023d - The War With Hannibal

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 23d, The War with Hannibal. Last week, we detoured out of Italy to cover the Second Punic War in its two foreign theaters, Spain and Sicily. This week, we will return to Hannibal's march through Rome's backyard and attempt to distill ten years of complicated allegiance-switching, threats, revenge, and posturing into a single podcast. Well, actually, half a podcast, because we must also return to Spain with young Scipio Africanus to pick up the ball where his father and uncle had left it. By the end of today, Scipio's ascendancy will intersect with Hannibal's slow decline, and the stage will be set for the final act of the Second Punic War, played out not in Italy as Hannibal planned, but in North Africa.

But before we get to our two main focuses today, we need to detour into the third major foreign theater of the war. Though critically important to the war effort, the struggle with the Macedonians in the east has thus far received little attention, because for the most part it featured Greek allies fighting on behalf of Rome, rather than the Romans themselves, and also because the war in the east served mostly to keep Philip V out of the war, rather than unfolding as an integral part of that war. Though inextricably linked to the war with Hannibal, the First Macedonian War was, in many ways, a completely separate animal. It is important not so much in the context of the Second Punic War, but as a stage setter for the next fifty years of Roman history, which will revolve around the Roman conquest of Greece.

Not long after Cannae, Hannibal and Philip V of Macedon signed a formal treaty with one another and pledged mutual support against each other's enemies. Philip was the young leader of a newly resurgent Macedon, who had visions of reuniting Greece under Macedonian rule, as his namesake Philip II, father of Alexander, had done. Rome, which had played no part in Philip II's calculations, now loomed large in Philip V's. The Romans were already entrenched in Illyria, and despite their claims of merely temporary occupation, they showed no signs of leaving. After the disaster at Cannae, Hannibal made formal overtures to the Macedonian king and Philip accepted at once. The deal would leave Philip in control of Rome's eastern territory when Hannibal inevitably won the war, and provide Philip a steady Carthaginian supply line for his planned move against the rest of Greece. It also cemented a mutual sphere of influence that allayed both sides' fears of territorial encroachment.

Deal in hand, Philip's envoys returned to Macedon, but on the way across the Adriatic, they were captured by the Roman navy. Immediately recognizing the danger of Hannibal's eastern alliance, Rome was forced to turn its already divided attention to one more front. But without troops to spare, they sent a scant force of about 2,000 with orders to not simply engage Philip, but instead to drum up Greek support for Rome and attempt to get the Greeks to fight Philip before them. This turned out to be easier than they thought. The Greeks were not happy in the slightest about Philip's ambitions, and despite their own prejudice against the barbaric Italians, they recognized the Romans for what they were, a force that could help blunt Macedon's influence. Specifically, Rome found a receptive audience in the Aetolian League, a confederation of cities that stood between Macedon and Greece proper. Knowing they would be among the first swallowed by Philip's territorial ambition, the Aetolians embraced Rome as their road both to continued independence and also possible dominance in a post-war Greece, and agreed to help counter Philip any way they could.

The Macedonian king had his eye on driving the Romans out of their coastal garrisons in Illyria so he could establish a port from which to launch attacks into Italy. The Aetolians agreed to launch incursions into Macedon every time Philip tried to turn west. So, whenever Philip left for Illyria, the Aetolians would begin making trouble. The ten-year war of skirmishes is today, in the context of Roman history, called the First Macedonian War, but that makes more of it than it really was. It was the Second Macedonian War that really marked the first time the Romans moved east and fought the Greeks directly. Though it was not a direct engagement between the Romans and Macedonians, and won the Romans no territory, the battle in the east between the Macedonians and the Roman-allied Greeks served the function it was meant to. It kept Philip out of the war with Hannibal. And this being the final upshot of all that fighting, we will leave it at that and return to the greater war at hand.

