This article will examine two popular myths found in the classical record concerning Hannibal’s exploits in Italy immediately after his victory at Cannae in 216 BCE: his apparent failure to march on Rome and finish the war, and the alleged softening of his fighting forces as the result of wintering among pleasures in the city of Capua.
Much has been made of Hannibal’s apparent failure to capitalize on his victory at Cannae by marching immediately against Rome. This alleged failure is the subject of an often quoted anecdote, in all likelihood fictitious, in which Maharbal, commander of the Numidian cavalry, urges Hannibal in vain to march without delay against Rome, telling him: “In five days you shall banquet in the Capitol! Follow after; I will precede you with the cavalry that the Romans may know that you are there before they know that you are coming!” Upon Hannibal’s refusal, he rebukes him by saying: “In very truth the gods bestow not on the same man all their gifts; you know how to gain a victory, Hannibal: you know not how to use one” (Livy 22:51). Livy presented this bit of nonsense to bolster his own thesis: “That day’s delay is generally believed to have saved the City and the empire” (22:51). As Seibert has pointed out, the Roman origin of this story is clear from the reference to “banqueting in the Capitol,” for Maharbal could hardly have known that this was customary for a returning victorious Roman general! But was Hannibal’s “failure” to march on Rome indeed a blunder? Why did he choose not to proceed toward the capital of his enemies, after his greatest victory? We will attempt to answer these questions.
Hannibal was born into a culture quite different from that of Rome. Carthage was a maritime merchant city-state, at one time achieving hegemony over commerce in the Mediterranean world. The philosophy of a business-oriented power is typically not militaristic, for war functions as an impediment rather than a facilitator of commerce. Conflicts and disagreements tend to be settled by trade, negotiation, and compromise, rather than by war, violence, and destruction. The historical record suggests that although Carthaginians were able to wage war when necessary, they were not a warlike society. When circumstances forced armed conflict, they preferred to hire mercenaries to do the fighting for them. Mercenaries can be hired, paid, and dismissed. The Carthaginians did not maintain a regular citizen army. When given a choice, they preferred a negotiated peace to violent conquest. Being a product of a mercantile society, the character of Hannibal, the man, must have been affected by this social background.
There is little doubt that Hannibal was an educated man. He was able to communicate in many languages, among them Greek, and it is likely that he was well read in the Greek classics. One of his tutors, Sosylos, was from Sparta, and another, Silenos, was a Greek from Sicily. It is likely that Hannibal was familiar, not only with the works of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, but also with those of Greek philosophers, such as Heraklitus, Parmenides, Plato, and above all, Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, whom he greatly admired.
From age nine, Hannibal grew up in Spain, among the forces of his father, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who made sure that his son continued to have the best of tutors, and who undoubtedly inculcated in him the values of Carthaginian society. To assume that because he grew up surrounded by the Carthaginian colonial forces in Spain he only learned soldiering (at which he clearly excelled) is unjustified. It seems likely that Hannibal, far from being a violent man filled with hatred of the Roman enemies of Carthage, was a rational, cultivated individual. The story of his childhood oath of eternal enmity against Rome is most likely apocryphal, and in any case, as reported by Polybius was an oath never to become a “friend” (meaning “a subject” or a “client”) of Rome, rather than a profession of hatred (it was Livy who changed the wording to imply the latter). It is quite possible that rather than delighting in warfare, Hannibal engaged in it only out of necessity for the protection of his home city. There is no doubt that he was patriotic, and he clearly placed the welfare and glory of Carthage above his own, even at times when it failed to support him.
The document he prepared for the treaty of Carthage with King Philip V of Macedon, in 215 BCE (recorded by Polybius, 7:9), reveals not only that he was highly educated, respectful of religious traditions, and well aware of diplomacy and protocol, but also that his plans and intentions did not include the destruction of Rome. It is clear from this document that Hannibal merely intended to curb the expansion of Roman imperialism, and restrict the Romans to their own geographical region in the middle of the Italian peninsula. His success would have resulted in freedom from the Roman yoke for the cities previously subjugated by them, especially the Greek colonies at the south of the peninsula, and of the Gallic tribes in the north. Naturally, it would also have allowed Carthage to retain its commercial pre-eminence in the Mediterranean.
