The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (38 page)

The action opened with pachyderm pandemonium. Once the harangues were over (Polybius’s version [15.11.11], for what it’s worth, has Hannibal reminding his veterans that they were facing some of the “wretched remnants” of the legions they had smashed at Cannae), bugles sounded from all sides, freaking the elephants and causing them to attack prematurely. Those on the left veered off and stampeded back into the Punic Numidian cavalry. Seeing his opening, Masinissa charged and quickly chased them off the battlefield. The beasts in the middle did hit the Roman infantry formations, but chose to follow the
velites
, who were enraging them with javelin fire, up the corridors, out the back, and also off the battlefield. It was much the same story with the behemoths on the right. They did swerve toward the Italian horse, but when greeted with a hail of javelins, they reversed field and crashed into the Carthaginian cavalry, prompting Laelius to charge in hot pursuit of this retreating wing.

The battle had barely begun and Hannibal was without cavalry, but then again so were the Romans, which raises an interesting possibility. It has been suggested that it was a trick, that Hannibal, knowing he was weaker in this arm, had ordered his riders to give ground and draw their equivalents off the field.
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The plan may have been complicated by pachyderm panic, but the effect was the same…. It was now Hannibal’s infantry against Scipio’s, and crunch time for his ghosts.

The foot soldiers on both sides moved forward, with the exception of Hannibal’s veterans, who stayed put. As the two sides closed, the Romans commenced banging their shields with
pila
, and let out a collective war whoop that eclipsed the discordant Babel of cries from the multiethnic Punic force.
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Nevertheless, Mago’s mercenaries fought bravely and aggressively, wounding many Romans among the
hastati
. But the legionaries were undeterred and moved relentlessly forward, driving their opponents back, Livy notes, with characteristic
scutum
punches.
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As the Punic front tired and looked to support in back of them, the Carthaginians and Libyans initially hesitated, untrained as they were to fight as a coordinated whole. And when Mago’s mercenaries eventually broke, fighting appears to have erupted between the two Punic groups, as the Carthaginians refused to let the refugees retreat through their ranks, perhaps on Hannibal’s orders, or, as one later historian sarcastically suggests, unconsciously emulating war elephants by turning on their own.
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Once confronted by Romans, though, the Punic troops of the second line fought with what Polybius calls “frantic and extraordinary courage,” throwing the
hastati
into confusion and checking their forward momentum.
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At this point the officers of the
principes
began feeding their legionaries into the fight, which got the line moving again and ultimately broke the Carthaginians, Libyans, and the remaining mercenaries, all of whom began to flee, with the Romans in hot pursuit.

But rather than break ranks, the veterans to the rear, on Hannibal’s orders, leveled their spears as the Punic fugitives approached, a sure sign they were not going to let them through. Those who were not cut down veered to either side of the Punic line, where they began to congregate and re-form.

A critical moment had arrived. The space between the two forces was now covered with dead and dying men, the ground made slippery by their blood.
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On the Roman side the
hastati
were in complete disorder from the chase, and the maniples of
principes
were probably somewhat disheveled from their short fight. Only the
triarii
were fully ready to confront the much more numerous Carthaginian veterans, lined up in perfect battle array. It may well have crossed Scipio’s mind that he had been tricked by the master into committing too many units too soon, just another Roman commander led cluelessly into the abattoir. His horns sounded the retreat, and he set about attempting one of the most difficult of military maneuvers, reconstituting his formations in the midst of a battle. The ghosts were up to the task, reversing their field, reconnecting with their centurions, re-forming their maniples, and lining up again, this time along a single front,
hastati
in the center and the
principes
and
triarii
on either flank.

For as long as it took, they were dangerously vulnerable. Yet Hannibal with his fresh veterans in perfect order simply watched as the Romans scurried about, brought their wounded to the rear, and above all rested. Opportunity beckoned, and the supreme opportunist marked time. Maybe he was worried about keeping good order while attacking across the corpse-strewn battlefield. Perhaps he was wary of one of Scipio’s flanking maneuvers. Whatever the reason, he waited and let the Romans come to him. It would be his undoing.

If fate were a dramatist, there could not have been a better place for an intermission. The issue had been reduced to a fight of soldiers, not generals. The supreme rematch was at hand; after fourteen long years, the ghosts of Cannae would meet their vanquishers again in mortal combat. When they were ready, the Romans marched directly at the Carthaginians and the fight began. As far as we know there were no military sleights of hand, no feints, no hidden reserves, no centers extended or withheld. It was to be a straight-up clash between two supremely experienced hosts of murderously inclined experts with sharp instruments. Polybius (15.14.6) reports, “As they were nearly equal in numbers as well as in spirit and bravery, and were equally well armed, the contest was for long doubtful, the men falling where they stood out of determination.”

But then when it seemed perhaps both forces would wear each other away into nothing, the tiebreaker arrived in the form of Laelius and Masinissa back from the chase. The combined Roman cavalry hit the Punic formation in the rear, and the slaughter was on. Most were killed in formation; those who bolted were run down by the horsemen, as the ground was flat and there was nowhere to go. Before it was over, twenty thousand Punic soldiers were killed—with most of the rest captured—at a cost of fifteen hundred Romans.
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But numbers barely tell the story of Zama. The ghosts of Cannae had achieved a revenge probably unmatched in all of military history. Perhaps the most victorious army in human memory essentially lay dead at their feet, and Hannibal, one of the greatest captains of all time, had hesitated and lost just about everything. He fled with just a few horsemen back to Hadrumetum. He would live almost two decades longer, occupying a place in Rome’s nightmares and a place on the fringes of high politics, but in reality it was now his turn to play the ghost.

