If even his officers supported the mutineers, Alexander had no choice but to submit. But he left the decision to the gods; he had his priests offer sacrifices to continue the march, but the sacrifices proved unfavorable. That allowed the king to say that since the gods opposed a further advance, he would take the army home. But Alexander neither forgave nor forgot. Coenus died suddenly a few days later. Some modern scholars suspect poison but the ancient sources say Coenus died of disease. In his anger over the mutiny, perhaps Alexander wished a similar fate for the rest of his men, but he needed them. Still, two years later, he finally got a chance to take revenge.
The fastest and easiest way to go home was for Alexander and his men to go back the way they came, through the Khyber Pass and Bactria. But that would be admitting defeat. Alexander still had new worlds to explore, even if they did not lie in his preferred direction, to the east. He would travel down the river valleys of the Punjab to the southern Indus Valley and the Indian Ocean, a distance of more than a thousand miles. Then he would turn westward toward southern Iran, with some of the men marching overland and the rest traveling by sea.
Alexander began by having his men return to Porus’s realm and build a vast fleet on the Hydaspes—eight hundred or more ships. The fleet sailed in November 326, accompanied by an army marching on either shore. It is estimated that Alexander had a total of 100,000 men by now.
The Macedonians had to fight all the way to the sea. The Indian kingdoms put up a spirited resistance but rarely posed much of a threat to the invaders. The Macedonians responded with terror. They massacred unarmed people, charged the cavalry into columns of refugees, and killed civilians who were trying to cross a river or hid in the woods.
There was regular fighting as well. Things went very badly for the Macedonians during an engagement near the modern city of Multan in January 325. To inspire his weary men, Alexander personally led the attack on a strong city and received an arrow wound in his chest. He nearly died because of the blood loss required to remove the arrow, leading his men to bewail their fate, leaderless in a hostile land very far from home. But Alexander recovered.
In July 325, after putting down two major rebellions, the Macedonians reached the sea not far from the modern city of Karachi, Pakistan. A month later, Alexander was ready to depart. He had already taken the Macedonian old and wounded, along with all his elephants and a few battle-ready troops for protection, and sent them back through the Khyber Pass and Bactria. Now he dismissed his Indian troops and divided the rest of his forces in two. He marched westward along the coast with perhaps about thirty thousand men, while the rest sailed with the fleet. Alexander started out in August but the fleet waited for the monsoon to end in November. The commander of the fleet was another of Alexander’s boyhood friends, Nearchus of Crete.
The launching of Alexander’s Indian Ocean armada was an extraordinary moment. Nearchus was a trailblazer. If Alexander had lived to old age and held his empire together, the fleet’s success could have opened a new chapter in the history of the relationship between East and West. Contact between India and Greece might have become a central theme of ancient history. But even within the limits of fact, even though Alexander’s successors turned their backs on India, the fleet was remarkable.
The fleet speaks to Alexander’s ambition, his leadership, and his ability to grow as a military strategist. In 334, at Miletus, he dismissed his navy. Nine years later, in India in 325, he built a fleet and gave it an audacious mission, which it carried out smartly. As a result, the scales now dropped from Alexander’s eyes when it came to sea power and its potential. By 323, he was ready to entrust his navy with the future of his army.
Meanwhile, the march overland to Iran was painful. Alexander’s route took him through the Gedrosian Desert (roughly, the Baluchistan region of Pakistan). Cyrus the Great had once lost an army in this harsh terrain and Alexander wanted to outdo him by making it across the Gedrosian Desert. Alexander succeeded, but those around him paid the price. He spent two months crossing the desert, taking an inland route, which left food supplies on the coast for the Macedonian fleet but forced Alexander on a more difficult journey. Although the soldiers suffered, almost all of them survived. But many camp followers—women and traders—died and all the animals were slaughtered. The natives, meanwhile, faced famine after the invaders devoured their meager food stores.
By December 325 the Macedonians had crossed the desert and reached southeastern Iran. The rainy season had begun and they were back in contact with the heartland of Alexander’s empire. The fleet arrived soon afterward, as did the men who had marched back via Bactria. The war in the East was over. Now what?
