(An edited transcription of a presentation delivered in Barletta, Italy, on the 2230th anniversary of Hannibal’s greatest victory, 2 August 2014, at the invitation of the Comitato Italiano Pro Canne della Battaglia.)
I’m essentially a psycho-historian; I try to figure out the motivations of historical characters. Not just of Hannibal and the Roman commanders during the wars between Carthage and Rome, but also of the historians who wrote the story. Particularly Polybius and Livy (Titus Livius), for those are the two main sources we have. The history of Hannibal is contained in the writings of Polybius and Livy. If you look at Polybius, you can see that the reason he wrote was to explain to his Greek countrymen why the Romans had been so successful in taking over the Mediterranean world. Polybius was a close friend of Scipio Aemiliano, who was the commander in charge of the destruction of Carthage in the year 146 BCE. He was in the employ of the Aemilian family.
Consequently, any time he wrote about the Aemilian/Scipionic clan, you have to wonder whether he was actually completely objective, or was he beautifying things in order to please his friend and his employers? The other main source is Titus Livius, or Livy, who, by his own admission, was essentially writing to instill patriotism in the youth of the age of Augustus.
Consequently, he made the actions of the Romans more admirable and he allowed himself to invent all kinds of anecdotes and speeches to enliven his narrative, events which he obviously could not have witnessed or recorded, and for which often no other source exists. Consequently, we have to take what he said with a grain of salt.
For instance, when he tells his audience what Hannibal supposedly said to his soldiers, or to Scipio, his enemy, we know that in all likelihood he used his imagination and composed fictional speeches. Now, both Polybius and Livy used some earlier sources, such as Silenus or Coelius Antipater, but they have been largely lost, so we have no way of checking the earlier sources to see to what extent Polybius and Livy followed them accurately and to which extent they changed or modified them to suit their agenda.
For example, there is a story told by Polybius, repeated and distorted by Livy, that Hannibal, when he was a small child, nine years old, swore on an altar to be the eternal enemy of Rome. Actually, Polybius didn’t say that, he said instead that Hannibal promised to never be a subject of Rome, never be a “friend” of Rome, but Livy changed that into an oath to always hate Rome. Later, all kinds of uncritical historians picked up the Livian version of this unverified anecdote and made the hatred of Rome, on the part of Hannibal, the main motivation for his subsequent actions. I think such assumption is completely wrong.
I don’t believe that Hannibal hated Rome. I think instead that he opposed the colonialism and the incipient imperialism of the Romans, but did not hate them as a people. The entire story of the childhood oath of hatred is nothing more than an invention. It is a fiction created, in part, by Livy. Interestingly enough, Livy corrected his wording later and went back to the way Polybius described the alleged incident, namely that Hannibal said he would not be a subject or friend of the Romans, rather than an eternal enemy, but the harm was done, and later “historians” cherry-picked the more inflammatory version, so that today almost every book on the great Carthaginian claims, incorrectly, that Hannibal was motivated by his terrible hatred of the Romans.
It is clear that Hannibal’s strategic objective was never the destruction of Rome. He did not plan to wipe out the Romans from the face of the earth. What he intended, instead, was to stop the spread of the Romans’ predatory colonialism and restrict them to their geographic location in the center of the Italian peninsula. He actually stated that he came to Italy to liberate the other Italian people from the yoke of Rome, as well as the people of Magna Grecia in the south, originally Greek colonies, and the tribes of the Gauls in the north.
He never intended to march on Rome and destroy the city by the Tiber; that was not his plan. We know from the treaty of Hannibal with King Philip V of Macedonia that his objective was to break up the alliance of Rome with subjugated Italian people, so that the Romans would become isolated and would have to agree to a boundary precluding further militaristic expansion. That was actually his strategic objective.
Now, I could talk for many hours about all kinds aspects of the strategy of Hannibal, but I want to concentrate today on the Battle of Cannae, surely one of the most amazing battles in history and, in my opinion, the most incredible military victory ever, because that is essentially what brings us here together, what brings me to Barletta, on the 2230th anniversary of the Roman defeat at Cannae. There are several questions that have come up in recent research which have led us to a somewhat different understanding from the traditional way in which the event is described.
