The second so-called Punic War between Carthage and Rome came to an end in 202 BCE. Rome had prevailed and a peace treaty was signed in 201 between the two Mediterranean powers, with heavy concessions and indemnity to be paid to the victor. The deciding factor, according to the classical record (composed almost exclusively of pro-Roman accounts, the Carthaginian reports having been conveniently lost or destroyed), was the Battle of Zama. Hannibal, probably the most brilliant military genius in history, after remaining unvanquished for 16 years on enemy land, facing overwhelming odds and receiving almost no reinforcements, was allegedly decisively defeated by the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio, who would be awarded the title Africanus in recognition of his great victory. Is this really what happened? A number of problems, inconsistencies, and paradoxes suggest otherwise.
At Zama, Hannibal supposedly was able to field 36,000 infantry, 4,000 horse, and 80 elephants, to face Scipio’s army of 29,000 infantry and over 6,000 cavalry. A standard summary of the description of the battle, as presented by Roman historiography, can be found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003): “The elephants, opening the battle, were either ushered down corridors Scipio had left in his formation or driven out to the flanks, where they collided with Hannibal’s cavalry, which was then routed by the Roman cavalry. When the infantry lines closed, the Roman first line may have defeated both Hannibal’s first and second lines, though the remnants may have reformed on the wings of his third line, composed of his veterans from Italy. Scipio, too, reformed his lines at this point, and a titanic struggle developed until the Roman cavalry, returning from the pursuit, charged into Hannibal’s rear, whereupon his army disintegrated” (Polybius 15: 9-16; Livy 30: 29-35; Scullard, 1970; Lazenby, 1978).
First of all, let us consider the matter of the elephants. Roman historiography, as part of the development of the Scipio legend and the dissemination of pro-Roman propaganda, has recorded that Hannibal had available an inordinately large number of war elephants at Zama, no less than 80 (Livy 30:33). Considering that he had only 37 to cross the Alps and invade Italy, and that in the string of his great and devastating victories, from 218 to 216, the elephants participated in only one battle, at the Trebia, the number given for Zama is quite remarkable.
Following Scipio’s invasion of the Carthaginian homeland in North Africa, two major military engagements between the warring powers took place before Zama, one at Utica and the other at the Great Plains. How many elephants did the city of Carthage, which did not support a regular standing army, maintain? If the Carthaginians had had a large supply of trained war elephants at hand, it would have made sense for them to send along a sizeable contingent of pachyderms, the tanks of antiquity, with Hasdrubal Gisgo, when he marched to meet Scipio’s invading force surrounding Utica. But we do not read Roman reports of any elephants, not a single solitary one, accompanying the forces of Hasdrubal.
Surely, after Scipio’s treacherous sneak attack in the middle of the night, burning the tents of unsuspecting soldiers lulled into complacency with a promise of peace, the Carthaginian senate would have ordered all its available war elephants to march to face the ruthless enemy at the Great Plains. Once again, the elephants were conspicuous by their absence.
Then, all of a sudden, Hannibal, who had only been able to assemble a makeshift army for the decisive confrontation at Zama, appears with no less than 80 elephants, all with mahouts and trained for battle. This most unlikely brigade of pachyderms is in all likelihood nothing more than a fabrication of the pro-Roman historians, a bit of propaganda to make Scipio’s victory appear more formidable and impressive. Perhaps instead of 80, there were 18, or maybe only eight, or, most probably, none.
The charge of the presumed elephants supposedly opens the battle, but we are told that they were frightened by the Romans responding with loud noises, shield clashing, trumpets, and what not. This also does not make much sense. Ancient battles typically started with loud yelling, shield banging, and other forms of intimidation, and consequently a major part of the training of animals to be used in attacking enemy positions would have consisted of accustoming them to such sounds.
