The Persian cavalry lined the east bank of the Granicus, covering both the lip of the bank and a flat area going back about three hundred yards. They held their infantry, all Greek mercenaries, in reserve on the high ground behind them, knowing it would be pointless to deploy them against an enemy who outnumbered them. The infantry could be called in later, if needed.
On the other side of the river, Alexander’s Macedonians did not follow suit, but arranged their infantry between their cavalry on either wing. Alexander and the Macedonian cavalry held the Macedonian right wing; Parmenio and the allied, Thessalian cavalry occupied the left wing. As usual, the cavalry would strike first. They could not make a frontal assault, but their scouts had found a few gentle, gravel slopes along the steep banks of the river. The cavalry aimed for them as crossing places.
And so, the two waves of riders, with which this book started, attacked the Persians. Alexander began with a cunning move. He sent in a squadron of about one thousand cavalrymen, to draw the enemy off the bank and into the river. It succeeded, at a cost of heavy Macedonian casualties. Having forced the enemy to break up its line, Alexander now attacked. He led his men in oblique order heading upstream, that is, going farther to his right, in order to do two things. Alexander wanted both to outflank the Persians and to ensure that his men would present a solid front to the enemy rather than emerge from the river in column, where they could be picked off one by one. No novice, he had proven himself four years earlier by leading a cavalry charge against the Greeks at the Battle of Chaeronea.
The Persians were no tactical novices either. A wedge-shaped unit of horsemen, led by some of Persia’s leading men, bore down on the enemy. They aimed for Alexander, hoping to cut out the heart of the invasion by killing its leader. They almost succeeded. In fact, they would have changed history, had not Cleitus saved his king from Rhoesaces’s nearly fatal attack, as we saw in chapter 1.
Once the Macedonians rescued Alexander, their assault proved devastating to the Persians. For all the elegance of Alexander’s opening moves, Granicus came down to a brawl. The sources talk of shoving and of “horses fighting entangled with horses and men entangled with men.” Alexander’s men had better equipment and technical expertise, and many of them, especially his bodyguard, were simply big and strong. The Macedonians had cornel wood lances, heavy thrusting weapons that greatly outperformed the Persians’ light javelins, which were throwing weapons. A twelve-foot lance, with the weight of a galloping horse and rider behind it, could crush a skull, and the Macedonians aimed at the faces of the Persians and their horses. While Macedonian horsemen pushed the Persians back, Thracian light troops, who intermingled with the cavalry, added to the Persians’ woes. They were specialists at darting in and out of horsemen and hurling their javelins.
Meanwhile, in the center of the line, the Macedonian infantry advanced. With terrifying efficiency, and with their huge pikes held out before them, the men of the phalanx crossed the river, climbed the opposite bank, and forced the enemy back. The Persian center broke and the cavalry turned and fled. On the Macedonian left, the Thessalian cavalry fought with distinction. Persia’s Greek mercenaries stood in the rear, amazed and horrified at what was happening; apparently no one ordered them into action.
Alexander and his men won a great victory. It was a tribute to the army’s professionalism and its power and it reflected well on Alexander’s boldness as a field commander and courage as a warrior. But it also left an opening to the Persians, who had, after all, nearly killed their enemy’s king. Yet the Persians had access to huge manpower resources. If they mustered a big enough army, with plenty of Greek mercenaries and enough cavalry to surround the Macedonians on the wings, they stood a chance in battle.
Except for the squadron of one thousand cavalrymen, Macedonian casualties were light, although probably not as light as the pro-Macedonian sources claim: supposedly, just eighty-five cavalry and thirty infantry died. Macedonian casualty figures would increase in the battles ahead, but all in all, they stayed fairly low. That was one key to Alexander’s success: he spared his men.
He also lavished kindness on them. After the battle, Alexander made sure his wounded were treated well and went to the trouble of visiting them himself. He had the Macedonian dead buried with their weapons; he exempted their surviving families from taxes. Finally, he commissioned a bronze statue group in honor of the twenty-five Macedonian Companion Cavalry who fell in the first attack. Alexander gave the job to Lysippus, the most famous sculptor of the day, and had the statues erected in Macedonia.