One of the most important consequences of Hannibal's victory at Cannae was the decision by the nobility of Capua, the second most important city in Italy, to defect to the Carthaginian side. Hannibal expected this defection to be followed by the rest of Italy, but it was not meant to be. Capua's alliance with the Carthaginians did not sway the rest of Italy, as Hannibal, and no doubt the Capuans themselves, hoped that it would. Rather than putting them in the vanguard of history, Capua actually found themselves immediately isolated and recognizing that they may have bought high on Hannibal's stock. Certainly Capua's experience for the rest of the war was not a happy tale of preparing to rule Italy with Carthaginian backing, but instead a sad tale of enduring a Roman siege, finally begging for forgiveness, and ultimately a whole lot of beheadings. But for now, it was all still sunshine and roses for Hannibal. With Capua in his back pocket and Syracuse recently brought into the Carthaginian fold, Hannibal marched south to Magna Graecia with high hopes.

The apex of Carthaginian momentum came in 212 BC when Hannibal won control of the rich Greek port city of Tarentum. The pro-Roman party in the city was ousted by a group of young nobles who handed the city over to the Carthaginians. The moment fortune turned against Hannibal was there at Tarentum when, as he marched into the city, the Roman garrison stationed there fought its way into the citadel and held it. The citadel at Tarentum was situated on the coast and could be supplied independently of the rest of the city. Hannibal was never able to dislodge the garrison and so was denied a safe Italian port through which he could resupply his invasion force. This would prove critical down the road as the Carthaginian senate was loath to send supply ships and men to reinforce Hannibal when there was no guarantee they would even reach him. Up until Tarentum, almost nothing had gone against Hannibal. This was the first time things hadn't gone exactly according to plan.

Annoyed by this thorn in his side, Hannibal's attention was forced back north to Capua where his new ally was under siege by Roman forces. After Cannae, the Roman grand strategy abandoned any hope of taking on Hannibal directly. They had by now touched that hot stove enough to recognize that it burned. So rather than sending an army south to confront Hannibal, they laid siege to Capua and attempted to flip them back to the Roman side instead. If any of you out there have ever played the ancient Chinese board game Go, you are probably familiar with the proverb, when in doubt, tanuki, which translates roughly, when in doubt, ignore your opponent. Good advice and the Romans were wise to take it. By attacking Capua, the Romans forced Hannibal into a position where he was reacting to Roman moves rather than the Romans reacting to his. Rome, for the first time in the war, held the initiative.

Hannibal attempted to respond in kind to the Romans by embracing the concept of tanuki himself, and rather than making for Capua, he drove instead for the one city he had studiously avoided, Rome itself. In 211 BC, Hannibal marched within two miles of the city, the closest he would ever get to Rome, and waited for the Romans to fly into a panic, lift the siege at Capua, and come running home. But the Romans did not bite at the obvious gambit. They knew Hannibal's army was not nearly strong enough to take Rome by force, and so they only broke off a portion of their siege army to reinforce the city. Capua remained under arms and growing more desperate by the day. His bluff called, Hannibal was forced to withdraw. The pro-Carthaginian leadership of Capua, abandoned now by Hannibal, was overthrown by pro-Roman forces and the city surrendered. The penalties for treason were harsh, and the aforementioned beheadings commenced with bloody abandon. Though in typical Roman fashion, their fury was directed at the leadership, not the city as a whole, and the sanctions imposed on Capua were light compared to the stress their defection had put on the Roman war effort.

One of the main reasons I began the history of Rome in the first place was to distill the often mind-numbing minutiae of the ancient historians into digestible chunks. Specifically, the middle years of the Second Punic War is a period that cries for summarization. Livy fills hundreds of pages detailing every lost city, every betrayal, every conversation with every political faction, and every minor skirmish. The information is out there for those of you who would like more detail, but I now offer with great relish a paragraph I have been kicking around in my head for the better part of a year. The experience of Capua and Tarentum was repeated ad nauseum over the next few years. Hannibal would take a city and then move on. The Romans would follow behind and return it to the Roman fold. Hannibal would then be forced to either backtrack and refight for land he had already taken, or give up what he had gotten and hope for better luck the next time around. The two armies occasionally came into direct contact. Sometimes Hannibal would win, sometimes the Romans would. But victory no longer took the form of annihilated armies, but rather strategic withdrawals and prudent retreats. In this way, five years passed.

