The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT L. O’CONNELL

  Of Arms and Men:

  A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression

  Sacred Vessels:

  The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy

  Ride of the Second Horseman:

  The Birth and Death of War

  Fast Eddie:

  A Novel in Many Voices

  Soul of the Sword:

  An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare

  from Prehistory to the Present

  To Harry Dell, who taught me about

  Greeks and Romans and even had

  some sympathy for Carthage

  CONTENTS

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Cast of Characters

  I: TRACES OF WAR

  II: ROME

  III: CARTHAGE

  IV: HANNIBAL’S WAY

  V: THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG

  VI: CANNAE

  VII: AFTERSHOCKS

  VIII: THE AVENGERS

  IX: RESURRECTING THE GHOSTS

  EPILOGUE: THE SHADOW OF CANNAE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Glossary of Latin, Military, and Technical Terms

  About the Author

  Copyright

  LIST OF MAPS

  The Mediterranean Basin at the Beginning of the Second Punic War (218 B.C.), and Hannibal’s Lifetime Path

  The Italian Theater and Hannibal’s March to Cannae

  Cannae: Probable Force Dispositions Prior to Battle

  Cannae: Springing the Trap

  Cannae: The Trap Sprung

  The Spanish Theater

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Agathocles of Syracuse—Invaded Carthaginian North Africa in 310 B.C. and subsequently won a victory in the field, which prompted the revolt of native Libyans before Agathocles was forced to withdraw. This invasion revealed how vulnerable Carthage was at home.

  Antiochus III—Basileus of the Seleucid Empire, he made the mistake of hiring Hannibal as a military consultant after the Second Punic War, and then allowed himself to be drawn into a disastrous war with Rome that ended with defeat at the Battle of Magnesia in 189 B.C.

  Appius Claudius—Roman survivor of Cannae who helped Scipio Africanus put down the mutiny at Canusium and who later joined Marcellus at the siege of Syracuse.

  Archimedes—The great Greek mathematician who organized the defense of Syracuse against Rome.

  Hamilcar Barca—Hannibal’s father, and a commander during the First Punic War. Hamilcar later established the family empire in Spain and is thought to be the source of his son’s hatred of Rome.

  Hannibal Barca—Instigator of the Second Punic War, invader of Italy, and among the most capable generals in history.

  Hasdrubal Barca—Brother of Hannibal. He was left behind in Spain to guard the family holdings during the Second Punic War. He later invaded Italy over the Alps and was subsequently killed at the Battle of the Metaurus in 207 B.C.

  Mago Barca—Brother of Hannibal. He played a vital role at Cannae and later returned to Spain, where he struggled against the Romans. He too invaded Italy in 206 and subsequently died from a wound he received there.

  Cato, M. Porcius—A Roman politician and soldier. He was an archetype of conservatism and was a lifelong enemy of Scipio Africanus, not to mention Carthage.

  Q. Fabius Maximus—Roman consul and dictator who devised the unpopular strategy of avoiding battle with Hannibal and relying on attrition instead.

  Cn. Fulvius Flaccus—Brother of the consul Q. Fulvius Flaccus, and the losing general at the First Battle of Herdonea. He was tried for treason, and his surviving troops were exiled to join the legiones Cannenses.

  Q. Fulvius Flaccus—Roman consul and important commander in the Second Punic War. He was one of the key participants in the siege of Capua.

  Flaminius, Caius—Roman consul and general who made a career of assaulting the Gauls and giving their conquered lands to Roman colonists. He was ambushed by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene and was killed along with much of his army.

  Flaminius, T. Quinctius—Roman general and victor at the Battle of Cynoscephalae, which effectively finished Philip V. Flaminius later was sent to Bithynia to hunt down Hannibal.

  Hanno “the Great”—The leader of the Carthaginian opposition to the Barcid agenda. He was the Barcids’ opponent during the Second Punic War and appears to have spoken for the interests of commercial agriculture.

  Hasdrubal (cavalry commander)—Brilliantly led the Celtic and Spanish cavalry at Cannae.