Hannibal was not a blood-thirsty monster. The pro-Roman sources (especially Livy), portrayed him as greedy, cruel, faithless, and treacherous, but these are charges of doubtful validity. While Hannibal was not flawless, he certainly was not crueler than his adversaries, who demonstrated terrible brutality and vengefulness upon retaking cities that had previously allied themselves with the Carthaginians. He was faithful to the religious traditions of his day, and his alleged greediness was part of the stereotype of the Carthaginian merchant in the Mediterranean. Of course what was perceived as treacherousness was his uncanny ability to spring unexpected traps on his opponents in the battlefield. For those interested in Hannibal’s character, the excellent books on the subject by Gottlob Egelhaaf (1922) and Edmund Groag (1967) are still highly recommended.
If we now imagine this brilliant general, an educated and cultured person from a society that settled disagreements through compromise and negotiation, standing on the bloody field of Cannae, littered with 75,000 dead and countless wounded and maimed, we can speculate that the spectacle was not one in which he would have taken pleasure. While acknowledging the necessity of achieving victory in the face of a ruthless and intransigent enemy, his emotions were probably closer to revulsion and consternation. In this mindset, for him to contemplate now the destruction of a great city, resulting in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, men, women, and children, would not have resulted in eagerness to implement such macabre vision (quite the opposite, by the way, seems to have been the case with Scipio Aemilianus, the architect of the destruction of Carthage 70 years later, whose only regret after killing over half a million people, as reported by Polybius, who was there, was the thought that someday Rome herself might suffer a similar fate!). An immediate march against Rome was then incompatible, not only with Hannibal’s goals and intentions, but also with his character and personality.
But would it have made sense to attempt such a march at all? Rome was a large city, defended by huge walls, which Hannibal’s troops would have been unable to breach, lacking siege equipment. Besides, his numbers were insufficient for a successful siege. Parking his relatively small army in front of the walls of Rome would have allowed them to be trapped between the city’s defenses and reinforcements arriving from all corners of the peninsula, and would have accomplished nothing but his own destruction. It must be remembered that, while Hannibal was in a foreign land, cut off from his supply lines, and unable to receive reinforcements, the manpower potential of the Roman federation was in excess of 700,000!
There was still another reason why Hannibal could not have simply marched on Rome right after the battle of Cannae. As John Shean argues quite convincingly in a well-known paper, the logistical limitations of Hannibal’s army would have made such move impossible at that point in time. Without a permanent base of supply, Hannibal did not have the resources to feed his animals and men on a march of over 200 km without adequate preparation. Additionally, he had to take care of an indeterminate, but certainly large, number of wounded.
There is also a further socio-cultural and political reason for why Hannibal would not have contemplated such an action, even had it been feasible. In the tradition of the Mediterranean world of his day (Greek, Macedonian, and Carthaginian), a defeat such as the one inflicted on Rome at Cannae would have led inevitably to a negotiated peace. Rome, having been repeatedly defeated in the field and having had its greatest army annihilated, would have been expected to agree to peace terms that would have included some concessions and compensation paid to the victor. But the Romans refused to negotiate, and, showing a total disregard for human life, even that of their own citizens, refused to ransom their own captured soldiers, branding them as cowards simply due to the fact that they were still alive! This attitude was something Hannibal could not have foreseen. Once it became apparent, Hannibal continued with his original plan of liberating the people subjugated by Rome in order to gradually achieve the defection of Rome’s allies. He almost succeeded. His strategy was sound, and the causes for its ultimate failure can be found, not in some intrinsic weakness in his plan, but in two factors. The first one was the reluctance of the people of Capua, Tarentum, and other liberated cities, to actually serve in Hannibal’s army and risk making the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their newly gained freedom (Hannibal having agreed not to force such a service). The other consisted of the myopic and misguided policies of his mother city, Carthage. The Carthaginian senate repeatedly failed to fully support their greatest field commander, showing more concern for the protection of their silver mines in Spain than for the resolution of the struggle in the Italian peninsula, the war theatre in which final victory or defeat would have been decided.
Marching on Rome in the aftermath of Cannae was thus logistically impractical, strategically suicidal, philosophically unacceptable, and psychologically incompatible with Hannibal’s cultural upbringing and personality.
