon, Caesar might have calculated his military strengths and weaknesses. His greatest strength by far was his army. Caesar’s army was not merely good, it was his. Eight years in Gaul had tied the men to him by blood and iron and faith. The army believed in Caesar.
He, in turn, played them like a lute. He overlooked their lapses and foibles but came down hard on deserters. He never called them “soldiers” but always “fellow soldiers.” After a massacre in Gaul, he swore not to cut his hair or beard until he had avenged the dead—and, as everyone knew, he was vain about his looks, so it was a sacrifice indeed.
Caesar’s army worshiped his brains, his courage, his charity, and his charisma. Thirty thousand fighting men saw him as their captain, their patron, their leader, and even their father. In Gaul he gave them victory and profit. The men never lacked for material rewards: Caesar saw to that. Now, he promised them the first rank in the Roman state.
True, civil war offered fewer sources of loot than foreign conflict, and that would generate tension. Yet Caesar’s political skills would keep his men happy, and besides, civil war offered the thrill of the illicit, the knowledge that every man in his army had made himself an outlaw once he crossed the Rubicon. The prospect of victory or death wove extraordinary ties between leader and led. It was, in short, a love story.
Caesar’s forces at the Rubicon were small in number but reinforcements were on the way. Meanwhile, he had the men of the Thirteenth Legion. Veterans of Gaul, they were experienced and self-controlled. They knew how to infiltrate a town and then suddenly make their presence known. One legion—five thousand men—was big enough to lay siege to a small city, and Caesar’s army was expert in sieges. Once his numbers increased, they could do the same to big cities.
Nor was there any doubt about their ability to move fast. Alexander and Hannibal were speedy but Caesar was quicksilver—an athlete of the battlefield. Rarely has a general understood better that speed kills. Neither did Caesar lack stamina. His army combined the speed of a cheetah with the endurance
of an ant.
Once he had more soldiers, Caesar would relish meeting the enemy in battle. He might have guessed, however, that Pompey would not want to risk his men against Caesar’s veterans. More likely, Caesar would have to outrun and outmaneuver Pompey, and catch him in a town that he could besiege or maybe even take by storm.
Caesar knew Pompey personally and seems to have had genuine affection for him, but Caesar had no doubt about his own superiority as a general. Whether he thought that Pompey had lost his skill or that he had never had it, Caesar was convinced that he was better.
It didn’t matter. Whatever Pompey might have been able to do, he suffered one big disadvantage: he lacked supreme command. Instead, he shared command with several leading senators. His army lacked the unity at the top that victory usually requires. Caesar, the undisputed chief, did not have to wrestle with other generals. He was not a committee chairman but a leader.
Balanced against this advantage was a big military disadvantage: Caesar had no navy. If he could not beat his enemies in Italy, they could escape by ship and live to fight another day. And perhaps Pompey was not quite so inferior as Caesar might have thought. It was all the more reason for Caesar to move with speed and decisiveness.
Caesar was enough of a realist to know that he would probably not catch Pompey in a decisive battle in Italy. To win the war, Caesar would have to overcome his weakness at sea, transport his army abroad, and force Pompey into a do-or-die battle. Could he do it? That would be Caesar’s greatest test.
Targets Hard and Soft
When Alexander and Caesar each launched their wars, the enemy—the Persian empire or the Roman republic—had already been weakened by decades of regional rebellions and civil war. Mercenaries and adventurers in force had already crisscrossed the Aegean Sea for years when Alexander invaded. Caesar was not the first rebel general to march on Rome. Neither Darius’s Persia nor Pompey’s Rome offered a united front to the invader; each suffered from factionalism.
By contrast, the Roman republic attacked by Hannibal stood relatively united. Rome’s Italian confederacy was vulnerable in northern Italy, where the Celts had only recently lost their freedom to Rome and southern Italy too had its share of independistas. But the core of Rome’s Italian confederacy in central Italy was rock solid. To win the war, Hannibal had to break that rock. If that was not impossible, neither was it easy.
So Hannibal faced a tougher job than either Caesar or Alexander did. Domestic politics did not make his task easier. Hannibal was not a king or a dictator but a general of the Carthaginian state. Although Spain gave him a power base, he would need support from Carthage unless he defeated Rome very rapidly. And that support was not guaranteed.
Most Carthaginians were eager to fight their hated Roman enemy, but that doesn’t mean they supported Hannibal’s war plans. Some disagreed with his strategy, while others distrusted him or disliked the Barcas. And Hannibal had last seen Carthage when he was nine years old. His knowledge of domestic politics could hardly match his familiarity with the field of arms.
The other two commanders also faced problems on the home front. Alexander was a king loathed by most of the Greek city-states that were, in theory, his allies. Many of Alexander’s Greek allies were itching to rebel and join Persia. Caesar was no king but a rebel provincial general against lawful authority; he lacked legitimacy. Even if Caesar conquered Italy, he had no fleet to pry open the sea-lanes needed to get grain supplies through; if Pompey took to the sea, he could starve Italy.
All in all, Hannibal had the most difficult task. To crack Rome’s Central Italian confederacy would take the application of great resources in infrastructure to precisely the right point. Hannibal had to procure those resources from the Carthaginian government and he had to direct them against the proper target. That would require a grasp both of strategy and of politics. The war would prove if Hannibal had it.
