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The long, difficult war against Hannibal left a huge imprint on Roman life. Even though the propaganda produced by the Carthaginian side – modelled on the example of the chronicles about Alexander the Great's campaigns, just like that for Agathocles of Syracuse and Pyrrhus of Epirus – is lost, surviving small extracts1 and other clues hint at the appeal of his figure for many.
This was particularly the case for some western Greeks who saw Rome's dominance of the western Mediterranean as suffocating, and Hannibal’s own march to Rome as a reenactment of the legendary Heraclean Way: in this famous legend, the hero led some cattle owned by Geryon – a giant who supposedly lived in southern Spain – to various places in the Mediterranean including Italy2, where he fought Cacus, a barbarous chieftain who disturbed his neighbors, a brute that any semi-competent propagandist in Hannibal’s army would have identified with Rome.
Even as he came from a Semitic state that was half-Hellenized at best, Hannibal himself strived to fit into this picture. He presented himself as a philo-Hellene, always accompanied by his trusted confidant Sosylus of Sparta, who taught him Greek3 and wrote a seven-volume “Deeds of Hannibal” that is sadly lost almost entirely.
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