Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (10 page)

The material impact of the invasion is visible at the archaeological site of Kerkouane, situated between the tip of Cap Bon and Clupea. Kerkouane (its ancient name unknown) was a small Punic coastal town that produced a purple-coloured dye much coveted in the ancient world. The town is one of the few purely Punic occupation sites to have been excavated and it gives an insight into the high standard of urban living in a small town that lived off agriculture and fishing. The archaeological record shows us that Kerkouane had only just recovered from Agathocles’ invasion at the end of the fourth century when the Romans under Regulus arrived. The evidence provides a more human aspect to the extensive wars between Carthage and Rome. The small population of Kerkouane lived in a well-constructed cohesive urban centre in small very well-built houses, some of which were decorated with mosaic floors and had internal plumbing and small bathtubs. The sheer number of well-constructed bathrooms in the town has led some scholars to hypothesize that a kind of ritual bathing was an important part of daily life in Punic Kerkouane. It is thought that the invasion of Regulus led to the abandonment of the town. The population was perhaps among the twenty thousand captives taken back to Rome and anyone who remained must have moved away from the exposed location on the sea. It is a beautiful site today that provides a glimpse of the destruction of the countryside during this devastating invasion.
⁸¹

Regulus began his land campaign in the spring of 255
BCE
. He moved west towards Carthage, which lay on the other side of the gulf. At the town of Adyn (perhaps the site of Uthina – just south of Tunis) he met his first Carthaginian opposition led by two generals, Bostar and Hasdrubal. The seasoned Roman commander quickly took the initiative and attacked the Carthaginian positions. Regulus was victorious and moved his forces north through the hills to take the town of Tunes (modern Tunis), which sits eighteen kilometres south of Carthage between the city and its agricultural heartland (Polyb. 1.30.4–15) (maps 1 and 3).
⁸²

Faced with a confident Roman army, a devastated countryside and defections of the Libyan and Numidian allies to their enemy, the Carthaginians were under a great deal of pressure. After a succession of defeats the previously hinted at peace treaty may have seemed an unpalatable necessity. A group of men from the Senate entered into negotiations with Regulus but failed to
come to an agreement. Polybius claims that Regulus had insisted on such harsh demands that the Carthaginian senators were deeply offended and rejected them out of hand (1.31.7–8).

Just at this dark hour for Carthage an expedition returned from Greece with new recruits and an experienced Spartan commander named Xanthippus among them. Xanthippus was given ‘authority to conduct operations as he himself thought most advantageous’ by the Carthaginian Senate (Polyb. 1.33.5). The Spartan general reorganized Punic battle lines employing the elephants to maximum advantage. With his revamped Carthaginian army, Xanthippus engaged Regulus’ forces on open ground. The battle ended in a complete Roman defeat.

The Spartan Xanthippus had saved the city of Carthage, and Hannibal may have studied this famous victory in his youth. It is also possible that Hannibal’s father Hamilcar had fought under the Spartan general.
⁸³
This victory was a dramatic turnaround for the Carthaginians, who now held the Roman consul captive.
⁸⁴
An unexpected Carthaginian victory had again shifted the momentum of the war and it was the turn of the Romans to suffer a series of disasters.
⁸⁵
Rome, upon receiving the news of Regulus’ capture, prepared another fleet to ‘rescue their surviving troops’ in Africa who had fled back to Clupea (Polyb. 1.36.5). After picking up the survivors these ships were caught in a terrible storm while sailing along the south coast of Sicily towards Syracuse. The loss in terms of lives and ships was enormous and after the storm only eighty of over 350 Roman ships remained intact. This account of the Roman disaster would put the numbers of men lost at almost a hundred thousand and whilst these may be inflated numbers the losses were surely in the tens of thousands. Some scholars believe that the Roman innovation of the
corvus
made their ships significantly less stable in open seas and may have exacerbated the calamity.
⁸⁶

The crisis in Africa averted, the Spartan Xanthippus departed from Carthage, surely much wealthier for his endeavours. The focus of the war returned to Sicily but there the momentum again shifted back to the Romans, who rebounded from their defeat with amazing alacrity (so quickly it is ‘not easy to believe’, comments Polybius in 1.38.6). The fortunes of the Carthaginians fluctuated. When they lost Panormus in 254
BCE
it was a significant blow. The city’s deep natural harbour set on the mountainous north-west corner of Sicily had been a Phoenician/Carthaginian allied port for many centuries.
⁸⁷
The Carthaginians still held the west coast ports of Drepanum and Lilybaeum but they had failed to capitalize on Roman setbacks and political infighting during this period of the war.