The first question is, who was really in charge of the Roman army? The traditional account says that there were two consuls, Aemilius Paullus and Terentius Varro, and that they alternated command; each was the commander on a different day. And on the day of the battle, it was Varro who was in control. Aemilius Paullus didn’t actually want to engage in battle, he was very cautious, but Varro was imprudent and definitely wanted to fight. Well, that is obviously not so; when Rome created a super army with 80,000 infantry, and as you will see, much more than the 6.000 cavalry usually claimed, they didn’t create it in order to just continue the strategy of Fabius Maximus, of just shadowing Hannibal.
They assembled this enormous army to destroy Hannibal, to confront him and annihilate him on the battlefield once and for all. So, it is reasonable to assume that both consuls wanted to fight, not just Varro. And the place where the battle would take place, the plain between the River Aufidus, today’s Ofanto, and the hill where the citadel of Cannae was located, was actually ideal for the Romans. We often read that it was a mistake for Varro to opt for a plain because Hannibal’s more numerous cavalry would be able to maneuver and this would help the Carthaginians. But, as you will see in a moment, there is evidence that the cavalry of the Romans was much larger than what is reported in most books.
So the Romans didn’t have to worry about Hannibal’s horse because their cavalry was just as good, or so they thought, and at least as numerous. Therefore Varro didn’t make a mistake, if he was in command. Since Aemilius Paullus was on the right side of the Roman Army, commanding the Equites or the Roman horse, which was the place usually assigned to the consul in charge, it seems that he was actually in command that fateful day. Varro was in command of the cavalry composed of Italian allies. There is no way the commanding consul would have chosen to ride along with the second class horse. The evidence suggests that it was Aemilius Paullus and not Varro who was in command.
Things become even more obvious when we notice that Aemilius Paullus, who was seriously wounded, had an opportunity to escape, but declined the offer of a horse to flee, even though the battle had become hopeless. He was like a captain who decides to go down with his sinking ship, or like a Japanese general committing seppuku when defeated. If Varro had been in command, there would have been no reason for Aemilius Paullus to willingly die, but being in command he would have felt guilty and disgraced for having led his splendid army to its doom. Varro escaped, and he was accepted with open arms in Rome and thanked for not despairing of the Republic.
Not only that, but later he was given further military command. There is no way that this would have happened had he been regarded as responsible for the disaster, had it been the outcome of his decision. It seems likely that the reason why Polybius attributed the command to Varro on the day of battle, was to protect the reputation of his employer, the Aemilian family, to which Aemilius Paullus belonged. Varro became a convenient scapegoat.
A different point is the size of the Roman horse. According to Polybius, the Roman cavalry consisted of “over” 6,000. He doesn’t say approximately 6,000, he doesn’t say about 6,000, he says over 6,000. But he doesn’t say how much over, so this is a very open thing. He also says that in situations of emergency, the Romans increased the number of horse accompanying each legion. Instead of having 200 or 250, it became 300 or more. By the time of Polybius the standard cavalry contingent was 300 per legion. In case of an emergency this would be increased to 400. So how many horsemen accompanied each legion at Cannae? It seems very likely that they were probably between 300 and 400, not 150 or 200.
If you assume 400, then the Romans had 3,200 Equites, and since the Italian allied cavalry was required to be three times as numerous, the Italians would have numbered over 9,000. So you have 3,200 plus 9,000, together over 12,000. Hannibal had only 10,000. Why, then, make reference to “over 6,000” when alluding to the Roman horse? The reason is easy to divine. The Romans, who regarded themselves as the best warriors of their time, needed some excuse for their catastrophic defeat by an enemy they outnumbered practically 2 to 1 in infantry. The excuse became “well, we had superior numbers in infantry, but Hannibal enjoyed a vast advantage in cavalry, and that is why he was able to beat us.” The official account claims that the Carthaginians had 10,000 horse and the Romans only 6,000 (or, ahem, “over” 6,000). But if you read carefully, it becomes clear that the Romans didn’t have 6,000, but a lot more than 6,000, actually, in all likelihood, more than 12,000! At Cannae they had superiority in both infantry and cavalry, and yet Hannibal managed to not only defeat them, but to annihilate their numerically superior forces. The injury to Roman pride and hubris required the doctoring up of the historical record.
