Hannibal had lost more than half his army. As we saw, the Carthaginians had begun their journey with 50,000 foot and 9,000 horse. By the passage across the Rhodanus, these numbers had dwindled to 38,000 and 8,000, respectively. Only 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, plus a handful of elephants, made it to the valley of the mighty river Padus. The greater part of Hannibal’s supplies had been lost, along with many pack animals. Undaunted, he immediately launched a recruitment drive among the discontented Celtic tribes of northern Italy, who regarded him as a liberator from their Roman conqueror, and soon 14,000 fresh volunteers had joined his ranks. A successful cavalry engagement near the river Ticinus convinced the Celts that they were backing a winner. The careful Scipio was in command, and nearly lost his life. Luckily, his seventeen-year-old son Publius was close at hand, as Polybius describes:
Scipio had put his son in command of a picked troop of horse to ensure the boy’s safety, but when the latter caught sight of his father in the thick of the action surrounded by the enemy, dangerously wounded and with only two or three horsemen near him, he at first tried to urge the rest of his troop to ride to the rescue. Then, when he found that they were hanging back because of the overwhelming number of the enemy around them, he is said to have charged by himself with reckless daring against the encircling cavalry.
This shamed his comrades, who followed him into the fray and saved his father. Scipio’s wound incapacitated him (although it did not kill him), and he stepped down as commander.
Effective control of the legions was handed to his colleague, the incautious and overconfident Sempronius. Hannibal was lucky.
IT WAS A bitterly cold December morning with gusts of snow, on or around the winter solstice. The night before, there had been a downpour and the river Trebia, together with its accompanying web of streams running beside it, was in full spate. Hannibal decided to make the weather work for him.
The two armies, Carthaginian and Roman, both perhaps forty thousand strong, were encamped on either side of the river. The land was flat and treeless and suitable for a set-piece battle, but the Punic commander noticed that it was crossed by a watercourse with high banks that were densely overgrown with thorns and brambles. There was room here for quite a substantial special-service unit to hide away out of sight. Hannibal arranged for a body of a thousand cavalry and the same number of foot soldiers to be assembled and placed his younger brother Mago in charge of them.
After dark on the evening before the battle, once the army had eaten its evening meal, this force made its way through rain to its place of ambush. First thing in the morning, some Numidian horsemen galloped across the river and threw javelins at the Roman camp. Their instructions were to lure the consul Sempronius to lead out his army before the men had had breakfast, ford the Trebia, and offer battle. Sempronius, eager to fight before his term of office expired at the end of the year, was only too happy to oblige.
The legions struggled across the rushing river and formed up in battle order. The whole process must have taken several hours and the men were soaking wet, cold, and hungry. In contrast, before deploying, the Carthaginian rank and file had time to warm themselves by large fires in front of their tents. They breakfasted at leisure and groomed their horses. They were given portions of olive oil so that they could rub themselves down to keep their bodies supple.
After all this, the outcome of the battle itself was a foregone conclusion. The foot soldiers faced one another in the center and were evenly matched, but the Punic cavalry on the wings soon drove back their Roman counterparts. This exposed the legions’ flanks to attack. Then Mago’s hidden force suddenly emerged and fell on them from behind. Despite the fact that ten thousand Roman legionaries pushed their way through the enemy line out of the battle and quit the field in good order, the day was lost. Well over half of the Roman army was slaughtered.
On the Carthaginian side, the Spaniards and Africans were more or less unscathed, but the newly recruited Celts suffered heavy losses. Unluckily, the winter continued harsh and, in the coming days, more rain, snow, and intolerable cold took their toll. Men and horses perished. In this weather, Hannibal, riding the only surviving elephant, marched south through marshy terrain on the way to Etruria. He suffered intense pain from a bout of ophthalmia and lost the use of one eye.
For all that, it was the Romans who had been defeated. The Senate was not so much alarmed as energized. A hundred thousand men were conscripted, and Sicily, Sardinia, and Rome garrisoned against possible attack. The losses sustained by the four consular legions at the Trebia were made good. Nevertheless, it was a dark time. Many portents were reported to bode ill for Rome. A spring sacred to Hercules at the Etruscan city of Caere was found to have flecks of blood in it, and a propitiatory
LAKE TRASIMENE, IN Etruria, was shallow, muddy, and humid, a breeding ground of pike, carp, tench—and malarial mosquitoes. Its northern shore was guarded by a line of steep hills. Approached from the west, some high ground gently sloped down to the lakeside (near today’s Borghetto, in the
In the spring of 217, the Punic army, well rested after its winter trials, marched down through Etruria, laying waste to the countryside as it went. It bypassed a Roman army led by a new consul, Gaius Flaminius, who immediately set off in hot pursuit. Hannibal reached the lake and turned east into the defile. An idea struck him; here was the ideal spot for an ambush, if only the consul was foolhardy enough to walk into the obvious trap. One of the habits of the Carthaginian was to seek out intelligence on enemy commanders and to tailor his tactics to what he knew of their personality. Flaminius, he discovered, was not without military experience, but as a plebeian he seems to have had a chip on his shoulder and was an impatient leader. He would have felt humiliated by having to take his legions through a devastated landscape, and now be eager for revenge.
This was a correct judgment. Flaminius saw the Punic army enter the defile and followed straight after, setting up camp on the plain. Hannibal’s camp could be seen in open view right at the far end of the lake, but he had stationed most of his troops unseen in the hills, where the ground narrowed and there was no room for maneuver.
In the early dawn of 21 June, Flaminius formed up his troops into column of route and they proceeded along the lakeside. He did not trouble to send out scouts. Visibility was poor, for a heavy mist hung over the water and the shore. So when the Carthaginians charged down from the high ground, the surprise was complete. The Romans hardly knew what had hit them and there was little they could do to defend themselves. Nevertheless, the battle, or perhaps more accurately the bloodbath, lasted for three hours. Flaminius fought bravely, but at last was struck down by a Celtic lance. Livy takes up the narrative:
The Consul’s death was the beginning of the end. Panic ensued, and neither lake nor mountain could stop the wild rush for safety. Men tried blindly to escape by any possible way, however steep, however narrow; weapons were flung away, men fell and others fell on top of them. Many, finding nowhere to turn to save their skins, plunged into the lake until the water was up to their necks, while a few in desperation tried to swim for it—a forlorn hope indeed over that broad lake, and they were either drowned or, struggling back exhausted into shallow water, were butchered wholesale by the mounted troops who rode in to meet them.
A vanguard managed to push through the Carthaginian line and escape into the hills, but fifteen thousand Romans perished, while Hannibal lost only fifteen hundred men. When the news reached Rome, there was no attempt to hide the magnitude of the catastrophe. A praetor went to the Forum and announced, with becoming brevity,
A YEAR PASSED, and the date was now 2 August 216. The scene was a windy, dusty plain in Apulia a few miles from the Adriatic coast. High summer in southern Italy brought fierce heat and a permanent chorus of cicadas. Within a space of five square miles, two armies, consisting in total of about 150,000 men, confronted each other. One of the great battles of the world was about to be fought, and has inspired generals down the ages. It is
