Hannibal knew that the Romans practically smelled ambushes when they entered the woods and would be on their guard. The open country, though, would invite Roman carelessness, Hannibal reasoned. One night, he managed to hide two thousand men in an overgrown gully behind the likely Roman battle line.
Hannibal knew his enemy. As Polybius wrote, Hannibal understood that nothing is “more essential to a general than the knowledge of his opponent’s principles and character.” A general has to envision the weak spots not only in his enemy’s body but in his mind. Hannibal did just that and Polybius was all admiration.
The next morning, Hannibal lured the Romans out to battle, under Sempronius’s command. The Numidian cavalry taunted the Romans and they took the bait. Having seen the Carthaginians retreat, Sempronius might have mistakenly thought that he had them on the run.
Before going out to fight, Hannibal prepared his troops carefully. He fed them a good breakfast, warmed them around the campfires, and told them to rub themselves down with olive oil as protection against the cold. The Romans, however, had no time for breakfast and did not protect themselves with oil. The Carthaginians had only a short distance to go to reach the battlefield. The Romans had to travel farther, and they had to cross the river. The water was cold and breast high, leaving them drenched and tired by the time they reached the enemy. It was the winter solstice, around December 22 or 23, 218 B.C.
As at the Ticinus, Hannibal planned to win by enveloping his enemy’s flanks. He arranged his infantry in the center and divided the cavalry between the two wings. Hannibal divided the elephants too and placed them in front of the infantry on either wing. Roman armies deployed their legions in three lines, with the cavalry on the flanks, and Tiberius Sempronius Longus did so as well. In the battle that followed, Rome’s always powerful legionaries held their own against the Carthaginian center. But the Carthaginians overwhelmed the enemy’s wings. After driving the Roman cavalry from the field, Hannibal’s men used a combination of cavalry, skirmishers, and elephants to break the Roman flanks. Meanwhile, the two thousand Carthaginians hidden in the gulley rose up and attacked the Romans in the rear.
The Roman legionaries in the center—ten thousand men—managed to escape by punching through the enemy line. Most of the cavalry escaped as well. But two-thirds of the Roman army—about twenty-eight thousand men—was killed or captured. Hannibal’s losses consisted mainly of Celtic infantrymen in his center. Wintry weather after the battle killed most of Hannibal’s surviving elephants.
Tiberius Sempronius Longus did not dare send the truth about the battle to Rome; instead, he sent a message that a storm had deprived him of victory. Hannibal was a tempest, all right, but one whose cunning and agility left Rome in shock.
As the truth about the Trebia percolated to Rome, Hannibal struck another propaganda blow. While barely keeping his Roman prisoners alive, he treated the Italians respectfully. He called an assembly in which he said that, “he had come above all to give the Italians back their freedom and to help them recover the cities and the territories which the Romans had taken away.” Then he sent them home without asking for any ransom.
Hannibal delivered a dual message: slaughter and liberation. The question was whether it would drive a wedge between Rome and its allies.
Caesar: The Audacity of Terror and the Sting of Clemency
Caesar made his first move with a wolf’s speed and agility. Before crossing the Rubicon he sent centurions in civilian clothes into Rimini, a key city at the junction of two Roman roads. On January 12, 49 B.C. (November 24, 50 B.C. by the solar calendar), Caesar crossed the Rubicon. By the time he marched on the city with his legion, Caesar’s men had opened the gates. Rimini surrendered. It was a sign of things to come.
As one ancient writer says of Caesar, “He thought surprise, daring, and taking quick advantage of the moment could achieve more than preparing for a regular invasion; he wanted to panic his enemies.” Another says that because Caesar “used to depend on the surprise caused by his speed and the terror caused by his audacity, rather than on the immensity of his preparations, he decided, with his 5,000 men, to be the first to attack in this great war and to seize the strategic positions in Italy before the enemy.” Such methods worked.
Within a month, Caesar and his men took the major towns in northern and central Italy. They did not need to shed any blood. In some places the enemy fled, in other places, they surrendered, either on their own initiative or because of local pressure. Italians reacted with horror to find in their backyard the army that had conquered Gaul.
