The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (15 page)

After the Gauls’ attack in 390, serious unrest recommenced in 338 B.C., when the Boii stirred up local tribes and some Transalpine warriors to attack Ariminum (modern Rimini), settled three decades earlier as part of the Roman incursion on behalf of the land-hungry poor, into the fertile plains of northern Italy, which they called Cisalpine Gaul. Gallic bickering soon blunted this attempt, but two years later continuing problems with the Boii forced Rome to send an army to restore order.
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The trouble had just begun. In 232, Caius Flaminius, the farmers’ friend and Hannibal’s eventual victim at Lake Trasimene, pushed through a law as a tribune to parcel out captured Gallic lands to poor citizens in small plots rather than sending them out in concentrated colonies, thereby inviting a deluge of Romans.

Inevitably, the anger of the dispossessed Celts boiled over. In the spring of 225, Boii from around what is now Bologna, Insubres from the area of present-day Milan, and Taurini from the Piedmont were joined by a band of itinerant warriors from the Alps, the Gaesatae, to self-organize into a host seventy thousand strong, which then poured through the Apennine passes and fell upon Etruria, the rich area in the northeast high on Italy’s boot. Shades of the devastating attack on Rome in 390—the Gauls were laden with booty and were just three days’ march from the panic-struck city—only this time they chose to withdraw in the face of the four legions of consul L. Aemilius Papus that were heading north to intercept them. Unfortunately, the Gauls ran into another double consular army headed by C. Atilius Regulus, hastily recalled from Sardinia. At Telamon, trapped between the two jaws of what was the biggest force the Romans had ever accumulated prior to Cannae, the Gauls were forced to form lines back-to-back and fight for their lives. It was a desperate encounter that saw the severed head of Regulus delivered to one of the Celtic chiefs, but at the end of the day, forty thousand of the invaders lay dead and another ten thousand were taken prisoner by the Romans.
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The emergency was over, but Rome was far from finished with the Gauls. The next year both new consuls descended on the Boii with armies and forced their submission. In 224, it was more of the same, with now-consul Flaminius and his colleague Publius Furious both moving into the tribal territories of the Insubres and Cenomani. Here Flaminius won a great victory over a combined force of around forty-thousand Gauls, a victory featuring an on-the-spot tactical innovation that has recently stirred up some scholarly controversy. Being backed up against a river—a bad habit of Flaminius’s—his tribunes gave the maniples of the first line the spears of the
triarii
, the idea being to keep the Gauls and their long slashing swords at bay during their initial charge. It worked, and Polybius (2.33.1–6) is clear that the legionaries subsequently finished matters with their short swords. Modern historian Martin Samuels, however, arguing that the Greek historian was confused about the legionary’s equipment at this point, uses this passage to indicate that all fought primarily with long thrusting spears, both here and seven years later at Cannae.
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While Samuels’ points about the Roman army are interesting in other respects, this argument is just not convincing, given Polybius’s general reliability and knowledge of military detail. We can rest assured the Romans fought with the
gladius
at Cannae, and meanwhile would continue using them to kill Celts.

Thoroughly battered, in 222 the Gauls sued for peace. But the senate spurned their offer and instead sent both consuls with armies to throttle them still again. At Clastidium, one of the consuls, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, single-handedly killed and stripped the armor from the Gallic chief Britomarus, winning the
spolia opima
, immortality of the most Roman sort. His colleague, Cn. Cornelius Scipio, was also gainfully employed, successfully storming the site of modern Milan and the capital of the Insubres. Both were now made men, especially Marcellus, destined to play major roles and to die fighting in the Second Punic War. Yet again the tribes surrendered and were stripped of more land. Rome’s response was to push farther north, in 218 planting colonies of six thousand each at Placentia and Cremona on either side of the Po River, still further inflaming Gallic resentment.
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This anger would prove to be a magnet for Hannibal, providing a ready source of allies, supplies, and fresh bodies when he and his army spilled off the Alps, depleted and hungry. The potential for an amalgam with the restive tribes of Cisalpine Gaul was a brilliant insight and was the basis for his decision to invade Italy by land from the north. The Gauls were essentially the pot of gold at the end of his long journey.
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Yet no prize comes without its cost. It has been said that Hannibal’s objectives in Italy were limited, but an affiliation with the Gauls could only have served to convince the Romans of the opposite. These were not ordinary foes. The Gauls represented something altogether more frightening and dangerous to the Roman soul, and by joining them, Hannibal took on an onus that would serve to define the coming conflict in the starkest possible terms. So it was that what we refer to as the Second Punic War was frequently called by the Romans “the war against the Carthaginians and the Gauls.”
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[3]

