Hannibal (32 page)

Some historians have commented that Hannibal made a tactical error in relying upon them, but the fact was that he was compelled to do so through his shortage of cavalry. He did, however, late in that summer receive some useful reinforcements in the shape of 2,000 horsemen from a Numidian prince, Tychaeus, who was a rival of Masinissa and who no doubt hoped to do to Masinissa what the latter had done to Syphax, and then take over the kingdom for himself. These North African rivalries and intrigues, difficult as they may be to unravel from this distance in time, nevertheless played a great part in the battle that was to decide the fate of the western world. The army that Hannibal finally led out to engage Scipio was even more heterogeneous than usual: Balearians, Ligurians, Bruttians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Numidians, and (strangely enough at this late moment) some Macedonians sent by King Philip, who perhaps at last had realised that the defeat of Rome was all-important for the freedom of his own country.

Leaving Hadrumetum, Hannibal marched west in the direction of a town called Zama, which is probably to be identified with a later Roman colony Zama Regia (Jama) ninety miles west of Hadrumetum. Reports had reached him that Scipio was engaged in burning villages, destroying crops and enslaving the inhabitants of all this fertile area, upon which Carthage depended for its grain and other food. It can only have been this driving necessity that made Hannibal march after Scipio, for on the surface it seems more logical for him to have taken his army in the direction of Carthage and interposed himself between Scipio and the city. But the latter’s systematic destruction of towns and villages, and his present activities in the Carthaginian hinterland, clearly precluded the ability of the city to feed a further 40,000 or so men, together with their horses and elephants, as well as its own teeming masses. The main cause, then, for the battle taking place where it did arose out of a matter of supplies to the capital. Scipio knew what he was doing, and had quite deliberately drawn Hannibal away from the city so as to decide the outcome of the war in an area selected by himself. It is an ironical fact that the great Carthaginian did not know his own country, not having seen any of it since he was nine years old, whereas Scipio and the Romans were by now well acquainted with the Carthaginian terrain. But Scipio was not without his worries: his army, probably somewhat smaller than Hannibal’s, although well trained and experienced in the climate and conditions of North Africa, still lacked its cavalry arm. He desperately awaited the arrival of Masinissa and his Numidians, without whom he could hardly engage in a major battle—particularly against an opponent such as Hannibal.

On reaching Zama, Hannibal, as was natural enough, sent forward spies to try to discover the nature and number of the Roman army: in particular he must have been concerned to find out just how strong was Scipio’s cavalry. These men were detected and brought before the Roman general, who had them entertained, shown round the camp, and then released to report back to their master. Some historians have doubted the likelihood of this, instancing among other things that the same story is told by Herodotus about Xerxes and the Greek spies prior to the great Persian invasion of Greece. There is nothing inherently improbable about it, however, and the fact that it is vouched for by Polybius gives it a certain authenticity. Scipio no doubt wished to let his enemy know that he was supremely confident about the outcome of the impending battle. There was something else which that astute Roman must have wished to be reported back to Hannibal: Masinissa and his Numidians were not in the camp. It was this, of course, which Hannibal wished to find out more than anything else, and the news that Scipio was weak in cavalry must have been encouraging. What he did not know of course, and Scipio undoubtedly did, was that Masinissa and his Numidians were only two days’ ride away.

