Hannibal's Best Shot At Beating Rome

A History of Mankind (173)

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The long war against Hannibal became a crucible for Roman leaders for decades to come, and an entire generation came to be defined by how it survived the Carthaginian onslaught, or otherwise.

This was particularly the case at the very peak of Roman politics. Publius Cornelius Scipio the Younger, the hero of Ticinus later nicknamed “Africanus,” earned much distinction and a legendary fame, although Cato, the later called the Elder (born 234 BC) — a new man¹ obsessed with following the example of the long-deceased Dentatus, a hero to all cranky conservatives since — had a less remarkable service.

Cato mostly served as staff officer for Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, leader of the anti-Scipio faction, a position that Cato, as he intended all along, eventually inherited. Cato was a master at avoiding battlefields and staying far from the cold steel even when he was forced to be close to actual fighting, but he still obtained the military experience needed to ascend in Roman politics².

Despite their early arrogance, Romans quickly understood how dangerous Hannibal was. Even in early 218 BC, before Hannibal started his rampage through Italy, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio – left in command of the Roman contingent in Iberia – executed Roman soldiers that were laxed in guarding the fleet, what later tradition understood as the first historical example of “decimation”³.

This Scipio, an uncle of the later Africanus, briefly became Rome’s only purveyor of good news, as he defeated a Carthaginian army in Cissa just north of Tarraco in late 218 BC, and the next year he destroyed a small Carthaginian fleet at the mouth of the Ebro River. Such Scipio successes inflamed other prominent Romans, tired of defeats against Hannibal: surely, if Carthaginian troops in Iberia could be defeated, the same could happen in Italy.

Verrucosus disagreed. He had been appointed dictator after the defeat at Lake Trasimene, and opted by an extremely cautious strategy that gained for him the additional surname of “Cunctator” or “Delayer” as he had Roman forces shadow Hannibal’s army movements across the peninsula, while avoiding pitched battle; Hannibal, in response, punished Roman allies while recruiting fresh troops among Roman enemies.

At the end of Verrucosus’ term, the Scipios managed to get Lucius Aemilius Paullus, father of Africanus-wife-to-be, elected as consul and provided with a massive army to crush Hannibal. Eight legions were put in the field together for the first time in Roman history, and marched towards Apulia, where Hannibal had entrenched his army in the supply depot of Cannae, over the summer of 216 BC.

The Roman army may have numbered around 90,000 men, with the Carthaginians at just half that strength as the armies made contact on a plain by the River Aufidus. Given their traditionally inferior cavalry, the Roman commanders planned to rely on their superior infantry to beat up the Carthaginian center to a pulp, and make the predictable Carthaginian cavalry superiority pointless: by the time the African horsemen ended up their pursuit of defeated Roman horsemen, the Carthaginian infantry would have been crushed or fled.

Hannibal’s plan was better. As the Roman footmen advanced, his infantry line extended to form a crescent that held the enemy push, first, and then only gave way gradually; as the Roman legions advanced, Carthaginian infantry drifted to their flanks, creating a trap that was finally closed from the rear when the African cavalry closed with the infantry, having disposed of their Roman peers, and attacked the Roman infantry from the rear.

Cannae was a tactician’s dream come true. A perfect entrapment driven by the enemy’s own forward momentum, which turned the trap even more dangerous the further they advanced, a plan that many generals would seek to imitate for millennia to come.

For Rome, the disaster was absolute. Consul Paullus died in combat, together with 29 of the state’s 48 military tribunes and around 80 senators. Scipio the Younger managed to escape the trap with a few thousand men, and yet over half of the Roman force died or was taken prisoner. Any other state in the world, perhaps with the exception of China’s Qin, would have negotiated a peace proposal at this point, but not Rome: when Hannibal sent a delegation led by his officer Carthalo to the city, it was intercepted by forces sent by newly-minted dictator Junius Pera, and forced to leave Rome immediately.

An unbelievable story in Livy tells of Scipio the Younger storming into some meeting sword in hand, after he heard that Lucius Caecilius Metellus and other young nobles were planning to go overseas to serve some king, forcing all present to swear that they would not leave Rome. Another story painting the Scipios in a favorable light that was planted among the populace was that it wasn’t the Scipio ally Paullus who was to blame for the defeat at Cannae, but his consular colleague Gaius Terentus Varro, who had actual command of the army in the day of the battle⁴.

(For early examples of successful Scipio propaganda, see below:)

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Much of southern Italy defected to Hannibal after Cannae; and yet many Italic cities remained faithful to Rome, turning what could have been a massive anti-Roman uprising into a complex series of internal struggles and small-time raids and counter-raids.

This confused situation kept the Carthaginian army busy trying to protect key allies like Capua where pro-Carthaginians had risen to the fore. Rome kept raising more legions, with criminals, slaves and whoever would be able to hold weapons, while taking decisive action against draft-dodging⁵.

Hannibal had arrived in Italy a century too late: lands that had long filled with anti-Romans ready to join anyone who would promise an assault on the hated Republic were now crammed with Roman colonies. And Sicily, still mostly under Roman control, represented a major block standing on the way of receiving reinforcements from Carthage: Hannibal only got such reinforcements once, via the southern Italian port of Locri, in 215 BC.

