Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (46 page)

Scipio laughed at the answer and asked ‘where would you place yourself, Hannibal, if you had not been defeated by me? Hannibal, now perceiving his jealousy, replied, “In that case I should have put myself before Alexander.” Thus Hannibal flattered Scipio in a delicate manner by suggesting that he had conquered one who was the superior to Alexander’ (Appian,
Syr.
910). It is a lovely story and reflects the view of later generations that Scipio and Hannibal were among the most remarkable military commanders who had ever lived. Livy describes them as ‘the greatest generals not merely of their own day, but of the whole of history down to his [Livy’s] time’ (30.30.1).

Appian’s is not the only extant discussion on the eternal question of ‘who was the best’ general of antiquity. The comic prose of Lucian of Samosata’s
Dialogues of the Dead
(380–398) presents the fantasy comparison between Alexander the Great and Hannibal. The story is set before Minos, one of judges of the dead in the Underworld, who is to announce the final verdict on each man’s claim to be the finest military commander in the world. The two men bicker over who should go first. ‘I should be heard before you, Libyan; I am the better man,’ claims Alexander. Their introduction before an impressed Minos elicits the response, ‘both famous [men] indeed’. There is room in the competition for the glorification of the Roman soldiers of the mid-Republic
and denigration of the Persians through the words of Hannibal: ‘My rivals were the ablest generals in the world, commanding the best soldiers in the world; I warred not with Medes or Assyrians, who fly before they are pursued, and yield the victory to him that dares take it.’
²⁷
Scipio, as is fitting, makes an appearance and Hannibal ends up being judged the last of the three.
²⁸

By the time of Lucian, Rome’s empire encompassed a vast world of diverse cultures and languages, from the Germanic and Celtic north to the Arabian peninsula and Sahara in the south. Throughout the Empire Hannibal’s fame endured and it was perhaps his role in opposition to the prevailing power of Rome that sustained his celebrity. Hannibal was viewed as one of the renowned generals of antiquity but also remembered for his time in exile in the Hellenistic east where he became a rallying point for those who opposed Roman power.
²⁹
In the late second century the Severan dynasty came to power and Septimius Severus (193–205
CE
), an African with Punic roots from the city of Lepcis Magna (now in modern Libya) became emperor. It was in the reign of Severus, or more likely his son Caracalla, that the place of Hannibal’s burial was commemorated with a new tomb. The site of the burial in Libyssa, the small city in Bithynia where Hannibal died, was well known and visited almost four centuries after his death but had apparently fallen into disrepair.
³⁰
We are told that the Severan emperor built a white marble tomb dedicated to Hannibal, ‘for he too was Libyan by race’, according to a later Byzantine writer.
³¹

This monument of the Severans, set up to commemorate a fellow African, reveals the complex attitude towards Rome’s ultimate enemy in the imperial period. An important aspect of the myth of Hannibal was his evolution from the enemy into something more autonomous. We learn that Hannibal’s tomb was a place of pilgrimage in the ancient world and that people came to his grave as to the graves of Alexander the Great and Achilles. Perhaps Rome’s first African dynasty saw no conflict in honouring a famous Punic general. In fact, they may have been more interested in tapping into Hannibal’s reputation as a brilliant military man. The shared cultural heritage may also have been seen as advantageous for the Severan dynasty. The Severans were outsiders and could not trace their family heritage back to legendary Roman ancestors but they could at least evoke the famed general of the Punic world. The Severan emperors, like Hannibal, used the image of Herakles in their propaganda.
³²
Their interest in Hannibal may help to articulate his role for posterity as a symbol of the powerful outsider, an aspect of Hannibal’s life that had existed probably since his death. The population of the second- and third-century Roman Empire were largely non-Roman in origin and they were ruled by a series of soldier emperors. Hannibal could be celebrated for his military
prowess and opposition to Roman power. This celebrity endured and Hannibal’s tomb stood visible until at least the eleventh century
CE
.
³³