Then, it is claimed that the elephants either run blindly into corridors left open in the Roman formation for the purpose of directing the animals to harmlessly pass through—Scipio’s alleged “solution” to the problem posed by an elephant charge—or they panicked and turned against Hannibal’s own men, wrecking havoc with his cavalry on the flanks. This also does not hold up against logical scrutiny. Since in addition to one or more armed warriors the animals carried mahouts on their backs, and the animals were trained to respond to the commands or prodding of their riders, they would surely have been angled to the right or left to trample men at the edges of any such corridors and cut through them obliquely. Furthermore, as Haywood (1933) and Scullard (1974) point out, it is not credible that rampaging elephants would do a lot of damage turning against their own side, because the mahouts carried a hammer and chisel to kill any elephant running out of control, as was the case at the earlier battle of the Metaurus (Livy 27:49). It can also not be argued that these were poorly trained elephants, for if Carthage did not send any elephants with Hasdrubal Gisgo to Utica or to the Great Plains, it would have had available all its trained pachyderms. If all elephants had been insufficiently trained to be of any use to Hasdrubal Gisgo, their status would not have changed by the time of Zama and they would not have been deployed. Finally, had the city exhausted its supply there would not have been enough time, between the Great Plains battle and Zama, to capture and train more. Of course, as Richard Gabriel has pointed out (personal communication), no serious military historian accepts the figure of 80 elephants at Zama. If there were any, they would have been few, and probably none.
Unfortunately the myth of the elephants at Zama has been perpetuated in many accounts found in the literature, and was even an important feature of the fascist film Scipione l’africano, directed by Carmine Gallone, produced and backed by Mussolini’s government in 1937. In that barbaric motion picture 50 elephants were used, with a number of them being actually speared and butchered. Mussolini identified himself with Scipio, and his fascist regime with the Roman Empire (less so with the Roman republic, but politicians are often notoriously ignorant in historical matters).
Attempts have been made to compare the battle of Zama with Cannae, and to call Zama a “Cannae in reverse,” but the comparisons simply do not hold up. First of all, the scale of Cannae was vastly larger. With 96,000 Romans and 50,000 Carthaginians, almost 150,000 men committed themselves to a death struggle on that fateful day, 14 years earlier. By contrast, if we accept the Roman accounts, likely to have exaggerated the number of Carthaginian combatants at Zama in order to make victory more impressive, we would have 35,000 on the Roman side and 40,000 (probably less) on the Carthaginian, or a total of 75,000—about half the number of combatants fielded at Cannae.
At Cannae discipline was absolute, and Hannibal’s forces moved with clockwork precision, leaving nothing to chance. After the Carthaginian heavy horse under Hasdrubal defeated the Roman equites on the right wing of the Roman formation, they did not give in to the temptation of pursuing the survivors, a remarkable display of discipline. Instead they wheeled to the right like a well-oiled machine, swiftly riding behind the mile-long battlefield to fall upon the flank and rear of the large contingent of allied Italian cavalry under Varro, which was being kept in place by the hit and run tactics of the agile and versatile Numidian riders. When the allied cavalry panicked and broke, it was only the fast Numidian horsemen who undertook the pursuit, while Hasdrubal’s heavy horse, again with perfect discipline, wheeled once more to the right and fell upon the rear of the Roman army already engaged with the Carthaginian center and in the process of being enveloped by Hannibal’s elite Lybian forces closing in from the sides. Hasdrubal’s preordained cavalry manoeuvre blocked the possibility of any retreat and doomed the legions under Servilius and Minucius to their fate.
Compare the above display of equestrian manoeuvrability and discipline with the cavalry engagement at Zama, where Hannibal was outnumbered by 6,000 to 4,000 in horsemen. It is clear that Hannibal instructed his smaller Numidian and Carthaginian cavalry to feign a retreat when the Roman horse attacked at the beginning of the battle, and, pretending to escape, draw away from the battlefield the pursuing Numidian horse from the right Roman flank, under the command of Massinissa, as well as the Roman equites under Laelius from the opposite wing. This they accomplished with perfection, removing the superior cavalry forces from the battlefield. Hannibal, and not Scipio, controlled this development.