Meanwhile, Pompey left Rome, first to Capua and then to Luceria, a city on the Apulian plain. It takes a shrewd and seasoned commander to engage in a fighting retreat; Pompey was such a general. Critics accused him of cowardice, but Pompey and his lieutenants were raising troops in central and southern Italy and then moving them south. They kept just one step ahead of Caesar’s advance. Things went rather smoothly until Corfinium.
Corfinium sums up the politics of the civil war in Italy. It was the only place that offered any real resistance to Caesar. But Corfinium wasn’t just a military operation; it was a “new type of conquest,” as Caesar himself said. Corfinium symbolizes the brilliance of his policy—and its risks.
Geography made Corfinium. It sat high in the Apennines, in a fertile valley hemmed in by mountains. The town lay about 100 miles due east of Rome on the ancient via Valeria, the highway to the Adriatic Sea. Other strongholds nearby controlled roads to the south and west.
About forty years earlier, in 90 B.C., the Italian rebels against Rome had chosen Corfinium as their capital in the Social War (91–88 B.C.). They renamed it Italica and gave it a new forum and Senate house, but they soon surrendered the town to Rome. Apparently, there was no struggle—otherwise Rome would have destroyed the city’s fortification walls, which still stood in 49 B.C. Elsewhere in Italy, the Social War was hard fought. Rome put down the rebellion but agreed to the allies’ demand for Roman citizenship.
The city’s strategic position remained obvious. As he marched south, Caesar could not afford to bypass Corfinium and leave a strong enemy force in his rear. If the enemy chose to make a stand there, he would have to fight. And so it happened.
In February 49 (by the Roman calendar: December 50 by the solar calendar), as Caesar approached from the north, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus decided to dig in at Corfinium. Domitius was a man of grand gestures and extreme opinions, famous for bringing one hundred African lions to the arena and for marrying the sister of Cato, the archconservative of the Roman senate. How appropriate that the emperor Nero was Domitius’s great-great-great-grandson!
When it came to Caesar, Domitius was a fire-eater. He came from a rich family whose prominence extended to the dawn of the Roman republic. Domitius had often publicly attacked Caesar and, for that matter, Pompey too, before Pompey split with Caesar. Domitius had once threatened to recall Caesar from Gaul; the Senate had recently appointed him to replace Caesar as governor there. An ex-consul, Domitius was now a leading general of the Senate’s armies.
In the second week of February, he decided to stand his ground at Corfinium. Pompey had already evacuated his forces to Luceria, about one hundred miles southeast of Corfinium. Domitius might have joined Pompey there, but he reasoned that it was better to make a stand in a stronghold on the road to Rome than in open country far from the capital. He had no small force of men in and around Corfinium, having raised twelve cohorts of troops from the tough mountain peoples in the vicinity. Pompey’s lieutenants brought another nineteen cohorts from central Italy, for a total of thirty-one cohorts: on paper, about fifteen thousand men. But fearing that Caesar would cut Domitius off, Pompey sent an urgent message to withdraw.
By now, Caesar had two legions, or eight thousand to ten thousand men. He arrived at Corfinium on February 15 and set up camp outside the city walls. Seven of Domitius’s cohorts in a neighboring town immediately defected to Caesar. Two days later, another legion, twenty
-two newly recruited cohorts from Gaul and three hundred foreign cavalry joined Caesar, for a total of about 27,000 to 30,000 men. Caesar outnumbered Domitius by about two to one.
When Caesar reached Corfinium, Domitius had sent messengers to Pompey, asking him to come quickly with his forces to block the passes, cut off Caesar’s supplies, and trap him between their two armies. While he was waiting for help to arrive, Domitius organized his troops in defensive positions, arranged artillery on the city walls, and called an assembly in which he pledged a piece of his own land as a reward to each soldier.