The stories of the Romans of the Republic, as written chiefly by Livy, passed into the medieval and Renaissance imagination through the poems of Boccaccio and the poetry and biographies of Petrarch. Thus Hannibal’s story became part of the mainstay of a classical education across Europe.
³⁴
In the seventeenth century, as European powers began to develop into nation states, the story of the war between Rome and Hannibal captured the imagination and was used by writers and poets to express political views. It was a time when all education in Europe included the classics and Livy was read universally. For the educated of the early modern world, Hannibal and the Carthaginians became a recognizable moral tale.
³⁵

This is nowhere more apparent than in England in the early seventeenth century. When Sir Walter Ralegh was accused of taking part in a plot against James I (VI of Scotland) he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The rule of the Stuart king James I was advertised as that of the ‘New Caesar’. The Stuart king charged Ralegh, one of England’s military heroes, with treason. While languishing in the Tower, Ralegh wrote a history of the world that included Hannibal. The character of Hannibal has always elicited admiration from military men through the ages because of his outstanding strategic victories. In addition to this, Ralegh was a staunch Protestant who believed that Catholic Spain was the greatest danger to England and in his history he presented the story of the Punic Wars and Hannibal from a Carthaginian point of view. With the Stuarts identifying themselves in the role of the Romans, Ralegh related his position to those much-slandered Carthaginians. His history focused on perceived Roman treacheries in the face of Hannibal’s nobility.
³⁶
Ralegh’s history represents a continuous theme in the remembrance of Hannibal through the ages. Groups and individuals who find themselves in opposition to a larger, more imperial power often connect to Hannibal and the Carthaginians.

Another of Livy’s tales that captivated European soldiery was how Hannibal and his army at Capua succumbed to an excess of luxury. This proved a popular cautionary tale. Livy’s vivid digression recalls how the winter that Hannibal spent in luxurious Capua (216/215) had a disastrous effect: ‘men whom the most intense misery had failed to break [were] now ruined by excessive comfort and unlimited pleasure – and the more thoroughly ruined because, thanks to their inexperience, they had immersed themselves all the more eagerly. Sleep, drink, dinner-parties, whores, baths and inactivity that, from habit, became sweeter every day – all this sapped their physical and moral strength’ (Livy 23.18.10–13).
³⁷

The story of Capua resonated with many seventeenth-century Irish writers, who warned their soldiers not to engage in too much luxury, worried that the fate of Hannibal’s army was waiting for them.
³⁸
In a treatise on military discipline written in 1634 the Irish soldier Gerrat Barry referenced the story of Hannibal’s winter stay at Capua as a warning of what can happen to a battle-hardened army if it is given too much time to rest. At Capua, Barry wrote, Hannibal and the soldiers became idle ‘and forgetful of all military exercise, as though they never had managed arms. Which was the cause of the ruin and perdition of all his army …’
³⁹
With Irish mercenaries fighting in contemporary European wars it may be that the luxuries of the sophisticated cities of Europe had turned some of the tough soldiers in their ranks. Livy claims that after their winter in Capua, many of Hannibal’s men had formed relationships and would slip away from their duties, and ‘the deserters’ hiding-place was always Capua’ (23.18.16). As Henry Burnell summed up in his tragicomedy
Landgartha
, ‘this kingdome being more fatall unto them – than Capua was to Hannibal’ (Act I).
⁴⁰

In early modern Europe Hannibal’s deeds and great battles continued to be celebrated in tragedy and opera. It was not just among the educated that Hannibal’s memory thrived. By the nineteenth century the poet Lord Byron wrote that ‘every district of Italy has its hero. In the north some painter is the usual genius of the place … to the south we hear of Roman names. Near Thrasimene [Trasimeno] tradition is still faithful to the name of an enemy and Hannibal the Carthaginian is the only ancient name remembered on the banks of the Perugian Lake.’
⁴¹
This memory of Hannibal’s victory had retained its part in the life and folklore of the Italian countryside.