Another interesting point is that normally a deployed Roman army looked a little bit like a wide, flat rectangle, with the infantry in the center and the cavalry on the sides. But the army that fought at Cannae looked instead like a much narrower and deeper rectangle, with separate cavalry on the sides. Many authors claim that Varro made a strange and erroneous decision. Instead of having the width of a normal deployment, he piled up the units of soldiers one behind the other and made a very deep formation. What possessed him? Why would he do that? Well, I say no, he didn’t make a bizarre decision. The unusual deployment was not Varro’s (or Paullus’s) idea, it was imposed on the Romans by Hannibal himself, who, like a chess grandmaster, created a situation of Zugzwang for his enemies.
Hannibal knew that the Roman army was vastly superior in number, and that if they deployed in their usual way their front would by far exceed that of the Carthaginian army, which then could have been easily enveloped and destroyed. For that reason, he deployed his army first, in such a manner as to force the Romans to deploy facing him in the limited confine between the Cannae hill and the Aufidus River. Within that limited space, there is no way the Romans could have deployed in their normal way. They were forced to deploy with a narrower front and a deeper formation to have enough room for the cavalry on the sides, between the Roman right flank and the Aufidus River, and between their left flank and the hill of the Cannae citadel. So, it was Hannibal who forced Varro, or rather Aemilius Paullus, who most likely was in command, to employ a much deeper formation than normal. This was all part of Hannibal’s master plan to neutralize the numerical superiority of the Roman infantry.
If the Romans did have 12,000 cavalry, 9,000 Allied and approximately 3,000 Equites, as was most likely the case, and they had divided their cavalry in two equal halves, 6,000 riders on each flank, Hannibal would have had a harder time achieving victory. It would have been a very difficult battle. But Hannibal knew that the Romans would not do that, because the Roman Equites would not ride next to the lesser Italian allies. See, they were noblemen. The Italian allies were second-class. So Hannibal knew the Romans would put their nobility on one side, only 3,000, and the much greater force of 9,000, on the other side. Since the right side was the place of honor, it was easy to predict that the Equites would ride on the right, next to the river. Knowing that, he placed his 6,000-strong heavy Iberian and Gallic horse on his left, facing the Italian nobles.
So, even though the Roman horse had overall numerical superiority, on their right wing the Romans were outnumbered 2 to 1. On the opposite side, between the infantry and the hill, the Allied horse was numerically superior, with 9,000 riders, but Hannibal had the Numidians facing them. He had only 4,000 Numidian riders but they could maneuver in ways the Allied horse could not match. The specialty of the Numidians, the most talented horsemen of Antiquity, was the hit and run attack, to approach, attack, retreat, spin around, move in circles, and keep the enemy in a state of disarray and confusion. And they did. They kept the Allied horse busy and unable to charge or advance in a coordinated manner. Meanwhile, the heavy Celtic and Spanish cavalry on Hannibal’s left wing attacked and destroy the 3,000 Equites. With 6,000 against 3,000 it was hardly a contest, although the fighting became so fierce riders even dismounted to finish off their adversaries on foot. In short time, the Roman cavalry on their right flank was no more, while the Allies on the left struggled in confusion faced with the lethal dance of the Numidians.
Following Hannibal’s master plan to the letter, Hasdrubal, in charge of the victorious heavy horse, instead of pursuing the few fleeing survivors among the Equites, raced with his riders behind the battlefield to fall upon the Allied horse, which, attacked from two directions, broke and fled in a panic, pursued with deadly efficacy by the Numidians. Instead of joining in the chase, Hasdrubal’s heavy horse turned around and descended upon the rear of the Roman infantry as planned, sealing their fate. In retrospect, it is clear that what doomed the Romans at Cannae was above all, their hubris, which made them predictable and resulted in the fatal uneven deployment of their cavalry, a factor Hannibal exploited in his brilliant and deadly battle plan.