  Hasdrubal Gisgo—Longtime Carthaginian commander, first in Spain and then in North Africa during the Second Punic War. Not a great soldier, but extremely persistent. Also, the father of Sophonisba.

  Hasdrubal the Handsome—Carthaginian politician and Hamilcar Barca’s son-in-law. He took over the Barcid holdings in Spain after Hamilcar’s death. Hasdrubal the Handsome was assassinated in 221 and replaced by Hannibal.

  Hippocrates and Epicydes—Carthaginian brothers of Syracusan descent whose maneuvers proved to be the catalyst for Syracuse’s revolt against Rome.

  Indibilis—A powerful local Spanish chieftain whose shifting loyalties came to epitomize the treacherous political environment in Iberia during the Second Punic War.

  Laelius, Gaius—Longtime military subordinate to Scipio Africanus. A talented commander in his own right, he played an important role in securing the North African countryside during the Roman invasion that would lead to Carthage’s surrender.

  Laevinus, M. Valerius—Capable Roman commander in Greece during the first of Rome’s wars against Philip V. He later served in Sicily.

  Sempronius Longus, T.—Roman consul defeated at the Battle of the River Trebia in 218 B.C.

  Maharbal—Opportunistic Carthaginian cavalry commander who challenged Hannibal to march on Rome after Cannae.

  Marcellus, M. Claudius—One of the key Roman generals during the Second Punic War, and conqueror of Syracuse. Marcellus was an extremely belligerent commander who was killed in one of Hannibal’s ambushes in 208.

  L. Marcius, Septimus—Roman commander in Spain who rallied the survivors after the defeat of the elder Scipio brothers.

  Masinissa—Numidian prince and later king of Massylia in North Africa. He was an excellent cavalry commander who first served with the Carthaginians in Spain and later switched sides to join the Romans. He would prove a potent force in Carthage’s defeat and later destruction.

  Muttines—Talented Numidian cavalry commander who went over to the Roman side in Syracuse and subsequently became a citizen.

  Nero, C. Claudius—Roman general in the Second Punic War in both Spain and Italy. It was his surprise march to the Metaurus that probably sealed Hasdrubal Barca’s fate.

  Paullus, L. Aemilius—One of the two consuls defeated at Cannae. Paullus was killed there.

  Philip V—King of Macedon who after Cannae made an alliance with Hannibal and subsequently fought two wars with Rome.

  Pleminius, Quintus—A Roman legate whose brutal behavior at Locri toward the town’s citizens and toward his fellow Roman commanders almost brought about the disgrace of Scipio Africanus.

  Prusias II—King of Bithynia who employed Hannibal during the 180s as a city planner and admiral. Prusias ultimately betrayed Hannibal.

  Pyrrhus—Epirote king who invaded Italy and fought the Romans in a series of three costly battles between 280 and 275 B.C.

  Regulus, M. At
ilius—Roman consul who invaded North Africa during the First Punic War and subsequently suffered defeat and capture. His example was later cited by Romans wary of staging an analogous invasion during the Second Punic War.

  Salinator, M. Livius—A Roman consul who came out of retirement and disgrace to lead (with Nero) the Roman armies at the Battle of the Metaurus, which ended the invasion by Hasdrubal Barca.

  Scipio, Cn. Cornelius—Brother of Publius Cornelius Scipio, who was also known as Scipio the Elder. Like his sibling, Cnaeus died fighting in Spain.

  Scipio, P. Cornelius—Father of Scipio Africanus. He and his brother led the Roman effort in Spain until they were defeated and killed.

  Scipio Africanus, P. Cornelius—Victorious Roman leader in Spain, and the conqueror of Hannibal at Zama in North Africa.

  Sophonisba—Heroic daughter of Hasdrubal Gisgo. She was also the wife of Syphax, whom she influenced deeply and kept loyal to Carthage until he was defeated and captured.

  Syphax—The Massaesylian king who provided much of the opposition to the Romans during Scipio Africanus’s invasion of North Africa.

  Torquatus, T. Manlius—Hard-core Roman who denounced the prisoners that Hannibal took at Cannae. He subsequently consolidated Roman control of Sardinia.