Despite the death of Syracuse’s Hiero II in 215 BC, and his replacement as king by his pro-Carthaginian grandson Hieronymus⁶, developments in other fronts, as a rule, didn’t help the Carthaginian cause. Iberia, in particular, was becoming the decisive theater of the war, and the Scipios were making an impact there.

In the spring of the same year, near Hibera/Dertosa just south of the Ebro river, a significant Roman army under brothers Gnaeus and Publius Scipio – Scipio the Younger’s father – blocked the route of a similarly-sized Carthaginian army under Hasdrubal Barca, Hannibal’s brother, on the way to Italy to reinforce the main Carthaginian contingent.

A Roman defeat would have represented utter disaster for the Roman cause in Iberia. The Ebro River and its largest tributaries represented the main commercial trade route in northern Spain and all the wealthiest tribes and towns of the area benefited from riverine commerce there⁷; with the Romans withdrawing towards the Pyrenees, Iberians would certainly see the Carthaginian cause as doomed to win and act accordingly; and then another enemy army would arrive in northern Italy, sure to rile up the Gauls there against weakened Roman defenses.

Hasdrubal deployed his army in a manner that shows he was trying to repeat the Roman slaughter at Cannae: his weakest infantry – made up of Iberian mercenaries who fought in a style similar to Romans, but with less discipline and interest in the outcome – was positioned in the center, so that it would take the brunt of the Roman infantry assault and give some way, allowing for the stronger Carthaginian infantry wings (made up of Carthaginian infantry and Libyan mercenaries) to envelop the Roman center, with Numidian cavalry and African elephants completing the encirclement.

The plan had one big defect that undid the whole setup: in Italy, Hannibal’s Iberian infantry was far from home, with nowhere to go, and willing to fight just as hard as the Romans, and stand its ground, at least for some time; in Iberia, under the weight of the Roman attack the Iberian infantry essentially melted down and ran for home, leaving both Carthaginian wings isolated, and open to destruction by the dominant Roman army. As was common in history when the going was tough, Carthaginian cavalry and elephants just fled the scene to fight another day. By the time another Carthaginian army was able to try and force its way past the Ebro towards Italy, in 208 BC, Hannibal’s situation there would be much more desperate.

Roman progress in Iberia was coupled with a lack of progress for Hannibal’s most important ally, Philip V of Macedon. The Hellenistic king turned openly hostile to Rome in 216 BC, after he defeated Greece’s Aetolian-Spartan coalition in 220-217 BC in the so-called Greek Social War, and signed a pact with Hannibal in 215 BC. However, he was still surrounded by hostile poleis and petty kingdoms on all sides, and struggled to make even a small impact on the wider war against Rome until he took the city of Lissus from the Ilyrian allies of Rome three years later.

1. That Cato the Elder, a “new man,” eventually became the quintessential, conservative Roman aristocrat, goes to show that the importance of ancestry has been slightly exaggerated by some historians of the period. In the end, wealth trumped everything in Rome, as in most places, and new men like Cato and, later, Cicero had enough money to overcome a lack of real or made-up heroes in their bloodlines.

2. Cato, at best, may have been present at the Battle of Metaurus (207 BC) when the Romans defeated and killed Hasdrubal Barca when he was marching into Italy in support of his brother Hannibal, even though it’s unlikely he ever faced an enemy sword. Again as Verrucosus’ protegé, Cato went to Africa with Scipio in the 205-204 BC campaign, which he conveniently left before any major fighting after a dispute with the commanding general over the expenses incurred in the campaign.   

3. Decimation technically meant the killing of one in ten soldiers of a unit because of cowardice or insubordination; Scipio’s move followed three alleged earlier examples in the 5th and 4th centuries BC that may have never occurred. In his 2016 paper “Decimation in the Roman Republic” (Classical Journal, Vol. 111), Charles Goldberg notes that even Scipio’s executions may have been small in number, not rising to the killing of 10% of the manpower in any force. In total, Godlberg finds 19 possible “decimatio” in Roman history including the one in 218 BC and the three archaic examples, and very few of those are likely to have involved an actual 10% of a full army. The last was conducted by Julian the Apostate in 363 BC – and even this one was limited, since only 10 soldiers appear to have been executed for fleeing their Sasanian Persian enemies.

4. The Scipio’s propaganda machine never slept. Carthalo, the Carthaginian negotiator and one of Hannibal’s top lieutenants, was murdered by the Romans upon surrendering Tarentum to them in 209 BC, his fate as a footnote to history, like this one.

5. See Vishnia, Rachel. “State, Society and Popular Leaders in Mid-Republican Rome 241-167 B.C.” (Routledge, 2012), pp. 150-151. Keith Hopkins, in “Conquerors and Slaves, Vol. 1, Sociological Studies in Roman History” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), estimates that by 213 BC legionnaires accounted for 29% of all Roman citizens, which implies massive rates of enlistment among the young. Livy provides an estimate that the Roman citizen population suffered a dramatic net decline after the Second Punic War, from 214,000 adult male citizens in 204 BC to 143,704 in 194 BC.

6. Widely seen as unreliable by all sides, he was murdered the next year, and the city fell completely under the control of the city’s pro-Carthaginian faction.

7. Cit. “Battle of Hibera,” an undergraduate study by David Feeney of the University of Melbourne (2019).