The role embodied by Hannibal and the Carthaginians in the moral exempla of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe continued and fluctuated depending on whose version of history was being told. In revolutionary France the Roman Republic played an important role yet in 1805 the painter David evoked Hannibal when painting Napoleon crossing the Alps. A glance through English newspapers from 1914–1918 reveals frequent allusions to Rome vs Carthage, with the Romans symbolizing England and the Carthaginians Germany or vice versa depending on which side was being expressed.
⁴²
Rome versus Carthage was and is also an allegory for the fight of the colonized against the colonizer. ‘I am Carthaginian, the earth is mine, not Britain’s not Rome’s,’ states a character in Frank McGuinness’ 1988 play
Carthaginians
(line 17).
⁴³

In the twentieth century a newly independent Turkey embraced Hannibal when Atatürk vowed to build a monument marking his supposed burial place, resurrecting the location of pilgrimage that the Severans had commemorated
millennia earlier. A monument to Hannibal now stands on the grounds of the Tübitak Scientific and Technical Institute in Gebze in modern Turkey (see Plate 8).
⁴⁴
The precise location of the original tomb of Hannibal is, however, uncertain. We only know that ‘crossing the Bosphoros and passing by Chalcedon and Libyssa, where Hannibal the Carthaginian is buried’ was noted by Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century
CE
(22.9). The name of Hannibal also resonated through post-colonial North Africa where he was considered a hero who fought Rome, embodied here by the European colonial powers. The former Libyan dictator Mu’ammar Gaddafi called his youngest son Hannibal and in post-Arab-Spring North Africa Hannibal’s memory will certainly take on other meanings in the cultural patrimony.

Because of his military genius Hannibal is perhaps most often compared to Napoleon. His feats of brilliance and daring verged on insanity and his crossing of the Alps with elephants is remembered more than his origins and the culture that created him. The name of Hannibal has travelled through modern history as half superhero and half great enemy. Everyone recognizes his name but large parts of his real story are lost, enveloped by the memory created by Rome. The Hannibal who has passed down to our times is a chameleon who can be moulded to fit the guise of an enemy, a great fighter, a strategist, or an anti-hero. When Thomas Harris in
Silence of the Lambs
named his brilliant villain Hannibal, a man of superhuman intelligence who is able to outsmart his enemies, he surely had the great Carthaginian in mind. Even more incongruous perhaps is that today there are business management gurus who study and employ Hannibal’s strategy.
⁴⁵
Much more than his nemesis Scipio, it is Hannibal who continues to be celebrated up to this day in popular culture.
⁴⁶

Hannibal’s vibrant afterlife derives, more than that of most historical figures, from a timeless appeal that mixes fact, a lost culture, Roman construction and an ambiguous persona that alters depending on who embraces his story.
⁴⁷
When Arthur Miller called Al Capone ‘the greatest Carthaginian of them all’, the link from the New World in the twentieth century back to ancient Sicily and Hannibal is made in an instant.
⁴⁸
This enduring interest in Hannibal is rooted in both our imagination and the few extraordinary details of his life that we know. He was a brilliant and daring general of the Hellenistic age who challenged and almost defeated Roman power, yet he remains an elusive and enigmatic Carthaginian.

NOTES

Introduction: No Ordinary Enemy

1.
Numbers taken from Livy 22.49.15 are probably exaggerated but certainly reached into the tens of thousands. All dates in
BCE
unless otherwise stated.

2.
All references to Livy throughout the book are from
Ab urbe condita
unless otherwise noted and translation used throughout is based on Yardley and Hoyos’ 2006 edition.

3.
The end of the Hannibalic War is often noted as a shift, Rome’s power expanding rapidly from the second century
BCE
onward to encompass the whole of the Mediterranean.

4.
‘And thus the Romans won the Carthaginian part of Africa, destroyed Carthage, and repopulated it again 102 years after its destruction’ Appian,
Lib.
136. Appian also mentions an earlier attempt at colonization by G. Sempronius Gracchus in
c.
122
BCE
. This colony, on the site of Carthage, never quite emerged due to Gracchus’ assassination and the civil chaos in Rome that followed but there were settlers who took up their land grants and settled there. See also Plutarch,
C. Gracchus
11, Livy,
Periochae.
60; a
Lex Agraria
in 111
BCE
gave possession of land to some colonists, see Bruns (ed.), 1909, vol. 1, 102–21.