The second myth to be examined in this article is the alleged degradation of the Carthaginian fighting forces as the result of exposure to the delights of their winter quarters following their greatest victory. Capua, the second largest city in the Italian peninsula, had grown weary of the Roman yoke, and in 216 BCE, following Hannibal’s crushing defeat, at Cannae, of the largest Roman army ever assembled, opened its doors and welcomed him as liberator. This was an important defection from the Roman alliance and a clear indication that his plan to separate Rome from its subjects and allies appeared to be working. Hannibal and his army established winter quarters at Capua that year, an event that became a cause célèbre for classical historians Appian and Livy, who claimed that wintering among the comforts offered by the city destroyed the moral fiber of the Carthaginian army, to the point that they were unable to win any further victories. They supposedly found the climate, the food, the women, the hot baths, and the entertainment so alluring that they lost their discipline and their battle readiness, growing fat and lazy. This well-known contention has entered popular literature to the point that, as Guerber points out, “when people think too much of ease and not enough of duty, they are said to be ‘languishing in the delights of Capua’.” Is there any truth to this story, or is it merely another example of Roman patriotic propaganda?
Livy is quite explicit in his colorful description of the incident (History of Rome, 23.18): “Hannibal settled in Capua as his winter quarters. There he kept his army under shelter for the greater part of the winter. A long and varied experience had inured that army to every form of human suffering, but it had not been habituated to or had any experience of ease and comfort. So it came about that the men whom no pressure of calamity had been able to subdue fell victims to a prosperity too great and pleasures too attractive for them to withstand, and fell all the more utterly the more greedily they plunged into new and untried delights. Sloth, wine, feasting, prostitutes, baths, and idle lounging, which became every day more seductive as they became more habituated to them, so enervated their minds and bodies that they were saved more by the memory of past victories than by any fighting strength they possessed now … the wintering at Capua was a great mistake on the part of Hannibal [for it] deprived him of the strength to win [further] victory. It certainly did look as if he left Capua with another army altogether; it did not retain a shred of its former discipline. A large number who had become entangled with women went back there, and as soon as they took to tents again and the fatigue of marching and other military toils had to be endured their strength and spirits alike gave way just as though they were raw recruits. From that time all through the summer campaign a large number left the standards without leave, and Capua was the only place where the deserters sought to hide themselves.” Appian, a Greek historian from Alexandria, was clearly influenced by Livy, and even suggests that Hannibal himself was corrupted by the Capua experience, “abandoning himself to unaccustomed luxury and love-making.” This unusual statement, written some 250 years after Cannae, is in all likelihood a fabrication, for, as Robert Garland points out in his recent biography of Hannibal (p. 95), the allegation that Hannibal “strayed from his military objective” or engaged in promiscuous sex has no corroboration in the classical record. There is certainly no mention of such events in the account of Polybius, the more reliable historian of the Second Punic War.
Before we examine the record of Hannibal’s military campaigns following Cannae, to see if it supports the rather bizarre contention that, by spending a single winter in relative comfort, the army of the great Carthaginian was rendered useless and incapable of effective military action, we need to point out an important circumstance. The Romans, having suffered terrible defeats at the Ticino and Trebia rivers in 218 BCE, and at Lake Trasimene the following year, in their panic and consternation elected Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator to lead their army and stop the invader. As mentioned in a previous article, Fabius had the good sense to realize he was no match for Hannibal and wisely limited himself to following him with his army at a distance, refusing to engage the Carthaginians in battle (which led many Romans to regard him as a coward and earned him the derogatory sobriquet of cunctator, or “delayer”). Upon the end of his six-month stint in office, Roman hubris and impatience resulted in the election of a pair of consuls willing to face and eliminate the Carthaginian menace once and for all: Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Caius Terentius Varro. The consequence was the disaster at Cannae, where 70,000 Romans perished. This convinced the Roman Senate of the wisdom of their former dictator and forced a return to the Fabian tactics of following Hannibal at a distance, harassing his foraging parties without engaging him in battle. It must be remembered that in those days it was practically impossible to force an army to battle, unless it was cornered and could not retreat. Typically an army would deploy its forces, offering battle and the enemy, if he accepted, would do likewise, which would allow for the confrontation to commence. It was the Roman protracted avoidance of battle, and not the wintering in Capua, which robbed Hannibal of more victories comparable to that at Cannae. Nevertheless, the often-stated assertion that after his initial victories during 218-216 BCE, Hannibal was contained and rendered unable to achieve further battlefield successes during the following 13 years, is woefully inaccurate.
