The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (19 page)

Knowing their own geography, the Romans hedged their bets. They sent Geminus north along the Via Flaminia (the same route probably taken by Sempronius) to Ariminum, where he could combine his new recruits with Publius Scipio’s veterans
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and cover the eastern corridor down the peninsula. Flaminius had already arrived at this destination, assuming office here and not in Rome, thereby flouting tradition and skipping the religious rituals normally presided over by an incoming consul. To compound matters, he ignored the commissioners sent to recall him. Instead, he added the remnants of Sempronius’s force to his own legionaries and moved to Arretium, where he thought he would be in a position to block the Apennine passes leading toward Etruria.
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He wasn’t. Hannibal gave him the slip crossing at the Porretta pass,
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and then struck out through the flooded marshes surrounding the River Arno. This was not simply a matter of deception; as usual the Punic commander had a hidden agenda. The march also would serve as a means of toughening the Gauls and weeding out the weak ones. This trek would be a swampy version of the one over the Alps. He lined up his army with the Spaniards and Africans intermingled with the baggage train, the Celts sandwiched in the middle, and Mago and the Numidians to the rear to keep the whole mass moving and the Gauls from turning back. Those who survived slogged continuously for three days and nights. They had to; in this inundated terrain there was no place above water to rest except upon the corpses of the many fallen pack animals. Cavalry horses frequently lost their hoofs. Hannibal, atop the last surviving elephant, contracted a case of ophthalmia so severe that he lost the sight of one eye.
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All told, it was a bad trip. But when the Carthaginians emerged from the morass somewhere around Faesulae (modern Fiesole), the army was not only clear of the Romans, but also it had rid itself of fair-weather Gauls and begun the process of fully integrating the remaining Gauls into the force structure.

Hannibal’s swarm of scouts and spies had been busy. They confirmed that the rich Etrurian plain was ripe for the plucking and that Flaminius, still at Arretium, was a commander every bit as impulsive and belligerent as Sempronius and just as easy to trap. Hannibal decided to lead him on a fool’s errand south. And as he traveled he understood exactly how to distract the Roman commander; nothing would infuriate the farmers’ friend more than Hannibal’s foragers’ descending like a plague of locusts onto the villages and fields of Rome’s allies. Here in the heart of Italy, Flaminius had only to follow the smoke columns to follow Hannibal, a humiliating circumstance that could be stopped only by bringing Hannibal into action, which Flaminius was determined to do.

Both Polybius and Livy maintain that Flaminius was discouraged by his subordinates, who advised him to await reinforcement from Geminus.
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He ignored them, and also in typical Flaminius fashion, he overlooked a series of ill omens (here is where the hard-to-pull-up tent standards came into play), and probably did so appropriately, if only because he was a Roman and was predisposed to fight. Besides, Hannibal was on the move; how could his colleague Geminus have been expected to catch up? It also says something that Flaminius’s army was joined by a host of irregulars carrying chains for the prisoners they expected to take and enslave after an easy victory. So Flaminius, as always with his ear more attuned to vox populi than to the council of prudence, went forward in hot pursuit.

No more than a day ahead, Hannibal came upon Lake Trasimene and saw opportunity along the route before him—a narrow plain that separated the shoreline from a parallel track of steep hills, the entrance to which was a blind defile. He slowed his army so that late in the day Flaminius would march up and see him entering the gulch, and later Flaminius’s scouts would observe the Punic campgrounds near the far end of the line of hills. The Romans settled down for the night outside the gulch entrance. Hannibal, under the cover of darkness, led his forces back down a parallel path on the other side of the hills and stationed the men high along the hills’ reverse slopes, awaiting the arrival of dawn.