Unaware that Masinissa was closing up, and thinking that he was still busily engaged in trying to establish his somewhat precarious hold over the Numidian kingdom, Hannibal possibly felt that he was in a position of superiority to the Roman. This would be a good moment, then, to try to negotiate and see whether he could not obtain favourable conditions for Carthage—terms similar to those which Scipio had previously given the Carthaginians but, if anything, somewhat improved. Accordingly he sent a message to Scipio asking him for a personal meeting to discuss terms, some-thing to which the latter agreed. Apart from anything else, there must have been considerable personal curiosity on both sides about the nature and even the appearance of their opponent. The two men had never seen each other before, although on three occasions over the years they had been close on the field of battle. First of all, the young Scipio had been present at the battle of the Ticinus, just after Hannibal had swept into Italy (when Scipio had managed to save his wounded father from the battlefield); secondly, he had been at Cannae and had witnessed the full genius and wrath of the Carthaginian unleashed like a storm against the Roman legions: thirdly, he had initiated the successful move against the port of Locri in southern Italy, when he had thwarted Hannibal’s attempts to recover it. He had had three opportunities, then, to confront the great enemy of Rome and on each occasion had had the perspicacity to observe exactly how Hannibal reacted in a given situation. The Carthaginian, on the other hand, engaged in the responsibilities of high command, had never been conscious of the pair of keen young eyes that watched him, as it were, from the sidelines. It was as if an ageing chess-master was soon to meet a student who had secretly for years been studying his ‘games’, detecting his weaknesses, and determining to improve upon the master’s play. Hannibal, for his part, knew only by report of the young man’s triumphs in the Spanish war, although he was sufficient strategist and tactician to appreciate just how brilliant was the capturer of New Carthage and the victor in several engagements over men as able as his dead brother Hasdrubal, his dead brother Mago, and Hasdrubal, the son of Gisgo. He had observed how the Romans were changing, learning how to shake free of the old consular command and acquire flexibility on the field of battle, and he was probably as curious as Scipio to meet his opponent face to face.

The factitious accounts of both Polybius and Livy, composed so many years after the events, must be considered suspect, but there can be no doubt as to the outcome of the meeting between these two great commanders—two of the most distinguished soldiers not only of the ancient world, but of all time. Hannibal, apart from the ability to speak Punic, various Hispanic dialects and Gallic, could also speak Greek and Latin fluently: Scipio, apart from Latin, was also educated in Greek. The two men could well have chosen either Latin or Greek as their lingua franca but (like many modern leaders) they preferred to make use of interpreters so as to give them flexibility and time for making their responses. If we ignore the rhetoric of Livy, the substance of their encounter was brief and to the point. Hannibal offered Scipio ‘the surrender of all the lands that were formerly in dispute between the two powers, namely Sardinia, Sicily and Spain’, together with an agreement that Carthage would never again make war on Rome. He also offered all the islands ‘lying between Italy and Africa’, i.e. the Aegates islands off western Sicily, the Lipari islands, places like Lampedusa, Linosa, Gozo and Malta—but not naming the western Balearics, which had proved so useful to Carthage. He made no mention of indemnities, nor of the handing over of nearly all the fleet, nor of the return of Roman prisoners and runaways.

Scipio could hardly have been impressed by the offer, pointing out that ‘if, before the Romans crossed to Africa, you had retired from Italy, there would have been some hope for your propositions. But now the situation is manifestly changed…. We are
here
and you have been reluctantly forced to leave Italy….’ Scipio could not accept lesser terms for the Carthaginian surrender than had been agreed by Carthage before their recent betrayal of the treaty. There was no more to be said.

Scipio had gained some invaluable time by his meeting with Hannibal: all along he had been aware that Masinissa and his Numidian horsemen were spurring across the land to be at his side when the great encounter took place. The delay had rendered the arrival of Masinissa in time for the battle almost certain. It was Hannibal who was dazed by the immensity of African and not Scipio, and it was Hannibal—accustomed for so many years to the relative size of Italy-whose intelligence service had been deceived by the absence of Masinissa’s cavalry in Scipio’s camp, and by the lack of knowledge about events in Numidia. The meeting between Hannibal and Scipio has been compared to that between Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia two thousand years later. ‘Mutual admiration struck them dumb/ wrote Livy. One doubts that Hannibal was struck dumb, but he was certainly reassured, while Scipio, for his part, knew that the great expatriate Carthaginian was willing to make peace, and the knowledge that your adversary has anything other than victory in his heart is always a considerable comfort in any contest.

