(247-183 B.C.)
[Illustration: Hannibal.]
Hannibal (the grace of Baal, the Hanniel of Scripture) was the son of
the great Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, and was born in 247
B.C. It is said that in his ninth year his father led him to an altar
and bade him swear eternal enmity to Rome. From the age of nine to
eighteen he was trained in war and diplomacy under Hamilcar in Spain;
and from his eighteenth to his twenty-fifth year he was the chief
agent in carrying out the plans by which his brother-in-law,
Hasdrubal, extended and consolidated the Carthaginian dominion in the
Peninsula. On the death of Hasdrubal, in 221 B.C., the soldiers with
one voice chose Hannibal, then in his twenty-sixth year, as their
general. Forthwith he crossed the Tagus, and in two years reduced all
Spain up to the Ebro, with the exception of the Greek colony of
Saguntum. That town, which claimed the protection of Rome, fell in 218
B.C., and the Second Punic War, or, as the Romans justly called it,
"the War of Hannibal," began. Garrisoning Libya with Spaniards, and
Spain with Libyans (a precaution against treachery), Hannibal set
out on his march for Rome. In the summer of 218 B.C. he left New
Carthage with 90,000 foot, 12,000 horse, and 37 elephants, crossed the
Pyrenees, and gained the Rhone, where his passage was barred by a host
of Gauls. The general thereupon sent part of his troops two days'
journey up-stream, with orders to cross the Rhone and fall on the rear
of the barbarians. His orders were executed by Hanno, and the passage
of the river was safely effected. He crossed the Alps in fifteen days,
in the face of obstacles which would have proved insuperable to almost
any other commander. His troops, reared under African and Spanish
suns, perished in thousands amid ice and snow. The native tribes
threatened the annihilation of his force, and were only dispersed by
his matchless courage and address. The beasts of burden fell over
precipices, or stuck fast and were frozen to death. In places, rocks
had to be shattered and roads constructed to enable the men to creep
round projecting crags. When he gained the valley of Aosta, Hannibal
had but 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse to attempt the conquest of a power
which had lately shown that she could put an army of 170,000
unrivalled soldiers into the field.
[Illustration: Hannibal crossing the Rhone.]
After allowing his men to recruit in the villages of the friendly
Insubres, he overcame the Taurini, besieging and taking Turin, and
forced the Ligurian and Celtic tribes on the Upper Po to serve in his
army. At the Ticinus, a stream which enters the Po near Pavia, he
encountered the Romans under Scipio, the father of Scipio Africanus.
The cavalry of both armies joined battle, Hannibal's Numidian horse
proved their superiority, and Scipio fell back beyond the Po. The
Carthaginians crossed the river, and the first great battle of the
campaign was fought in the plain of the Trebia. Placing Mago in ambush
with 2,000 men, Hannibal enticed the Romans across the stream. His
light troops retired before the legionaries, and as Scipio was
pressing on to fancied victory he was taken in flank by the terrible
Numidian horse, Mago came down in the rear, and the 40,000 men of the
consular army were either cut to pieces or scattered in flight.
Wintering in the valley of the Po, in the early spring Hannibal
crossed the Apennines and pushed through a region of lakes, flooded by
the melting of the snow, to Faesulae. The beasts of burden perished in
vast numbers amid the morasses; the Gauls, disheartened by the perils
of the journey, had to be driven forward by Mago's horsemen, and the
general lost an eye. Quitting Faesulae, Hannibal wasted Etruria with
fire and sword, and marched toward Rome, leaving behind him two
consular armies of 60,000 men. He awaited the consul Flaminius by the
Lake Trasimene, where the hills, retiring in a semicircle from the
shore, inclose a plain entered by two narrow passes. Concealing the
main body of his army amid the hills, he placed his Numidians in
ambush at the pass by which the Romans must enter; while he stationed
part of his infantry in a conspicuous position near the other defile.
