023b - The War With Hannibal

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 23b, The War with Hannibal. After the disaster at Lake Trasimene, the Romans were understandably frightened at what the future had in store for them. Every army they threw at Hannibal met with total destruction, and their once unshakable sense of invincibility had now been thoroughly shaken. It would only be a matter of days, it seemed, before the Carthaginian army would march on Rome and conquer the once mighty city. Optimism was in short supply, and lamentation flooded the market.

In this depressed state, the Romans turned to an old psychological defense mechanism one last time to see them through the dark days ahead—the dictatorship. Unused since the First Punic War, and avoided in general since the heady days of the Samnite Wars when a dictator seemed to be appointed every other year, the people of Rome turned their fates over once again to a single man. This time, the reigns were handed to Quintus Fabius Maximus, the well-respected head of the well-respected Fabii. There would be one or two more temporary dictatorial appointments in the years to come, but the reign of Fabius Maximus would mark the effective end of the office of dictator. It was through no fault of his own, however—rather, the office was rendered impotent by the people of Rome and fell into disuse. But it was Fabius who kick-started the demise of the dictatorship by ignoring the will of the people and acting like, well, a dictator.

Fabius Maximus had a plan. It was not a popular plan, it was not a plan to win the war, it was not a plan to bring everlasting glory to Rome, and it was not even a plan that would bring everlasting glory to Fabius himself. It was a plan, however, that would ensure the survival of Rome. Fabius knew exactly what he was doing, and in the face of near-unanimous opposition pursued his plan unswervingly, and because of his plan, the Roman Empire was not destroyed in 217 BC, as it very well could have been. The plan earned Fabius a place in the annals of military history by affixing his name to a certain kind of strategy, known forever after as Fabian tactics, or the fine art of avoiding battle.

Fabius had watched with horror as the consuls of the previous years had been goaded into pitched battles at the time and place of Hannibal's choosing. The Carthaginian general had shown a singular ability to exploit the aggressive nature of the Romans to his own advantage. Fabius was determined not to make the same mistake. If he was going to fight Hannibal at all, he was not going to let the Carthaginian dictate the terms. But Hannibal was too savvy himself to be drawn into a battle he had not carefully orchestrated, so the upshot of Fabius' plan was that the two armies studiously avoided one another.

But unfortunately for Fabius, studiously avoiding conflict was anathema to the Roman character. It was as if, in an effort to rejuvenate the Catholic Church, the College of Cardinals had elected an avowed atheist. The two just don't mesh well with one another. But whatever the merits of Fabius' plan, the outcry against him was immediately deafening and many began to look to Fabius' master of horse, Marcus Rufius Minucius, for deliverance from what they saw as intentional cowardliness. Hannibal was laying waste to the countryside, and here Fabius was sitting on his hands and letting it go on.

The only person who seemed to respect what Fabius was doing was Hannibal himself. When Fabius was dispatched against him, the Carthaginian general had attempted to set the legions up for defeat as he had done so easily before, but Fabius never bit at the traps. This left Hannibal in the driver's seat and he pillaged the countryside with impunity, but it also left him without the opportunity to really lay a killing stroke on the Romans. Sure he was causing a lot of havoc, but no matter how hard he tried to bait Fabius, the legions remained just out of reach and intact. The average Roman may not have fully understood what Fabius was doing, but the psychological benefit of simply keeping an army in the field was enormous. Days and months passed without news that yet another Roman army had been destroyed. Whether they appreciated it or not, Fabius was rebuilding Rome's confidence.

The chorus against Fabius only grew louder as Hannibal, cunning as he was in politics as well as war, ordered that lands owned by Fabius be spared in the general pillaging, immediately leading to suspicions that Fabius had made a secret deal with Hannibal. But there was no deal, and Fabius, now and forever after nicknamed Fabius the Delayer, was simply biding his time until the right set of circumstances presented themselves.

And when Hannibal marched his forces into Campania, Fabius saw his chance. It was only the genius of Hannibal, combined with a little luck, that saved the Carthaginian army from a decisive defeat by the Fabian legions. Without going too much into geography, the large valley of Campania has eight passes big enough to allow an army the size of Hannibal's to march through. Five of them were either held solidly by the Romans, or lay behind the unfortable Volturnus River, leaving three possible exits for Hannibal from Campania. He had gone into the valley as part of his strategy to peel off Rome's major allies. The great city of Capua had risen to be the second strongest in Italy behind Rome, and Hannibal believed there was a good chance he could flip Capua. And indeed, he would eventually succeed in his mission, though the Capuan revolt would not prove as decisive to the war effort as Hannibal had hoped when it finally occurred.

