Hannibal (18 page)

A trumpet sounded. The moment had arrived. Hannibal’s tactic of double envelopment of the Roman legions was complete. The African troops, heavily armed, disciplined and fresh, made their move: ‘those on the right wing, facing to the left, and those on the left wing, facing to the right.’ Upon the struggling mass of Romans, now caught in the centre, the Africans moved in like the two sides of an enfolding vice. To complete this terrible trap into which the legions had plunged in pursuit of Hannibal’s collapsing centre, their rear lines now found themselves assailed. The heavy cavalry, having completed the rout of the allied horse, had left it to the Numidians to pursue them as they fled, and had turned to take the Roman legions in the rear. Encircled, since the Spaniards and Gauls who had formed Hannibal’s centre still fought on ferociously, contesting every foot of ground, the Romans were totally stricken by the closing in on them of the two wings formed by the Africans. Throughout that hot afternoon the plain below the hill of Cannae became a slaughter yard.

Livy writes that ‘forty-five hundred foot and two thousand seven hundred horse were slain in an almost equal proportion of citizens and allies.’ Appian and Plutarch give a total of 50,000 men, Quintilian 60,000 men, while Polybius puts the grand total of Roman dead at 70,000. The Carthaginians lost about 4,000 Gauls, 1,500 Spaniards and Africans, and
200 cavalry. (Leonard Cottrell in
Enemy of Rome
comments: ‘This ghastly toll of lives, the result of a few hours’ fighting, is greater than the total number of men killed in the Royal Air Force throughout the First and Second World Wars…. More men were killed at the battle of Cannae than in the British Army during the murderous battle of Passchendaele in 1917, though that lasted for four months.’) As well as Consul Aemilius Paulus, the two consuls of the previous year, Servilius and Atilius, were both killed, as was Minucius, the former Master of the Horse under Fabius. Eighty senators, two
quaestors
(state-treasurers) and twenty-nine military tribunes—more than half the total of those scions of noble Roman blood—died on that day. The body of the Roman confederacy was savaged beyond repair, and as Livy was to write many years later, ‘No other nation could have suffered such a tremendous disaster and not been destroyed.’
 

XVI

HIGH TIDE

Terentius Varro, together with a small number of allied cavalry, rode to Venusia thirty miles away. Polybius comments that ‘he disgraced himself by his flight and in his tenure of office had been most unprofitable to his country’. The astonishing thing is that when he did ultimately reach Rome, he was met by a great throng who congratulated him on not having despaired of the Republic. It was this flexibility—the sheer strength and vitality—of Rome’s political institutions that was in the end to defeat Hannibal. In Carthage the fate of an unsuccessful and cowardly general was well known—he was crucified.

Of the surviving infantry an unspecified number managed to reach Canusium, among them one of the military tribunes, the young Scipio. This was one witness of Hannibal’s genius who was to study and profit by it. (Years later on the North African battlefield of Zama he was to demonstrate that he had absorbed the lessons well.) Ten thousand men who had been left to guard the Roman camp and, if possible, to attack and seize the Carthaginians’ main camp, were caught after the battle, two thousand being killed and the rest taken prisoner. The loot from the Roman camp and from the field of Cannae was considerable: arms and armour, horse trappings, silver and gold, horses and baggage. It is said that the gold signet rings, taken from the Roman knights who had fallen in battle, alone amounted to three bushels in weight. Hannibal, as usual, attempted to reclaim the bodies of his leading antagonists, but only that of the consul Aemilius Paulus could be identified, and this was given honourable burial.

