The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (13 page)

Carthage had found an ally in Mother Nature, and she proved by far the more effective killer, probably accounting for in excess of two hundred thousand Roman and allied drowned in the three great storms off Camarina, Cape Palinurus, and now Cape Pachynon. Too exhausted to reconstitute the fleet, the Romans were still not about to quit. Instead they appointed a dictator, resumed ground force operations in Sicily, and bided their time. Their adversaries, on the other hand, seemed to have reached a strategic fork in the road.

Back home, beginning around 248, the Carthaginians appear to have dealt directly with native unrest, waging war against the Numidians and Libyans until the Carthaginians controlled a band 160 miles deep—an Africa-first policy that came to be associated with the general and politician Hanno “the Great.”
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Just what this said about Carthage’s willingness to continue the war with Rome is hard to specify, but the effort is bound to have drawn resources away from it. Meanwhile, Hanno would remain in the eyes of the ancient sources the focal point of those who believed that Carthage’s best future was in its agricultural heartland. As such, Hanno became the great antagonist of Hannibal’s family and the skeptic of their subsequent overseas adventures.

Both were taking shape toward the end of 248, with Hannibal’s own birth and his father’s arrival in Sicily.
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Sometime earlier Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar, had picked up the nickname Barca (“Thunderbolt”); it certainly suited him and the rest of his clan. Unpredictable and lethal, that is the way they would be remembered by history, as Barcids, carrying a last name in a society without them.
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Hamilcar’s aggressiveness made him a most un-Carthaginian general. He was sent to relieve the more cautious Carthalo, and his first operation was a raid on Italy, ravaging the coast around Locri. This was the first installment in what would become a family saga of bringing war to the enemy’s doorstep.
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Back in Sicily, he established himself at Hercte, a high promontory above the sea, and began waging a guerilla campaign, striking like summer lightning the northwest coast of Sicily, and Italy as far up as Cumae. After three years he suddenly shifted thirty-five miles farther west to Eryx, where he held out for two more years between two Roman forces, resisting their every attempt to get rid of him. Polybius considered him the best commander on either side, but Hamilcar was plainly just holding on, starved for resources, hoping the Romans would give up first.

That was not about to happen. In late 243 the Romans decided to break the stalemate by building another fleet. But since the state lacked the cash, the endeavor had to be financed by leading private citizens—one, two, or three to a ship—asking to be reimbursed only if things went according to plan. This was an impetuous but characteristic act of faith and determination, especially considering the fate of previous Roman armadas.
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All two hundred of the new quinqueremes were modeled on a particularly fast captured Carthaginian galley, and the Roman crews were exercised relentlessly in Sicily during the year 242 by the consul in charge, C. Lutatius Catulus. They had plenty of time to train, since the Carthaginians were slow to send out a fleet against them, a laggard nine-month response that points to trouble in raising the oarsmen necessary to crew their fleet of 250 warships.

At last the Carthaginians sailed in early March 241, intent on joining up with Hamilcar, who had been cut off from resupply by the Roman fleet. Instead Catulus intercepted them in heavy seas off the aptly named Aegates (Goat) Islands. Their ships weighed down with provisions and rowed by inexperienced crews, the Carthaginians were swamped, quite literally. Polybius (1.61.6–8) puts their losses at 120 ships, with 50 sunk, but refers to only ten thousand actual prisoners. (Diodorus 24.11.1–2 puts the figure still lower, at six thousand.) Given the weather conditions, this implies that at least fifteen thousand drowned, and possibly a great many more. It is also conceivable that their fleet was simply undermanned. In either case, it is apparent that the Carthaginians had reached the end of the line in terms of human resources.