In the winter of 219, Hannibal arrived in New Carthage, awaited by envoys from Rome who warned him not to interfere in a dispute between their ally Saguntum and local tribes, and also reminded him not to cross the Ebro line of 226. The fact that the Romans had chosen to align themselves with a city well to the south of this line, and then had taken up for the city in a dispute with Carthage, not only echoed the Mamertine episode that had kicked off the First Punic War, but exemplified Rome’s characteristic pattern of defensive aggression.

Hannibal must have known what this implied. Most modern historians follow Polybius and Appian in saying that Hannibal thought it necessary to send home for instructions, though he prejudiced the case by presenting the situation as the Romans and Saguntines inciting Carthaginian Spain to revolt.
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Having apparently received permission to do what he saw fit, Hannibal attacked Saguntum, taking it after a brutal eight-month assault that left the adult population massacred and a good quantity of the copious loot in Carthage as a matter of public relations.

Yet the Roman historian and senior senator at the time, Fabius Pictor, disagreed completely. He argued that Hannibal began the war on his own initiative, and that not a single one of the notables in Carthage approved of his conduct toward Saguntum.
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If “notables” meant the traditional oligarchs, then Hanno’s impassioned speech against the war, cited by Livy (21.10), very probably represented more than a lonely voice in the political wilderness. “Is it your enemy you know not, or yourselves, or the fortunes of both peoples? … It is Carthage against which Hannibal is now bringing up his … towers; it is the walls of Carthage he is battering with his rams. Saguntum’s walls—may my prophecy prove false!—will fall upon our heads.”

But the delegation of high-ranking Romans sent to Carthage was demanding as the price of peace the surrender of Hannibal and his senior officers for trial as war criminals, a bribe that was at once infuriating and possibly beyond the Punic capacity to deliver. So when the most senior Roman—Livy (21.18.1) tells us it was Fabius Maximus—eventually announced that in the folds of his toga he held both war and peace and it was up to the Carthaginians to choose, the presiding suffete told him to do so instead. Fabius replied that war fell out, and a shout rang out in response: “We accept it!” From all appearances this was hardly what we might call a measured deliberation. Quite probably it was a decision also lubricated with Barcid silver and success with the popular faction, but the real story was that Carthage had not fully recovered from the first struggle with Rome and was unable and ultimately unwilling to throw its full weight behind a second.

Back in Spain, Hannibal was not sitting on his hands awaiting a decision from Carthage. Instead, he was expecting word from the agents he had sent forward, possibly even before Saguntum’s fall, to explore the proposed route into Italy and to make contact with the tribes of Cisalpine Gaul.
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When the emissaries returned to assure him that the passage over the Alps, while difficult, was possible and that he would be welcomed upon arrival, the invasion was a go.

Meanwhile, he had been using the winter of 219–18 to make all the key decisions, not just planning for the expeditionary force, but seeing to the defense of Spain and even Africa. He was a man very much in charge of events. An early cross-baser—cross-basing being the means by which the Romans later successfully garrisoned their empire—Hannibal sent a force of nearly sixteen thousand Iberians to guard the vulnerable African home front, and brought an equivalent number of reliable Libyans, Numidians, and Liby-Phoenicians to Spain and placed them under brother Hasdrubal to keep watch over Barcid land.
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Yet most of his efforts must have been devoted to putting together his land armada, an apparently bloated entity of ninety thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, along with thirty-seven elephants—really a force within a force.
27
This was probably deliberate. Most were likely to have been recently recruited Spaniards—Iberians, Lusitanians, and Celtiberians—raw but potentially good close order horse and foot soldiers; but at the core was the army initially forged by Hamilcar, veteran professionals—wickedly effective Numidian light cavalry and meticulously trained African heavy infantry, the centerpieces in all of Hannibal’s future tactical shenanigans. Italy was a long way off, and much as his father had done on the way to Spain, Hannibal it seems meant to use the trek to train and toughen his force into the steely instrument he would need to take on Rome. He must have foreseen that this would be a Darwinian exercise, with many falling by the wayside or off icy cliffs in the Alps, though he may have underestimated the wastage. His African troops in particular were not likely to be tolerant of the cold weather at altitude. Still we can assume from this initial force structure that he believed that most of his veterans would survive the journey and that the newbie Spaniards who remained from the expendable outer layer would arrive as tough as the rest.