It was no use, however. Winters in Corfinium are mild enough for military operations, and Caesar moved with vigor. He added a second camp on the far side of town; he fortified both camps with great earthworks. Then he prepared to lay siege to Corfinium by building walls and forts to surround it. For good reason Caesar was known as a great engineer! Pompey, meanwhile, wrote back to Domitius. His reply arrived on February 19 and stated a clear no. Far from bringing his forces to Corfinium, Pompey again advised Domitius to get his army out and join him in Luceria; doing anything else was too risky. Pompey would have ordered Domitius to join him if he could, but he wasn’t able to. Unlike Caesar, Pompey lacked supreme command.
What Pompey did insist on, though, was that he had neither advised nor wanted Domitius to make a stand at Corfinium. Far from fighting in Italy, Pompey decided to evacuate the peninsula. He would move east, and with the help of his vast contacts in the Greek world build a new army. If Domitius knew that, he didn’t agree. If Pompey left Italy and stormed back to victory with help from his friends in the East, he would owe the Senate nothing. But if they beat Caesar at Corfinium now, the Senate would share the credit. Pompey was unmoved, stating that he could not possibly stand up to Caesar’s veterans.
So Domitius was left on his own. He tried to rally his men but they knew a hopeless situation when they saw one. They were trapped in the mountains and under siege by the best army in the Roman world. Claiming that their general was trying to escape, his own officers arrested Domitius. Whatever the real story, Domitius made a good gift for Caesar, to whom they promptly offered to surrender. It was February 21. Pompey had already left Luceria and moved farther south, to the heel of the Italian boot.
In only seven days, the great fortress of Corfinium had fallen. That, however, is not the most striking part of the story; that distinction belongs to what happened next, when it was time for Caesar to take vengeance: nothing. Caesar prevented his soldiers from entering the city and looting it. Meanwhile, he received the elite among the town’s defenders: fifty men, including senators, public officials, and their sons. Caesar pardoned all of them. Domitius asked for death; Caesar not only gave him life but returned the six million sesterces (Roman coins) that Domitius had brought to town (and which the town authorities had turned over to Caesar). “This he did,” wrote Caesar, “in order not to seem more self-controlled in regard to men’s lives than their money.”
It was a remarkable display of generosity, and Caesar knew it. In a letter that he wrote to Cicero the following month, Caesar pointed out his determination not to follow the bloody road of Sulla the dictator, who had killed thousands in Italy. “Let this be the new type of conquest,” Caesar wrote, “to fortify ourselves with pity and generosity.”
Caesar’s policy was generous but also political: he wanted to win the goodwill of all Italians. He also wanted to win the support of Domitius’s soldiers, whom he immediately ordered to join him by taking a loyalty oath. Caesar had not only added fifteen thousand soldiers to his army, but he had deprived Pompey of them. Because it was a civil war it was not unusual for men to switch sides.
By his policy of clemency, Caesar branded himself as a conqueror who displayed generosity—but with a bite. In Roman eyes, clemency was a gift to a defeated, foreign opponent. There was, then, an insult in Caesar’s gesture, and everyone knew it. Cicero, for example, called it “insidious clemency.” Caesar’s opponents would never forgive him his mercy. No wonder that many of the men who stabbed him to death on the Ides of March, five years later, had been pardoned by Caesar.
THE ESSENCE OF DECISION
Starting a war is not like taking out a certificate of deposit. There is no guaranteed rate of return. Think of war, rather, as a high-tech start-up. If a commander has done his job properly, the enterprise will rest on a firm foundation, but it is a risk, even so. There are no sure things in war. From Caesar at the Rubicon to the present day, war remains a high-stakes gamble.
Yet the paradox is that our three generals each would have found peace too risky. Peace would have cost Caesar his career and possibly his life. The Macedonians would never have tolerated Alexander if he had refused to invade Persia. Hannibal’s fear of Rome might have contained an element of paranoia, but it was shared by most of Carthage’s power brokers. Daredevil though they sometimes were, Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar each played it safe by going to war. Peace was a sure thing—and it spelled ruin. War was risky but when risk is the only way out, it is the smart move.
Not that their wars were easy; far from it. But Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar each made it look easy, and therein lies part of their greatness. Alexander had an empty treasury, a restive rear, and a record mostly of failure by his advance troops in Anatolia up to that point. Caesar had only one legion to pit against the Roman state. Hannibal had even bigger problems, above all, the daunting journey from Spain to northern Italy. By the time he crossed the Alps, about five months after starting out, he had lost nearly half his forces. Yet more important, he had made the trip—and then went on to win a battle.
