Hannibal Reaches Into His Bag of Tricks

A History of Mankind (174)

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Only Rome could have withstood Hannibal’s campaign and a string of defeats against Carthage. Only Hannibal was able to go on for years on end, stuck in a seemingly endless, half-guerrilla war in southern Italy, seeing the core of his army wither away, always half a step ahead of his enemies.

In 214 BC, two new energetic Roman consuls put pressure on Hannibal’s positions, and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus¹ managed to defeat a Carthaginian army under Hanno near Beneventum, which represented the loss of about a thousand irreplaceable Numidian horsemen for Hannibal.

This victory for Rome, one of the biggest slaving powers in history, was won by people who had once been in chains: Gracchus two slave legions fought hard for the freedom they were promised for each man who would bring the head of an enemy — so hard in fact that they actually hampered the Roman advance, as the soldiers stopped to cut enemies’ heads while the battle was still in the balance. Gracchus was forced to send word that, unless the battle was won, nobody would win their freedom, no matter how many heads were brought to him.