The Rise of Rome

eyes, the Saguntum affair was yet another example of Rome playing fast and loose with freely negotiated agreements. Romans liked to sneer at Punica fides, Carthaginian “good faith”; what price now Romana fides? Perhaps the most important factor in persuading Hannibal to make war was his belief that he was able to do so with a good prospect of success. The conquest of half the Iberian Peninsula gave him two huge advantages—for all practical purposes, an inexhaustible flow of cash, thanks to the silver mines, and of manpower, thanks to the fierce Spanish tribesmen whom he now governed. There would never be a more favorable opportunity for a return match.

He had no intention of destroying Rome altogether; rather, he would cut it down to size. This would mean unpicking its web of Italian “allies.” If he could give them back their freedom, he would remove from Rome what he had just won in Spain—the money and men that a minor regional player needed if it was to become a great power. This political objective determined his military strategy. He had to take the war to Italy.

He laid his preparations carefully and secretly. He dispatched a large contingent of Spanish troops to protect North Africa and of African troops to garrison Spain; in this way, he insured himself against disloyalty by separating soldiers from their home communities. He entrusted the defense of the peninsula to his younger brother, another Hasdrubal. He would also, and crucially, depend on him for reinforcement as and when required, and for supplies of ready money. Messages were sent to forewarn the Gallic tribes whose territory in southern France he would have to traverse and to make logistical arrangements for the upkeep of a large army.

Hannibal went to Gades and sacrificed at the famous Temple of Melqart-Hercules, with its eight columns of brass on which the money-minded Phoenicians had inscribed the cost of its construction, before proceeding to his capital, Carthago Nova. In May or thereabouts he set out northward with an army of about ninety thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry. He crossed the contentious river Hiberus and, after conducting a quick blitzkrieg in northern Spain, sent a number of troops home to stand ready as a reserve for future deployment. He crossed the Pyrenees and advanced into Gaul with a force of fifty thousand infantry, nine thousand cavalry, and thirty-seven war elephants. He forced a crossing of the river Rhodanus (the Rhone), with difficulty persuading his nervous elephants to be drawn across the water on large earth-surfaced rafts.

A LEGENDARY PERSONALITY from the early years of Rome’s story (see this page) now puts in a reappearance.

Hannibal took care to promote his image as a great commander, and as a practitioner of moral and social virtues. Like Alexander the Great (as ever a model for would-be conquerors), he gathered round him a group of trusted Greek intellectuals. One was his old teacher, a certain Sosylus of Sparta, who had taught him Greek, a language in which he was fluent, and another the distinguished historian Silenus, the author of a four-volume study of Sicily, whom Cicero praised as a “thoroughly reliable authority on Hannibal’s life and achievements.”

Their task was not simply to record the events of the campaign but to put the best possible gloss on them and even to tell symbolic stories (invented or enhanced) about their hero. It was Silenus who first recounted a dream Hannibal was supposed to have had after taking Saguntum. He was summoned by Jupiter to a council of the Olympian gods and ordered to invade Italy. One of those at the assembly was produced as his guide. After he and his army began their march, the guide told him not to look back. He could not resist doing so. But unlike Orpheus, who yielded to a similar temptation when leaving the underworld ahead of his wife, Hannibal was not punished but given a vision of the horrors to come. According to Cicero:

He saw a vast monstrous wild beast, intertwined with snakes, destroying all of the trees and shrubs and buildings wherever it went. Staggered, he asked the god what such a terrible occurrence could mean. “It is the devastation of Italy,” answered the god. “Go forward and do not worry about what is happening behind your back.”

The beast sounds very much like the Hydra, a many-headed serpent whom Hercules killed during one of his labors. In the dream it stands for Rome, and Hannibal is cast as the brave demigod.

This was no casual identification. The Punic commander presented himself as a new Melqart-Hercules who restaged the demigod’s original journey from west to east, which began at Gades, proceeded up Spain, along southern Gaul, and as far as Italy. (In the original legend, of course, Hercules then crossed over into Greece.) He issued silver shekels to pay his troops, some showing Hercules with (almost certainly) the features of a bearded Hamilcar and others of his clean-shaven son. A reconciler of different cultures, especially the Greek and the Phoenician, an upholder of law, a dauntless fulfiller of labors, Hannibal was to be a standard-bearer for civilization, sent by heaven to defeat the cruel, barbaric power that was Rome. It was these qualities which helped him unite his disparate army and would, he hoped, persuade the peoples of Italy to switch their allegiance to him.

Hannibal also seems to have appealed to one of Rome’s most implacable enemies on Mount Olympus, the goddess Juno. She may have reconciled herself to the fall of her city of Veii, but she forgot nothing and forgave nothing—especially her humiliation at the hands of Paris, prince of Troy, and Aeneas’s rejection of her favorite, Dido, the lovelorn queen of Carthage.

MEANWHILE, THE UNKNOWING Consul Scipio arrived in Gaul on his way to Spain at about the same time as the Carthaginians, coming in the opposite direction. The armies brushed against each other, Hannibal avoiding an engagement and slipping away toward the Alps and Italy. It was only now that, with a shock of dismay, the Romans realized what Hannibal’s destination was. The consul chose not to chase after him; instead, he sent most of his force onward to Spain as planned, and he himself returned to Italy, where he would confront Hannibal with new troops. It was the single most important strategic decision of the war, for if Roman legions were active in Spain they should be able to remove or, at least, severely limit Hasdrubal’s opportunities to reinforce his brother.

In October or early November, Hannibal crossed the Alps. He would probably have taken Hercules’ route by the relatively straightforward Montgenevre Pass, but he had to avoid Scipio and so marched north away from the sea. We do not know which pass the Carthaginians actually chose (it was a matter of dispute even in ancient times), but wherever it was they were confronted by aggressive mountain tribesmen and unseasonable snow. Both men and animals made heavy going of it. The descent was just as hazardous as the ascent. The track down the mountainside was narrow and steep. New snow lying on top of old made surfaces treacherous. At one point an earlier landslide had removed part of the pathway, and the army looked fearfully over the edge of a brand-new precipice. Going back was out of the question—but how to go on? The pass had become an impasse.

Hannibal refused to admit defeat at the hands of nature. He had the snow cleared off a ridge and made camp. Livy writes:

It was necessary to cut through rock, a problem they solved by the ingenious application of heat and moisture; large trees were felled and lopped, and a huge pile of timber erected; this, with the opportune help of a strong wind, was set on fire, and when the rock was sufficiently heated the men’s rations of sour wine were flung upon it, to render it friable. They then got to work with picks on the heated rock, and opened a sort of zigzag track, to minimize the steepness of the descent, and were able, in consequence, to get the pack animals, and even the elephants, down it.

And then, all at once, the ordeal was over. The soldiers, freezing, filthy, unkempt, and starving, found themselves strolling amid sunny Alpine pastures with woods and flowing streams. Hannibal gave them three days’ rest to recover and clean themselves up, and then they continued their descent into the plains—in Livy’s words, “a kindlier region with kindlier inhabitants.”

The news of Hannibal’s arrival on Italian soil at the head of a large army stupefied public opinion, for at Rome the last that had been heard of him was his capture of Saguntum. Although Celts regularly went to and fro across the Alps, there was widespread amazement at his achievement in taking a large army across the mountains in wintry weather. Rather than a campaign in Spain, the Senate now had to contemplate a struggle in its backyard: It canceled the invasion of Africa and instructed Sempronius to rush north. Worse, in place of the usual incompetent generals of the First Punic War, it faced in Hannibal a commander of daring, stamina, and elan.

However, this public-relations triumph came at a high price. Since leaving Spain five months previously,