HANNIBAL
After Cannae, two roads to victory lay ahead for Hannibal. One called for marching on the city of Rome and storming it, as Alexander had stormed his enemy’s capitals. But Rome wasn’t Persepolis and it wouldn’t fall easily. The other called for Hannibal to rest his army and skip a hopeless attack on Rome. Instead Hannibal would pick off Rome’s allies one by one, the way Alexander had picked off cities like Miletus and Tyre. But Italy wasn’t Anatolia and, unlike the Macedonians, the Carthaginians hadn’t mastered the art of besieging cities. There had to be another way out for Hannibal, but what was it?
Maybe not storming Rome, but frightening it. The sight of Hannibal’s army outside the walls would panic the city and unnerve its friends nearby. Meanwhile, there were other possibilities. Finding new allies outside Italy, getting new resources from home, using dirty tricks or diplomacy to pry away Rome’s Italian allies, opening a second front in Sicily or Sardinia, getting Rome to the negotiating table—any of these or a combination of them might work, but Hannibal would have to decide. He might even decide to cut his losses in Italy and move on. Whatever the choice, it would challenge every inch of his strategic judgment and leadership.
Mago’s Rings
Hannibal had passed eighteen dramatic months. From the time he entered Italy in late 218 to his victory at Cannae in summer 216, the Carthaginian had won four battles against Rome and so frustrated the enemy that they gave up on Fabius’s strategy just when it was starting to work. If Hannibal had then marched on Rome and shocked the city into coming to the peace table, he would have won the war.
But the war dragged on. Rome did not agree to negotiate; Hannibal did not march on Rome. His strategy was, rather, to surround Rome with a web of enemy alliances and slowly squeeze it to the point of surrender. After Cannae, most of southern Italy defected to Hannibal. The most important recruit was Capua, Italy’s second-largest city, and a glittering prize. Capua offered Hannibal prestige, a supply base, and comfortable winter quarters. (Capua was known for the good life, but the story that the city corrupted him is just a story.) Much of Sicily joined Carthage as well, a boon to the Carthaginian navy, which now had way stations on the route to Italy. Farther afield, King Philip V of Macedon, whose country was powerful once again, made an alliance with Hannibal against Rome.
But all was not well. In order to woo his new Italian allies, Hannibal had been forced to promise not to conscript their men, so they did not solve his manpower problems. True, they did supply some soldiers to Hannibal, and they certainly did not contribute men to Rome, as they would have otherwise. But Hannibal had to garrison the cities that had joined him, and that cost him men. He had to protect the cities from Roman reprisals and to prevent them from rejoining Rome. All in all, the allies didn’t help Hannibal. They tied him down, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver.
Another problem was that Hannibal’s alliances were incomplete. Not a single city in central Italy joined him. For all his gains in southern Italy, important cities there remained loyal to Rome, which offered the enemy forward posts, control of roads, and, most important of all, seaports. Hannibal did not have enough men to conquer all these places. Though highly effective, his army had never been large. His battle casualties likely included junior officers, essential to future success. In short, Hannibal needed reinforcements�
��and he naturally turned to Carthage.
Yet Hannibal faced a paradox: he needed to conquer a port in order to open a secure supply route to Carthage, but he couldn’t do so without getting the Carthaginian reinforcements he had set his sights on. The temporary, imperfect solution was to land reinforcements on the Italian coast, but first Carthage had to agree to send them.
In 215 B.C., Hannibal sent his brother Mago from Italy to Carthage. Mago brought the Carthaginian senate news of Hannibal’s achievements. As a dramatic illustration, he poured out onto the hard Senate House floor hundreds of golden rings, “of that sort worn only by Knights, and only by the first among them,” rings that had been taken from killed or captured Romans. Then he asked for reinforcements in money, manpower, and grain. The Senate agreed but not unanimously, and the amount they sent was small compared with the resources that they committed to other fronts.
The Carthaginian senate cheered for Cannae but it was skeptical. Some senators no doubt remembered that it took nearly two years for a single Roman ally to join Hannibal. Those who were well informed about Italy might have noticed the many places that had stayed loyal to Rome. And then, perhaps some senators nervously eyed their own fingers at the sight of Mago’s rings.