The Carthaginian army, having entered Campania, proceeded with their standard M.O. of terrorizing the countryside, but before they knew it, Fabius had moved the legions into each of the three escape routes, trapping them in the valley. Hannibal knew he had been outmaneuvered, and racked his brains trying to think of a way out of the trap. One night, a few hours before dawn, Roman sentries spotted a mass procession of torches and immediately raised the alarm. Hannibal was attempting to break through one of the passes under cover of dark. The Roman troops rushed out, determined to prevent Hannibal from escaping, but in so doing they left the pass wide open, and when they reached the alleged column of troops, and found only oxen with lit torches tied to their horns, they realized the enormity of their mistake. Hannibal led his army through the unguarded pass, and the Carthaginians got away.

After this setback, Fabius was recalled to Rome to account for himself. The tribunes hurled every insult in the book at the dictator and convinced the people to support an unprecedented measure, the elevation of minutias to co-dictator. This extra-legal solution was the death knell of the dictatorship as an effective office. The whole idea behind the dictatorship is that one man should have the final say over all policy without right of appeal. By elevating a co-dictator, the entire premise of the office was lost for good. If a dictator could be so easily rebuked by the people, then what good was even having one? You may as well just have two consuls. The semi-magical spell of dictatorial infallibility had been broken for good, and not until the time of Sulla 200 years later would the concept of dictator reappear with any real meaning.

Minucius took command of half the army, and marched towards Hannibal with typical Roman aggression. But, like all his predecessors, Minucius was outmaneuvered by Hannibal and the legions under his command were almost wiped out. However, the much derided Fabius, who watched from the nearby hills, decided he could not allow Minucius' forces to be destroyed and, against his better judgment, ordered his troops to the rescue of his beleaguered colleague. The addition of Fabius' troops turned the tide and Hannibal was forced to withdraw. Minucius, humbled by his experience, immediately placed himself back into a subordinate position to Fabius. The rest of 217 passed without any major battle. Fabius, despite persistent calls for his head, had managed to lead Rome through an entire year without a major defeat.

Rome, however, would not learn from Fabius' success and clamored for leaders who would take the fight to Hannibal. In 216 BC, they got what they asked for, and for their trouble, got everything Fabius predicted, a defeat so massive it nearly ended the Roman Empire right then and there.

The dominant figure to emerge during Fabius' dictatorship was a man named Marcus Vero, who denounced at every opportunity the cowardly policies of the wealthy Patrician dictator. He promised the people that if they elected him consul, he would raise the largest army Rome had ever seen and crush Hannibal once and for all. The people responded by overwhelmingly supporting Vero for the consulship. His colleague for the year was the respected Patrician Lucius Aemilius Paulus, who would play the superego to Vero's id. Together they raised sixteen legions of Romans and allies and marched southeast from Rome to find and destroy Hannibal.

The Carthaginian army had taken over the small but important town of Cannae, or, as I have been incorrectly referring to it, Cannae, thanks to those of you out there who have knocked some sense into my Latin poor tongue. The Carthaginians were set up in Cannae, and the legions marched straight for them, 80,000 strong. Hannibal had just over 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry, and despite his track record against the Romans, he had to be nervous at the sight of the massive force deployed against him.

When the Romans arrived, a disagreement arose between the two consuls. Paulus did not like the look of the flat, open plain, fearing the destructive force of Hannibal's Numidian cavalry, and wanted to move the Roman forces into the nearby hills where the cavalry would be neutralized. Vero, however, saw the nearly two-to-one advantage the Romans held and immediately wanted to fight an infantry battle in the field and simply overwhelm the Carthaginians. When two consuls are present at the same site, there were two ways of dividing the command equally between them. One was to divide the army in half and give each consul total discretion over his half of the army, and the other, in force at Cannae, was for each consul to have total discretion over the whole army every other day. It was on Vero's day of command that the camps were built beside the plains, and it was on Vero's day of command that the battle was initiated, and there was nothing Paulus could do about it.