Persian casualties were high. About a thousand Persian cavalrymen were killed. Eight Persian generals fell in the battle, including two satraps, the commander of the mercenaries, and two royal in-laws and a former king’s grandson. Another satrap escaped and committed suicide soon afterward. Memnon escaped as well, but he planned to keep up the fight.
The six thousand Greek mercenaries fared much worse. Because the fighting was all but over, the Greeks expected to be able to surrender. Instead, the Macedonians surrounded them and attacked. The Greeks defended themselves, and the Macedonians took casualties, but in the end it was a massacre. Only two thousand Greeks survived. They were sent to Macedon to do hard labor. Even by ancient standards, this was brutal, but the point was not military but political. Alexander wanted to brand any Greek who opposed him as a traitor. The message was aimed not only at Greeks in Persian service but also at potential rebels on the Greek home front.
To underline the message, Alexander sent three hundred captured Persian suits of armor to the Parthenon in Athens, with the inscription: “Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks except the Spartans, from the barbarians living in Asia.” In Greek terms, the inscription meant that Alexander was fighting for all Greece in a clash of civilizations against a savage enemy living on another continent. For all Greeks, that is, except the Spartans! This was an insult: in the old days, Sparta had stood against Persia at Thermopylae. Now, Macedon claimed to be the new Sparta. That would make Alexander a great hero, like Sparta’s legendary King Leonidas—except, of course, that unlike Leonidas, who died at Thermopylae, Alexander planned to live.
Hannibal: A Two-fisted Victory and Thirty-seven Elephants
The most impressive thing about Hannibal and his army as they exited from the Alps about November 218 B.C. was that they were there at all. They had just completed one of the great epic marches in the history of warfare. It was approximately a five-month, thousand-mile struggle against both natural and human enemies. Besides traversing the Pyrenees and the Rhône, they had to cross the Alps in the snows of late autumn. They fought hostile tribesmen and evaded a Roman expeditionary force. They suffered desertion, disease, battle casualties, and starvation. And then there were the elephants, those stunning beasts that Hannibal’s men ferried over the Rhône and drove through icy Alpine passes.
When the Carthaginian high command was debating the proposed march from Spain to Italy, one of Hannibal’s generals warned him of the dangers. The general, who was also named Hannibal but with the fierce nickname of “the Gladiator,” painted a picture of terrible logistical obstacles. The men would have to eat human flesh in order to survive, said Hannibal the Gladiator. That was an exaggeration, but not much.
Success had not come cheap. When Hannibal left Spain’s New Carthage in or around June, he had 90,000 infantrymen, 12,000 cavalrymen, and 37 elephants. He gave 15,000 troops to his brother Hasdrubal to hold central and southern Spain, while he gave 11,000 troops to pacify northeastern Spain; another 10,000 troops were sent home. Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees into France with 50,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry, and the elephants. When he reached the Rhône about October, he had 38,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, and thirty-seven elephants; most of the recent losses were due to desertion. Then, he crossed the Alps in about fifteen days. By the end of November, about five months after starting his journey, he reached Italy with only 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry—the Alpine trek had cost him nearly half his rem
aining soldiers. Some died in combat with the hostile mountain peoples, while others succumbed to the snow and cold. Many others simply deserted. No doubt Hannibal had expected some losses on the march, but probably not on this scale.
Polybius emphasizes how much the elephants helped Hannibal’s army in the Alps. Neither he nor any other source mentions the loss of any elephants there, although they do state heavy losses among horses and pack animals. Perhaps all of Hannibal’s original thirty-seven elephants survived the Alps.
Desertion was the prime cause of Hannibal’s losses in manpower. The good news, however, was that most of his best troops were still with him. They came from North Africa, and that was too far to run home to. Most of the deserters were probably Spaniards. Yet, they were good soldiers too.
Hannibal’s ability to hold the best part of his army together under awful conditions is a tribute to his leadership. Still, there is no way to get around it. Hannibal left Spain with 59,000 men and reached Italy with 26,000 men. In the campaign season that followed, his main problem was a lack of manpower. So, Hannibal’s initial losses haunted him for years to come.
