Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (45 page)

Along with genius, however, came charges of cruelty and avarice, both flaws that Polybius was willing to concede might be a result of the ‘force of circumstances’ rather than the true nature of the man (9.24.1–3, 25–26). In fact the claims against Hannibal were fairly typical of those made by victors about the enemy: breaking of treaties, displacing inhabitants to other towns, confiscating property for plunder, impiety, cruelty.
⁵
The accusations of avarice made by Polybius should be seen in light of Hannibal’s needs. His army and allies depended on him and to succeed he needed to secure a huge amount of wealth.
⁶
We are left, however, with the paradox of Hannibal’s generosity to his troops and this alleged avarice, both of which play an important part in the construction of his afterlife.

Hannibal set out to change the paradigm of power in the western Mediterranean and succeeded, but not in the way that he intended. Instead of restricting Rome’s power, it was the Romans who emerged as masters over the dominions of the Carthaginians by the end of the war.
⁷
The resulting transfer of power, the combination of the Carthaginian and Roman resources and skills, allowed the Romans to take on the divided eastern Mediterranean with the whole force of the west. The Punic Wars had honed the Romans’ skills of warfare. Their navy was now unchallenged and their generals schooled by encounters with Hannibal. The newly allied troops from the Celtic and Iberian lands, combined with the cavalry capable of the best traditions of the Numidians, would help to create a military machine that conquered all in its path. The legacy of Hannibal was the creation of Rome as the only major power in the western Mediterranean and, subsequently, the only power in the whole Mediterranean.
⁸

Thus the memory of Hannibal lies deep in the creation of Roman power. We have seen that the myth of Hannibal was born well before his death, its origins lying in ideas of Hellenistic heroic leadership and his own propaganda. This depiction lay in the heart of his supporters and his enemies, both in Carthage and in Rome. By linking his adventure to the labours of his patron god Melqart/Herakles in his propaganda, Hannibal ensured that the tales and legends of his divine patronage arrived in Italy well before he did in 218
BCE
.
⁹
The stories were propagated both to promote the cohesion of his army and to win over the population along his route. When Hannibal wrote his
res gestae
on a bronze plaque at the temple of Juno Lacinia near Crotona, he was attempting to place his deeds within the wider Hellenistic Mediterranean.
¹⁰

Yet Hannibal’s words were almost completely erased as the Romans went on to conquer the known world and build an empire without any serious challenge to their authority. The whole of the Mediterranean remained Roman territory for the next 500 years. The Hannibalic War was therefore a critical moment in the self-definition of the Romans both as a people and a power.
¹¹
The Romans treated their wars with Carthage as worthy of epic from the very beginning. The First Punic War was glorified in the
Bellum Poenica
of the third-century Latin poet Naevius. Ennius’ account of the Hannibalic War (second century) provided a contemporary view from the Roman perspective. The deeds of Rome in the war with Hannibal were lauded in epic poetry whose traditions can be traced back through the western Mediterranean to the Trojan War. The stories of the Punic Wars are connected with the myths and legends of the star-crossed lovers Dido and Aeneas, who are first linked together during this period of conflict between the two cities.
¹²
Thus the tales of Carthage and Rome were interwoven with the Greek traditions of famous deeds and heroic wars. These traditions combine through the surviving narrative history of the Hannibalic War.

As Rome went on to construct an empire, a key part of the process was the celebration of the heroes of its past. For Scipio Africanus to be considered a military genius it required that Hannibal be a worthy adversary, a foe equal to the conqueror. The Roman hero’s success lay in his ability to adapt Roman troops to Hannibal’s style. Hannibal’s war taught a generation of Romans how to succeed against a Hellenistic army. Thus it is not just Scipio’s reputation that was forged by his encounter with Hannibal but also that of the Roman generals Fabius Maximus, Marcellus and their sons.
¹³
So great was Rome during these decades of conquest that Hannibal had to be equally so. It is fascinating that over time it was the reputation and celebrity of Hannibal, even more than those of his Roman foes, that flourished in the Roman world and beyond.

