The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (27 page)

Nevertheless, the scale of operations maintained by the Romans was truly immense. Even in 215 they were able to field fourteen legions.
16
Adrian Goldsworthy estimates that in the ten years following Cannae, more than twenty legions were regularly in the field (a high of twenty-three legions was reached in 211 and 207), supported by an equivalent number of allied troops.
17
Some legions may have been undermanned and used for garrison duty, but the sheer numbers give pause. Using a conservative pre-Cannae figure of forty-five-hundred troops for each legion and each
alae
, this amounts to on the order of 180,000 troops raised year in and year out. This is an extraordinarily large figure for a preindustrial military, and does not even consider the manpower requirements of the Roman navy, which remained substantial throughout.

Plainly, this sort of war was expensive, and even if the study of ancient economics remains murky, it is apparent that after Cannae the primitive Roman financial system was showing signs of massive strain. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, in order to pay the soldiers (though not the
Cannenses)
, the tax on Roman citizens, the
tributum
, had to be doubled in 215. This statistic, however, must be balanced against the chronic devaluation of the Roman currency. In 217 the bronze as—the basic coin, if you can call it that—weighed one Roman pound; three years later it was one sixth as heavy. This devaluation prompted the creation of a new medium of exchange based on the silver denarius, which itself had to be devalued before the war was over.
18
Exactly how this economic ax cleaved Roman society is hard to say. Military contractors surely did well, and also, because there were monetized property qualifications for service in the Roman army, currency devaluation would have broadened the draft pool. But somebody had to pay the bills, and as the fighting dragged on, reconquered defectors were obvious targets. Marcellus’s epic fleecing of Syracuse and Fabius’s enslavement and sale of much of Tarentum’s population provided the archetypes. Fabian II meant war truly on a societal scale.

The updated Fabian strategy also called for better leadership. The time for amateurish generals had passed, as had single-year commands for truly competent ones. In the face of Hannibal, quick leadership turnover had to be sacrificed, even if it meant electing the same men to the consulship over and over, and extending the imperium indefinitely to efficient proconsuls and propraetors.
19
This extended imperium had already been in place for the Scipio brothers in far-off Spain, but now it took hold in Italy. In particular, a group of men in their fifties and sixties, who’d reached their maturity during the First Punic War, came to dominate the Second, particularly after Cannae. In addition to Fabius Maximus himself, there was Marcellus and Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, all of whom held the consulship at least four times, which was unprecedented. On a slightly less elevated tier were Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (twice consul, once master of horse), Marcus Livius Salinator (twice consul), and Gaius Claudius Nero. Not all of these men subscribed to the Fabian style of warfare—Marcellus and Nero were exceedingly aggressive—but all were excellent soldiers and capable of working together. Hannibal’s days of picking off prima donnas were not quite over, but for the most part he now had to face Team Roma, a grim and determined bunch.

[3]

Cannae’s reverberations shot out from Italy’s coasts in all directions. Hannibal’s war had already been trans-Mediterranean, given the Barcid power base in Spain and Carthage’s complicity, but now the roster of contestants broadened in the wake of Rome’s perceived vulnerability. In the rollicking world of Hellenistic geopolitics, piling on was a frequent handmaiden of defeat, emblematic of the system’s very cynicism and, in its meddling with Rome, myopia.

There were few more enthusiastic practitioners of piling on than the young king of Macedon, Philip V, a perennial kibitzer in the affairs of Greece, and any other place he thought he saw an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. According to Polybius (5.101.6–8), ever since Philip had heard of the debacle at Trasimene, he had been eying Rome’s protectorate on the east coast of the Adriatic. The protectorate had been established in 229 to thwart the Illyrian pirates, and was a continuing thorn in the side of Macedon’s monarchs, who resented the presence of outsiders but were afraid to do anything about it. Now with word of Cannae, Philip’s horizons broadened, his fear of the Romans evaporated, and the possibility of an alliance with Rome’s apparent subjugator loomed large.