Hannibal’s remaining army was in bad shape by the time it reached Italy. “For his men had not only suffered terribly from the toil of ascent and descent of the passes and the roughness of the road,” writes one ancient writer, “but they were also in wretched condition owing to the scarcity of provisions and neglect of their persons, many having fallen into a state of utter despondency from prolonged toil and want of food.”
Given the size and shape of the army that staggered into Italy in November 218, the war might have been over. Hannibal could not defeat Rome in the long run without substantial reinforcements. But in the short run, Hannibal turned things around, which is a tribute to his leadership and to his men’s toughness. Not only that—he went on to win battlefield victory after victory, which seems almost miraculous.
Like Alexander, Hannibal drove his men hard but he knew their limits. They needed rest, which Hannibal gave them. The men also needed food, but the only way to get food was to fight the enemy and take his resources—hard work, but victory would restore both the Carthaginians’ bodies and their morale.
Within a month or so of arriving in Italy, Hannibal achieved that victory, indeed several victories. He gave a virtuoso display of his skill as a commander. As a diplomat, he alternated between policies of terror and appeasement and won gains with both. As a manager, Hannibal proved that he knew men as well as he knew war. As a commander, he applied a combination of cunning, ingenuity, and fortitude that defeated Roman armies twice, first in a cavalry skirmish and then in a pitched battle. And he accomplished it all by the winter solstice, about December 22 or 23, 218 B.C.
But the Romans racked up a string of accomplishments as well. They demonstrated that they could think strategically. Although they could not match Hannibal’s tactical skill, they showed guts and endurance. The Roman infantry—the famed legions—could throw a powerful punch, and Hannibal now knew it from personal experience. Like the Carthaginians, the Romans exhibited mobility and speed in their operations. Indeed, a neutral observer at the end of the year 218 would have gasped at the distances that the two sides had each covered, at the rapidity with which they had moved, and at the flexibility with which they shuffled pieces on the military chessboard.
When it came to strategic surprise, however, Hannibal had the edge. The Romans expected him to stand on the defensive, so they were stunned by his aggressive march to Italy.
After leaving the Alps, Hannibal headed for the Po River Valley, where his agents had already made contact the previous spring with the largest Celtic tribes—Rome’s longtime enemies. The mighty Po flows from the Alps to the Adriatic. Whoever controlled its valley controlled northern Italy. The Romans had fought the Celts for control of this area and only recently emerged on top. First Hannibal had to pass through the area around modern Turin, whose Celtic inhabitants were not friendly to him. He attacked their main town and slaughtered the residents. The other tribes around Turin learned their lesson and joined him.
The Romans, meanwhile, hurried to the scene. After declaring war on Carthage the previous summer, they had decided on a two-pronged offensive, with attacks in both Spain and North Africa. When news of Hannibal’s approach in southern France came, they cancelled the African offensive but decided to keep up the pressure on Spain, Hannibal’s base. Rome wisely recognized that the struggle might be long, and so it was crucial to prevent Hannibal’s Spanish reinforcements from joining him.
Before Hannibal’s arrival in Italy, Rome had sent troops to the Po River Valley to deal with Celtic unrest. Just a few months before, it had also founded two new military colonies in the valley, one at Cremona and the other at Placentia (Piacenza), each in a strategic location. As Hannibal approached, even more Roman troops marched to northern Italy under the command of Tiberius Sempronius Longus, one of the two consuls (chief officials, annually elected) for 218 B.C. The other consul, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was in charge of the Spanish expedition, but he turned command in Spain over to his lieutenant (and brother) and made haste to northern Italy as well.
The campaign of November to December 218 focused on the strategic triangle represented by three points, the cities of Placentia, Clastidium, and Ticinum. Placentia, the new Roman colony on the central Po, stood just east of the valley of the Trebbia River and the pass that led to the northern Italian port city of Pisa. Farther west of Placentia, a spur of the Appenines reached up from the south and nearly touched the Po, making this a strategic chokepoint. Just west of that lay Clastidium (modern Casteggio), a Celtic fort that the Romans had taken over and turned into one of their strongholds. Both Placentia and Clastidium lay on the south side of the Po. On the north side, just east of Clastidium, the Ticinus River flowed into it. A few miles upstream on the Ticinus lay Ticinum (modern Pavia), a Celtic settlement. Whoever held these three cities had the key to the Po River Valley.