Like any good general, Hannibal had prepared as carefully as possible. “Men are apt to think in great crises that when all has been done they still have something left to do and when all has been said that they have not yet said enough,” wrote Thucydides around 400 B.C., and the words continue to ring true. Yet they don’t tell the whole story.
Success in war depends not only on knowing yourself but your enemy. Within a month of stepping onto enemy soil, Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had the right to feel that they had judged their enemy correctly. Alexander had counted on the Persians challenging him to a pitched battle rather than adopting a scorched-earth policy. Hannibal had made a similar assessment about the Romans. Events proved each of them correct. The battles of the Granicus River, the Ticinus River, and the Trebia respectively were triumphs for the two invading war machines.
Caesar might have hoped that Pompey would do him the favor of engaging Caesar’s veteran army in a pitched battle, but that wasn’t likely, as Caesar surely had known. Pompey’s more probable policy would not have been a mystery to a man of Caesar’s wiles: recruiting soldiers and rapidly withdrawing them eastward. The best that Caesar could have hoped for was to chase Pompey out of Italy before he could raise many troops. Domitius’s clumsy stand at Corfinium was a lucky break for Caesar. But six weeks after crossing the Rubicon, Caesar had still not caught Pompey nor stopped him from leaving Italy with his army.
Of the three generals, Alexander had the best war so far. He had brought his army across the Hellespont without opposition, won a pitched battle at the cost of few casualties, and stood poised to take control of Anatolia’s western provinces and their resources. Caesar captured an enemy army led by a clumsy foe and he scored propaganda points through generous behavior, but he had yet to catch his main opponent, Pompey, and his army. Hannibal had the most difficult war because of his punishing losses on the march to Italy. In the long run, he needed reinforcements. Still, Hannibal had held his men together, reached Italy and hooked up with his allies, and he had smashed the Roman army, all considerable successes.
Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had each begun his war well. But none of them had the luxury of mistaking beginner’s luck for final victory. Their wars, like any new enterprise, would be judged by their ultimate achievements, not their initial performances—even though those performances had been spectacular.
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p; Wars, in fact, have a way of getting more complicated the longer they go on. Once hostilities begin they take on a logic of their own. Having survived the initial shock, each side tends to increase its investment, which decreases its willingness to give in. The result: what might have seemed like a decisive move before the war turns out to be just an opening gambit once the fighting is under way.
In the opening stages of war, Persia, Rome, and the coalition of Pompey and the Senate had all been hit hard. But none of them was ready to quit.
For Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar, therefore, the wars had just begun.
3
RESISTANCE
ON AN AUTUMN MORNING IN 334 B.C., Alexander, king of Macedon, looked down from a hillside and surveyed his prize. Below, in a natural theater, lay the great city of Halicarnassus, with the blue sea sparkling beyond it. The city was Persia’s main naval base on Anatolia’s Aegean coast, and it had fallen to Alexander’s army after a long siege.
But the Persians didn’t go before putting up a stiff fight, and they left in good order one morning after burning down half the town the night before. Worse still for Alexander, the Persians didn’t precisely leave. They withdrew from most of the city but kept the two fortified citadels (one a hill, one an island) that flanked the harbor. Halicarnassus was a Persian naval base before Alexander’s siege and it remained a Persian naval base afterward.
And so, as Alexander’s men marched into Halicarnassus, they could watch Persian warships sail serenely in and out of town as if the battle had never happened. In one of those ships sat the enemy commander, the chief strategist of the war that was not going as Alexander had planned—Memnon of Rhodes.
About a hundred years later and 3,500 miles away, on a spring day in 217 B.C., another commander’s war plan began to come unhinged. On that day two fleets, one Carthaginian and the other Roman, met in battle just off the northeast coast of Spain. They were near the delta of the Ebro River. The commanders represented the two greatest military families of the war: Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, led the Carthaginians, and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, uncle of the later Scipio Africanus, led the Romans.
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