Hannibal (16 page)

His experience throughout the summer had taught him that Fabius was not to be drawn, while his recent encounter with Minucius had shown him that the latter, even if able enough, was capable of being lured into attack. He proceeded, then, to lay an ambush very similar in style to that which had been so successful at the Trebia and, using once again his assessment of his opponent’s character, to make this factor work for him, as well as the lie of the land itself. Polybius tells the story:

There was an eminence between his own camp and that of Minucius capable of being used against either of them, and this he decided to occupy…. The ground round the hill was treeless but had many irregularities and hollows of every description in it, and he sent out at night to the most suitable position for ambuscade five hundred horses and about five thousand light-armed and other infantry. In order that they should not be observed in the early morning by the Romans who were going out to forage, he occupied the hill with his light-armed troops as soon as it was daybreak. Minucius, seeing this and thinking it a favourable chance, sent out at once his light infantry with orders to engage the enemy and dispute the position.

Eager to drive what he imagined to be Hannibal’s advance guard from the hill and deny it to him, Minucius sent forward his cavalry, then himself advanced with his two legions. All the attention of the Romans was entirely fixed upon the hill where the preliminary battle was taking place. In order to convince the Romans that this was the main object of his interest, Hannibal kept sending forward reinforcements to assist his men who were holding the position against the Roman attack. The Roman light forces were gradually driven back by the weight of the Carthaginians and, as they retreated, fell foul of the legions advancing to support them and threw them into confusion. Now was the moment—and the signal was given. Hannibal’s concealed troops rose up from all directions, and fell upon the legions in the rear. The whole of Minucius’ army was now in a perilous position…another Trebia was imminent. They were saved only by the action of Fabius. For once ‘the delayer’ delayed no longer, and brought his own two legions to the rescue. Hannibal, seeing the fresh legions advancing, wisely abandoned the pursuit of Minucius’ panic-stricken army and withdrew his own men. The Romans had lost many of their light troops and even more of their best legionaries.

It was a lesson that Minucius took to heart. He not only apologised to Fabius, while thanking him for his rescue, but also admitted that the whole idea of two dictators and the division of the army was wrong. He handed over his part of the command to Fabius and willingly relegated himself to his former position of Master of the Horse. The two separate Roman camps were broken up and the army once more composed itself into a single strong unit with one base: everyone acknowledging that Fabius was rightfully the sole leader and that his strategy had all along been correct. Hannibal was not slow to realise that this deliberate choice by the Romans of a new unity boded ill for his campaign. The willingness of the defeated troops and their commander to accept the leadership of Fabius, whom he had learned to respect over those summer months, showed a new spirit. ‘Then for the first time,’ comments Livy, ‘they realised that they were fighting with Romans and in Italy.’ During the campaign of the past year, and ever since the engagement at the Ticinus the year before, they had grown to despise both the Roman soldiers and their generals, but already there was evidence of change. ‘And Hannibal is said to have remarked, as he was returning from the field, that at last the cloud which had long been hanging about the mountain-tops had broken in a storm of rain.’

Hannibal now had a stockade erected around the hill and linking this position up by trenches with his camp at Geronium settled down for the winter. Until the spring of 216 B.C. the two armies lay opposite one another, and the months went by without any further real action. Fabius’ term of office as dictator came to an end and until the election of new consuls in the following year, Servilius, who had commanded the legions at Ariminum, and Marcus Atilius Regulus, who had succeeded Flaminius on his death at Trasimene, held the command. Hannibal had much to think about. The year which had begun so well for him, and during which he had nothing but success over the Romans, was not entirely happy for the Carthaginians. Things had not gone well in Spain. There had been a revolt among the Celtiberians, the Romans were consolidating their hold over the northern part of the country, and his brother Hasdrubal had withdrawn south of the Ebro for the winter. Everywhere at sea the power of the Roman fleet had shown that the control of the Mediterranean still remained firmly in their hands. He had not been able to take advantage of his victory at Trasimene by attacking the Roman capital; and not a single ally had come over to him. No reinforcements had reached him from Carthage and, as Carthaginian spies within the city must have sent word, seaports like Neapolis had declared their allegiance to Rome to be unshaken.

O’Connor Morris, in
Hannibal: Soldier, Statesman, Patriot,
has summed up the position at the end of the year:

And if Rome had been defeated by a great captain, her resources for war were still enormous. She had already summoned eight double legions to the field, the numbers of men in the ranks being largely increased, for the campaign of the coming year; she was about to oppose 90,000 men to Hannibal, who had not more than 50,000, three-fourths of them being, perhaps, Gauls; she had prepared an army to march into northern Italy, to prevent the Gauls from assisting their terrible enemy. Her stern national spirit, too, was as bold as ever; she sent threats to the court of Macedon, and to the Illyrian tribes, warning them that they had better remain quiescent; and with admirable wisdom, she refused gifts of money offered by Hiero, her vassal king in Sicily, and by several of the allied Italian states, accepting, however, their aid for the war.

The only news that may have inspired Hannibal with confidence was that the Romans did not intend to re-elect a dictator: they were reverting to the consular system. The names and the histories of the two new consuls may also have given him cause to feel that his enemies were repeating their old mistake. One was a partisan of the aristocracy and the other was a known demagogue. The former was Lucius Aemilius Paulus, member of a celebrated patrician family, who had held the office of consul in 219 B.C. and who had a good military record. He was known to be a staunch adherent of the aristocracy and had been voted into office by them for this second time in order to counterbalance the influence of his fellow consul, Gaius Terentius Varro. Two men more dissimilar could not have been chosen. Varro was a plebeian of ultra-democratic opinions who had managed to get voted into office by the people for his defamatory attacks on Fabius the dictator. His arguments, and those of his supporters, will be familiar to those who have observed the pattern of similar politicians in later centuries: the nobles had been seeking war for many years, and it was they who had brought Hannibal into Italy. It was their machinations, too, that were spinning out the wary when it might be brought to a victorious conclusion; the consuls had employed the arts of Fabius to prolong the war, when they could have ended it. The nobles had all made a compact to this effect; nor would the people see an end to the war until they had elected a true plebeian, a new man, to the consulship….

