Hannibal What Kind of Genius

Hannibal: What Kind of Genius? Author(s): B. D. Hoyos Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Oct., 1983), pp. 171-180 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642568 Accessed: 12/01/2010 21:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Cambridge University Press and The Classical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Greece & Rome. http://www.jstor.org Greece and Rome, Vol. XXX, No. 2, October 1983 HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? By B. D. HOYOS The year 1983 marks the 2300th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Punic War, one of the most momentous conflicts in history. The outstanding figure of that war was, of course, the Carthaginian leader Hannibal, son of Hamilcar Barca. His invasion of Italy at the outset of the war was a model of strategic daring and skill. His tactics in destroying the much larger Roman army at Cannae remain a classic exemplar of a battle of envelopment. He came near to bringing down Roman power, a near-miss for which his Roman contemporaries never forgave him, while their descendants accorded him grudging respect or even admiration. These achievements have made him, indeed, the most famous of the adversaries of Rome and one of the three most highly rated generals of antiquity (with Alexander and Julius Caesar). There is some irony in this, for of the three he was the only one to fail ultimately in his enterprise. That enterprise, admired and analysed so often, still repays scrutiny. How soundly based was the strategy of invading Italy? Could Hannibal have conducted the war more effectively when the victories of 218-216 failed to produce peace? Another relevant question was already being asked in antiquity: how right or wrong was he in refusing to march on Rome directly after his shattering victory at Cannae? In sum: how able was he really in the art of warfare? There is room for a not entirely conventional assessment of Carthage's greatest hero. When he attacked Saguntum in 219, Hannibal knew perfectly well that he risked war with Rome. The Romans had gone to the trouble of sending him an embassy in the later part of 220 to advise him of this. Nonetheless - whether provoked by them or out of deliberate bellicosity - he did attack the place and capture it. He must have calculated that the risk was worth running. The Romans might back down when deprived of their Spanish foothold. If not, Carthage was rich and powerful, thanks to her Spanish empire; and no doubt the youthful governor of that empire was confident of his own military talents. He formed a plan of grand strategy which he believed would give him full military initiative and every prospect of disrupting Rome's dominion over Italy, the cornerstone of her military might. Obvious and inevitable as the invasion of Italy may appear to us - since he did carry it out - it was in fact extremely risky. Carthage had been pre-eminently a sea power, though often operating with large land armies as well, notably in Sicily; but Hannibal was proposing to HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? fight a land war, and to open it with a land advance through indepen- dent and not necessarily friendly country on a route over a thousand miles long from his capital New Carthage in southern Spain, without reinforcements or provisioning by Punic ships along the way, and with two formidable mountain-ranges to overcome (Pyrenees and Alps). In Italy, Rome's network of alliances had been tested and found true both in the First Punic War and again when a great Gallic invasion took place in 225. The only rebellious area Hannibal could be sure of winning over was the newly subdued northern Italy, inhabited by Gauls. If things went wrong he could be held up or cut off with the main army of Carthage, while the Romans massed overwhelming forces to invade both Spain and North Africa. That he not only achieved his march but went on to deal Rome devastating blows in her own land is proof of his abilities as a general - and as a leader of men, for he was able to inspire his motley army with enthusiasm and energy throughout the long years of campaigning: a quality given special commendation by Polybius and, following him, Livy.1 At the same time the great march calls for other comment too. The land invasion was necessary because in 218 Rome had a much more powerful navy: 220 ships to 100 Punic. This is one of the strongest arguments for the view that Carthage had not planned war (contrary to later hostile claims). What is surprising is that after 218 Carthage made only limited efforts to increase her navy, in sharp contrast to her repeated build-ups in the previous war and a severe handicap to her capacity for supplying Hannibal in Italy or harassing Roman shipping, communications, or coasts. Manpower was available, for Punic armies were recruited largely from subjects and foreigners while Carthaginians traditionally served in the fleet. There should have been plenty of money, since until about 208 Carthage enjoyed the wealth of southern Spain. The Romans for their part mobilized large fleets as well as armies during the war. It is hard to avoid inferring that Carthage's failure to make fuller use of naval capacity is linked to the fact that her supreme commander and his lieutenants were men versed in land warfare but without any naval experience. It is a paradox and an irony of Hannibal's career that a genius in land fighting should be the most glorious leader in the annals of a great naval power. Nor was the march itself anything like a textbook exemplar. Of course Hannibal cannot be blamed for the hostility of some of the Gauls across whose territories he marched: he had tried to conciliate them and not all had responded. But their resistance did not start until the Rhone and the Alps, nor did they impede him for long intervals. The army suffered worse from Hannibal's own miscalculations. They did not reach the Alps until cold weather and even snow had started, 172 HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? and these conditions caused severe losses in men, horses, elephants, and equipment. This had not been inevitable. As