The next day—June 21, 217 B.C.
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—broke with a heavy ground fog hanging over the lake and its environs. It is unclear whether the Romans were already deployed into three parallel columns of
hastati, principes
, and
triarii
when they entered the defile, but they may have been, since they were expecting action in the near future. But they had no idea they were walking into what would be remembered as the biggest ambush in history, the only time an entire large army was effectively swallowed and destroyed by such a maneuver.
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With amazing self-control the Punic forces waited silently above as the Romans marched along the lakeshore, gradually filling the narrow plain until the Romans made contact with Hannibal’s stopper force of Africans and Spaniards, at which point Hannibal gave the signal for all his troops to come charging down the hill. Emerging out of the mist, they hit virtually the entire length of the Roman army simultaneously, completely surprising and quite probably freezing them into terrified passivity. There was no going back, the Carthaginian cavalry had sealed the defile. Livy (22.5–6) tries to make the case that many stood and fought bravely; some may have, but Polybius’s (3.84) pathetic description seems more in line with the circumstances.

Most of them were cut to pieces in marching order, as they were quite unable to protect themselves…. Those again who had been shut in between the hillside and the lake perished in a still more pitiable manner. For when they were forced into the lake in a mass, some of them quite lost their wits and trying to swim in their armor were drowned, but the greater number, wading into the lake as far as they could, stood there with only their heads out of the water, and when the cavalry approached them, and death stared them in the face, though lifting up their hands and entreating to be spared in the most piteous terms, they were finally dispatched either by the horsemen or in some cases by begging their comrades to do them this service.

Nor did Flaminius survive the attack. The Gauls who had long suffered at his hands went straight for him, easily recognizable by his splendid accoutrements and also, if you believe Silius Italicus (5.132), because he wore a Gallic scalp on the crest of his helmet. For a while his bodyguards fought the Gauls off, but then an Insubrian horseman, whom Livy names Ducarius, charged through the dense mass and first slew Flaminius’s armor bearer, and then, knowing the consul’s face, ran him through with a lance.

The killing spree continued for about three hours, a slaughter so intense that neither side was aware that they were fighting in the midst of a major earthquake that had shot across central Italy.
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According to Fabius Pictor, around fifteen thousand Romans joined their leader that morning in death.
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Another six thousand Romans, probably near the head of the column, seem to have brushed past those in front of them and headed for the hills. Polybius claims they could not see—possibly due to the fog—what had befallen the rest of the force until they reached higher ground, and by then it was too late to help. More likely they were simply demoralized, which better explains their taking refuge as a body in a local Etrurian village, and their abject surrender to Maharbal and his Spaniards and Numidians a little later. At that point they were added to the other prisoners, now totaling fifteen thousand, all of whom Hannibal assembled after the fighting had ceased. As at Trebia, he slapped the Romans in chains and sent the allies home without ransom, but with the same message that he was all about liberating them from the tyrants on the Tiber. Livy (22.7.2) says some ten thousand men were scattered and eventually made it back to Rome; whether this number included the allies Hannibal let go is impossible to say. One thing was and remains clear, however. In a matter of hours an entire consular army had simply vanished.

If ever a Barca lived up to the family appellation Thunderbolt, it was Hannibal at this moment. But it is unlikely that this brilliantly conceived trap materialized out of thin air. Hannibal would not have soon forgotten the two ambushes he’d suffered in the Alps, and it is plausible that they provided the seeds of his plan at Trasimene—the same scheme of assaulting a force on the march, hiding and then attacking from above, leaving no avenue of retreat, and setting a death trap to the side. Had the Romans made this connection, it might have further mortified them. Here was an adversary who not only learned from his mistakes, but found ways to leverage them to his own advantage. He was dangerous not only on the battlefield, but anywhere in his vicinity.

For Hannibal it was an altogether felicitous encounter—after the Alps, the winter, and the swamp, his troops had been exhausted and probably capable of only a short, sharp action. His own losses were low, around fifteen hundred, most of them Celts, who’d likely seen at least some compensation in the opportunity to kill the hated Flaminius. And Hannibal’s good fortune was not at an end. There were scouting reports that the remaining consul, Geminus, had sent a large cavalry force down to support Flaminius and that it was now in the area, presumably unaware of what had happened. So Hannibal sent the enterprising Maharbal and the Numidians to deliver still another unpleasant surprise.

