The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (32 page)

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Authors: Robert L. O'Connell

Tags: #Ancient, #Italy, #Battle of, #2nd, #Other, #Carthage (Extinct city), #Carthage (Extinct city) - Relations - Rome, #North, #218-201 B.C, #Campaigns, #Rome - Army - History, #Punic War, #218-201 B.C., #216 B.C, #Cannae, #218-201 B.C - Campaigns, #Rome, #Rome - Relations - Tunisia - Carthage (Extinct city), #Historical, #Military, #Hannibal, #History, #Egypt, #Africa, #General, #Biography & Autobiography

Fortunately, those in charge saw through the situation and acted accordingly. In fact, Rome was now battle-hardened, far stronger, and more militarily capable than when Hannibal had first entered Italy. For the year 207, fully twenty-three legions were to be fielded. This was the greatest number in the war and was equaled only in 211 during the relentless siege of Capua. But after Rome lost two consuls simultaneously to Hannibal, the perception must have been that the senate needed to make sure the right men now assumed command. The obvious choice for consul was the very dynamic and experienced C. Claudius Nero. He had been among the conquerors of Capua, had nearly put an end to Hasdrubal in Spain, and had been with Marcellus at Canusium when, at the very least, they had kept Hannibal away from Tarentum.
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Yet his very boldness left a sense of unease and sparked a desire by the leadership to balance him with a more prudent soul as colleague.

Marcus Livius Salinator was hardly a conventional choice. After sharing the consulship in 219 with Lucius Aemilius Paullus and successfully fighting the Illyrian War, Salinator had been convicted for mishandling the booty and had withdrawn in disgrace to his estates for more than a decade, letting his hair and beard grow long, and wearing only shabby clothing. Still, his leadership skills and cool head were not forgotten, and in 209, Marcellus and Laevinus convinced him to return to the senate, where he said very little and remained his unkempt self, at least until the censors forced him to cut his hair and put on a clean toga. Further complicating matters, Salinator and Nero, perhaps for temperamental reasons, were notorious enemies. But the perceived emergency was pressing, and under the auspices of Fabius Maximus the senate reconciled these two strong personalities—fire and ice—and they formed a notably effective consular team.
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Yet, the object of all this attention, Hasdrubal Barca, was once again proving himself to be no Hannibal, not even close. Instead of exploiting his sudden arrival and striking immediately into the heart of Italy, Hasdrubal dawdled around Placentia, which Hannibal himself had judged too well defended to take, apparently to impress the Gauls he wanted to recruit, only belatedly giving up its siege and heading down the peninsula.
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Hasdrubal had a choice of going either west or east of the Apennine mountain spine. On the west, Varro was waiting in unsettled Etruria, and on the east, the capable praetor Licinus was athwart the Adriatic coastal route, with Salinator waiting in Rome, poised to join either one, depending on which way the Barcid turned. Hasdrubal went toward the Adriatic, with Licinus retreating and harassing him all the way, as Salinator raced north to join forces.
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And even worse for the Barcid, his own plea for reinforcements would bring still more Romans down on his head.

After he left Placentia, Hasdrubal dispatched a letter to Hannibal saying he would meet him “in Umbria.” The letter was carried by a party of six horsemen—two Numidians and four Gauls. This was a shot in the dark—sending a bunch of foreign-looking, and presumably not Latin-speaking, horsemen off through a country crawling with enemies and expecting them to find Hannibal, who was always a moving target during campaigning season. It has been suggested that the letter was intended for capture and was meant to mislead the Romans as to Hasdrubal’s projected route,
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but it appears that Hasdrubal was already being closely monitored by Licinus, and if by chance the letter had gotten through, wouldn’t it have confused Hannibal? (“Meet me in Umbria” was hardly specific.)

As it happened, the horsemen made it almost the entire length of the peninsula, arrived at Metapontum (near the arch of the boot) only to find Hannibal gone, and were soon captured by foragers near Tarentum. They brought them for interrogation to Nero. The Roman had been dogging Hannibal back and forth through Bruttium and Apulia in a confusing series of actions that had left the two armies camped in close proximity again near Canusium. Once the predictably rough treatment of the prisoners revealed the truth, Nero decided to stage a vanishing act of his own. He took seven thousand picked troops—six thousand foot soldiers and one thousand horse—from his much larger force and slipped them out of camp under the cover of night, leaving the Carthaginians none the wiser.
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Quite plainly the days of Hannibal the omniscient were over; it was now the Romans who held the intelligence advantage and were capable of strategic maneuvers under the cloak of secrecy.
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Until they were well away from camp, Nero’s men were under the impression they were going to stage a raid on a nearby town. Then he told them the truth; they were heading north to join Salinator.