At this moment of triumph, when it seemed that their enemies were irrevocably broken, it was hardly surprising that there were those among the Carthaginians who felt that the time had arrived for the march on Rome. Even less surprising was it that this sentiment should be voiced by Maharbal, a cavalry commander without equal, who was justified in feeling that much of the success obtained by the Carthaginians since entering Italy could be attributed to his superb horsemen. It is the nature of a good cavalryman to be hot-blooded and full of
élan,
and Maharbal now called upon his leader to make use of the opportunity that such an outstanding victory gave him. ‘On the fifth day from now,’ Livy has him saying, you shall dine as victor on the Capitol hill. My horsemen will go before you, and the Romans will know you have come even before they know you are coming.’ Hannibal replied that, good though such words were to hear, yet he must have time to consider. At which Maharbal’s famous and angry response rings down the ages: ‘Hannibal, I see that the gods give a man many gifts, but not all. You know how to win a victory, but not how to use one!’ Hannibal had no option. His army was not large enough to invest a city the size of Rome and starve it out, and he had no siege machinery.

‘The Carthaginians by this action [at Cannae] became at once masters of almost all the rest of the coast,’ wrote Polybius, ‘Tarentum immediately surrendering, while Argyrippa and some Campanian towns invited Hannibal to come to them…. The Romans on their part owing to this defeat at once abandoned all hope of retaining their supremacy in Italy, and were in the greatest fear about their own safety and that of Rome, expecting Hannibal every moment to appear.’ The reasons that he did not are known, but at the time it seemed inconceivable to the Romans that he would not follow up his triumph. The first news that reached the city after messengers had been sent out to see what had happened at Cannae was that the army had been destroyed and both its consuls killed. (It was not yet known that Terentius Varro was gathering ‘something resembling a consular army’ at Canusium.) There was no sign of a Roman camp, and the enemy appeared to be in possession of the whole area. It was as if those proud new legions, which had marched south to destroy Hannibal once and for all, had vanished from the face of the earth.

Hannibal’s treatment of his prisoners differed slightly on this occasion, since he did not automatically allow the allies to return free to their homes. He separated the one from the other, but offered both allies and Romans their freedom on payment of ransom—the Roman payment being fifty per cent higher than that of the allies. He had more than enough prisoners and slaves already and, despite the wealth garnered from the battlefield, he may have felt that now was a good time to acquire as much money
as
possible with a view to the future payment of his troops. He took care once more to impress on the allies that his war was not against them but against Rome, and allowed a delegation of ten Romans to leave for their city in company with a Carthaginian noble, Carthalo. Whatever Hannibal’s expectations, he was to be disappointed: Carthalo was not allowed into Rome and was told to be clear of the city’s territories before nightfall. If Hannibal had hoped by his magnanimity to be given an opportunity of discovering the state of Roman morale, the Senate was equally determined that he should learn that there had been no weakening. After much debate it was decided that the delegates should be sent back to Hannibal with a message that Rome had no intention of ransoming her captured soldiers.

In this hour of disaster Rome showed that tough and enduring face which was to make her the head of a great empire. Although she could well have used these soldiers, it was felt and proclaimed that it was a Roman’s duty to die rather than yield. The city embraced the Spartan code. There was hardly a mother within the walls of Rome who had not lost a husband or son in the campaigns of Hannibal: they were not allowed to go outside their houses in mourning. Fabius Maximus, ‘the delayer’, once more asserted the old Roman code, taking charge of morale as well as the work on the defences. Public mourning was forbidden, rumour and gossip were eliminated by the imposition of silence in public places, all bearers of news coming from outside the city were immediately brought before the praetors to reveal their information (but not allowed to discuss it afterwards), and sentries were posted at the gates to prevent anyone from leaving the city. The necessity for these stringent measures was reinforced when the last piece of grim news came through: a consular army in the north of Italy, under the consul-elect Lucius Postumius, had fallen into an ambush set by the Boii and had been massacred.

Livy, looking back at this moment in Roman history, accurately assesses the situation:

The year before, a consul and his army had been lost at Trasimene, and now it was not merely one blow following another, but a calamity many times as great as before. Two consuls and two consular armies had been lost [at Cannae] and there was no longer any Roman camp, or general, or soldier. Hannibal was master of Apulia, Samnium, and well-nigh the whole of Italy…. Would you compare the disaster off the Aegatian islands, which the Carthaginians suffered in the sea-fight, by which their spirit was so broken that they relinquished Sicily and Sardinia and suffered themselves to become taxpayers and tributaries? Or the defeat in Africa to which this very Hannibal afterwards succumbed? In no single aspect are they to be compared with this calamity, except that they were endured with less fortitude.