the Carthaginians well knew, many Gallic peoples had migrated (with wagons, families, and animals) across the Alps in both directions and without disaster, just as a decade later Hannibal's brother would bring a new army through in good shape. Hannibal had not left New Carthage till about May, then spent perhaps more time than planned in imposing Punic authority north of the Ebro in Spain itself.2 The result of his near- disastrous march was that he arrived in North Italy with an army reduced by more than half to 26,000 to challenge a power which had three-quarters of a million men of military age available. This smallness of numbers may have had historic consequences. Although the Gauls of North Italy did join him in thousands, they were not as disciplined or reliable as his own African and Spanish troops. When the great battles of 218-216 failed to shatter Roman power or drag Rome to the conference table, he had not enough troops to force the issue - and distrust in what he could achieve with his remaining forces no doubt contributed to his refusal to march on Rome after Cannae, along with the expectation that now the Romans must negotiate. When that failed to happen, he had to march up and down the southern half of the peninsula, trying to detach Rome's allies from their allegiance and on the whole not succeeding exceptionally well. Carthage's naval inferiority made it hard to supply him with reinforce- ments; and, as we shall see, he himself more than once diverted forces that he could have had. His hopes of final victory thus had to rest on a new army repeating the laborious march from Spain; that army never reached him. Had he brought fifty or sixty thousand men safely to Italy, there to be joined by the Gauls, things could have been very different. In victory, most historians would now agree, he did not envisage the destruction of the Roman state, still less of the city itself. The Romans naturally assumed one or the other to be Carthage's aim; but Livy himself has Hannibal (uncharacteristically, from Livy's view of him) assure his Roman prisoners after Cannae that the war was 'de dignitate atque imperio', not a war to the death.3 When the Senate refused to offer talks, he tried to ginger it along by sending an emissary, Carthalo.4 The terms of his alliance the following year with Macedon again assume the continued existence of Rome: both powers agree to stand together in future if Rome should go to war with either (for instance).5 It is sometimes suggested that Hannibal was hiding his real aims because Macedon would not welcome the prospect of Carthage seeking to destroy Roman power and become dominant from Atlantic to Adriatic; but Carthage could not realistically hope to rule or control 173 174 HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? a populous and warlike Italy for any lengthy period. Better to strip Rome of her overseas possessions (there is a hint of this aim in the treaty with Macedon too) and break up the greater part of her Italian alliances: this would reduce her to a second-class power yet prevent the rise of some other Italian state to take her place. It is worth noting that, in the various treaties he made on Carthage's behalf with Italian states that broke away from Rome, Hannibal guaranteed their indepen- dence and entered into a mutual agreement by which either side pledged to support the other in war and peace:6 thus foreshadowing a postwar Italy in which Carthage stood as guarantor of Rome's ex-allies and inhibited any Roman attempt to recover control of them. Clearly there was more to him than military ability. He had a reason- ably coherent power-political goal and did his best to achieve it by diplomacy as well as war. His most enthusiastic modern biographer, Gilbert Picard, sees him as the perfect Hellenistic genius, master of statecraft as well as warcraft, the potential unifier of the entire Mediter- ranean world into a confederated partnership of peoples under Car- thage's leadership.7 But Picard is more eloquent than convincing. Evidence for these ideals is flimsy or lacking; for flaws and miscalcula- tions, by contrast, there is evidence enough. In the years after Cannae the Carthaginians must have felt that they were close to triumph. Much of southern and central Italy went over to Hannibal - even Capua, one of the wealthiest Italian cities and linked to Rome by limited citizenship. Macedon became an ally, and a change of rulers at Syracuse led that old Roman satellite to turn to Carthage in 214. In 211 the Roman expeditionary forces in Spain were annihilated. The Carthaginians, and Hannibal himself, must have felt that his bold strategy had been proved right. Yet, it turned out, not right enough. Much, perhaps most of Italy remained loyal to Rome, and Rome herself still had sizeable reserves of manpower. Moreover Hannibal's own position involved problems. He posed as liberator of Italy, but he had to have bases, supplies, and funds; though we know little of his detailed arrangements it looks as though he expected his Italian allies to provide at least some of his needs. But the amount of help he received does not seem to have been great, apart from contingents of Lucanian and Bruttian troops. Yet it was unwise to put a lot of pressure on the Italians, since it might alienate them. With men and supplies from Carthage a rare event, the need to husband his resources severely strained Hannibal's war- effort. He could have received more help from home, but he seems to have sought little. This is a curious aspect of the war. The only substantial reinforcement arrived in 215: 4,000 men and some elephants. A much HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? larger force, over 13,000, under his brother Mago was diverted to Spain to counteract a Roman victory; a similarly-sized expedition was sent off to Sardinia (of all places) in a bid to retake that lost possession. Yet the vital sector of the war was surely Italy. Powerful reinforce- ments to Hannibal might have brought decisive action even if the cost was the temporary loss of Spain - and as for Sardinia, that was a strategic irrelevance in 215. Its recovery would contribute little to ultimate victory; whereas