In the city of Rome memorial and commemoration of the Hannibalic War would have dominated the ritual landscape for many decades. The victory monuments and temples vowed during the fighting became part of the city’s architecture and memory. The list of structures set up in Rome over the period of the Punic Wars runs to hundreds of temples and altars dedicated by the victorious generals. These constitute the visible commemoration of the battles
with Hannibal and were found throughout the centre of the city.
¹⁴
The spoils from the cities conquered during the war – Syracuse, Capua, Tarentum, and eventually Carthage – decorated Rome. For centuries afterwards the landscape of the city kept the memory of Hannibal alive. When Plutarch wrote ‘… near that of the great Apollo, brought from Carthage, opposite to the Circus Maximus’ (
Flam
. 1) he reveals a snippet of the epic landscape that kept Hannibal and Carthage alive in the Roman mind.
¹⁵
Valerius Maximus adds to our knowledge of the Roman memorial landscape. He notes that the Apollo from Carthage stood in Rome without its cloak of gold or its hands. These had been chopped off during the looting of Carthage by soldiers who had committed sacrilege by doing so (1.1.18). The statue stood as a symbol in Rome of the sack of Carthage and the final destruction of the city’s great enemy.

The defeats that Hannibal inflicted on the Roman armies were equally etched into the visual memory of the war. The spot where humans were sacrificed after the defeat at Cannae was still marked centuries later. The temples vowed by each senator during the war stood in the centre of the city. Moreover, a gold shield bearing the portrait of Hasdrubal Barca and weighing 137 pounds hung on the great temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome.
¹⁶
The visual narrative of the Punic Wars became an integral part of the physical surroundings of the city of Rome.

The period of the Punic Wars was a time of great social change in the wider Mediterranean. As the Roman world expanded quickly and the Republic took on the entire Mediterranean and won, the records of these times reflected the conservative memory of those who created them. The upheaval and social change, political violence and civil wars that followed the conquests were ultimately blamed by some ancient commentators on the influence of foreign luxury, foreign gods and a loss of traditional Roman morality. Central to this period of social upheaval were the wars Rome fought with Carthage, but especially the Hannibalic War. In the mind of some Romans of the Late Republic – when there was no one left to conquer and Rome’s generals had turned on each other in civil strife – historians could look back on the war with Hannibal with some nostalgia.

A contemporary theory held that fear of a mortal enemy was a restraining factor on the Roman state. This idea developed less than a century after the end of Hannibal’s war when there was again fighting in Africa. At this time it was the Numidian king Jugurtha, a grandson of Masinissa, who challenged Roman hegemony.
¹⁷
This idea of the mortal enemy developed in the writing of Sallust, a historian of the Late Republic and the African wars of Jugurtha.
For Sallust the fall of Carthage in the second century
BCE
removed the fear of Carthage as embodied by Hannibal and the challenge he represented to the Roman state. Sallust believed that this fear had imposed a kind of political restraint on the state and that the Roman Republic needed the discipline of a great enemy for it to function at its best. Today we only have to look back to the fondness with which people remember the Cold War, or the social cohesion of the Second World War years, to understand this point of view.
¹⁸
Fear is an important factor in political unity within states, and this is perhaps only slightly less true today than it was for the Romans.

Through the chaotic years of the late Roman Republic this idea grew more powerful as the Romans turned on each other and civil war tore their society apart. The most enduring versions of the Carthaginian wars and Hannibal were developed in the period of the Late Republic and into the principate of Augustus. Rhetoric and poetry used the battles with Hannibal and Carthage as a backdrop to depict the true virtues of the Roman people. In these years Cicero, Livy and the poets Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Propertius wrote into orthodoxy the deeds of the Romans who fought Hannibal.
¹⁹

The assessment of Hannibal’s identity and legacy thus changed from the immediate aftermath of the war and the destruction of Carthage, through to the end of the Roman Republic. Representations of Hannibal varied according to the way the Romans remembered their own past.
²⁰
Cicero, writing in the last years of the civil wars, both condemned Hannibal’s Carthaginian treachery and also held him up, on occasion, as a model for Romans to live by.
²¹
For Livy (in the later first century
BCE
) Hannibal was the most dangerous enemy that Rome had ever faced and in his defeat Rome was at her best. At the time of Silius Italicus (first century
CE
) Hannibal could be seen ‘merely as an Alexander impersonator’ who squandered his talents but had orchestrated the greatest threat to Roman hegemony.
²²
As Roman power grew, enemies of quality were harder to find, and the challenge that Hannibal had represented also grew. There were no more enemies like Hannibal to contend with. Pliny the Elder (first century
CE
) tells us that at least three statues of Hannibal could be found in the city of Rome in his time (
NH
34.32). The commemoration of this illustrious enemy was essential to Rome’s glorification of its own power and might.