Philip’s diplomacy may have been adroit, but it was hardly discreet. According to Livy, the delegation he sent to Hannibal was captured twice by the Romans.
20
On the first occasion they were let go, having given the excuse that they were actually on their way to negotiate an alliance with the senate. The second time, they were caught red-handed with Carthaginian officers and a text of the treaty, which was delivered to the Roman archives, where Polybius found and preserved it.
21

An odd combination of Greek and Old Testament–like diplo-speak, the treaty mentions as signatories not only Hannibal but Carthaginian elders Mago, Myrkan, and Barmocar. The presence of these names has been sometimes seen as indicating that the metropolis and not the Barcid was in charge, even in Italy.
22
But if this was the case, why didn’t Philip send the delegation to Carthage rather than to Hannibal to seal the alliance? If nothing else, Hellenistic monarchs had an eagle eye for who held the initiative. And in that regard this was a document typical of the “great game” mentality, promising very little up front beyond bland assurances of mutual support, and getting specific only about transfers of Greek properties to the Macedonians once the war was won. Most significant, the treaty foresaw the continued existence of Rome, even in defeat. While Livy’s (23.33.10–12) far less convincing rendition of the treaty envisions a Macedonian invasion of Italy, probably Hannibal looked upon the whole thing as a potentially useful way of distracting the Romans, another problem for them to cope with that would drain their strength. The treaty—Polybius’s version at least—is worth considering, since it is about as close to a first-person look at the motivation of Rome’s enemies as we have left. What emerges is more calculating than deadly serious. The Romans, for their part, were utterly committed to the war, and they would neither forgive nor forget this alliance of convenience.

As it turned out, the Romans easily handled the extra burden of the First Macedonian War, which mainly played out in raids and quick sieges. The Romans engineered it so that Greek mostly fought Greek, and Rome seldom had to commit more than a legion of their own troops, supported by elements of their ample fleet.
23
For his part Philip badly underestimated the Romans’ ability to practice divide-and-rule politics among the fractious Hellenes.

Critical in this success was Marcus Valerius Laevinus, who during his propraetorship beginning in 215 set the conditions of victory—parrying Philip, keeping him on the defensive, and distracting him from any contemplated linkup with Hannibal in Italy. In 211, Laevinus concluded a treaty with Macedon’s recent adversaries the Aetolian League, having convinced them that Rome was winning the war with Carthage. There commenced a series of joint raids against Philip and his friends that kept him and his army racing from threat to new threat to yet another threat.
24

But after Laevinus left for home to assume a well-deserved consulship, Philip and his friends staged a comeback. In 207, Philip led a massive raid into the Aetolian League’s territory, while Philip’s allies in the Achaean League smashed the Spartans at Mantinea—yet another decisive drubbing, on perhaps the most famous battlefield in ancient Greece.
25
Reeling, the Aetolians had had enough, and, like any sensible Hellenistic player would do, they cut their losses by making a separate peace with Philip. The Romans were not pleased with their former ally, but neither were the Romans about to give up. They threw an additional ten thousand infantry, one thousand horse, and thirty-five quinqueremes back into Illyria.
26

In the face of the resulting stalemate, representatives from the Epirote League (Pyrrhus’s former home base) interceded and managed to negotiate an end to the hostilities, the Peace of Phoinike in 205. Philip got to keep most of what he had grabbed, and unlike other treaties with the Romans, this one was negotiated between equals. Philip probably thought he had won.

But the Romans had always fought with an eye to Hannibal, making sure he derived absolutely no benefit from what they must have considered a most unholy alliance with Philip V. For Philip, the alliance with Hannibal had been Hellenistic business as usual; for Romans a stab in the back, which would be avenged virtually as soon as they finally disposed of their Barcid tormentor. For mainland Greeks—Macedonians and all the rest—this Cannae-inspired treaty with Hannibal was a disaster of the first order, marking the beginning of the end of their independence. Once drawn into the Greeks’ affairs, the Romans would not leave them alone.