Beautiful. That said, I now want to shift gears and move out of Italy and back to Spain where, after the defeat of the Scipione army, it looked for all the world as if the Romans would never regain their footing. Certainly, no Roman general was eager to take up the difficult task in Spain. All that remained in Iberia was the bare remnants of the defeated legions, a horde of Carthaginians and hostile Spanish tribes. Officially, Rome had no intention of giving up in Spain, but practically speaking, they were about to do just that.

Into this leadership vacuum stepped a young man, Scipio Africanus, who was destined to become a towering figure in Roman history. In the lineage of truly great, great Romans, the short list begins with Romulus, passes to Camillus, and then passes to Scipio, perhaps the greatest of them all. It was not until Julius Caesar 250 years later that Rome would again see a man with the stature of Scipio Africanus. Now of course he was not called Scipio Africanus at this point. He was still simply Publius Scipio, son of Publius Scipio the Elder. He would not earn the cognum Africanus until after he returned from Zama, having won the Second Cunic War for Rome. But that was still a ways in the future. At this point, he was an untested youth of barely 25 who impetuously stepped forward into the Senate and offered to take up the command in Spain if nobody else would. The Senate was not crazy about the idea, but under the circumstances they figured they had nothing to lose. It was essentially take a chance on Scipio or admit defeat in Spain. So to Scipio went the command.

Now it was not just his youth that worried the old Roman guard, but the personality of Scipio in particular. Old war horses like Fabius did not like the look of young Scipio one bit. For one thing, he had, horror of horrors, long hair like a woman. For another thing, he had a distressing habit of talking as if he personally spoke to the gods and was acting on their behalf. In later years, he would often return from long strolls and announce battle plans as if they had been given to him by Mars himself. Finally, and most troublesome of all to the keepers of tradition, tradition Scipio seemed to delight in flouting. He was enormously charismatic. Scipio represented a changing of the guard, and despite his success, or perhaps because of it, he was looked upon with real fear by his elders. He was an incredibly magnetic cross between Jim Morrison, Alexander the Great, and Jesus. For those looking to keep things exactly as they are, a figure like that leads to many a sleepless night.

But Scipio's flouting of tradition was the key to his success. He and old Fabius agreed on one thing, however. The Roman legions presently constituted were no match for the Carthaginians. But where Fabius read this to mean the Carthaginians should not be fought directly, Scipio read it to mean that the Romans had to fundamentally alter their tactics. Hannibal beat the Romans over and over again with cunning and imagination. So where the Romans had previously shown nothing but uninspired plotting, Scipio hoped to give the Carthaginians a taste of their own medicine and outthink his opponents rather than simply try and outfight them.

He arrived in Spain with 10,000 men in 210 BC with vague instructions to regain lost Roman territory. But Scipio had no intention of simply fighting a defensive war. His long-term goal was to end the war completely and saw Spain as his proving ground. If he succeeded here, the Senate might offer him overall command of the legions and allow him to pursue his real dream of invading North Africa and conquering Carthage. There was no way he could convince the conservative Senate today, but if he drove the Carthaginians out of Spain, he just might gain their ear.

After spending his first year in Spain getting a feel for the land and the locals, he embarked on an audacious assault of the largest, strongest, and richest of the Carthaginian strongholds, New Carthage. The three Carthaginian armies still out in the field had no idea the new Roman commander would attempt such a suicidal move. But the element of surprise was the element Scipio coveted most and so he did the last thing anybody would expect of him and ordered his army to march on New Carthage. Not even his subordinate commanders knew their true destination. The only other Roman who was in on the plan was a close Scipio confidant named Laelius who commanded the Roman navy in the area. He was ordered to make for New Carthage and simultaneously attack from sea as Scipio engaged from the land.

The small garrison at New Carthage was shocked when the Roman navy appeared on the horizon and was doubly shocked when a Roman army came marching over the hill. The nearest Carthaginian army was days away, more than enough time, Scipio felt, to take the city and fortify it before reinforcements could arrive. He attempted a direct assault on the first day but was repelled. That night he received a critical piece of intelligence. A local pointed out that at certain times during the day the lagoon that bordered one of the walls of the city drained out with the tides and became shallow enough to ford. The next morning Scipio ordered a full assault on the front gate and the defenders of the city concentrated all their attention on that spot. Scipio himself led a small contingent through the shallow and unwatched lagoon and scaled the walls. They easily overpowered what resistance they found and when the Romans suddenly appeared behind the troops defending the wall the Carthaginians panicked and broke for the citadel, allowing Scipio to open the gate and let the rest of his army in. It was only a matter of time before the unprovisioned force in the citadel was forced to surrender. In about 36 hours Scipio had captured the Carthaginian capital.