The intended heroes of Silius Italicus’ epic poem on the Punic Wars were the men of the Republic, whose virtues were held up as moral examples to the Romans of the Empire. These were the men who fought and defeated Hannibal. The tales of Roman glory and the moral example of the illustrious ancestors had an important part in the education of young Roman men in the
Empire. A fearful and great enemy was an idea in the political thinking of the ancient Romans and lent itself to traditional views of the rise and fall of states.
²³
We are told that Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of Scipio Africanus, wept at the fall of Carthage in 146
BCE
, because he saw in its demise the future of Rome itself (Appian,
Lib.
132). Valerius Maximus, writing during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, evokes the memory of Roman glory as a linear progression towards the ultimate height, which is that of the imperial state.
²⁴
In his description of the debate in the Senate at the end of the Hannibalic War, Valerius Maximus (7.2.3) also evokes the power of a great enemy. When the proconsul Metellus questions whether the peace will bring good or ill to the state, he implies that Hannibal’s presence had kept the Romans alert and ready for anything.
²⁵
The Romans of the Empire believed that the machine of the Roman Republic functioned at its best when facing an external threat. Hannibal’s role in the formation of Roman greatness blurs real insights into his character. He became an enemy for all times.

Hannibal’s story connects to many different Roman rhetorical and historical traditions. The satirist Juvenal succinctly reduced Hannibal’s achievements to a few lines of poetry.

Put Hannibal in the scales: how many pounds will that peerless

General weigh today? A man for whom Africa

Was too small a continent, though it stretched from the surf-beaten

Ocean shores of Morocco east to the steamy Nile,

To Ethiopian tribesmen – and new elephants’ habitats

Now Spain swells his empire, now he surmounts

The Pyrenees. Nature throws in his path

High Alpine passes, blizzards of snow: but he splits

The very rocks asunder, moves mountains – with vinegar.

Now Italy is his, yet still he forces on. (
Satires
10.147–159
)

By the time Juvenal wrote his poetry the fear of Hannibal and of the threat he posed was two and a half centuries old. In two separate satires Juvenal mentions schoolboys having to debate whether or not Hannibal should have marched on Rome after Cannae. So deeply embedded was Hannibal in Roman culture that he became a rhetorical exercise for every child at school. His role was ‘to entertain schoolboys, and provide matter for their speeches’.
²⁶
Roman power had reigned supreme for centuries but the legend of Hannibal was still active. For Juvenal, Hannibal could be ridiculed without fear, the
potency had gone but the reputation remained, he was the ‘one eye’d general … who had troubled humanity’.

Scipio’s legend equalled or surpassed that of Hannibal, as demonstrated (or possibly imagined) by a famous scene at the court of Antiochus III at Ephesus where the two old foes faced each other in the 190s
BCE
. The scene was set in the gymnasium where Scipio, as Roman envoy at the court of the Seleucid king, approached Hannibal. Scipio asked Hannibal whom he considered to be the greatest of generals. Hannibal’s first answer was Alexander of Macedon. ‘To this Scipio agreed, since he also yielded the first place to Alexander.’ Then Scipio went on to ask Hannibal whom he placed second to Alexander and Hannibal replied, ‘Pyrrhus of Epirus’ because he considered boldness the first qualification of a general. Hannibal thought it would be impossible to ‘find two kings more enterprising than these’. Scipio was rather piqued by this, but nevertheless he went on to ask Hannibal to whom he would give the third place, ‘expecting that at least the third would be assigned to him’. Hannibal replied, however, ‘to myself; for when I was a young man I conquered Spain and crossed the Alps with an army, the first after Hercules. I invaded Italy and struck terror into all of you, laid waste 400 of your towns, and often put your city in extreme peril, all this time receiving neither money nor reinforcements from Carthage.’