Hannibal could not invest and destroy Rome, but Cannae did enable him to reap the fruits of victory in political terms. A number of towns in Apulia opened their gates to him, including Arpi and Salapia, while all Bruttium, with the notable exception of the Greek cities, and nearly all Lucania left the Roman confederacy to join the Carthaginians. Most of Samnium came over, to be followed in due course by Capua in Campania-the second largest city in the whole of the Italian peninsula, richest after Rome itself, and the most important among the confederation. Capua was capable of fielding an army of some 30,000 foot and 4,000 horse and seemed designed to be the capital of this new coalition of states which, under Hannibal’s control, might form an Italian bloc stretching from the river Vulturnus on the west to Mount Garganus on the Adriatic coast.

What was significant, however—and it can scarcely have escaped Hannibal’s notice—was that not one of the Latin colonies in the area had opened its gates to him and that the Greek cities likewise maintained their allegiance to Rome. The latter was of the most consequence since it was the Greek ‘naval allies’, as they were termed, who provided the backbone of Rome’s fleet. Their ports of Neapolis, Rhegium, Tarentum and Thurii were not only prosperous in themselves but essential for control of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the approaches to Sicily and, indeed, the whole western Mediterranean. Polybius was anticipating when he referred to ‘Tarentum immediately surrendering’. It was months before this great southern seaport fell into Hannibal’s hands, and for the moment he still had no real access to the sea. He did, however, manage to get his younger brother Mago back to Carthage with the news about Cannae and a picture of the general situation in Italy. Mago marched through the ‘toe’ of Italy, the Bruttian tribes welcoming anyone who freed them from the interfering dominance of Rome, and embarked presumably in some Carthaginian vessel that had detached itself from a fleet which had already been nervously probing the defences of Sicily.

Hannibal badly needed reinforcements, particularly with regard to cavalry and to trained North African infantry. The brilliant hand-picked force with which he had left Spain two years before had suffered severe losses—excluding even the many men lost in the passage of the Alps—and the Gauls and other allies were no substitute for professional soldiers. Hannibal also needed money; mercenaries had to be paid, and the spoils from Cannae and the political successes that stemmed from it were not without a reverse side to the coin: Hannibal now needed men to reinforce garrisons, money to bribe suitable citizens, and above all a siege train. With his army of conquest he had made a brilliant showing that would never again be repeated in the history of warfare. Now he was faced with something that neither he nor his father, and certainly none of the senate in Carthage, had ever envisaged: the requirements of consolidation. Having no means to reduce walled cities, and having no spare troops to garrison them even if they yielded, he was faced with an insoluble problem: he could not hold down a whole country.

Hannibal’s thinking—the Carthaginian thinking—was out of date. Having done the impossible, crossing the Alps to attack the Roman state from overland, and having successfully defeated them in the north, Rome should have surrendered. Having marched south and annihilated a consular army at Lake Trasimene, Rome should have surrendered. Having marched further south and completely destroyed the armies of the Republic, Rome should then have surrendered. Hannibal and the Carthaginians were thinking in terms of the past. Over the centuries first of tribal and then of extra-territorial warfare, the Romans had learned that one battle does not make a conquest. Hannibal was a commando-leader and he had achieved his objectives. No one had told him—nor had he ever foreseen—that he would now be required to command an army of occupation.
 

XVII

THE KINGDOM OF THE SOUTH

Hannibal’s brother Mago might have expected that his reception in Carthage would be warm and appreciative, at the very least. He came to report to the elders of Carthage, and to what amounted to their senate, that their general Hannibal, son of Hamilcar, the founder of their empire in Spain, had avenged the wrongs of the first war against Rome, and that the nation which had humbled them by the terms of an infamous peace treaty was now beaten to its knees. He had evidence from the battlefield—the gold rings of the Roman knights among other things—of the extent of the victory that had just been won.