A further fascinating aspect of the battle is that the center of Hannibal’s infantry was advanced in the form of a semi-circle. He put his weakest and least reliable men in the center: Gauls, whose discipline was questionable and who had a tendency to run if the going got too tough, interspersed with units of Spanish infantry, known for their bravery. He arranged them in a semi-circle, convex from the point of view of the Romans. The reason for that unusual formation was to ensure that when the Roman army advanced they would make initial contact only with the center of the Carthaginian battle line. The men on both sides of the center, also anxious to clash with the hated enemy, naturally would start converging towards the center. So instead of the Roman army maintaining their initial deployment, they became gradually more and more compacted towards the center in order to be able to fight, just as Hannibal had envisioned.
Following Hannibal’s orders, the Carthaginian center composed of his Gauls and Iberians started a slow measured retreat, their front line flattening out and then, bit by bit, becoming concave, like a huge sack, into which the Romans pursued, thinking they were winning. We are winning! We are pushing the damned Gauls and Spaniards back, they are afraid of us, any moment now they will break and run! Let’s kill them all! The Romans kept advancing, not realizing that they were moving into a trap of Hannibal’s devising. And then, the 10,000 Libyan elite infantry kept on reserve, 5,000 on each side, moved into place and started compressing the Romans from the right and the left, creating chaos and confusion in the trapped Roman juggernaut.
The previous year, at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, Hannibal had been able to capture 15,000 Romans, and despoiled them of their armor, their shields, their swords, their equipment, which was now worn by the elite African troops, who at first sight looked like Romans. So, the men attacking from the sides caused terrible confusion. If you were a Roman soldier, moving with the flow, concentrating on the fight in front of you, you could suddenly be cut down by what appeared to be other Romans at your side, who didn’t look at all like the enemy. For this reason, the Libyans pressing in from the sides were able to get really close without resistance, and as the Roman army became more and more more compacted, they gradually were completely immobilized. The Gauls and Iberians, led by Hannibal himself and his brother Mago, stopped their retreat and are started counterattacking with renewed energy.
The Carthaginian heavy horse stormed and trampled the Romans from the back, and as the Africans pressed like a vise grip from the flanks, the huge mass of Roman soldiers were completely trapped and pressed together until they hardly had space to wield their weapons. Although they were 80,000 strong, the only ones that could actually fight at this point, and barely so, due to lack of space, were the men at the edges, all around the doomed army—those inside could only wait their turn to die. Even though Hannibal had only half their number, he had more that could actually fight, swing their swords and thrust their spears, and also move to allow fresh replacements to take their place. For the Romans it must have been terrifying. Can you imagine being one of the men in the middle? Just waiting your turn to be cut down?
Sadly, this outcome was not the result of Hannibal’s desire to slaughter an entire Roman army, but the consequence of the Romans’ assembling such an enormous force to annihilate him and his men. I am convinced that Hannibal was forced to use the double envelopment as the only possible solution to the problem posed by the numerical superiority of the Roman army. I mean, how can you fight an army of 92,000 with an army of 50,000, unless you immobilize it? And once you have immobilized that army, what can you do? The people inside are not surrendering. They’re all armed. If you don’t continue cutting them down they will fight again.
They will redeploy. So the Romans, by creating their super army, forced Hannibal to find a way to neutralize and annihilate it. See, the battles of those days were not battles of annihilation. They were battles where two armies met, and when one side got the upper hand, the other fled and accepted defeat, with some sort of peace deal following. Usually the defeated army would lose maybe a few hundred or a thousand or two, but nothing like the casualties at Cannae, where 70,000 Romans and some 5,000 of Hannibal’s men perished. The numerical superiority of the Roman army made it impossible to defeat in any other way. Hannibal, contrary to Livy’s propaganda, was not particularly cruel or bloodthirsty. He was a civilized man, a cultured man, an educated man, not some sort of barbarian butcher. I am convinced that he did not rejoice in the death of so many men. He was, in all likelihood, horrified, and contemplated the outcome of his brilliant battle tactics with a heavy heart, but he also knew that there had been no other way. By putting together their enormous army, the Romans forced Hannibal to opt for a tactic with devastating effects. Ironically, in trying to annihilate Hannibal the Romans assured their own annihilation.