Hannibal did win further battles, a number of them resulting in casualty figures on the Roman side comparable to those of the battles of the Trebia and Lake Trasimene. He did so every time some Roman general grew arrogant enough to think he could take on the great Barcid, and forgot the lessons of Cannae. These victories are further evidence that give the lie to the contention that Hannibal’s army had degenerated into an undisciplined and ineffective force by wintering in comfort. For instance, in 212 BCE he won the battle of Capua, defeating the consuls Quintus Fulvius Flaccus and Appius Claudius Pulcher, although the Roman army escaped. The same year he was the victor at the battle of the Silarus River, where he destroyed the army of the Roman praetor Marcus Centenius Penula, in Campania—the praetor was killed, and out of 16,000 Romans only 1,000 survived. Even more impressive was Hannibal’s victory at the first battle of Herdonea (also in 212 BCE), where he wiped out the army of another praetor, Gnaeus Fulvius Flaccus, in Apulia, with casualties comparable to those at Lake Trasimene (according to Livy, 25.21.5-10, of the 18,000 men in the Roman army only 2000 escaped). And there were more military successes for the Carthaginians. The second battle of Herdonea took place in 210 BCE, and in that instance Hannibal crushed the army of Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus, who was killed, with the Romans suffering no less than 13,000 casualties (Livy 27.1.4-15). The same year he defeated Marcellus at the battle of Numistro and in 209 confronted him again at the battle of Asculum, following which Marcellus was recalled to Rome on charges of bad leadership. At the battle of Venusium in 208, Hannibal ambushes and defeats the two consuls of that year, Marcellus and Crispinus, the former being killed and the latter dying later from his wounds. These and other victories would not have been possible for an army that supposedly “did not retain a shred of its former discipline” and clearly demonstrate the preposterous nature of the allegations of Livy and Appian.
Polybius records that Hannibal remained undefeated during the entirety of the 16 years he spent in Italy, which is particularly amazing in view of the fact that he was fighting in enemy territory, cut off from his supply lines, and received almost no reinforcements, a feat unparalleled in history. During that period, despite all the hardships he and his soldiers encountered, he experienced no mutiny, rebellion, or desertion. His men remained loyal and followed him till the end without hesitation, a clear indication of their enduring discipline and of the quality of his inspired leadership. We must conclude that the story of the “delights of Capua” was also fabrication of Roman patriotic propaganda.
It is clear, then, that Hannibal’s strategic judgment after Cannae was sound and that he and his men retained their strategic goals and fighting capabilities throughout the remarkable years spent in Italy confronting the might of Rome.
References:
Appian. Roman History, Volume 1 (Loeb Classical Library). Harvard, 1912.
Barcelo, Pedro. Hannibal. Stratege und Staatsmann. Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta, 2004.
Egelhaaf, Gottlob. Hannibal. Ein Charakterbild. Stuttgart, Germany: Carl Krabbe, 1922.
Garland, Robert. Hannibal. Bristol Classical Press, 2010.
Goerlitz, Walter. Hannibal. Eine politische Biographie. Stuttgart, Germany: W. Kohlhammer, 1970.
Groag, Edmund. Hannibal als Politiker. Rome, Italy: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1967.
Guerber, H. A. The Story of the Romans. Amerian, 1898.
Lancel, Serge. Hannibal. Paris: Artheme Fayard, 1995.
Lazenby, J. F. Hannibal’s War. Aris & Phillips, 1978.
Livy. History of Rome, Volume 3. London: J. M. Dent, 1905.
Mosig, Yozan and Imene Belhassen. “Revision and reconstruction in the Punic Wars: Cannae revisited.” The International Journal of the Humanities, 4(2), 2006, pp. 103-110.
Polybius. The Histories (Loeb Classical Library). Harvard, 1922.
Shean, John F. “Hannibal’s Mules: The Logistical Limitations of Hannibal’s Army and the Battle of Cannae, 216 B.C.” Historia, 45:2, 1996, pp. 159-187.
Seibert, Jakob. Hannibal. Feldherr und Staatsmann. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 1997.
© Yozan Mosig, 2012
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