In a savvy move designed to gain Spanish support, Scipio released the members of the various local ruling families who had been held by the Carthaginians as hostages. By this one act alone Scipio did more for the Roman position in Spain than all the battles in the world ever could. The Carthaginians were immediately on the defensive and found their Spanish allies deserting in droves. But Scipio, as I said, had no intention of staying put and fighting a defensive war. Leaving a garrison behind to protect the newly conquered city, he marched out with the rest of his army in search of Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother and the architect of the Scipio's family dishonor.

In 208 BC Scipio caught up to Hasdrubal and fought a running battle against the Carthaginians in the middle of Spain. Hasdrubal, however, managed to slip away and lead his army northwest of the Atlantic coast. Hannibal's brother had decided fighting young Scipio in Spain would be counterproductive and made the decision to leave Spain for Italy. The best way to regain the upper hand in Spain, he figured, was to deal the Romans another crushing blow in Italy. But that was the plan hatched between the two Baracca brothers. The Carthaginian Senate, on the other hand, was not ready to cede Spain to Scipio quite so easily and sent 50,000 reinforcements to defeat the young, dynamic Roman general.

In 206 BC the two sides met near Illypia. The battle that followed would be, tactically at least, Scipio's finest hour. Outnumbering the Romans by a sizable margin, the Carthaginians were confident they could beat the so far undefeated Scipio. But the Roman general, taking a page from Hannibal's playbook, employed a clever trick that turned a long-shot win into an easy victory. Each morning, the two sides would line up for battle and wait for the other to make a move. And each day, neither would budge and the day would pass without a battle. When Scipio deployed his troops, he concentrated the core of the legions in the center and placed his Spanish allies on the wings. The opposing Carthaginian general got used to this formation and placed his strongest troops in the center and his own, weaker Spanish mercenaries on the wings.

On the morning Scipio had decided to fight, however, he switched things up. But first, he took revenge on the Carthaginians for the Roman defeat at Trebia, a battle Scipio was very likely at. He ordered out his cavalry early in the morning to attack the Carthaginian camp. In a reverse of the previous battle, this time it was the Carthaginians who were roused from their beds and forced to charge out without a good breakfast. They formed for battle in the usual line, but the Romans, as I said, switched things up. Scipio put the Spanish in the center and deployed the legions on the wings. When the Carthaginian general did not notice the switch, Scipio knew victory was his for the taking. He waited most of the day while the Carthaginians suffered, hungry and tired, under the hot afternoon sun, and then ordered the attack. The Roman wings led the charge, easily destroying the overmatched, opposing Spanish wings. The Libyans and Carthaginians at the center of the other army suddenly found themselves flanked on both sides by the Romans. In the confusion, they didn't even charge forward to attack the Roman center, made up of the weak Spanish mercenaries, where they may have won an escape route. Instead, they stayed put and were caught in a pincer. The only thing that saved them was that the weather turned ugly and rain turned the field into a mud-clogged morass. The Carthaginians were able to escape, but their will was broken. Hannibal pursued the fleeing army and destroyed them a few weeks later.

When Scipio entered Spain, the Carthaginians controlled practically the entire country. But now the Romans were the undisputed masters. Carthaginian influence in Spain was over, and in a few years hence, the Great War itself would be over as well. Scipio now had all the clout he needed to take his master plan to the Senate. There would be fierce resistance for his idea of an African invasion, but Scipio's charisma and track record would carry the day.

Next week, we will follow Hasdrubal in his desperate effort to link up with his brother in Italy and form an army large enough to attack Rome. I don't think I'll be giving anything away by revealing Hasdrubal was stopped in the last pivotal battle of the war fought in Italy. Without hope of reinforcement, Hannibal's decade-long invasion would run out of steam and he would be recalled when the Romans decided to take another chance on Scipio and authorize his invasion of Africa.