Messengers fanned out ahead along the 250-mile route requesting provisions as the troops raced north with nothing but their weapons. Livy (27.45) paints a scene of patriotic enthusiasm, with throngs gathered by the side of the road competing with one another to give the soldiers what they needed, and cheering them as they passed. Back in Rome, however, word of the consul’s bold move provoked more anxiety; the voice of the street fretting over Nero’s leaving a hollow army camped in front of the dreaded Hannibal, and remembering the events in Spain, when Hasdrubal had eluded Nero, leaving him “baffled like a little child.”
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Polybius, who was not inclined to exaggerate, agrees, stating in a fragment, “Rome had never been in such a state of excitement and dismay, awaiting the results.”
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The future was in good hands. As Nero neared the combined camps of Salinator and the praetor Licinus at Sena Gallica, he dispatched couriers to ask how the forces should best link up, and was advised to enter secretly by night. The newcomers would be housed in the existing tents, to minimize their footprint and avoid betraying their presence to Hasdrubal, who was just five hundred yards away.
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All went well, and on the following day Salinator and Licinus held a council of war with Nero. Assuming Nero’s men needed rest after their long forced march, Salinator and Licinus suggested postponing a confrontation for several days. Nero objected in no uncertain terms, arguing that delay would only squander the advantage he had gained by his bold move and heighten the danger down south, since it was only a matter of time before Hannibal discovered he was gone and sprang into action. Nero was right, and the others saw it immediately. An order went out for the combined army to move out on the double and begin deploying for battle.
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Hasdrubal stood ready to accept the challenge, lining up his army in front of their camp. But then as he rode forward with his bodyguards, the Barcid smelled—if not a rat, then at least road-hardened Romans, noticing some particularly battered shields, some unusually stringy horses, and a general swelling of the legions facing him. He had his trumpeters sound an immediate retreat and sent out scouts to survey the Romans more carefully. The scouts reported that the encampment itself looked normal, yet the bugles had sounded just once in the praetor’s camp but twice in Salinator’s. Instantly Hasdrubal realized he was facing both consuls, and his mind turned in a fearful direction.
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What bothered him was not so much the apparent reinforcement of the Roman legions here; uppermost, it seems, was the haunting thought that the second consul’s presence meant that Hannibal had suffered a crushing defeat and that Hasdrubal’s assistance had come too late. This at least would best explain his decision to retreat.

He sought refuge under the cover of night and ordered his men to silently collect their baggage and head back toward the Metaurus River, around twelve miles to the northwest, in hopes of finding a ford and safety. Then, being no Hannibal, he lost control of the situation. His guides, unwatched, absconded, and his troops, many of them Gauls, tended to fall out and go to sleep. When the caravan finally blundered into the Metaurus, Hasdrubal told them to follow the bank, but it grew steeper and more circuitous and provided neither a place to cross nor much progress away from the pursuing Romans.
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First Nero rode up leading the cavalry, then Licinus followed with the
velites
, both of them harassing the Carthaginians to a standstill. At this point Hasdrubal saw his best chance in establishing a camp on a steep hill by the bank of the river. But shortly after he began work, Salinator marched up with the heavy troops in full battle array, ready to deploy. Now Hasdrubal had no choice but to fight.

According to Ovid
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and the Roman calendar, the day was June 22, 207 B.C. As usual the exact location of the climactic battle remains unknown, with at least six sites south of the river having been proposed,
55
but at least we have a fragment from Polybius (11.1–3.6) describing the action, which can act as a check on Livy. There are some differences between the two historians’ accounts, but in the main they can be reconciled.