Hannibal was already bound to his veterans in a way no prior Carthaginian general could claim; he had not only lived with them and fought with them, he had literally grown up with them. Yet the march to Italy would prove the first great test of his leadership. There were multiple initial challenges, but in the Alps there was a real possibility of total disintegration. He rose to the occasion, but it was a near thing, and he probably completed the journey also transformed, tempered by danger and driven by a new sense of ruthless desperation.

He was not alone, never alone. Relatively little is known about the officers and unit commanders who left with him on the great adventure, but as with many other illustrious captains, they appear to have been a close group of friends and family, and with few exceptions they appear to have stayed with him for the duration.
28
As is appropriate for a “brotherhood of arms,” his youngest brother, Mago, acted as his right hand at Trebia and as his virtual co-commander at Cannae. Another Barcid, nephew Hanno—the son of the admiral Bomilcar and Hannibal’s sister—though barely an adult, may have led the Numidian cavalry at Cannae. Another Hasdrubal, not the brother Hasdrubal who was left in charge in Spain, was known to have headed the army service corps, and as commander of the Celtic and Spanish cavalry at Cannae, he closed the final escape route on the Romans. Then there was the cheeky critic of Hannibal’s strategic sense, the brilliantly opportunistic commander of horse, Maharbal, whom Plutarch calls a Barcid.
29
Polybius (9.24.5–6; 9.25) identifies two other officers, Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the Samnite, as particularly good friends, and certainly as tough customers—the former advising his namesake to teach his men to eat human flesh to get through the Alps, and the latter so notoriously greedy that even Hannibal avoided disputes with him over spoils.

Together this group seems to have formed an inner circle of advisors—a general staff, if such a thing can be applied to a decision-making process about which so little is known. Several others are named—Carthalo, an officer whose light cavalry captured two thousand fugitive Romans after Cannae; Gisgo, who worried about the size of the Roman army before the battle; Adherbal, chief of engineers; Bostar and Bomilcar, apparently aides.
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The remains of this group are obviously skeletal, an archaeology of bits and pieces, with no individual besides Hannibal even remotely taking shape as a personality. Yet corporately, they formed a cadre brilliantly attuned to their commander’s intent, instinctively carrying out his will with a timing that could only have come from complete and mutual trust. Without them Hannibal never would have made it to Italy, and with them, once there, he would win victory after victory.

[4]

He had a narrow window of time to arrive; the Alpine passes close down with snow and ice by mid-November. Conventional wisdom has it that he would have wanted to leave New Carthage in the early spring, but it seems more likely he had to wait until late May or early June. Once he left Barca land, his army would have had to forage, and the harvest would have begun to become available during this time frame, and progressively later as he moved north.
31
This was to be a continuing theme for the entire war. Hannibal’s army would move or not move according to the rumbling of its stomach, and as much as anything else, the Romans’ understanding and manipulation of this most unrelenting fact of life would save them from defeat. A soldier on the march burns between four and five thousand calories a day, or between two and three pounds of food; for an army of fifty thousand that meant over sixty tons daily, and Hannibal’s initial force would have required more than twice that amount, plus forage for thousands of cavalry horses and pack mules—quite literally a tall order.
32
For the initial 280-mile march to the Ebro, there were probably supply dumps, but once they passed this point, Hannibal and friends were on their own. This was their Rubicon.