The Romans pushed into the valley; the pass in their rear was secured
by the Carthaginians who had lain in ambush; Hannibal's men charged
from the heights, and the army of Flaminius was annihilated. Six
thousand infantry cut their way through the farther pass, but these
were overtaken by the horse under Maherbal and forced to yield on the
following day.
After recruiting his men in the champaign country of Picenum, where
the Numidian horses, we are told, were groomed with old Italian wine,
Hannibal marched through Apulia and ravaged Campania, dogged by the
dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus, whom he vainly endeavored to entice
into an engagement. He wintered at Gerontium, and in the spring took
up a position at Cannae, on the Aufidus. A Roman army of 80,000 men,
under the consuls L. AEmilius Paulus and P. Terentius Varro, marched
against him. Hannibal flung his troops (he had but 30,000) into a
space inclosed on the rear and wings by a loop of the river. He placed
his Spanish infantry in the centre, with the African foot on either
flank. His Numidian horse, now reduced to 2,000 men, he posted on the
right wing; while Hasdrubal, with 8,000 heavy cavalry, was opposed to
the Roman cavalry on the left. The legionaries pressed into the loop,
and Hannibal drew back his centre before them. Hasdrubal, on the left,
broke the Roman cavalry, swept round to the left wing of the Romans,
drove the second detachment of Roman horse into flight, and then came
thundering in the rear of the legionaries. The Libyans, who had by the
general's orders fallen back as the Romans pressed after the retiring
Spanish infantry, now closed on the enemy's flanks. Packed together so
closely that they could not use their weapons, assailed in front,
flank, and rear, the legionaries were hewn down through eight hours of
carnage, till 50,000 lay dead on the field. The battle became a
butchery. Nearly 20,000 men were taken prisoners. The consul Paulus,
the proconsul Servilius, the master of the horse Minucius, 21 military
tribunes, and 60 senators lay amid the slain. On his side Hannibal
lost but 5,700 men. "Send me on with the horse, general," said
Maherbal, "and in five days thou shalt sup in the Capitol."
But the general was wiser than the fiery captain of the horse. It has
been common to censure Hannibal for neglecting to march on Rome after
the battle of Cannae. But his dazzling triumph did not for a moment
unsettle his clear judgment. He knew that his forces were unequal to
the task of storming a walled city garrisoned by a population of
fighting men. An attack which he had made on Spoletium had proved the
inadequacy of the small Carthaginian army to carry a strongly
fortified town. Had he followed the advice of Maherbal, he would in
all likelihood have dashed his army to pieces against the walls of
Rome. His aim was to destroy the common oppressor by raising the
Italian allies against her; and the hope was partly justified by the
revolt of Lucania and Bruttium, Samnium and Apulia. The soundness of
judgment, the patience and self-control which he evinced in this hour
of intoxicating success, are hardly less marvellous than the genius by
which the success had been won. After the battle of Cannae the
character of the war changes. Hitherto Hannibal had swept everything
before him. Rivers and mountains and morasses had been powerless to
thwart his progress. Army after army, vastly superior in numbers and
composed of the best fighting men the ancient world ever saw, had come
against him to be broken, scattered, and destroyed. His career through
Italy had been, in the words of Horace, as the rush of the flames
through a forest of pines. But after Cannae the tide turned. His
niggardly, short-sighted countrymen denied him the support without
which success was impossible. As his veterans were lost to him he had
no means of filling their places, while the Romans could put army
after army into the field. But through the long years during which he
maintained a hopeless struggle in Italy he was never defeated. Nor did
one of his veterans desert him; never was there a murmur of
disaffection in his camp. It has been well said that his victories
over his motley followers were hardly less wonderful than his
victories over nature and over Rome.