Back in Rome, the city was rife with foreboding. Days passed. Wives and mothers wandered the streets quizzing any and all on the fate of the army. As the frightening gossip clarified, a great crowd formed around the senate house, demanding solid information from the magistrates. Finally, a little before sunset the urban praetor Marcus Pomponius emerged to announce only: “We have been defeated in a great battle.” So the rumor mill ground on, with the women who were gathered at the city gates awaiting their men—or at least some word of them—gradually realizing a great many would not be coming home.
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Meanwhile, Pomponius kept the senate in constant session from sunrise to sunset, racking their collective brains as to how they might deal with a threat that over the course of seven months—punctuated by Ticinus, Trebia, and now Trasimene—had grown exponentially to the point where it was shaking the foundations of the state. For these disasters were palpably worse than those of the First Punic War, having fallen heavily upon the more prosperous elements, who served in and commanded the legions—not upon the poorer and less politically significant types, who rowed the warships that had been lost in the earlier contest. Existentially, the army was at the center of Rome’s conception of itself. Losing in this fashion and leaving an invader free to ravage the Italian countryside was humiliating almost beyond the capacity of words to describe.
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Then, after three days of deliberations, news arrived that Gaius Centenius, who’d been sent to help Flaminius with a force of four thousand horse—most of Rome’s remaining cavalry—had been surprised and surrounded by Maharbal probably somewhere near Assisi.
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Half of the men had been killed immediately, and the rest had surrendered the next day. Still another substantial Roman force had been obliterated. At this moment there was nothing left standing between Hannibal and Rome itself, except an easy hundred-mile march down the Via Flaminia. The situation seemed truly desperate, and the senate fell back on what was the system’s last bulwark in the face of disaster. For the first time since 249, when Rome’s navy had been wiped out off Sicily, a dictator was appointed.

[4]

He was Quintus Fabius Maximus, the same man Livy believed had told the Carthaginians that he held war or peace in his toga. It may not have been him, but he was the sort who could have said such a thing and been taken seriously. He was fifty-eight years old, had been twice consul and once censor, and was from an ancient clan, one that had already earned the title Maximus—“the greatest.” Owner of an impeccable pedigree, he was exactly the type Rome turned to in emergencies. Just the name Fabius sounds august, but actually it relates to what had once been the family business, bean farming. And symbolically, temperamentally, and strategically, he was the Beanman matched against the Thunderbolt. For like the hedgehog, Fabius Maximus understood one big thing—Hannibal’s never ending need to feed his army. To win, Rome did not have to defeat him in battle; they had to simply restrict his ability to provision his troops. Once the dictator took to the field, it became apparent that this involved two essential expedients: the removal or destruction of crops and livestock in the path of the Punic force, and the relentless interception and attrition of Carthaginian foraging parties.
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In the meantime, Fabius would scrupulously avoid a field engagement with Hannibal, electing instead to shadow his every step, but at a safe distance and always taking the high ground to avoid being brought unwillingly into battle.

It is important to realize that the Fabian strategy, from the outset, was seen by Romans not as a magic bean but as a bitter pill. Their entire orientation was offensive; they were acculturated to seek battle; they had been conditioned to believe their military system would triumph over any general, no matter how clever. They were also farmers, whose instincts were to protect, not burn, their fields. Everything Fabius proposed, while prudent in the face of military genius, went against the Roman grain.
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A later generation who benefited from his policies would apply to him the title Cunctator (“the Delayer”), and even this was not altogether positive.
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At the time, his countrymen employed less flattering sobriquets—Verrucosus for the wart that grew above his lip; Ovicula (“Lambykins”); and “Hannibal’s
paedagogus,”
after the slave who followed Roman schoolboys and carried their books.
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His countrymen also subverted and resisted his approach, undermining his authority even within the short space of his six-month term of office. It probably felt like the right thing to do, but it was a path that led directly to Cannae.