With respect to the infantry engagement, only Hannibal’s third line, which he held as a reserve far behind the others, was composed of seasoned veterans and elite forces from his Italian campaign. Naturally, most of them were not among the men who had crossed the Alps with him in 218 BCE, but they were experienced soldiers, including many from Bruttium, who were determined to shake the Roman yoke. His first two lines, on the other hand, were of questionable quality, and Hannibal probably expected them to cave in under the onslaught of the veteran Roman legionnaires, although not without first taking their toll from them, both in terms of casualties and fatigue. He wanted to insure that not only the Roman first line—the hastati—but also the second and third lines—the principes and the triari—would come into the fray and gradually wear themselves out. Once Hannibal’s first line broke, the retreating soldiers were not permitted to reintegrate themselves at random points in the next line, but were forced to move to the sides, extending the Carthaginian front. Knowing Hannibal’s habit of meticulous planning, it is likely that this repositioning was intentional and decided well before the start of the battle. The same thing happened after the second line broke, and then the Romans were left facing the fresh and rested elite veterans of Hannibal’s army, plus a vastly wider enemy line, threatening to engulf them from the flanks.
At that point in the fray, Scipio must have realized that his situation was becoming desperate, for he was in danger of being enveloped from the sides, and was facing an irresistible barrier of rested veterans ready to crush his tired soldiers in the center. We are told that he ordered the Roman advance stopped and repositioned the principes and the triari to the sides of his formation, extending his front to match the width of the Carthaginian line, hoping to avoid encirclement. From the Roman account we get the impression that the Carthaginians remained idle during this redeployment, patiently waiting without attacking until Scipio was done with his preparations, which is patently absurd. We are asked to believe that the most brilliant tactician in history not only was waging a most unimaginative battle but actually wasted time when he would have known full well that time was of the essence and that he had to complete the defeat of the enemy infantry before the absent Roman cavalry could return to the battlefield. It is likely that, if the battle was unfolding as described, at this point Hannibal’s rested veterans would have attacked the Romans without giving them the opportunity to redeploy. At the very least Hannibal would have used the momentary lull in the fighting to reorganize his own forces, most likely by displacing his veterans to the sides, to face the triari and the principes, while the survivors of his first two lines got ready to deal with the exhausted hastati in the center—it is not credible that he would have remained idle. As for Scipio, there was nothing more he could have done at this point, and we are told that the battle resumed with increased ferocity. In view of the rested condition and the quality of Hannibal’s elite veterans, it is very likely that they were in the process of routing the principes and triari while the center held, and certain defeat looked Scipio in the face.
What saved the day for Scipio, if we believe the classical accounts, was the fortuitous return in the nick of time of the horsemen under Massinissa and Laelius, who had been tricked away from the battlefield for what must have been hours, and who fell upon the Carthaginian rear. If this is what happened, we must conclude that ultimately it was Massinissa’s betrayal of Hannibal and his fortunate (for the Romans) return to the field, rather than the generalship of Scipio, that decided the outcome of the battle. Had Massinissa and Laelius’s return been delayed for another half hour, Hannibal would almost certainly have prevailed. Even at this point, the Carthaginians were not completely encircled, as the Romans had been at Cannae. According to Polybius, the Carthaginian casualties numbered 20,000, an outcome hardly comparable with the 70,000 fallen at Cannae. Scipio, undoubtedly aware of how close he had been to defeat, had he not been saved at the last moment by Massinissa, later acknowledged that Hannibal had done at Zama everything anyone could have done (Livy 30:35, 5-8). The illusion that at Zama the student had matched and outdone the teacher, part of the Scipio myth propagated by Roman historiography, does not fit what supposedly took place in the last battle of the Second Punic War.
The classical accounts of the battle of Zama, as we have seen, are strangely inconsistent and contradictory. The course of the struggle is unimaginative to the point of being suspect as the alleged outcome of a first-rate military mind such as Hannibal’s and even Scipio’s. It reads more like the invention of a writer lacking the vision of a great general. The matter of the fictional elephants further reduces credibility. But these are not the only problems with the battle of Zama.