victory where it counted would have brought all such prizes in the subsequent peace. Two years later another strong Punic army, more numerous than the one with which Hannibal had reached Italy, took the field - in Sicily. This was a fresh effort to entangle the Romans abroad and thus weaken them in Italy; perhaps a further motive was again eagerness to recover a lost possession, this time western Sicily. Again it was a case of resources scattered. The Romans declined to be weakened in Italy, and proceeded to recover Sicily. By 213 Hannibal could make little strategic headway in Italy, despite local coups like the winning of Tarentum. Strong reinforcements might have provided at least the opportunity for greater achievements. At all events the 28,000 troops would hardly have been as thoroughly wasted in Italy as they turned out to be in Sicily. As late as 205, when Mago did bring fresh forces to Italy - this time no fewer than 30,000 men - he landed them in Liguria: about as far from his brother (in Bruttium) as it was possible to get. No doubt it was hard for a fleet with transports to make it past Roman naval screening to southern Italy, but they were on the lookout for Mago wherever he was heading and still he reached Italian soil. It is hard to imagine a worse dispersion of Carthage's last available overseas forces. In these arrangements there is no evidence that Hannibal was sabo- taged by a hostile home government. His authority over strategic decisions is shown by his arrangements for Spain and Africa before setting out in 218 for Italy. It was his brother who was in command of the troops diverted to Spain in 215, and those landed in Liguria ten years later. Polybius stresses that it was Hannibal who all these years held the threads to all theatres of war and diplomacy in his own hands.8 Thus it was Hannibal who allowed himself to do without reinforcements for years on end. There is only one explanation. When the expected denouement to the grand invasion and victories failed to occur, his Italian strategy collapsed. To replace it he tried envelopment of the enemy again, but on a Mediterranean scale. To be sure the collapse will not have been obvious in 215 when he drew Macedon into the war: that will have 175 HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? seemed one further blow, using Macedonian suspicion and resentment towards Rome, to add to the blows which looked like fragmenting Rome's system of Italian alliances. But it proved to be the first step in the replacement strategy. That strategy was both conventional and uninspired. Hannibal's efforts in implementing it were, in any case, too divided and piecemeal, and several were poorly judged. Military (and naval) forces were dispersed; even the alliance of Macedon and Syracuse looked better on paper than it worked in practice. There was little chance that the former could or would supply meaningful help, given her commitments and ambitions in Greece and the East; and in fact she and Hannibal went their own separate ways in prosecuting their struggles with Rome. As for Syracuse, it was by 214 a small power which could hardly make a decisive difference to the outcome. Hannibal cannot have expected anything more from either - or, if he did, he was indulging in quite unfounded optimism. More likely he miscalculated once again Rome's reserves of manpower and determina- tion. The upshot was (as soon became clear) that Carthage would continue to bear the brunt of war: and Hannibal had no new creative strategy to offer. Strategy had boiled down to mere attrition, even though that was the policy that Carthage could afford least. He still won successes over the Romans, but they avoided big battles and preferred to harass his army while striking at his allies. Capua and Syracuse were retaken, later on Tarentum. A proconsul of twenty- four was sent to Spain and promptly began dismantling the Punic empire. Invading Italy had been a fateful gamble, and it had not come off. Hannibal had completely miscalculated the odds. In the Hellenistic world, grand strategy at the highest level had become comparatively straightforward: if you could invade your enemy's heartland and win a couple of set-piece battles, your enemy collapsed and sought terms. The Carthaginians were used to this: more than once a promising expedition against Greek Sicily had been undone in a single day. They had come close to collapse themselves forty years before when Regulus invaded Africa and crushed their army. It remained the norm in the eastern Mediterranean - that was how Rome overthrew Macedon, Syria, and Achaea in the next century, though the first two at least were states not less populous and wealthy than she was. It was the norm Hannibal expected of Rome. His speech to his Roman prisoners in 216 presupposes this view: he had won, fairly and overwhelmingly, so the Senate should admit it and come to terms.9 He had brought no siege equipment from Spain; and throughout his decade and a half in Italy he seems to have acquired little in the way of such equipment, or at any rate to have put it to 176 HANNIBAL: WHAT KIND OF GENIUS? little use - taking cities by surprise or betrayal, or else by starvation, was more his forte. Yet the well-forested land of Italy could have provided as much material for siege machinery as even a Poliorcetes might have wished, and it could have come in very useful. Ironically enough the master of the imaginative and the unconventional in war had made a conventional assumption about his enemies. Their response was not conventional: they kept fighting. That proved enough to defeat him. The same assumption is illustrated, as suggested earlier, in the famous story of how his cavalry commander Maharbal, who had just helped him win at Cannae, urged him to strike instantly at Rome, and how Hannibal refused. The ancients saw this as a fateful decision: 'that day's delay,' says Livy, 'is generally thought to have been the salvation of the city and the empire.'10 Modern historians reject this opinion, stressing that Rome was garrisoned, had powerful walls, and Hannibal had a tired army two hundred miles distant and (as usual) no siege equipment."1 But this misses t