Hasdrubal seems to have anchored his line on the steep hill with the partially constructed camp, leaving his least reliable troops—the Gauls—there, since it was the easiest point to defend. In the center, if we are to believe Livy,
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Hasdrubal placed the Ligurians he had recruited on the way to the Alps. For the moment they were fronted by a screen of ten elephants. Finally, on his right were his most trusted troops, those he had brought with him from Spain; this was his attack force, and as the fighting developed, the elephants would be shifted in front of them with the aim of compounding their momentum.
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That was the hope at least.

For their part the Romans lined up with Salinator on the left facing the Spaniards, Licinus in the center, and Nero on the right looking at an uphill battle against the Gauls. As the action opened, Nero found he could make no progress, not because the Gauls were fighting so hard, but simply because the terrain made advancing nearly impossible. Using his head and his force structure for something besides a battering ram, Nero cut loose the rear ranks of his part of the line and marched them over to the extreme left, setting up for a devastating flank attack on the Punic right.

Here Salinator was engaged in a furious struggle with the troops from Spain, the elephants as usual sowing confusion as they trampled both sides with panicked impartiality. Nero soon broke the stalemate, leaving the Spaniards in a death grip, front and rear, to be cut to pieces. Most were killed at this point, along with six of the elephants; the remaining four elephants wandered off to be recovered later. Meanwhile, the Romans had rolled up the rest of the Carthaginian line and had reached the campsite, where, Polybius reports, they butchered many of the Gauls, whom they found drunk and asleep.
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As for Hasdrubal, Livy and Polybius agree that once he saw that all was lost, he made no effort to escape but died bravely in the midst of the fighting.
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Nero, the architect of the victory, made sure Hasdrubal’s corpse was recovered and that he, Nero, had a full measure of revenge for being given the slip back in Spain. Like Scipio, Nero had plainly been working with his troops and upgrading their tactical capabilities, giving them the capacity to radically shift objectives and exploit opportunities as the situation developed on the battlefield. His secretive advance to the Metaurus stands as one of the most dramatic and successful strategic maneuvers of the entire war. The maneuver was capped off by his leaving the night following the battle and driving his weary legionaries back to their camp near Canusium in six days—almost fifty miles a day, one of the greatest marches in history.
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But as good a general as Nero was, Hannibal remained in Italy through his consulship and beyond. Earlier, Nero had had roughly the same opportunity as Publius Scipio to deal decisively with the Barcid power base in Spain, and he had made very little of it. Twenty-two hundred years is a long way back for definitive personnel judgments, but the facts speak for themselves. Getting rid of Hannibal was a job for somebody else.

Back in Rome, however, getting rid of Hasdrubal was enough … at least for now. Polybius reports that when the news first arrived, the anxious inhabitants refused to believe it, and it was only after more messengers repeated the good tidings that relief and joy swept over the city. All the holy places were decorated and the temples were set to bursting with offerings. Livy would have us believe that “Cannae was avenged” with the death of the Carthaginian general and fifty-six thousand of his troops.
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But the magnitude of the Roman victory was likely more modest, Polybius’s estimate of around ten thousand total Punic casualties, including Gauls, probably being closer to the mark. Except perhaps at its very core, Hasdrubal’s army had in no way been qualitatively the equal of Hannibal’s. Rather, the circumstances of its recruitment indicate it was more akin to the typical Carthaginian rent-a-force, essentially a disposable asset.

Still, the Romans were happy. At summer’s end the generals were brought to Rome. Salinator (who was technically in charge) was given the first triumph of the entire war, and Nero, riding behind him, got an ovation.
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There was reason to celebrate. After almost twelve years of fighting, Rome had at last won decisively on Italian soil. Polybius concludes that “It seemed to everyone that Hannibal, whom they formerly so much dreaded, was not now even in Italy.”
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He still was, but the results from the Metaurus filled him with foreboding. As is so often the case in family matters, among the principals he was the last to know, and it could not have come in a more awful manner. The grim Nero had the carefully preserved head of Hasdrubal delivered to an outpost of Hannibal’s camp in Canusium, along with two captured Africans to tell him what had happened. Upon hearing the news, Hannibal immediately decamped to Bruttium down in the very toe of Italy, where he stayed. It was said that, staring at his brother’s dead features, Hannibal declared that he saw the fate of Carthage.
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He might have been looking at his own reflection. For he, more than anybody else, was responsible for the city’s doom.

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