Only one of them had elephants

In August​ 378 AD, the Roman army suffered a catastrophic defeat at Adrianople, near modern Edirne on what is now the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Tens of thousands of soldiers were slaughtered when the Gothic cavalry fell on the Roman flank. The high command of the eastern empire was almost completely wiped out and the Emperor Valens died on the battlefield, his body never recovered. Amid the blame game that began instantaneously, one voice that stands out is that of the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Yes, he wrote, Adrianople had been an appalling bloodbath. But it was not without precedent and the Roman Empire would recover – it had recovered from Cannae, which meant it could recover from anything.

Though it was fought six hundred years before Adrianople, the Battle of Cannae remained proverbial. In 217 BC, at Lake Trasimene in Etruria, the Carthaginian general Hannibal had trapped and massacred one of Rome’s two consular armies, killing or capturing 25,000 men. Then, bypassing Rome itself, Hannibal marched south, devastating Campania and wintering in Apulia. The consuls of 216, each with an army tens of thousands strong, found him there next spring and brought him to battle at Cannae. Anchoring one flank on the line of the river Aufidus, Hannibal pulled off a perfect encirclement, luring the Roman legions to his retiring centre and then wrapping around them with Numidian, Spanish and Gallic cavalry. In the slaughter that followed at least 50,000 were killed, including one of the consuls and about a third of Rome’s senators. Only a few thousand men escaped. And yet Rome recovered. One of the marvels of ancient history is the Roman willingness to sustain heavy casualties, raise yet more soldiers and sacrifice them, too, rather than accept a losing peace. No other ancient state behaved like that. The expansive Roman approach to granting citizenship, as well as fortunate demography, are part of the explanation, but it is also the flip side of the implacable destruction that Roman armies were all too happy to unleash. And so Rome survived Cannae. Its control of the sea denied Hannibal supplies and reinforcements from North Africa, while a new strategy of shadowing his movements but refusing battle prolonged the war in Italy for more than a decade.

Cannae made Hannibal more than just another name in the endless list of Rome’s enemies, but the elephants helped too. Twenty of them, a mix of Indian and North African forest elephants, marched from Spain to Italy with Hannibal and his enormous army in 218. It took him fifteen days to cross the Alps, perhaps via the Col du Clapier or the Col de la Traversette, and descend on a slumbering Italy. The giant tropical creatures struggling through Alpine snow proved an indelible subject for painters including Turner and Poussin and kept Hannibal’s war alive in collective memory like no other Roman conflict. Of his Roman adversaries, none has anything approaching his fame, though Publius Cornelius Scipio comes closest: it was Scipio who took the war to Africa, forcing Hannibal’s recall from Italy, and won the decisive victory of the Second Punic War at Zama, now al-Jamah in Tunisia, for which he was surnamed Africanus.

Born into one of Rome’s great patrician clans in 236 BC, Scipio was the son, nephew and grandson of consuls. He is said to have saved his father’s life in the battle of Ticinus and to have rallied the survivors of Cannae. A master tactician, his campaigns against Carthaginian forces in Spain and his intensive drilling of his troops introduced a new flexibility to the Roman order of battle. For B.H. Liddell Hart, whose military histories were ubiquitous during the 20th century, Scipio was ‘greater than Napoleon’ and his strategies are still studied in army colleges. Alongside this Scipio stands the version created by Cicero, whose ‘Dream of Scipio’ (part of the now fragmentary De re publica) is preserved in its entirety in a commentary by Macrobius, a fifth-century Neoplatonist. In it, Scipio’s grandson by adoption, Scipio Aemilianus, also a military hero, dreams of a dialogue with his grandfather, who foretells his future and says that after death he will rise to the stars and hear the music of the spheres. This vision of the heavens teaches the younger Scipio that Rome is merely a small part of the vast universe, a topic dear to the Neoplatonists and to those medieval Christians who found Macrobius’ handbook of cosmology indispensable: well over two hundred manuscript copies survive from every corner of the Latin Middle Ages. The Scipiones, grandfather and grandson, became moral exempla for the ages.