Almost immediately the authorities at home gave the now hopelessly marooned Hamilcar full authority to negotiate a peace with the Romans. It was a mistake. Anxious to distance himself from any admission of defeat, Hamilcar worked through his subordinate Gesgo, who then bargained with Catulus to avoid having Hamilcar’s army disarmed, which was another mistake.
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Catulus, anxious to end the war on his watch, not only agreed to these terms, but imposed rather light conditions in other respects. Basically, Carthage had to evacuate Sicily; give up all Roman prisoners, while ransoming their own; and pay an indemnity of around 112,000 pounds of silver during the next twenty years. (This indemnity was later raised to 163,000 pounds over ten years, with 51,000 payable immediately.) The deal having been struck, Hamilcar marched his forces to Lilybaeum, abandoned his command, and promptly sailed for home, leaving the hapless Gesgo with the unenviable task of demobilizing twenty thousand mercenaries long without pay. This was the biggest mistake of all. For Carthage the war may have been over, but the fighting was far from finished.

The First Punic War had been an epic struggle. As was the case with World War I, at the outbreak of hostilities neither side had had any idea what they were getting into. Both wars were also contests characterized by immense tactical futility and huge losses. The Roman death toll is remembered as proverbially huge by historians, but less attention is paid to the price Carthage paid, in large part because its fleets avoided the kinds of storms that probably killed almost everyone involved.
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Still, Polybius (1.63.6) estimates that Carthage lost five hundred quinqueremes during the conflict. Even if most of these ships were captured and their crews were not entirely made up of its citizens, Roman marines were swordsmen trained to kill, and many of the survivors may have been sold into slavery rather than ransomed. Altogether, it adds up to a lot of potentially missing Carthaginians.

And this was not a society well suited to warfare. During the long course of the conflict it had been the Romans who had taken all the initiatives to actually win—building a fleet and invading Africa. The Carthaginians, it seems, had fought mostly to persevere. With rare exception, they had failed to effectively apply their fleet, and from this point, Punic naval power would remain permanently depleted.
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Wealth had bought endurance in the form of successive mercenary forces, but in the end this beast would turn upon its master in the most disastrous way, not simply biting the hand that fed it but going for the throat.

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Forsaken by Hamilcar, who had apparently filled their heads with empty promises, the twenty-thousand-man force he left in Sicily can be presumed to have been in a foul mood, one only temporarily mollified by Gesgo, who at least had the sense to send them back to Africa in small groups on a staggered schedule to be paid off.
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Had this been done promptly, each element might have been repatriated safely. Instead, apparently hoping to strike a better deal, the Carthaginians refused to put up any cash until all the mercenaries had arrived, a blunder of the first order. Having congregated and once again been put off, this time by Hanno “the Great,” all twenty thousand marched on Carthage. Upon realizing just how frightening they were to their former employers, the mercenaries raised the ante repeatedly.

Worse followed, much worse. When the Libyan contingent became enraged and seized the unfortunate Gesgo, who had been trying to pay them, the whole force went into open revolt. This in turn led the Libyan peasantry, whose taxes had grown ever more burdensome during the war with Rome, to join the mercenaries. Many of the Numidian princes, who had been struggling against Punic domination over the previous decade, followed, and very soon Carthage faced an army many times the size of the one that had been led by Regulus. Once again the city revealed its terrible vulnerability on home soil.

This conflict would last more than three years until at least the end of 238 B.C., and in the words of Polybius (1.88.7), this struggle “far excelled all wars we know of in cruelty and defiance of principle.” Beset by a sea of mercenaries, Carthage had trouble hiring more but eventually managed to put together a combination of Punic citizens and loyal local hirelings with no affinity to the veterans from Sicily, though the force was heavily outnumbered and lacking in experience compared to their adversaries. The imbalance was compounded by a leadership struggle at the top. Hanno, who proved to be a good organizer but was less competent in the field, found himself sharing command with Hamilcar Barca, a far better soldier. The two, already likely to have been political antagonists, did not play well together, and eventually Hanno would be forced to resign, but not before operations had been compromised.
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Fortunately for Carthage, the enemy was a body without much of a brain, and Hamilcar, applying his martial skills in ways not evident even in Sicily, consistently flummoxed the larger rebel forces, who responded with senseless acts of cruelty like dismembering Gesgo and his fellow hostages. At times Barca used diplomacy, winning over the Numidian Navaras and his forces, then rewarding him with marriage to his daughter. But for the most part he showed himself every bit the rebels’ equal in atrocity, ordering captive mercenaries stomped to death by his elephants, and crucifying their leaders once their forces collapsed.