After the fall of Panormus magistrates at Carthage reportedly sent the captured consul Regulus to Rome ‘clad as a prisoner in Punic garments’. The legend of Regulus permeates the Roman epic history of the Punic Wars and the story goes that Carthage hoped to negotiate a peace treaty or perhaps a prisoner exchange by sending the ex-consul. However, when Regulus appeared before the Senate he described a desperate financial situation at Carthage and urged the Romans never to accept a peace but to fight on until Carthage was destroyed. After this mission Regulus honoured his vow to return voluntarily to Carthage and there he was executed (or died in captivity).

There are a number of elaborate variations of the death of Regulus but the fact that Polybius makes no mention of them leads to the suspicion that they were invented by later Romans hoping to use the story to emphasize the valour of the consul in the face of perceived Carthaginian cruelty. The earliest surviving version comes in a poem by Horace (first century
BCE
), who imagines Regulus’ last days in Rome before returning to captivity and death:

[T]o strengthen the Senate’s wavering purpose,

by making of himself an example no

other man had made, and hurrying,

amid sorrowing friends, to glorious exile.

Yet he knew what the barbarian torturer

was preparing for him. Yet he pushed aside

the kinsmen who blocked his path,

and the people who delayed his going

(
Odes
3.5
)

Later Roman authors embellish the tale further, revelling in the idea of the barbarity of the Carthaginians. The legends describe how the Carthaginians put Regulus to death in a series of particularly gruesome ways. In one version his captors enclosed Regulus in a box with iron spikes and left him to die in a standing position. Even if the torture is entirely made up by Roman sources with the intention of juxtaposing the cruelty of the Carthaginians with the manly courage of the Romans, it makes for one of the lasting images of the First Punic War.
⁸⁸

The authenticity of the reports on the death of Regulus is brought further into question by a story that only appears in one later source, Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus claims that Regulus’ widow was accused of the torture and murder of two Carthaginian prisoners of war in retaliation for her husband’s
death. So serious was the accusation that the family of Regulus was almost prosecuted in the Roman courts (24.12). Modern scholars have often wondered if the story of Regulus’ torture was made up after the fact in order to rationalize the actions of his widow.

With the rejection of their peace offer, Carthage was facing further defeat and their territory had been reduced to the western edge of Sicily, again. Rome was in control of the rest of the island but the Romans in turn suffered a dramatic naval defeat in a battle off Drepanum in 249
BCE
. In 247
BCE
Hannibal’s father Hamilcar stepped into command of the Carthaginian land forces on Sicily. The tide had been relentless and the one remaining Carthaginian base in Sicily was under a Roman blockade. Hamilcar would need to make an immediate impact if the paradigm was to shift away from the continuous defeats suffered by the Carthaginians so far. Hannibal was born that same year, when the long and bloody war was already seventeen years old. The rise of his father to military command in this epic struggle against the Romans, both practically and psychologically, would shape Hannibal’s subsequent life and choices.