  Varro, C. Terentius—Roman consul defeated at Cannae. He survived to be given other commands, somewhat inexplicably.

  Xanthippus—The Greek mercenary who organized the Carthaginian defense in 255 B.C. in the face of the Roman invasion led by Regulus.

  I

  TRACES OF WAR

  [1]

  Polybius of Megalopolis peered down from a pass high in the Italian Alps and caught sight of the rich green Lombard plain far below. It was exactly the same inviting panorama Hannibal had shown his half-starved, half-frozen, thoroughly discouraged army seventy-three years before, exhorting them to stay the course on what would prove to be an amazing path of conquest. Quite probably enough bits and pieces of that weary host remained visible for Polybius to be sure he was in the right spot; a certitude denied future chroniclers, and giving rise to one of ancient history’s most enduring and futile controversies: Where exactly did Hannibal cross the Alps?1 Polybius, for his part, was free to concentrate on questions he found more important.

  It was his aim—an endeavor that would eventually fill forty books—to explain to his fellow Greeks how a hitherto obscure city-state on the Italian peninsula had come to dominate, virtually in the course of a lifetime, the entire Mediterranean world. But if Rome stood at center stage in Polybius’s inquiry, Hannibal and Carthage were his foils. Each in their own way had nearly put an end to Rome’s ambitions. Both by this time were dead, obliterated by Rome, but it was the challenges they had posed and the disasters they had inflicted that Polybius found most compelling. For no matter how bad things had gotten, Rome had always responded, had picked itself up out of the dustbin of history and soldiered on. And it was in defeat more than victory that Polybius saw the essence of Rome’s greatness.

  It never got worse than Cannae. On August 2, 216 B.C., a terrible apocalyptic day in southern Italy, 120,000 men engaged in what amounted to a mass knife fight. At the end of the fight, at least forty-eight thousand Romans lay dead or dying, lying in pools of their own blood and vomit and feces, killed in the most intimate and terrible ways, their limbs hacked off, their faces and thoraxes and abdomens punctured and mangled. This was Cannae, an event celebrated and studied as Hannibal’s paragon by future practitioners of the military arts, the apotheosis of the decisive victory. Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history. Worse yet, Cannae came at the end of a string of savage defeats engineered by the same Hannibal, Rome’s nemesis destined to prey on Italy for another thirteen years and defeat army after army and kill general after general. Yet none of this would plumb the depths reached on that awful afternoon in August.

  It has been argued that Polybius, aware of Cannae’s enormous symbolic import, deliberately structured his history so as to make the battle appear as the absolute low point in Rome’s fortunes, thereby exaggerating its significance.2 Yet, not only do sheer numbers argue the contrary, but also Rome on this day lost a significant portion of its leadership class, between a quarter and a third of the senate, the members of which had been anxious to be present at what had been assumed would be a great victory. Instead it was a debacle by any measure, so much so that a case can be made that Cannae was even more critical than Polybius believed, in retrospect a true pivot point in Roman history. Arguably the events of this August day either initiated or accelerated trends destined to push Rome from municipality to empire, from republican oligarchy to autocracy, from militia to professional army, from a realm of freeholders to a dominion of slaves and estates. And the talisman of all of this change was one lucky survivor, a young military tribune named Publius Cornelius Scipio,* known to history as Africanus. For at the end of many more years of fighting, Rome still would need a general and an army good enough to defeat Hannibal, and Scipio Africanus, with the help of what remained of the battlefield’s disgraced refugees, would answer the call and in the process set all else in motion.