POLITICAL STRATEGIES
All three men fought wars with a strongly political dimension. Like most generals today, none had the luxury of following military logic alone. Each had to take politics into account as well.
Alexander: Politician and General
Alexander’s march into the Persian empire was not merely an invasion route but a form of information warfare, aimed at two audiences: the Persian army and Greek public opinion. His message to Persia was that he was coming in force. For two years, the Macedonian army in Anatolia had consisted of a 10,000-man advance force. Now, in 334, nearly 50,000 Macedonians—an additional 32,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry—had invaded, along with a fleet of 160 warships and numerous transports. To the Greeks, Alexander presented his expedition as revenge—he marketed it as a Panhellenic crusade to avenge the Persians’ invasion of 480 B.C. That was long ago but most Greeks still thought of the Persians as “the barbarian,” as their ancestors had.
But Alexander had to shore up weak support—indeed, the threat of rebellion—from his Greek rear, including the unreliable Athenian navy. He had to show that he was pro-Greek and that any Greeks who supported Persia would be dealt with severely. He did that by a combination of branding and brutal reprisals.
In order to emphasize the theme of Greek revenge, Alexander led the Macedonian army eastward toward the Hellespont on about the same route that the Persian king Xerxes had followed when he marched westward in his doomed invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. Alexander crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, the very place where Xerxes had bridged the channel (they went by ship) in the opposite direction. While crossing the Hellespont, Alexander made sacrifices to the gods and poured a libation to the water, in contrast with Xerxes, who had his men whip the Hellespont and toss chains in it to “punish” the water for a destructive storm, acts that the Greeks considered impious.
When he landed near Abydos, Alexander strode onto the shore of Asia in full armor. He had already thrown a spear from the ship: a sign, as he later put it, that he considered the Persian empire a spear-won land from the gods. For good measure, Alexander went to the nearby city of Troy or, rather, Ilion, the Greek city built on the site of Troy. Xerxes had made a similar pilgrimage there in 480, and Alexander could do no less.
Having waged a propaganda campaign to demonstrate his devotion to the cause of Greece, Alexander now returned to the main purpose of his trip to Anatolia: he rejoined his army.
Alexander invaded the Persian empire in 334 B.C. with a clear war plan but an open-ended goal. At a minimum he wanted to conquer western Anatolia (modern Turkey) and add it to his kingdom. At a maximum—well, there is reason to think that Philip had aimed at conquering the entire Persian empire in all of its vastness. This included both Persia’s other holdings in Western Asia—Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia—and lands lying farther eastward—the Iranian plateau and all or part of modern Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India. It was a huge ambition, and to some it would probably have seemed like a mythological tale. No one could rule an empire this big without becoming an absolute monarch; Alexander’s advisors knew this, and many of them eventually recoiled in horror from the prospect. But it probably seemed unlikely at first, since the Persian empire was no pushover. Although it had demonstrated military weakness in recent years, Persia still had huge advantages in money, manpower, ships, and local knowledge.
Each step in Alexander’s campaign was in itself a tall order. Take Anatolia. To conquer it, Alexander had to keep the Persian navy from opening a second front in Greece as well as defeat the Persian army in Anatolia. He also had to win allies and find food for his men. Last but not least, he had to raise money, because war is expensive, and the Macedonian treasury was empty.
In 334 B.C. Alexander was twenty-two and had sat on the throne for only two years. Yet he was already an experienced field commander. At age sixteen, Philip made him regent of Macedonia, and Alexander led a rapid expedition to Thrace that put down a rebellion and turned a city into a Macedonian military outpost called Alexandropolis. At a
ge eighteen, under Philip’s supervision, Alexander led the Macedonian cavalry on the war-winning charge that conquered Greece at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.). At twenty, he became king. In the next two years as commander-in-chief of the Macedonian army, he marched his armies a thousand miles, suppressed rebellions in Greece and the Balkans, and destroyed Thebes, Greece’s single most powerful land power. He also extended his empire’s northern frontier to the Danube River, won a series of victories on his own without the help of Philip’s best generals, and executed both precisely planned operations and brilliant improvisations. Alexander demonstrated other skills as well, such as his mastery of combined-arms operations, in which he used cavalry and light-armed and heavy-armed infantry. He showed himself able to scramble when needed, by sizing up both enemy and terrain on the spot and issuing precisely the right orders. He was very inventive. On one occasion, he had his men cut steps up the cliff face of a mountain, and on another occasion, he ordered them to throw together a scratch fleet to cross the Danube. His most creative manuever of all was history’s first recorded use of field artillery.
Alexander had earned the love of his soldiers. He also earned the fear of Macedon’s Greek and Balkan allies but he didn’t trust them. Nowadays, the province of Macedonia (not to be confused with the independent country to the north) is an integral part of Greece, but in Alexander’s era, many Greeks looked on Macedonians as savages, and would have been glad to revolt, given a chance. The Persian navy represented that chance. To discourage the Greeks, Alexander left 13,500 soldiers (27 percent—i.e., more than one quarter—of his total forces) in Macedonia when he invaded Persia. Their job was to be ready to invade any Greek city-state that joined the Persians.
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