Hannibal (35 page)

He was fortunate in possessing so fine an instrument of warfare as his Numidian horsemen, whose speed and adaptability confounded the Romans and, certainly in the early stages, contributed very largely to Hannibal’s victories. His handling of his cavalry, whether light or heavy, was masterly, and it was not until Scipio Africanus had learned from this master that the Romans were able to face the Carthaginians with any confidence. Hannibal was fortunate, too, in possessing a fine team of staff officers; between them they taught the world that war is for professionals. Hannibal was a general with a quick adaptable mind, and for him every battlefield was an opportunity to create a new masterpiece. Undulations of the land, scrub or trees, open plain or river valley, each presented to this artist in warfare a completely new canvas. He made the land work for him and drew upon it his grand design—marked always by his distinctive signature.

The man himself eludes us—just as he eluded so many during his lifetime. Married in Spain, about two years before he left that country, to a chieftain’s daughter called Imilce (who is said to have borne him a son), the only other mention of his private life is given by the unreliable historian Appian, who writes, long after the events, that during one winter in Italian Lucania ‘he abandoned himself to unaccustomed luxury and the delights of love’. Polybius and Livy tell us nothing. Only Silius Italicus, in a long and tedious poem about the Hannibalic War (written at least two hundred years after Hannibal’s death), relates a traditional story that Imilce pleaded with Hannibal to allow her to cross the Alps with him, and that he refused. This is not history, but Italian opera.

The man as a soldier and commander we know well enough, and we have a few examples of his laconic wit which allow us to see that a sense of humour never deserted him. Any character analysis of this strange and brilliant Carthaginian might well be called ‘The Silences of Hannibal’, for it is the taciturnity of his appearance upon the stage of world affairs that marks him out. Scipio Africanus, his great opponent, is a man of flamboyant charm, and enough is known of Alexander who came before him and Julius Caesar who succeeded him among the great generals of the ancient world to make them figures comprehensible in modern times. Hannibal, the boy from North Africa who grows up to dominate European history for sixteen years, seems to vanish like the mist rising off Lake Trasimene on that fateful day; or like the south wind, the sun and the dust that blinded the Romans at Cannae.

If it is true that, as Alfred de Vigny wrote in ‘The Military Condition’, ‘A man who exercises absolute authority is constrained to assume a pose of invariable reserve’, then Hannibal is the supreme example. At the same time, many commanders have possessed or cultivated such a distant and withdrawn attitude but not one of them has ever been capable of his mysterious art of ‘disappearing’. When, after so many years in southern Italy, he finally leaves for Carthage, the Romans are amazed. They cannot believe that he no longer haunts their land. When the Roman commission comes to Carthage and his own people prepare to betray him he rides out at evening from the city to which he has given his life, embarks on a ship and sails east towards Tyre, the ancient home of his race. When Antiochus of Syria, after his defeat at Magnesia, is prepared to hand Hannibal over to the Romans, it is discovered that the Carthaginian has already gone. When in his remote home in southern Crete the ubiquitous Romans once again arrive and it seems that their routine investigation of the ports, harbours and possibilities of the island is likely to uncover his quiet retreat, he is no longer to be found—he has left the island as if he had never existed. Finally, in distant Bithynia, when King Prusias has been forced to disclose the whereabouts of his aged Carthaginian guest and the soldiers secretly gather round his country home, he escapes yet again—into the eternal silence.

Hannibal was an aristocrat. It is probable that a flinty arrogance was concealed beneath the outward charm and bonhomie that delighted his friends, his soldiers, and even an enemy like Scipio. A member of the Barcid family, he could trace his origins back to the queen who had founded Carthage, and beyond her to a long line of Semitic kings of Tyre. The calm ease and authority with which he handles all the affairs of his life and his campaigns are not those of a man who is no more than a superb general. Scipio, who was clearly fascinated by him, recognised this; and Scipio came from one of the most illustrious patrician families of Rome. The remoteness of Hannibal is in no way a deliberate concealment of his personality, but the remoteness of a man who is, in everything that he undertakes, coolly and clearly in control.

From the days of Polybius onwards many people have endeavoured to follow the tracks of Hannibal: from Spain, across the Pyrenees, into southern Gaul, up the Rhône, eastward to the Alps and then—by as many routes as there are scholars—down into Italy. Centuries before, Juvenal had cried out that he who would follow Hannibal must be a madman, and that his ambition must be insatiable. His strange, dark shadow has haunted European literature over all the centuries and, from Roman wall-paintings, through illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages to masters like Tiepolo, the Carthaginian has exercised his curious spell over artists. He is the sphinx whose riddle still eludes us.
 

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