It is interesting to note the difference between Polybius and Livy as to how many Romans lost their lives in this battle. Polybius, who is generally regarded as the more trustworthy source, says 70,000. Livy, on the other hand, says about 50,000. That’s a big difference. Well, the problem is that Livy is adding the numbers from what became the official pro-Roman account. He is counting only 6,000 for the Roman horse. But if we add instead the 12,000 we have established as the real size of the cavalry, as clearly Polybius must have, forgetting for a moment that he had previously disguised the number as “over 6,000,” we have enough men on the field to accept 70,000 killed.
The reason why the 70,000 figure is sometimes rejected by modern historians is because it doesn’t seem to add up due to the doctored up cavalry numbers. The higher number of Romans killed according to Polybius can be seen as additional proof that their cavalry was larger than reported. If we accept Polybius’ numbers as correct, we have about 70,000 Romans and over 5,000 on the Carthaginian side, which is an enormous number. The fighting at Cannae took maybe four to six hours, and utilized primarily swords and spears, and yet the casualties were comparable to those of the atom bombing of Nagasaki! Although such numbers in ancient battles are often exaggerated, Delbrück says in his History of Warfare that in the case of Cannae the Polybian numbers are credible, by virtue of the nature of the double envelopment that prevented escape from the trapped army. These casualty numbers are unparalleled in the history of Mediterranean warfare and were not matched until the killing fields of World War I, and then only with the use of machine guns, tanks, bombs, and poison gas.
Livy’s statement, that Hannibal’s failure to immediately march against Rome after his victory at Cannae was what saved the Republic, is sheer nonsense. First of all, Cannae and Rome are far away from each other, over 400 km, and there is no way Hannibal could have gotten there in a couple days; it would have taken weeks. His army needed to be resupplied. He undoubtedly had a large number of injured soldiers who needed care. His fighting forces were not large enough to lay siege to a fortified and walled city like Rome. In Spain it took him eight months to conquer the city of Saguntum, which was much smaller than Rome. He knew that if he parked his army in front of the walls of Rome it would take years to breach the city’s defenses, even had he had siege engines, which he did not.
Roman reinforcements would arrive from all parts of Italy and his army would end up trapped between the walls of Rome and large contingents of enemy forces. More importantly, destroying Rome was never his strategic goal; he instead intended to limit the expansion of Rome to the central area of Italy and to liberate Gauls, Italians, and Greeks from the yoke of Rome. His strategic goals were brilliant and he would have won the war, had he received the necessary reinforcements from Carthage. But the politicians at home were concerned with defending their sources of profit: the silver mines in Spain. So, practically every time they sent reinforcements, they went to Spain, and not to their commander winning battles in Italy. The myopic Carthaginian plutocrats could not see that the very survival of Carthage was at stake. By not supporting Hannibal, they doomed Carthage. It was the greed of the politicians, not the failure of Hannibal, what led to the war being lost.
The more we study the Battle of Cannae, the more amazing it becomes, because every single aspect of that battle was carefully planned, orchestrated, and implemented with the utmost precision. The amazing discipline of Hannibal’s forces, the coordinated movements of the multi-ethnic elements of his army, the synchronization of his infantry and cavalry, as well as his manipulation and control of the terrain and the deployment of the Roman army, everything worked perfectly. This was not a battle that was decided by luck. He didn’t just get lucky. In his mind’s eye he had seen the battle unfold before it was fought. Every detail was set in place. His men trusted him and followed his orders exactly, thus achieving this incredible victory. Cannae was a masterpiece never equaled in the history of warfare.
Over the years, Cannae has had many imitators, with different degrees of success. In the last century, for example, Germany’s Schlieffen plan in World War I was based on the Battle of Cannae. Alfred von Schlieffen died before the beginning of World War I, and so it was von Moltke who was actually in charge of implementing the plan, which called for the envelopment of France’s forces all the way to and around Paris. Von Moltke was too timid and worried so much about leaving Germany open to an attack by Russia from the east that instead of following Schlieffen’s plan to the letter, he committed an insufficient number of men and tried to surround a smaller part of France, falling short of Paris.