  [2]

  Two questions spring to mind: How do we know? and Why should we care? For this is, after all, ancient history, among the dimmest and potentially most obscure of our recollections. Putting relevance aside for a moment, it is still necessary to concede a point made by Cambridge classicist Mary Beard: “The study of ancient history is as much about how we know as what we know, an engagement with all the processes of selection, constructive blindness, revolutionary reinterpretation and willful misinterpretation that together produce the ‘facts’ … out of the messy, confusing, and contradictory evidence that survives.”3

  In other words, what we know for sure is entirely limited, and all the rest is basically opinion. This point is driven home by the single sliver of archaeological evidence purporting to show that Hannibal ever actually invaded Italy—an inscription thought to commemorate Fabius Maximus’s capture of the port city of Tarentum and containing the name Hannibal but not a word about Tarentum or Fabius.4 After all those years, all those battles, that’s it. Speaking of battles, military historians are prone to muddying their boots walking the fields on which mayhem once took place, seeking all manner of insights from the terrain, revelations that they maintain it is impossible to derive from the flat pages of a book. With Cannae and virtually all the other battles of the Second Punic* War, this exercise is, well, just an exercise when it becomes apparent that it is impossible to locate the battle sites with any degree of precision; during twenty-two hundred years, rivers change course, lakeshores advance and retreat, contemporary sprawl steamrolls the landscape.5

  All we really have are words, preserved for us in the most haphazard fashion out of a much larger body of literature. So the study of ancient history is roughly analogous to scrutinizing a badly decayed patchwork quilt, full of holes and scraps of material from earlier work. Central to understanding the process of study is an awareness that, besides an occasional fragment liberated from the desert by archaeologists, there will be no more evidence. The quilt is it; everything must be based on a reasoned analysis of the fabric at hand. Plainly the quality and integrity of some of the patches greatly exceed those of the others, so they will be emphasized and relied upon whenever possible. Yet, because of the limited nature of the material, there is always the temptation to fall back on a truly outlandish polka dot or a monumentally garish plaid, if only to figure out where it came from and what it might have meant in its original form. In the end, even among otherwise tasteful and scrupulous ancient historians, something is almost always better than nothing.

  Fortunately for us, that “something” generally includes things military. Ancient historians were united in their belief
that force was the ultimate arbiter of human affairs, and almost without exception wars and their outcomes were at the center of their works. Printing presses were nonexistent, and literacy was the possession of a tiny minority generally clustered around the ruling classes. Military history was not only dramatic and entertaining; it could be highly instructive for those in charge.

  To Polybius, plainly the best of our sources, command in battle was “the most honorable and serious of all employments” (3.48.4) and he wrote knowing he had the ear of some of war’s most enthusiastic practitioners. He was not in Rome by accident, or by choice. Polybius was a hostage, a hipparch, or master of cavalry, brought there in 167 B.C. along with a thousand of his countrymen to ensure the future good behavior of the Greek region of Achaea, part of the grinding, half-unwilling process by which the Romans eventually stifled Greek freedom. In a city where patronage meant everything, Polybius managed to attach himself to the clan and person of Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of one of the two losing consuls at Cannae, a perch that gave Polybius unparalleled access to the sources he needed for his great project of explaining Roman success. Besides trekking the Alps, he visited the state archives and read old treaties between Carthage and Rome, examined the personal papers and correspondence of important players, traipsed across battlefields, and journeyed to other pertinent locations. He even examined a bronze tablet Hannibal had had inscribed, enumerating his sanguinary achievements before leaving Italy. Polybius also interviewed a number of Cannae’s participants, including two of Scipio Africanus’s key henchmen, Gaius Laelius and the Massylian prince Masinissa, and he possibly even spoke to some of Cannae’s survivors, although they would have been very old.

  He also read a lot of history—contemporary or near contemporary accounts that are now lost to us. Key here was the work of Fabius Pictor, a distinguished Roman senator, who after the defeat at Cannae had been sent on a mission to the Delphic oracle to try to figure out what had gone wrong soothsayer-wise. Fabius Pictor is interesting in part due to his kinship with Fabius Maximus, the savvy architect of the strategy of attrition and delay that at least cut Rome’s losses to Hannibal, and also because Fabius Pictor’s history seems to have revealed deep fissures in the Carthaginian government’s support of Hannibal’s invasion.6 We know that Polybius used the work of L. Cincius Alimentus, a moderately important Roman soldier and politician who had been captured by Hannibal and had struck up a relationship with the Carthaginian invader. Polybius also used the work of Aulus Postumius Albinus, who was consul in 151 B.C. There were probably others on the Roman side.