[4]

Already in Rome’s sway, the Greeks of Sicily proved no more sagacious in Cannae’s aftermath, allowing themselves, through their own vicious factionalism, to be drawn into a conflict that much more clearly pitted Rome against Carthage rather than against Hannibal. For their part, the Carthaginians waged a kind of parallel struggle that complemented Hannibal’s, one oriented toward areas of traditional interest, and fought with the same on-again, off-again military inefficacy characteristic of Carthage’s overseas imperial adventures in the past.

This was most evident in Sicily but was also paralleled in 215 by an abortive effort to snatch back Sardinia, whose seizure by the Romans in 240 during the revolt of Hamilcar Barca’s former mercenaries had so embittered Carthaginians. Believing the place was ripe for revolt, Carthage sent a fleet under Hasdrubal the Bald, who was delayed long enough by bad weather that the Romans were able to reinforce Sardinia with a legion under hard-core T. Manlius Torquatus, who was last heard from in the senate denouncing the Romans taken prisoner at Cannae.
27
When Hasdrubal finally came ashore, Torquatus made short work of the operation, hammering Hasdrubal’s landing force, capturing him, and stamping out the nascent rebellion. Even the retreating Carthaginian fleet was roughly handled by a naval squadron under Fabius Maximus’s nephew lurking off the African coast. It was the last Punic move in this direction.
28
The effort in Sicily was to be much more sustained, if ultimately no more successful.

The battle in Sicily began and essentially ended in Syracuse, which controlled a band of territory basically running the length of the island’s east coast, the rest of Sicily being administered by Rome as a result of its victory in the First Punic War. Syracuse’s longtime ruler, Hiero, was a trusted Roman ally, but he was also old—at least in his seventies and quite probably in failing health. Hiero’s eldest son, Gelon, his head turned by Cannae, was on the brink of denouncing Syracuse’s alliance with Rome, when he suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Hiero didn’t survive much longer. His heir, Gelon’s feckless fifteen-year-old son named Hieronymus, following his father’s inclination, and under the influence of his entourage, sent a delegation to Hannibal so that an agreement could be roughed out. The wily Barcid also sent back two scheming Carthaginian brothers of Syracusan descent who had served in his army in Spain and Italy—Hippocrates and Epicydes. If there was ever a poison pill, it was these two, who sowed dissent from the moment they arrived in Sicily.

Smelling defection, the praetor Appius Claudius—last seen at Canusium as one of the surviving tribunes who backed the young Publius Scipio against the cabal of defeatists—had his suspicions confirmed when the ambassadors he sent to renew the alliance were asked mockingly by Hieronymus “How had they fared at the battle of Cannae?”
29
The new treaty would be confirmed in Carthage, but plainly it was already a done deal. Not that it mattered for Hieronymus or the entire royal family; they were quickly murdered in a spasm of bloodcurdling political violence that left the interlopers Hippocrates and Epicydes vying for predominance with a ragtag force of mercenaries and fully two thousand Roman deserters.

Realizing the situation was deteriorating fast, the senate in 214 sent Marcellus, currently serving his second consulship, to Sicily, where he joined forces with Appius Claudius. When Hippocrates and Epicydes moved their band to the nearby city of Leontini, Marcellus followed them and stormed the place, taking it on the first assault. Unfortunately, while the consul busied himself with the traditional punishment for deserters—the Roman men were stripped naked, flogged, and then beheaded—the two Syracusan brothers escaped. On their way back to Syracuse, they met up with a pro-Roman relief column, whom they won over by convincing them that Marcellus was actually butchering Leontini’s citizenry.
30
This group the brothers then led back to Syracuse, where, after a short struggle, they managed to kill their rivals and assume control, putting the city firmly in the ranks of Rome’s enemies.

“Hannibal had certainly picked his men well,” writes one modern historian
31
of the brothers and their brilliant manipulation of the political chaos within the walls of Syracuse. But Marcellus’s actions during the Leontini episode, actions which gave Hippocrates and Epicydes the opening they needed, could be inferred to have been as much motivated by the desire to punish Roman deserters as the desire to get his hands on Hippocrates and Epicydes, and around the political situation in general. Marcellus certainly did not intend it, but letting Syracuse slip through his fingers was a heavy price to pay for punishing some apostates—though two thousand is a very substantial number.