Hannibal spent the winter of 216-215 B.C. at Capua, where his men are
said to have been demoralized by luxurious living. When he again took
the field the Romans wisely avoided a pitched battle, though the
Carthaginians overran Italy, capturing Locri, Thurii, Metapontum,
Tarentum, and other towns. In 211 B.C. he marched on Rome, rode up to
the Colline gate, and, it is said, flung his spear over the walls. But
the fall of Capua smote the Italian allies with dismay, and ruined his
hopes of recruiting his ever-diminishing forces from their ranks. In
210 B.C. he overcame the praetor Fulvius at Herdonea, and in the
following year gained two battles in Apulia. Thereafter, he fell upon
the consuls Crispinus and Marcellus, both of whom were slain and their
forces routed, while he almost annihilated the Roman army which was
besieging Locri. In 207 B.C. his brother Hasdrubal marched from Spain
to his aid, but was surprised, defeated, and slain at the Metaurus by
the consul Nero. By the barbarous commands of Nero, Hasdrubal's head
was flung into the camp of Hannibal, who had been till then in
ignorance of his brother's doom. The battle of the Metaurus sealed the
fate of "the lion's brood"--of the great house of Hamilcar. But for
four years Hannibal stood at bay in the hill-country of Bruttium,
defying with his thinned army every general who was sent against him,
till in 202 B.C., after an absence of fifteen years, he was recalled
to Africa to repel the Roman invasion. In the same year he met Scipio
at Zama; his raw levies fled, and in part went over to the enemy; his
veterans were cut to pieces where they stood, and Carthage was at the
mercy of Rome. So ended the Second Punic War--the war, as Arnold so
truly said, of a man with a nation, and the war which is perhaps the
most wonderful in all history. Three hundred thousand Italians had
fallen, and three hundred towns had been destroyed in the struggle.
Peace being made, Hannibal turned his genius to political toils. He
amended the constitution, cut down the power of the ignoble oligarchy,
checked corruption, and placed the city's finances on a sounder
footing. The enemies whom he made by his reforms denounced him to the
Romans, and the Romans demanded that he should be surrendered into
their hands. Setting out as a voluntary exile, Hannibal visited Tyre,
the mother-city of Carthage, and then betook himself to the court of
Antiochus, at Ephesus. He was well received by the king, who
nevertheless rejected his advice to carry the war with Rome into
Italy. On the conclusion of peace, to avoid being given up to the
Romans, he repaired to Prusias, king of Bithynia, for whom he gained a
naval victory over the king of Pergamus. The Romans again demanding
that he should be surrendered, he baffled his enemies by taking
poison, which, we are told, he carried about with him in a ring, and
died at Lybyssa about the year 183 B.C.
In judging of the character and achievements of Hannibal, it must
never be forgotten, that for all we know of him, we are indebted to
his implacable enemies. No Carthaginian record of that astounding
career has come down to us. The Romans did all that unscrupulous
malignity can, to blacken the fame and belittle the deeds of the most
terrible of their foes. Yet, though calumny has done its bitterest
against him, Hannibal not only dazzles the imagination, but takes
captive the heart. He stands out as the incarnation of magnanimity and
patriotism and self-sacrificing heroism, no less than of incomparable
military genius. Napoleon, the only general who could plausibly
challenge the Carthaginian's supremacy, had throughout the greater
part of his career an immense superiority to his adversaries in the
quality of the forces which he wielded. He had the enthusiasm of the
Revolution behind him, and he was unhampered by authorities at home.
Hannibal, on the contrary, saw his plans thwarted and finally wrecked
by the sordid merchant-nobles of the city he strove so hard to save.
He had not, like Alexander, to lead picked troops against effeminate
Asiatics. He had to mould his little army out of raw and barbarous
levies. He had no reinforcements to fall back on. With a motley army
of Libyans, Gauls, and Spaniards he had to encounter a nation in
arms--a nation of the stoutest and most highly trained warriors of
ancient times. There is not in all history so wonderful an example of
what a single man of genius may achieve against the most tremendous
odds, as the story of the Phoenician hero--the greatest captain that
the world has seen.