Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (35 page)

When Publius Scipio learned that one of the Celtiberian princes allied to Carthage, Indibilis, was advancing with 7,000 new troops he moved to cut them off before the two forces could meet up and overwhelm him (Livy 25.34.6–8). The Roman proconsul set out by night to engage the Celtiberians in battle but was then attacked from behind by Masinissa’s Numidian cavalry, who had followed them. The final blow came when the full Carthaginian army approached from behind. Thus Publius Scipio was completely surrounded and he and most of his army were lost.

Hasdrubal Barca may have been operating somewhere in the region of Castulo against Gn. Scipio at this point. After the demise of Publius Scipio, the surviving Roman army was extremely vulnerable. It included most of the Celtiberian allies who would by now have been aware of their numerical shortcomings and the defeat of the other Roman army. Hasdrubal Barca was
able to encourage an internal rebellion in the Roman force and soon the Iberians abandoned Gn. Scipio. Hasdrubal pursued the Roman army as they marched north in retreat. The Numidian cavalry in Hasdrubal’s army harassed Gnaeus’ retreating soldiers. The victorious generals who had just defeated the other Roman army then reached Hasdrubal Barca (about four weeks had passed, according to Livy) and were able to completely surround the Romans. The last stand of Gnaeus Scipio took place on a bare hillock. He died fighting bravely as he urged his men on: but only a few survived (Livy 25.36.13).

The story as told by Livy jumps about and it is widely accepted that there is a flaw in his chronology of the deaths of the Scipio brothers and the destruction of their armies in Iberia. Livy places these events a full year earlier than seems likely. The revised date for the death of the Scipios must be 211, so we can assume that it occurred around the time that Hannibal marched on Rome.
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It is tempting to consider whether Hannibal was aware of his brother’s victories before he decided to march on the city. As well as trying to alleviate the siege of Capua, by appearing in front of the city gates Hannibal may have hoped to capitalize on the news from Iberia. Our chronology of the events, however, does not allow for any certainty. The Carthaginian victories in Iberia, although they may have revived Hannibal’s aspirations for a peace deal, had come too late to aid Capua.

The war in the Iberian peninsula had been an enormous struggle, essentially led by two families of talented military commanders battling for the loyalty of the Iberians and control of the resources. The Scipios and the Barcids had fought each other for eight years, engaging, stealing allies, attacking cities and trying to create the advantage. The number of recorded victories for both sides suggests an overall stalemate, with military successes seeming to provide no apparent strategic advantage. It was a shifting and complex situation but the objective of the elder Scipio brothers had been to destabilize the Carthaginian alliances in Iberia and to occupy Hannibal’s brothers, preventing any attempt to unify the armies of Carthage in Italy. In this they had succeeded.