Meanwhile, Carthage’s new alliances faded like spring flowers in its hand. Macedon, for example, promised to send troops to help Hannibal in Italy, but Rome commanded the sea and blocked any Macedonian landing. Rome also threatened Macedon by stirring up a war nearby in Illyria (modern Croatia). Could the Carthaginian navy have broken Rome’s naval stranglehold? After a rebuilding phase, Carthage had enough ships and manpower to give the Roman fleet a real fight, but it lacked the one essential for victory: guts. Carthage’s admirals refused to risk a battle and so the Macedonians stayed home.
Then there was Sicily. Carthage scored a coup in 215 B.C. with the defection of Syracuse, Sicily’s greatest city. This rich, glittering seaport was armed to the teeth. No less a figure than Archimedes, one of antiquity’s greatest mathematicians, helped Syracuse devise new weapons. Carthage sent a huge expeditionary force, 28,000 men, to help Syracuse. But Rome laid siege to Syracuse in 213 and captured it in 211, after a two-year struggle. Archimedes was killed during the sack. Meanwhile, a Carthaginian naval expedition tried to retake the island of Sardinia, a former Carthaginian colony, but Rome crushed it.
Carthage frittered away its energies on one new initiative after another, but Rome broke each one in turn. Meanwhile, Rome held fast to its traditional strategy. It kept a firm grip on its oldest allies in central Italy and continued to raise new armies there. But it did not use them in a major pitched battle against Hannibal.
After Cannae, the Senate admitted that Fabius had been right. Instead of accepting Hannibal’s challenges to battle, it went back to the strategy of shadowing Hannibal’s forces and cutting off his food supplies.
This move was greatly to Rome’s credit. It demonstrates the strategic wisdom of Rome’s leaders, but it also shows the deep well of popular support they drew from. The Fabian strategy was slow and frustrating. It worked only because the Roman people trusted their government. Indeed, the Roman political system stood on the firmest of foundations.
Rome focused its energies on the area around Capua, Hannibal’s major new ally. Capua was only 125 miles from Rome; the Romans did not want Hannibal to get any closer. So Roman generals intervened in still-friendly cities near Capua; they ordered all grain to be harvested early and locked up in fortresses. Meanwhile, Roman raiders cut down Capua’s crops in the fields. To feed his men, Hannibal marched to the major Roman supply depots nearby: the cities of Naples and Nola. Rome kept these cities in line by garrisoning and fortifying them as well as by executing any local waverers. Naples was also an important seaport, while Nola was a key road junction. Frustrated and hungry, Hannibal had no choice but to move his army farther south.
But the Carthaginian was hardly out of steam. He captured the major southern Italian port of Tarentum in 213 B.C. by means of a ruse, not by storming or besieging it. After negotiating with disaffected Roman allies in Tarentum, Hannibal arranged for a commando unit to rush to hide outside one of the town’s gates one night while his allies pretended to be returning from a hunt. While the guards were admiring a large boar carried by the supposed hunters, Carthaginian soldiers rushed in. They had carefully chosen a night when most of the Roman soldiers were partying and unprepared.
Still, the attack was not a complete success. Hannibal took Tarentum but a Roman garrison held out in the town’s citadel, which had access to the sea. This greatly limited Hannibal’s ability to use Tarentum as a port, and Tarentum was the port where Philip of Macedon’s troops would land, if he ever sent them.
Five years later, in 208, Rome in turn tricked its way into recapturing Tarentum. An Italian serving in Hannibal’s garrison fell in love with a local woman whose brother served with the Romans. The brother talked the lovesick Italian into betraying the town to Rome. By then, Rome had successfully starved out Capua after a long siege; the city surrendered in 211. And Hannibal never took a seaport even more strategic than Tarentum—Regium, the gateway to Sicily, stayed stubbornly loyal to Rome.
Hannibal was still in Italy, but even though he was bottled up in the south, he remained dangerous, especially if reinforcements reached him. Rather than risking a pitched battle to drive him out, Rome attacked Hannibal’s base in Spain. In 209 B.C., a Roman army in Spain shocked the Carthaginians by capturing their well-fortified capital city of New Carthage (Cartagena). It was as bold a move as Hannibal’s march on Italy and as cunning in its execution as his tactics at Cannae. The Roman commander had taken the trouble to learn about the daily ebb of water from the lagoon north of the city, due to the wind, that left a poorly defended part of the wall accessible—and used the information to take New Carthage in a bloody afternoon. This Roman was none other than Publius Cornelius Scipio (later Africanus), son of the consul of 218, also named Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had lost to Hannibal at the Ticinus.