CHAPTER 3

HIS FATHER’S SON

I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another, more in harmony with my sentiments – the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since then Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies. (
Freud,
Interpretation of Dreams
, 196
)

S
IGMUND FREUD IMAGINES HANNIBAL’S
relationship with his father Hamilcar in his
Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud tells us that when he was at school the history of Rome and Carthage engaged him and, like many others who saw themselves as outsiders in society, he related more to the Carthaginians than the Romans.
¹
Freud identified with Hannibal and dreamt of a father like Hamilcar to stand up for him against bullies. In the mid-nineteenth century the Impressionist artist Cézanne imagined in a poem how the young Hannibal would cower before his powerful father. These two paragons of modernity, Freud and Cézanne, both connected personally to Hannibal’s story although they interpreted the relationship with his father differently. Both men underscore the enormous influence that Hamilcar had on Hannibal’s life and the choices he made. Many historians, ancient and modern, have attributed Hannibal’s actions and his war against Rome to Hamilcar’s unfulfilled wishes and see in the son the dreams of the father.
²
Whilst it is questionable whether we can attribute Hannibal’s actions directly to Hamilcar, his father’s life and reputation are crucial for any understanding of the choices Hannibal made.

Hannibal’s father was a ‘young man’ when he took up command in Sicily, which places him in his late twenties or early thirties.
³
This may have been the typical age in the military career of a Carthaginian to take up command of an army. Hamilcar was married at the time with three daughters and a son just born. As an elite Carthaginian general from an aristocratic family he would have identified himself with the origins of his great city. The rise to prominence for a family in Carthage may have involved being able to link back to the very roots of the city’s foundation, imagined or real. A strong sense of family identity may be read in the claim that the noble ‘Hamilcar, sprung from the Tyrian house of ancient Barcas’ (Silius Italicus 70–77). The surname Barca meant ‘lightning’ or ‘thunderbolt’ and the link back to Tyre could be Silius Italicus’ imaginative creation of a genealogy that traced the Barcids back to Dido herself. It is equally possible that the claim originated in the Barcid family’s own propaganda. Connecting your family back to the original founders established a close link to Tyre and would have been a prestigious association for a family at Carthage. Thus if Hamilcar was a ‘son of Tyre’ the Barcid family could link their heritage to the followers of the legendary queen Dido. Little else is known about the family history other than the father and the sons and anything beyond that lies in the poetic licence of later Romans.
⁴

Hamilcar was acclaimed as a brilliant and unorthodox military commander during the First Punic War. His leadership during the war and in the subsequent years both at Carthage and in Iberia was celebrated and propelled him yet further forward among the Carthaginian ruling elite. His fame spread across the wider Mediterranean. The Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos would write that ‘Hamilcar and Hannibal are generally admitted to have surpassed all men of African birth in greatness of soul and sagacity’ (
de Regibus
5).

In 247
BCE
the arrival of Hamilcar in Sicily seems to have altered the situation in the last phase of the war.
⁵
‘Hamilcar’s campaign in Sicily against the Romans might be compared to a boxing match in which two champions, both in perfect training and both distinguished for their courage, meet to fight for a prize’ (Polyb. 1.57.1). The young Hamilcar took up command in Sicily and brought innovative thinking to the Carthaginian strategy in the war. He certainly represented a new generation which had come of age during the war with Rome. After seventeen years of fighting, the young men of the Carthaginian elite had witnessed the failure of their traditional military establishment to meet the challenge presented by Rome.
⁶
Hamilcar set out to change the pattern of the war that, up until this point, had been entirely
dictated by the Romans. He harassed and disrupted the Roman occupation of the western part of Sicily by raiding along the Italian coast and generally making the Romans less comfortable in their fight. He did not engage the Roman standing army itself but strategically attacked Roman patrols. The intent was to make the Roman hold on the west of Sicily as unstable and expensive as possible and to restore Carthaginian morale.
⁷

Hamilcar’s attempt to take the initiative away from the Romans and carry the fight into Italy reflects an important shift in the Carthaginian view of the war. Hitherto Carthage had fought a defensive war by trying to hold on to territory as it was pulled away piece by piece. There had, until then, been at least two efforts by Carthage to make peace with the Romans but nothing had come of them. Hamilcar’s initial manoeuvres included raiding the southern Italian coastal area of Bruttium and the region of Locri (Polyb. 1.56.2–11). He continued to attack Italy and to unsettle the newly allied Roman territory in the south of the peninsula. In this way he hoped to relieve some of the pressure on Sicily by turning Roman attention back towards their Italian allies who were suffering under the attacks. It is clear that Hannibal built on this idea in his execution of the subsequent war in Italy decades later.