[5]

The Second Punic War was over. Its instigator knew it. A military oxymoron—Hannibal without an army—he returned to Carthage thirty-six years after he had left on the summons of the council of elders, warily, no doubt, given that so many failed Punic commanders had ended up on the cross. But his reception was polite, and he stated frankly that there was no hope unless Carthage sued for peace.

Later, when an elder named Gisgo (the same Gisgo who had marveled at the size of the Roman army at Cannae?) objected to Scipio’s preliminary demands, Hannibal knocked him off the rostrum and argued passionately that it was inconceivable that any citizen of Carthage did “not bless his stars that, now that he was at the mercy of the Romans, he has obtained such lenient terms.”
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Or so the terms seemed.

The final peace treaty was deceptively mild, largely along the lines of Scipio’s original armistice agreement. Carthage would continue to be self-governed following its own laws and customs, and would retain all prewar possessions in Africa. It would surrender its entire navy save ten triremes, and all its elephants, promising to train no more (arguably a benefit for Carthage). The war indemnity was raised to ten thousand talents, to be paid in annual installments over fifty years. This was a huge amount in the ancient world, equating to 572,000 pounds of silver worth more than $120,000,000 at today’s prices.
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More onerous—sinister even—was the Carthaginians’ designation as “friends and allies” of Rome, the same terminology used to subordinate dependencies in Italy, a designation that prohibited Carthage from going to war with anyone unless it had the Roman senate’s permission. Appian even maintains they were specifically forbidden to wage war against Masinissa, an inveterate enemy.
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This proved to be a demon protocol, a pretext for future intervention by Rome, and ultimately the city’s doom.
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But the Carthaginians would try to make the best of it, and for a while it seemed that the new relationship was actually to their advantage.

But beneath a cloak of legalism, Rome, and in particular conservative elements in the senate, remained traumatized by the events of the war and would pursue a course that must be interpreted as deeply vindictive toward those deemed responsible. This agenda of retribution would dominate Roman foreign policy in the opening decades of the second century and more subtly far beyond.

Given their distinctive fear-scape, it was utterly in character for Romans to remember the Second Punic War as “the war against the Carthaginians and Gauls.” Now that the Barcid menace had been removed, it was the turn of the Celtic tribes inhabiting the Po basin to suffer the wrath of those along the Tiber. The assault was relentless; during the decade after the year 200, more legions and consuls were sent to Cisalpine Gaul than to anywhere else.
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Pincered by Roman forces moving both east and west from the coasts, the results were inevitable. The Boii in particular were singled out for a pounding, and by 191 they had been crushed, with half their lands expropriated. The other local tribes—Insubres and Cenomani—were treated better but with the understanding that, at last, they were now Rome’s subordinates. Nor had the Romans forgotten that the region’s other inhabitants, the Ligurians, had lined up with Mago Barca when he’d arrived in their vicinity. Though it took longer because of mountainous terrain, by 155 they too had been steamrolled.
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Philip V of Macedon, whose alliance with Hannibal after Cannae had probably sealed his fate, was also marked for a payback. Philip would protest that he had done nothing to transgress the Peace of Phoinike, and the Roman people were plainly tired—Livy (31.6.3) claims that a motion for war was initially rejected by the Comitia Centuriata—but the senate was implacable and in the end had its way.

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, included in Rome’s military instrument of retribution was a substantial contingent from the
legiones Cannenses
. They were supposedly volunteers, but after a year, two thousand of them mutinied, bitterly maintaining that from Africa they had been transported back to Sicily and then put on ships to Macedonia contrary to their wishes.
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The consul P. Villius Tappulus persuaded them to remain under arms, and they were still serving two years later in 197, when under the thirty-year-old Titus Quinctius Flaminius they blundered into Philip’s army in the fog-enshrouded hills of Cynoscephalae. The armies seemed well matched, until an unnamed tribune, availing himself of the flexibility Scipio had engineered into his ghosts, peeled off twenty maniples and led them around to the flank and rear of the heretofore successful Macedonian right.
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Unable to turn to meet the Romans with their long pikes, the Macedonian phalangites were hacked to pieces by a buzz saw of Roman short swords.

His army destroyed, Philip accepted peace terms very much like those that had been imposed on Carthage. Now he too was no longer permitted to wage war outside home territory without Rome’s blessing.
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In linking himself to Hannibal after Cannae, Philip had only been playing according to the rules of the Mediterranean basin’s “great game,” but now he learned that Rome played for keeps.

The war’s end also meant that the
Cannenses
could get some rest. Although the two victorious legions remained in place, the military threat had passed, and presumably the oldest veterans could be shipped back to Italy relatively quickly.
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Then, two years after he had proclaimed “the freedom of the Greeks” at the Isthmian Games of 196, Flaminius, still in the process of arranging the new order, discovered as many as twelve hundred of the original Cannae prisoners in Greece. After the long-ago senatorial refusal to ransom them, Hannibal had sold the prisoners to Achaean owners, and they were now bought back and finally repatriated.
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Six years later, another substantial number of enslaved
Cannenses
would be found in Crete and sent home, fully twenty-eight years after the battle had occurred.
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Meanwhile, at the insistence of Scipio the senate instructed the
praetor urbanus
to appoint a commission of ten to allocate some public lands in Samnium and Apulia for Africanus’s soldiers, at the rate of two
jugera
(about 1.3 acres) per year served in Spain or Africa. But this equation apparently did not account for the ghosts’ time in Sicily.
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If this was rehabilitation, it was not exactly generous, given the pain and humiliation these troops had endured before acquitting themselves so heroically at Zama, and then at Cynoscephalae. But at least the republic had taken some responsibility for their long-suffering soldiers and had not left it to the initiative of their commander, as would occur so frequently late in the republican era, with disastrous consequences for the stability of the state. In any age, countries that fight a lot of wars are well advised to take good care of their veterans.