On the morning of battle, as I said, Vero was in charge. He ordered the army across a shallow river to where the Carthaginians were lining up for battle, Hannibal hoping to get the Romans to bite at a battle he could control with his superior Movil cavalry wings. Lining up the Romans for battle, Vero followed the conventional three-line maniple alignment, but when he saw the way the Carthaginians were lining up, he made a critical decision to pack his troops close together and eliminate the checkerboard space between the maniples. His hope was to drive through the weaker Carthaginian infantry, divide Hannibal's army in half, and use the superior Roman numbers to annihilate the Carthaginian army. But this left the Romans open to an easy flanking maneuver, the same mistake Regulus had made in his battle with Xanthippus outside of Carthage during the First Punic War. Vero's mistake was doubly compounded by the fact that Hannibal had deliberately lined his army up to lure the Romans into just such a trap.

The Carthaginian line was deployed in a semicircle, with the front closer to the Romans than the wings. In the center were placed the weaker Spanish and Gallic soldiers, which is what made Vero lick his lips and bunch the legions together. On the wings were the cavalry, and between the cavalry and the center were the Libyan infantry.

After eyeing each other and letting the light skirmishers do their thing, Vero ordered the legions to attack. At first, things seemed to be going great for the Romans. The Spanish and Gallic soldiers were no match for the Romans, and were pushed back easily by the reinforced Roman lines. However, caught up in the heat of battle, the Romans did not notice that it was the center and the center only they were pushing back. The Libyans remained where they were, and pretty soon the curve of the Carthaginian line had been inverted, with the Libyans now forward of the center. The Romans continued to charge ahead, and before they knew it, the Libyans had outflanked them, even though they had not yet moved a muscle. The Romans were now hemmed in, and suddenly found themselves fighting on three fronts.

In the confusion, they were just beginning to work on extracting themselves from what was turning into a bloodbath when Hannibal closed the trap. His cavalry easily drove off their Roman counterparts, and then wheeled around on the Roman rear. The legions were now completely surrounded, and, having been placed so close to one another by Vero at the outset of the battle, were in many cases unable to even lift their arms up to defend themselves.

At a minimum, 50,000 Romans died in the slaughter, with estimates going so high as 70,000. These totals included the cream of the Roman leadership, 29 military tribunes and 80 men of senatorial rank, including the former master of horse, Marcus Rufus Minucius. The consul Paulus, who never wanted the battle in the first place, was knocked from his horse and refused the offer of another to escape, choosing to die in the field and face the humiliation of surviving such a horrendous defeat. Vero, however, upon whose head the entire debacle rested, had no such qualms about his honor and fled for his life.

The Battle of Cannae has gone down as one of the most famous battles in history. Generals are always looking to emulate Hannibal's near-perfect destruction of the Romans. Eisenhower referred to Hannibal's plan as a work of art, and as recently as the First Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf modeled some of his attacks after Hannibal's formation at Cannae. Though the total envelopment is not nearly as impressive when you're commanding a much larger and more powerful army, it still shows how much this single battle has penetrated the collective consciousness.

Despite the universal praise of Hannibal's genius on the battlefield, what the Carthaginian general did with his victory is the source of the harshest criticisms against him, leveled both by his contemporaries and the judgment of history. Because what he did with his stunning victory was absolutely nothing.

It is easy to say that Hannibal should have immediately marched on Rome and taken the city rather than hold off and continue his policy of attempting to turn Rome's allies against them without actually going near the capital. But even in its weakened state, Rome itself would have been more than a match for Hannibal and his paltry army of 35,000. But it is impossible to say for sure. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if Hannibal had gone for the gold. All we do know is that he didn't. Whether this was because he didn't think he could pull it off, or because he didn't believe a direct assault on Rome was a necessary part of his greater plan, is also a matter of endless speculation. In the full light of history, though, we know that Cannae marked the high point of Hannibal's career. Whether he could have gone even higher by marching on Rome will never be known for sure.

The Battle of Cannae closed the first stage of the Second Punic War. Hannibal would never again be so successful, and in the following decade, the fortunes of war would turn against Carthage in favor of the Romans and their young rock star general, Scipio Africanus.