For the historical Scipio, as for Hannibal, we are tightly constrained by our sources. Books 21-30 of Livy’s history of Rome cover the Second Punic War, and survive complete in a tradition reaching back to an uncial manuscript of the fifth century that can be consulted online in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s expertly digitised version. By the end of the Middle Ages, Florentine humanists had rediscovered the first pentad of Polybius’ Histories, which covered the same period and on which Livy drew and elaborated. Livy is copious to a fault, and Polybius not much briefer, but their testimonies are not independent and there is very little to check them against. They contain more than enough material for a modern narrative treatment, but whether one can extract from them a biography of Hannibal or Scipio is another question. As to their parallel lives, Plutarch, who invented the genre, paired Scipio Africanus with the Theban general Epaminondas, not with Hannibal (who didn’t fit Plutarch’s schema, being neither Greek nor Roman). The parallels between Hannibal and Scipio are pretty tenuous: both spent years campaigning in foreign lands; both their careers ended in bitter failure, brought down by domestic rivals; and that’s about it. Their lives did intersect fatefully twice, at the Battle of Zama and in Asia Minor during the Roman war against the Seleucid king Antiochus III, where Publius Scipio served as his brother Lucius’ legate and Hannibal was a guest at Antiochus’ court. Livy has an anecdote about them meeting and exchanging views on generalship, but the whole episode is deeply improbable. It is not impossible, however, and whether or not to accept it is discussed in a valuable section of Simon Hornblower’s dense, episodic book, a series of pointillist case studies rather than a traditional narrative or joint biography. Though it will be hard going for the general reader, Hornblower’s approach throws up interesting juxtapositions between the protagonists and the societies that produced them.

Hannibal, born at Carthage in 247, was a decade older than Scipio. His childhood and adolescence were spent in Spain. His father, Hamilcar Barca, an experienced general and veteran of the first war between Rome and Carthage, had invaded the Iberian peninsula for its silver mines, to replace the ones Carthage had lost to Rome in Sardinia and Sicily. Hamilcar, it was said, made the child Hannibal swear never to be the friend of Rome, a not wholly implausible story, though – like everything else about the Carthaginians – transmitted by the Romans who defeated them. Hamilcar died fighting and was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who negotiated a treaty with the Romans that set the river Ebro as the demarcation line between their spheres of influence. Rome’s subsequent alliance with Saguntum, a port a hundred miles south of the Ebro, was deliberately provocative and understood as such. When Hannibal succeeded to his brother-in-law’s command in 221, he decided to make an example of the city, and took it in 219 after a nine-month siege.

This guaranteed a war with Rome, and a consular army, led by Africanus’ father (another Publius Cornelius Scipio), was en route to Spain when Hannibal wrongfooted everyone with his lightning march into Italy. The elder Scipio ordered his brother Gnaeus to continue to Spain in order to prevent Carthaginian reinforcements from coming overland, while he marched back to Italy and fought in the long string of defeats that Hannibal inflicted on the Romans. Both Scipiones were fighting in Spain by 217, keeping Hannibal’s allies pinned down and winning a series of victories that counterbalanced Rome’s many failures in Italy. In 211, the brothers died in battle in Spain, and the future Africanus found his moment. Elected by popular acclaim to succeed his father and uncle, he was given an unprecedented command that allowed him to wield the authority of a proconsul without having first held the consulate. In a long list of heroic exploits, his capture of New Carthage (Cartagena in Murcia) in 209 was the most celebrated. The city was joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, with a deep-sea harbour to the south and a marshy lagoon to the north. Repelled after attempting a frontal assault along the isthmus, Scipio realised that a combination of the ebb tide and a powerful north wind had made the lagoon fordable, so he crossed it and took the city from its undefended northern side. He had been guided, he said, by a visitation from Neptune, though others suggested it was the sight of a heron wading in the shallow water, or more prosaically the reports of local fishermen.

After years of success in Spain, Scipio returned to Italy and was elected consul for 205. At first prevented by political rivalries from taking the war to Africa, he did so as proconsul the following year. His goal was to inflict enough pain on Carthage’s hinterland that Hannibal would withdraw from Italy to protect his homeland. It worked. Scipio also succeeded in detaching the powerful Numidian chieftain Masinissa from his Carthaginian alliance. Numidian cavalry fought bravely for the Romans at Zama in 202, and thanks to Scipio’s tactical innovations his units were able to detach from one another and allow Hannibal’s war elephants to pass harmlessly between them. Victory was total and peace was imposed on Roman terms: an indemnity of two hundred talents of silver every year for fifty years, or 260 tonnes in all. Rome wanted to cripple Carthage, which meant there could be no long-term stabilisation in relations. The victory led to a new phase in Roman imperialism. Spain became a theatre of perpetual war for nearly two hundred years, until the whole peninsula was subdued under Augustus. Macedon, whose king had unwisely contracted an alliance with Hannibal that did neither of them any good, was chastised and set on a path that led, two generations later, to the kingdom’s abolition and the creation of a Roman province in its place. The fight against Macedon meant taking seriously the endless intrigues of Greek cities and confederations, and these ultimately resulted in the war with Antiochus III, who had made good on his dynasty’s claim to Thrace and was tired of Roman bullying.