Scipio, the first Roman on the scene, was also the first Roman to taste battle with Hannibal. Using Placentia as a base, he went on the offensive. Scipio’s engineers threw makeshift bridges over the Po and the Ticinus and he ordered his troops to cross the rivers in search of Hannibal. On the plain somewhere to the west of the Ticinus and north of the Po, Scipio found him. The date was about late November 218.
The flat plain was classic cavalry country, or it would have been had it not been pockmarked by woods, swamps, and streams. Those features rendered it perfect for the kind of ambushes and suprises that Hannibal loved to carry out. He was a tactical master, not least in exploiting geographical features to the maximum. Hannibal most likely employed such tactics in this terrain.
The Ticinus River was more a cavalry skirmish than a proper battle. Cavalry was never Rome’s strongpoint; the Roman army was primarily an army of foot soldiers. Hannibal’s cavalry both outnumbered and outclassed the Romans. His heavy cavalry consisted of Spaniards, and Hannibal attacked the Romans with them in the center. Meanwhile, he made good use of his light cavalry, the dazzling horsemen from Numidia (modern Algeria). Specialists at harassing and breaking up enemy formations, the Numidian horsemen at the Ticinus River rode around the Roman flank and charged their rear. Not only did the Romans turn and flee, but they almost lost their commander, Scipio. His wounded body was dragged to safety and, according to one tradition, he was saved by his nineteen-year-old son, also named Cornelius Scipio (later Scipio Africanus), the very man who would eventually defeat Hannibal, sixteen years later.
Scipio had badly underestimated Hannibal. Perhaps that is understandable, given both Hannibal’s youth and the information that Scipio probably received about the poor state of Hannibal’s army after it had straggled out of the Alps. Or maybe Scipio had a chip on his shoulder. When the Carthaginians had crossed the Rhône in southern France in October, Scipio had tried—and failed—to reach them in time to stop them. Humiliated, he then returned to Italy.
After their defeat across t
he Ticinus, the Romans retreated rapidly, leaving forces beyond to break up the bridges after them. They regrouped to the southeast near the Roman colony at Placentia on the Po. Hannibal followed, picking up Celtic allies and Roman prisoners along the way. He gained entry to Clastidium, when its commander opened the gates: he and the men in his garrison were Roman allies from southern Italy. The Carthaginian turned the occasion into a propaganda event, treating the prisoners ostentatiously well and even honoring their leader. By trying to woo Rome’s allies, Hannibal made war on the political as well as the military front. Meanwhile, a group of Rome’s Celtic allies left Scipio’s camp to join Hannibal and made a different kind of statement. They killed some of the Romans and cut off their heads to bring with them.
• • •
The two sides encamped in the valley of the Trebia (Trebbia) River, west of Placentia and south of its confluence with the Po. In early December, Tiberius Sempronius Longus and his troops joined Scipio and his men. Hannibal’s army had grown to 28,000 infantry but the Romans, with 36,000 to 38,000 infantry, outnumbered him. Yet Hannibal had 10,000 cavalry while Rome had only 4,000. Finally, there were still about thirty-seven elephants.
The two sides sparred and skirmished. One raid almost turned into an all-out battle, as Hannibal’s hard-pressed soldiers retreated in disorder. But Hannibal demonstrated his iron grip on his troops. He sent out officers and buglers with specific instructions. The men in retreat had to stand and hold their ground, but that was that; he would not let them go on the offensive. Hannibal refused to be drawn into a battle except on his terms, that is, in a place, at a time, and under circumstances that he had carefully chosen beforehand. He was, as we might say today, a control freak.
But Hannibal did have a general engagement in mind at the Trebia, and on carefully selected ground. He chose the wide fields west of the river, where the flat and treeless plain was crisscrossed with gullies.
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