On the day after this historic meeting, Masinissa’s troops reached Scipio—there were some 4,000 Numidian horsemen and 6,000 infantrymen in all—and the Roman prepared to give battle in a place of his choosing. Much debate in subsequent centuries has never satisfactorily established the exact location of the battle of Zama, although certainly it derived its name from the fact that the town of Zama was the only well-known point of reference. It is almost impossible to define a specific place in an area of North Africa which was then unmapped, and where one cannot estimate how the land may have changed during two thousand years, yet the research of several scholars seems to place the battle at twenty miles south-east of Naraggara (mentioned by Livy) and thirty miles west of Zama. The site is distinguished by the fact that there are two eminences of rising ground overlooking a flat plain, one having a spring and the other being waterless (both mentioned by Polybius and Livy). Scipio, who had chosen the battlefield, naturally selected the place with the spring for his camp, while Hannibal’s men found that they had some distance to go to fetch water. Since it was the hot autumn of North Africa this in itself may have had some bearing on the subsequent battle.

Scipio’s forces, although somewhat smaller than those of Hannibal, had two great advantages over the latter’s mixed and hastily trained army: the majority of them were disciplined Roman legionaries and, with the arrival of Masinissa, Scipio had superiority in cavalry—the finest horsemen in the world. Scipio could be confident that his Romans would not panic at the elephant charge, upon which it was clear that Hannibal must be counting for the opening phase of the battle, and he took careful steps to see that its effect would be minimised by his unusual disposition of the infantry. Instead of placing the maniples (units of 120 men) in the normal fashion like a chequer board, with the maniples of the second line covering the intervals between the maniples of the first line, and so on, as was standard practice, Scipio placed them one behind the other so that there were open lanes running fight through the army. These gaps he filled with his light-armed troops so that they could harass the elephants when they charged and at the same time could take refuge behind the armoured legionaries when necessary, leaving the lanes clear. On his left wing he deployed the Roman cavalry under Laelius, and on his right the Numidians under Masinissa.

Hannibal’s dispositions were governed by the fact that shortage of cavalry made him dependent on the elephants: all eighty were ranged in front of his army, the hope being that they would smash the Roman front line troops and cause general chaos in Scipio’s dispositions. Behind them Hannibal placed his mixed infantry—Gauls, Ligurians, Balearians and Moors, his intention being, as in other battles, to let the Romans expend their first impetus upon these rough-and-ready troops while keeping his best infantry fresh in reserve. As a second line he placed the Carthaginian and Libyan levies, and behind them what remained of his Army of Italy, the ‘Old Guard’, held back until the end. On his right wing, facing the Roman cavalry, were the Carthaginian horse and on his left, facing Masinissa, his own Numidian horse.

On that unrecorded day in autumn the last great battle began: the elephant charge thundering across the plain between the two camps. Quite apart from the awe-inspiring sight of those great animals bearing down upon the infantry lines, and their effect upon horses which were unused to their sight and smell, the elephant drivers relied upon the trumpeting of their charges to strike fear into the heart of any enemy. Unfortunately for them, in this case, the Romans reversed the procedure and began to set up a great shouting accompanied by the blast of dozens of war trumpets. The effect upon Hannibal’s insufficiently-trained elephants was that it was they who panicked and began to break and turn away from what, perhaps, they believed to be the noise of strange beasts considerably larger than themselves. Some turned about and crashed into their own front line, while others peeled off to the left and stampeded among Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry. Masinissa, whose horsemen were perfectly accustomed to elephants, was not slow to profit from the disintegration of the Carthaginian left wing and charged behind the elephants, putting to flight the other Numidians opposing him. The elephant charge ended as Livy describes:

A few of the beasts, however, being fearlessly driven into the enemy, caused great losses among the ranks of the light-armed, though suffering many wounds themselves. For springing back into the maniples the light-armed made way for the elephants, to avoid being trampled down, and then would hurl their lances from both sides against the beasts which were now doubly exposed to missiles. Nor was there any slackening in the javelins of the men in the front lines until these elephants also, driven out of the Roman line and into their own by missiles showered upon them from all sides, put the right wing, even the Carthaginian cavalry, to flight. Laelius, on seeing the enemy in confusion, increased their panic.