Hannibal would have been familiar with the nature of the two consuls, for he had his informants in Rome (Livy mentions one Carthaginian spy who was caught and had his hands cut off). He could only hope for some almost inevitable division of opinion between the patrician and the plebeian, something of which he could take advantage in order to force upon the Romans the battle that Fabius the dictator had denied him. Despite his triumphant record in Italy over the past two campaigning seasons, Hannibal badly needed a victory. He needed a victory so decisive that the allies of Rome would at last begin to break away from her.
 

XV

CANNAE

In the spring of 216 B.C. Hannibal began to move. The grain of Geronium was almost exhausted and there was nothing further to be taken from the surrounding land. While the Romans maintained a steady supply system to their army in the field, Hannibal was always compelled to capture a rich depot or to live off the country, a disadvantage that he was to suffer throughout his campaigns. He marched southwards, and crossing the river Aufidus (Ofante), descended upon the town of Cannae. It was a place of no importance in itself, but it was one of the original Roman grain depots, and one from which they had been supplying their army. The town was sited on a hill that stood up abruptly out of an undistinguished plain through which the Aufidus flowed in serpentine fashion down to the Adriatic some six miles away. By seizing Cannae, Hannibal deprived the Roman army of a main source of supply, as well as securing more than adequate food for his own army. Furthermore, the early corn of Apulia was ripening and he was thus in a position to cut off the Romans from these future crops.

Servilius and Atilius, the consuls of the previous year who were still with the army, were in a dilemma. Until they had been officially relieved by the two new consuls, Paulus and Varro, they were technically in command. They certainly had no wish to give battle against the formidable Carthaginian, particularly since they knew that the army that was due to join them provided about the only hope that the Romans had of defeating their enemy. Apart from giving battle, their only real options were of following Hannibal at a safe distance and drawing their supplies from depots far away, or withdrawing the army altogether until they were joined by the new legions.
 

The senate were determined that year on battle. They had the support not only of the people but also of the equites, the aristocratic knightly caste. All sections of the population, although there was great division among them—division that had been fostered by men like Varro-were determined to avenge the defeats that Rome had suffered in the campaigns of the previous two years, and to expunge the slight that had been cast upon the Roman name by the presence of this Carthaginian general and his makeshift army in the land of Italy. Not only their honour and their traditions called them out to offer their services; it also seems that plebeians and aristocrats alike realised that Rome, not just the city but the whole concept of
Roma eterna,
had reached a crisis point. Although Rome was still a Republic, it was a fact that Imperial Rome had already begun to come into being—and no empire can survive which cannot deal with an invasion of its homeland. It was essential, to maintain the respect of the countries that were already under its sway, or were about to become so, that the invader should be annihilated. Determined, then, on a decisive battle on a grand scale the Senate gave orders for the proconsuls to remain with the existing army and make no move until they were joined by Paulus and Varro-and the new army of 216. So, to quote Livy: ‘The will of the majority prevailed, and they proceeded, under the malign influence of Fate, to make famous the name of Cannae for the disaster that there befell the Romans.’

The legions under Servilius and the new ones under Paulus and Varro, according to Polybius, numbered eight in all—a figure which he himself describes as unprecedented. Certainly no Roman up to that time had had any experience of handling such numbers of men and, although arguments have been advanced to suggest that not more than four reinforced legions took the field, the disaster of Cannae—the total confusion in the latter stages—does suggest that things had got completely beyond the control of the consuls, something unlikely to have happened if they had been handling an army of familiar size. Livy is unsure of the constitution of the army and gives a number of variants, but the very minimum would be 45,000 men, exclusive of cavalry, and more probably 60,000. Polybius points out that each legion consisted of about five thousand men ‘apart from the allies’ and, if there were eight legions (40,000 men) and each legion was as usual ac-companied by an equal number of allies, it is not difficult to accept the traditional figures of some eighty thousand men in the army that went to meet Hannibal at Cannae. Their great weakness lay in cavalry, of which they seemed to have had no more than 6,000. Against them Hannibal opposed 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.

Part of the argument which has arisen over the exact number of the Romans engaged at Cannae seems to have stemmed from the fact that commentators have been unwilling to accept that there could have existed such a disproportion between the size of the two armies: at the most the Romans being double the number of their enemy, and at the very least about a quarter greater. But enough examples exist throughout the ages of small forces triumphing over large ones, and at Cannae there were many advantages on Hannibal’s side that far outweighed any numerical superiority enjoyed by the Romans. First of all, he was not only a genius of warfare but he was also in sole and undivided command. Secondly, his other commanders were exceptionally brilliant, had worked and fought together on many a battlefield, and knew and respected the quality of their leader. (Like Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’ they did not need any orders once action had commenced, for they completely understood one another.) Thirdly, the Carthaginian army, composite though it was, consisted entirely of experienced soldiers (soldiers who enjoyed the advantage that previous success had given them—complete confidence), whilst the majority of the Romans and their allies, on the other hand, were untried new levies. Last, and by no means least, the Carthaginians, by being first upon the scene, were refreshed and had had time to explore the whole area around Cannae and the Aufidus river, whereas the Romans were arriving after a long march at an unfamiliar place, and with commanders who were at variance with one another. Despite the disproportion in numbers, therefore, the real odds were in favour of the Carthaginian and it is extremely unlikely that Hannibal suffered much more concern than any general who is about to commit his army to battle.