Observing from across the Mediterranean, the Romans, who disliked deserters even more than they disliked Carthaginians, were initially scrupulously fair, banning their merchants from trading with the mercenaries, and even returning the remaining Punic POWs free of charge. Then, around 240 B.C., temptation appeared on the Carthage-held island of Sardinia, where a group of Carthage’s foreign hirelings seized the chaotic moment, murdered their officers, and Mamertine-like petitioned Rome for help. The Romans had wanted the island since building a fleet but had played coy until the locals ousted the mercenary mutineers, who fled to Italy and again propositioned the senate.
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This time the Romans cast their scruples aside and voted to send an expedition to Sardinia, and when the Carthaginians protested, declared war on them. In no condition to fight, acquiescence cost Carthage not only Sardinia but an additional sixty-one thousand pounds of silver.

It was a defining act and a defining moment. Rome in effect had kicked Carthage when it was down. Few modern historians disagree with Polybius’s (3.10.4) judgment that this episode did not simply further embitter Carthaginians but was a principle cause of the second war with Rome. The circumstances argue that Hamilcar and the Barcid clan were particularly outraged and held the grudge as long as they could hold a sword.

Conjuring what must have been the tumultuous political atmosphere of Carthage in 237 B.C. is a problematic endeavor, based essentially on scraps. Yet certain elements do emerge from the mists of time looking more like realities than apparitions. There was bound to have been widespread dissatisfaction concerning the events of the recent past, with the fingers of blame pointing in more than one direction. Also, we can make out two distinct factions, one led by Hanno the Great and the other by Hamilcar Barca.

Our own vision of the former has been clouded by Gustave Flaubert’s portrait in the flamboyant historical novel
Salammbô
. Hanno is portrayed as ulcerous, obese—eating flamingo tongues and drinking viper broth, a repulsive creature whose cowardice is exceeded only by his cruelty. The real Hanno was no caricature. Granted, Livy plainly uses him as a foil to Barcid ambitions, but Hanno does seem to have had a good sense of power realities. His vision of “Africa first” and commercialized agriculture was a plausible future for the state. Still, he plainly represented the oligarchy that had presumably mismanaged the lost war with Rome, and he was personally associated with the policy of heavy taxation that had caused the Libyans to join the mercenaries in rebellion.
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At this point, both his reputation and his style of government must have been open to challenge.

Yet skepticism of Hanno did not necessarily translate into approval for Barca. After all, it was Hamilcar’s original abandonment of his forces that had led directly to their disastrous mutiny. Nor were his earlier desire to continue resistance in Sicily and his general intransigence toward Rome necessarily popular with an exhausted and depleted Carthage. Indeed, Appian tells a story of Hamilcar threatened with being brought to trial over his conduct in Sicily.
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Still, of the two, Barca seems to have been the more resourceful and resilient.

It stands to reason that opposition to the oligarchy’s recent record would have been located in the assembly of the people, and here one Hasdrubal the Handsome seems to have held sway—“the lord of the Carthaginian streets,” Diodorus (25.8) calls him. It was this politician with whom Hamilcar forged a tight alliance, making him his son-in-law and possibly his lover.
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Some have seen the stirrings of democracy in this pairing, but this seems like a stretch. More likely, it was motivated by a general dissatisfaction with contemporary events and, in the case of these two, mutual self-interest. Hasdrubal was young and apparently ambitious. Hamilcar had a plan and needed a command. The people elected the generals.

It was a marriage made … if not in heaven, at least in Carthage, and then the happy couple would honeymoon in the south of Spain, the fabled land of silver mines, and make everybody rich—or at least rich enough to pay off the Romans. Compared to this scenario, Hanno and agribusiness must have sounded pretty stodgy, and the scenario’s appeal is testified to by Hamilcar’s apparently having left for Spain almost immediately, bringing his son-in-law with him.
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