After Zama​ , neither Hannibal nor Scipio showed the talent for peace that they had for war. As befitted his great fame and moral authority, Scipio was elected censor in 199, but did nothing of note in the role. He became princeps senatus – his name was placed first in the roster of senators – and was elected consul for a second time in 194, but prevented from campaigning against Antiochus as he wished. Hannibal, meanwhile, spent seven years at Carthage following his defeat. The Carthaginian system of government is known only sketchily and some of what Latin authors tell us may be calqued from Roman models. Two elected magistrates called sufetes were elected annually from among the city’s leading families but, unlike Roman consuls, did not command armies. Generals were elected separately and there was also a powerful body of judges who served for life and ensured oligarchic hegemony. Hannibal was elected sufete in 196 and seems to have taken measures to weaken the judges’ grip and to reorganise state finances so the annual indemnity to Rome could be paid without excessive taxation. His reforming zeal (if that’s what it was) made him new enemies and enraged old ones. They alleged to the Romans that he was carrying on an intrigue with Antiochus. When a Roman commission of inquiry arrived to investigate in 195, Hannibal fled. Whether or not he had been corresponding with Antiochus, it was in the Seleucid Empire that he now sought refuge. He accompanied the king on his campaigns in Greece in 192, though he seems not to have been present at the defeat at Thermopylae in April 191. Antiochus then retreated to Asia Minor, while the Rhodians, who were allies of Rome, defeated the Seleucid navy and cleared the way for the Romans to advance across the Hellespont. They were led by Africanus’ younger brother, Lucius Scipio; Africanus served as legate and adviser. Illness prevented him from taking part in the final defeat of Antiochus at Magnesia, inland from modern İzmir, in December 190. Lucius dictated the terms of a truce and returned to Rome in triumph, adopting the triumphal cognomen Asiagenes, as his brother had Africanus. The latter, meanwhile, negotiated the permanent peace, agreed at Apamea in 188.

Among its terms, unsurprisingly, was the surrender of Hannibal, but he had fled again, perhaps to Crete, though the evidence is poor. We next find him in Armenia, no longer under Seleucid hegemony, and then in the kingdom of Bithynia, which stretched along the Black Sea coast from the Asian shore of the Bosporus as far as modern Amasra. Perpetually at odds with the neighbouring kingdom of Pergamon, Prusias, the Bithynian king, had remained neutral in the war between Rome and Antiochus, but his long alliance with the Macedonian kings made him an object of Roman suspicion. At Apamea, the Romans ordered him to cede control of Phrygia (the region to the west of modern Ankara) to Pergamon. He refused and the two kingdoms launched a war in which Hannibal is said, most improbably, to have commanded the Bithynian navy and defeated a Pergamene fleet by catapulting pots of venomous snakes onto the enemy ships. Finally, in 183, the Romans demanded that Prusias hand Hannibal over. Anticipating betrayal, he took poison.

Scipio’s last days were no happier. Rome’s leading families, in their fierce competition for public office, were reflexively hostile to any member of their order who accumulated too much wealth, fame or prestige. The Scipiones were bound to be resented. Their enemies, led by the hero of Thermopylae, Marcus Porcius Cato, brought charges of embezzlement against one or both of the brothers, and may have accused Africanus of accepting bribes from Antiochus. The narrative is tangled, but Cato, censor in 184, seems to have stripped Asiagenes of his right to a horse at public expense, a privilege reserved to Rome’s two leading orders. Rather than suffer harassment, Africanus retired to a villa in Liternum on the coast of Campania north of Naples. He died there in 183, the same year as Hannibal.

His reputation was burnished retrospectively by the glorious career of his adoptive grandson, Scipio Aemilianus. But his two other grandsons were as notorious as they were famous. Scipio’s daughter, the younger Cornelia (Roman women were not given individual names, merely the feminine of the family name), married Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who had served with her father and uncle in Asia and later covered himself in glory by defeating the Celtiberians. The marriage produced twelve children, but only three lived to adulthood. The daughter, Sempronia, married her adoptive cousin, Scipio Aemilianus. The two sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, as tribunes of the plebs advocated land reform and redistribution. Hate figures for the later oligarchy, heroes to future reformers, both died by violence of the sort that would plague the late republic and ultimately result in the Augustan empire. Their notoriety helped keep the fame of Africanus alive, even if couched as a warning of the way ancestral virtue could be degraded in subsequent generations. Rome was still wrestling with the meaning of the Gracchi when Cicero wrote his ‘Dream of Scipio’ and cemented the Scipionic legend. Hannibal had no offspring, as far as we know, and no political legacy to speak of, but he is the one who lives on in popular memory. Blame the elephants.