The recent dating of the famed dual military and commercial Punic port of Carthage to the second, rather than the third, century BCE, has created a paradox leading to further doubts and possibilities. According to Dexter Hoyos in The Carthaginians, the suggested dating for the construction of Carthage’s artificial ports south of the agora is c. 218-210, but H. R. Hurst, in his Excavations at Carthage points out that the latest scientific dating indicates that the port, one of the great architectural and engineering wonders of the ancient world, was actually built later, at some point between 201 and 146 BCE (the latter, of course, being the year of the destruction of Carthage by the Romans). As Abdelaziz Belkhodja argues quite compellingly in his new book, Hannibal Barca: L’histoire veritable, published by Apollonia in Tunisia in 2012, if the military port was actually built after, and not before, the conclusion of the second war between Carthage and Rome, this casts serious doubts on the authenticity of the peace treaty that Carthage was required to sign after the alleged defeat at Zama. The treaty, which dates back to 201 BCE, included the clause that Carthage’s naval forces be dismantled, and in the future be limited to no more than 10 warships. The great Punic port, with berths for over 200 warships, could not have been built for a navy limited to 10 galleys. Consequently, that limitation did not exist when the port was constructed, which in turn means that at least that provision of the treaty is fictitious.
Belkhodja also points out that no one has been able to find the exact location of the battle of Zama (the village of Jama, close to Siliana, some 150 km southwest of Tunis, and a number of other candidates have been suggested, but without archaeological verification). The site remains unknown, while those of practically all other major battles waged during the Second Punic War are reasonably well established. This is particularly troublesome in view of the Romans’ penchant for erecting monuments in situ to commemorate their greatest victories. They held control of North Africa for centuries, so why is there not some impressive display of statuary marking the battlefield? There is none, not even a lonely column or the ruins of a temple—as would be expected if the battle had never taken place!
If the war was concluded with a peace agreement giving concessions to Rome (but not including the complete dissolution of the Punic navy), as offered by Hannibal in his meeting with Scipio, this would have negated the need for a final battle. The construction of the military port after the war would then make sense, as would the lack of a monument to mark the location of the fictitious battle. It is therefore possible that the battle of Zama never took place and was a fabrication of Roman propaganda, left uncontested following the Carthaginian holocaust of 146 BCE. As Belkhodja argues, although Carthage lost the war, Hannibal may never have actually been defeated by the Romans.
But why the deception, the smoke and mirrors creating the illusion of a decisive military engagement that may never have occurred? The answer can perhaps be found in the wounded pride and the hubris of the Roman psyche. For a people who regarded themselves as destined to rule and as better than all non-Romans, the humiliation of suffering defeat after defeat at the hands of a man of genius who remained unvanquished and untarnished for 16 long years, on their own land, where they enjoyed every possible advantage, was too much to bear. Cannae, in particular, left such a devastating hole in their arrogance that it could only be filled by creating the illusion of having achieved a comparable victory.
It is interesting to note that none of the classical accounts of the controversial final battle of the Second Punic War was written by an eye-witness. Both Polybius and Livy, and others who essentially parroted them later with small variations in details, wrote about Zama after the Carthaginian holocaust of 146 BCE (which Polybius witnessed in person, as companion and friend of Scipio Aemiliano, the butcher of Carthage). The myth of Zama seems to have emerged full-fledged after the burning and dispersal of the libraries of Carthage and the destruction of all Carthaginian records of the war. Consumed by hatred for what they could not overcome, and deeply resentful of the renewed prosperity of the North African city-state (largely the result of the reforms instituted by Hannibal as suffete after the war) the Romans eventually unleashed the genocidal fury that led to one of the greatest crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Roman war machine, the annihilation of the thriving and vibrant civilization of Carthage, 37 years after the death of its greatest defender.
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© Yozan Mosig, 2012
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