A brilliant general, Scipio copied Hannibal’s tactics in pitched battle as well. At the battle of Baecula in Spain a year later (208), Scipio won a solid if not decisive victory over a Carthaginian army by enveloping its flanks. It was a move out of Hannibal’s playbook. Never before had a Roman force maneuvered so well; Scipio had trained his men long and hard.
The Carthaginian general at Baecula was Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal. He had saved most of his men; now he was ordered to transfer them to Italy. Finally, Hannibal would get the reinforcements he was desperate for. Hasdrubal marched in 207. Like his brother, Hasdrubal crossed the Alps. He too found Celtic allies in northern Italy. He too brought elephants with him—ten of them. Including his Italian allies, Hasdrubal had about thirty thousand men. Unlike Hannibal, who crossed the Alps in the snows of late fall, Hasdrubal timed his crossing for warm weather, and he probably chose an easier route. Unlike Hannibal, though, Hasdrubal did not surprise the Romans, who knew that he was coming.
The Romans mobilized two forces, one under each consul: one in the north, to oppose Hasdrubal, the other in the south, to try to keep Hannibal from marching to join his brother. The Romans had reason to be concerned about what would happen if Hasdrubal won a major pitched battle—a likely result if he joined forces with Hannibal. That might have pushed war-weary Roman allies into the Carthaginian camp.
Then, Providence took a hand in events. Hasdrubal was based in Umbria in north-central Italy. He sent four horsemen south to Hannibal with information about his location and with plans for the two generals to join forces. The Romans captured Hasdrubal’s messengers and discovered his plan. This allowed them to detach part of their southern army and send it north to join the forces against Hasdrubal.
The Romans cornered Hasdrubal in north-central Italy, in the vicinity of the modern city of Urbino. The Carthaginians were outnumbered, had no cavalry, and didn’t know the countryside. The Romans forced them to fight a battle on the banks of the Metaur
us (modern Metauro) River. Once again, a Roman attack on the Carthaginian flank delivered a devastating blow, and the Carthaginian army collapsed.
Hasdrubal died in battle. The Romans decapitated him, sent his head south with a team of riders, and threw it into Hannibal’s camp. The story goes that in his distress, Hannibal cried out, “Now I understand the fate of Carthage!” But, if this is true, it doesn’t mean that Hannibal had given up. He withdrew his army to Bruttium, the “toe” of the Italian boot, but he held on tenaciously to Italian soil.
What Went Wrong?
In nine years, from 216 to 207 B.C. Hannibal had gone from being Rome’s conqueror at Cannae to being its virtual prisoner in a corner of southern Italy. Why?
When he began the Second Punic War in 218 B.C., Hannibal knew that Carthage could not match Rome’s manpower or its navy. Its strength was the professionalism of its small but elite army and his own ability as its leading general. Because Carthage could not match Rome’s resources, a long war was to its disadvantage. If it were going to win, Carthage would have to win quickly.
Hannibal’s actions from the time he left New Carthage (spring 218) to his victory at Cannae (summer 216) followed that strategy. His march on Italy shocked Rome. His victories in four battles left the Romans fearful “for themselves and for their native soil.”
At this moment, fresh from victory at Cannae, Hannibal should have opened a new military offensive. He made a diplomatic push. He tried to rebrand himself in Roman eyes as a man of peace. For the first time after winning a battle, he addressed the Roman prisoners and spoke in soothing terms. Then he sent a Carthaginian envoy, one Carthalo, to Rome to negotiate. Hannibal offered to ransom his Roman captives if the Senate would pay a high price for each man. The Romans recognized this as a trick, meant both to transfer money to the enemy and to sap Rome’s fighting spirit. If the Senate had agreed, in the future, Roman soldiers might have preferred surrender to fighting to the death, secure in the knowledge that eventually they would be ransomed. The Senate refused.
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