Later in 211 the Romans dispatched Caius Claudius Nero with reinforcements of 12,000 infantry and 1,100 cavalry.
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It was also decided that a commander with proconsular power was needed and that the ‘people should hold an election to create a proconsul for Iberia’ (Livy 26.18.1–11). Livy maintains that in Rome no one was very eager to take up the position of commander in Iberia and when the people ‘turned towards the magistrates and scrutinized the faces of the leading citizens’ they all looked at each other and shrugged (26.18.6). In this hesitancy can we read reluctance among the
Roman elite to take up the role? Perhaps the elite of Rome were disinclined to leave the focus of the fight in Italy, where, after years of hardship, they were just beginning to enjoy the glory and wealth from the sack of major centres like Syracuse and the recapture of Capua. By comparison, the war in Iberia had not yielded any rewards and was fraught with unstable allies and swiftly changing momentum. The indecision and reluctance in the Roman Senate may conceal a broader debate between those who were willing to give Iberia up and focus on Italy to bring about a swift end to the war and those with a more expansive outlook.
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At this moment of uncertainty, so the story goes, the younger Publius Cornelius Scipio (son of the consul of the same name) ‘suddenly … declared his candidacy and stood on higher ground so he could be seen’ (Livy 26.18.4–11). Scipio the younger was then unanimously elected by the people and given a proconsular imperium as a private citizen, even though he had not yet held a senior magistracy in the Senate and was legally too young to hold the position.
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Yet he was ‘the son of Publius Cornelius who had fallen in Iberia’ and was now, with the death of his father and uncle, the head of a very powerful family (Livy 26.18.4–11).
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The underlying steps that led to the unprecedented election of Scipio to the position of proconsul remain obscure. The most convincing argument links the fight in Iberia directly to the family of Scipio. For eight years the loyalty of key Iberian allies had been to the elder Scipio brothers personally and it would be essential for the proconsul in Iberia to build upon what remained of this loyalty.
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Taking the risk of appointing a young and relatively untried commander was a noteworthy shift from the conventional Roman approach.
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For Scipio personally there was the added element of ambition and desire to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle.
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In many ways it was Hannibal who created Scipio, a young man whose formative years were shaped by the struggle of the Second Punic War. Scipio and his generation had no experience other than that of the talented Carthaginian general as a foe. Scipio learned tactics and strategy from the master. In 218
BCE
, as a seventeen-year old, Scipio had bravely saved his wounded father’s life at the battle of Ticinus and almost two years later he is noted as being among the survivors of Cannae.
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After Cannae, Scipio commanded a group of young Roman elites who took an oath ‘never to betray the republic’, neatly matching Hannibal’s oath never to befriend the Romans (Livy 22.53.10–13).
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He was not yet twenty. In 213
BCE
he was elected to the office of
curule aedile,
although below the minimum age for the position. In Rome, with the loss of so many adult men in the battles with Hannibal,
extraordinary measures such as the speedy advancement of precocious military talent were permitted.
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The legend of Hannibal also helped to create the legend of Scipio. The Roman sources construct the narrative of Scipio’s life as the divinely inspired antidote to Hannibal’s great victories. He rose to prominence as the prodigal son sent to avenge his father and uncle. At last, in Roman eyes, they had a hero whose reputation outshone (or at least equalled) that of Hannibal. The legend of Scipio has passed down from Polybius, through Livy and into the Middle Ages and the early modern world. By the time of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Scipio was imagined among the semi-divine: ‘He with Olympias, this with her who bore Scipio, the height of Rome.’
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In the Roman view Scipio would become the greatest military hero of the Republic and was venerated as a legend.

In Rome stories of Scipio’s divine parentage circulated: ‘perhaps deliberately put about, perhaps spontaneous’, they were intended to bring back ‘into currency the rumour that earlier circulated about Alexander the Great’, that his real father was Zeus, in the form of a snake that had often been spotted in his mother’s bedroom (Livy 26.19.5–9).
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The Romans learned from Hannibal to engage in myth management and Scipio embodied all the virtues of the perfect Roman leader. As an equal to Hannibal, Scipio became ‘the most famous man of all time’. The ever-pragmatic Polybius lamented these exaggerations, claiming that ‘mankind can hardly avoid being led astray and forming a false opinion on these matters, since the description provided by those who have written about him departs so widely from the truth’ (10.2.1–3).
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Scipio’s family were among the very powerful in Rome. He was extremely well connected and had married the daughter of Aemilius Paullus, the consul who died at Cannae. The young Scipio was, by the reports in the sources, recognized as militarily talented, devout and politically astute. He was also extremely conscious of his public image and it is reported that he never went out into public life without first visiting the temple, meditating, sacrificing and, if one is cynical, making sure he was seen (Livy 26.19.5–9).
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Polybius’ close relationship with Scipio’s family provides an insider’s view. As Polybius was a client of the family in the second century, his history of the Hannibalic War is often seen as written from their perspective to counter earlier pro-Carthaginian histories that had been written in Greek.
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Scipio, as described by Polybius, was a talented general and canny politician whose successes lay in his ability to command and inspire confidence in his soldiers. As for the claims of divine support, Polybius the rationalist explains these as providing a practical way of encouraging his followers to believe in him, a necessity of
Hellenistic leadership and one that Hannibal also encouraged.
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There is no reason to doubt, however, that he was extremely devout and sought favour from the gods.