This led to disaster and to long lasting trench warfare in which an enormous number of soldiers died. It has been suggested that if the Schlieffen plan had been implemented exactly as designed, based on the Battle of Cannae, the Great War would never have developed and instead would have been a brief Franco-German conflict that would have been over in three weeks. The most recent example of an imitation Cannae occurred under the command of the American general, Norman Schwarzkopf. The first Gulf War was based on the Battle of Cannae. Saddam Hussein apparently was not familiar with the history of Hannibal’s campaign against Rome, and deployed his huge army in a manner reminiscent of the Romans at Cannae, which allowed Schwarzkopf to envelop and defeat it following the model of Hannibal’s masterpiece. In his memoir Schwarzkopf writes, “My victory was based on Hannibal’s Cannae.” The Battle of Cannae continues to be studied in military academies throughout the world. It was a perfect battle that no one has ever fully equaled or surpassed.
There are many new investigators in the field, and a lot of research continues to be done today on the Second Punic War and particularly on the feats of Hannibal. New discoveries are helping to see through the distortions of pro-Roman propaganda still permeating the historical record. In Tunisia, for example, a distinguished investigator, whose name is Abdelaziz Belkhodja, has been conducting research on the other big battle of the Second Punic War, the Battle of Zama. He has made some startling discoveries, finding plenty of evidence challenging the very historicity of the battle, which may never have happened at all.
His research strongly suggests that the second war between Carthage and Rome ended with a peace treaty favorable to Rome, with Carthage agreeing to pay reparations, but not with a final battle. Not only that, but the treaty in question must have been quite different from the one reported in the pro-Roman sources, written after the destruction of Carthage and the burning of all the Carthaginian records in the holocaust of 146 BCE. Belkhodja’s findings are detailed in a book that is rewriting history as we speak. There are all kinds of exciting new discoveries concerning the Punic Wars as the result of recent archaeological research, dating technology, and the careful examination and correlation of ancient texts.
History, particularly history written by the victors and infused with a large dose of propaganda, is not set in stone and needs to be challenged and reevaluated. The process is exciting and highly stimulating. It is like the work of a detective reopening a cold case, and discovering important details that were missed before. Such research is the passion of my life. I’ve been investigating this fascinating subject for more than 15 years and I don’t see an end to it. The more I explore, the more new discoveries come to the fore—it is an exhilarating journey.
Allow me to end by recommending an important book published in Tunisia, in 2014. It is by Abdelaziz Belkhodja and is titled “Hannibal Barca: L’histoire veritable et le mensonge de Zama,” in other words, “Hannibal Barca: The True Story and the Deception of Zama.” In my humble opinion, it is the most important book on Hannibal published in recent years. The author gives you a concise but accurate overview of the events in Hannibal’s life and then focuses on the last battle, the one Hannibal allegedly lost, and provides abundant and compelling evidence that shows that Hannibal was never actually defeated by the Romans and that the Second Punic War ended in a very different manner. Exciting discoveries like this one do not happen every day. The author’s thesis was first presented in a paper published in 2010, which was followed by the first edition of the book in 2011 and by the second, slightly revised edition this year (2014), both published by Apollonia in Tunisia.
Literature
Belkhodja, A. Hannibal Barca: L’histoire veritable et le mensonge de Zama. Tunis, Tunisia: Apollonia, 2014.
Daly, G. Cannae: The experience of battle in the Second Punic War. Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2002.
Delbrueck, H. Warfare in Antiquity. University of Nebraska, 1975.
Ehlert, H., M. Epkenhans, and G. Gross (editors). Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente. Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2007.
Goldsworthy, A. Cannae: Hannibal’s greatest victory. Cassell, 2001.
Healy, M. Cannae 216 BC: Hannibal smashes Rome’s army. Osprey, 2000.?Livy. History of Rome (Loeb Classical Library). Harvard.
Mosig, Y. and I. Belhassen. “Revision and reconstruction in the Punic Wars: Cannae revisited” in The International Journal of the Humanities, 4:2, 2006, pp. 103-110.
Mosig, Y. and I. Belhassen. “Revision and reconstruction in the Second Punic War: Zama—whose victory?” in The International Journal of the Humanities, 5:9, 2007, pp. 175-186.?Polybius. The Histories (Loeb Classical Library). Harvard.
Schwarzkopf, H. N. and P. Petre. It doesn’t take a hero: The autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Bantam/Random House, 1992.
Von Schlieffen, A. Cannae. E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1936.
© Yozan Mosig, 2015
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