Livy’s narrative of the Second Punic War was written to parallel the lives of Scipio and Hannibal, Rome’s greatest general versus Rome’s greatest enemy. The story sets out to balance the pure virtue of Scipio against the duplicity and faithlessness of Hannibal.
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As a result, the focus of our evidence shifts over the course of Livy’s narrative from Hannibal on to Scipio, the younger Roman general becoming the main protagonist in the later books of Livy’s history of the Hannibalic War. It becomes increasingly difficult to view events from Hannibal’s perspective as he was sidelined in the account of the last years of the war.

In 210
BCE
Scipio was twenty-five years old, almost the exact age Hannibal had been when he came to lead the Carthaginian army in the Iberian peninsula eleven years earlier (Livy 26.18.7).
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Scipio represented the new generation of Romans reared on fighting Hannibal, who was now in his thirties and worn down by years in the field. These young Roman commanders were educated and sophisticated in the ways of Hellenistic warfare. Their initiatives changed the paradigm in which the Romans fought and turned Hannibal’s tactics back on to him. In 210
BCE
Scipio left Rome with a fleet of thirty ships, all of them quinqueremes. His route took him from the mouth of the Tiber, around the coast of the Etruscan Sea, the Alps and ‘the gulf of Gaul’, then rounding the promontory of the Pyrenees. Scipio first put ashore at the Roman-friendly port of Emporium (Empurias), in origin ‘a Greek city whose people also derive from Phocaea’ (Livy 26.19.11) (
Map 2
).
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An escort had accompanied him there from Massalia and the Roman allies gathered around him. A coalition of the enemies of Carthage found in Scipio a unifying figurehead for their fight.

Taking Hannibal as his teacher, Scipio planned his approach to Iberia audaciously from the start. He spent his first winter north of the Ebro river at Tarraco (modern Tarragona), collecting information, charming the allies, and understanding the lie of the land. From the outset his strategy differed from what the Romans had done in previous years. Scipio aimed to capture New Carthage and cut the Carthaginian armies off from supplies and reinforcements. This was an extremely bold move since New Carthage was a fortified stronghold with a deep port and good access to Africa. A long siege would be difficult to sustain; however, there was an obvious opportunity that Scipio’s scouts had reported to him. The three Carthaginian armies in Iberia were dispersed into the hinterland fighting ‘at least a ten day march’ from the city,
so New Carthage lay relatively unprotected (Polyb. 10.7.5).
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A high level of confidence seems to have led the younger Barcid brothers and their colleague Hasdrubal Gisgo to relax their vigilance after their victory over the elder Scipios. Polybius notes that ‘they imagined their position in Iberia had been secured beyond any possible doubt’ and did not seem to have considered the possibility that the Romans would return in force (10.36.3). The Carthaginians, although their armies outnumbered the Romans, left a large part of the territory undefended. This was a massive and surprising miscalculation.
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Scipio recognized what we would call today the psychological impact of a quick, dramatic win. An attack on New Carthage would shock the enemy, divide their allies and shake their confidence to the core. The Carthaginian capital city held the treasury and the supplies of the army but the garrison in the city was only about a thousand men. Scipio understood that he could undermine the Carthaginians’ support in Iberia by occupying the hub of Punic culture and wealth, threatening their hold on the whole territory (Polyb. 10.8.1–9).

The element of surprise, so long a feature of Hannibal’s strategy, was put to use by Scipio early in the spring of 209.
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He kept his carefully laid plans secret from everyone except Gaius Laelius, his trusted lieutenant, right-hand man and fleet commander.
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This secrecy highlights Scipio’s belief that his allies might turn out to be unreliable and be infiltrated by enemy spies, an understandable precaution considering the fate of his father and uncle. Laelius sailed to New Carthage ‘while Scipio advanced with his army’ (Polyb. 10.9.4–7). The Romans marched quickly, although Polybius’ claim that it took only seven days to reach New Carthage from the Ebro would mean they covered the approximately 500 kilometres in a week – a feat that seems unlikely, if not impossible.
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