Hannibal (30 page)

When Scipio left Africa after his meeting with the Numidian king Syphax, he could be pleased that he had achieved his object and that Syphax was now an ally of Rome. Scipio knew from the war in Spain and Italy that a fearsome and efficient part of the Carthaginian armies was provided by their Numidian horsemen. He hoped that he could count on this alliance to give his own invading army the cavalry in which the Romans tended to be deficient. Before he even left Sicily, however, he heard from Syphax that Scipio could count on no support from him and, indeed, Syphax carefully warned him not to invade or he would meet with disaster. What had happened was that, during Scipio’s absence in Rome and Sicily, Hasdrubal Gisgo had won back Syphax’s allegiance to Carthage by offering him in marriage his beautiful daughter Sophonisba. The Numidian king, while under the influence of the first transports of love’, abandoned his Roman alliance and became the faithful servant of Carthage. Masinissa, the other powerful Numidian king and the deadly enemy of Syphax, after a long struggle for the throne of his Numidian kingdom, was then defeated by Syphax and forced into hiding. One thing only was certain when Scipio left with his invasion force for North Africa: he had lost the support that he had counted on from Syphax but, so great was the hatred between him and Masinissa, the latter might be counted upon to help the Romans if it meant revenge upon the man who had humiliated him.

In the spring of 204 Scipio’s troops disembarked at Cape Farina (the Promontory of Apollo), the headland forming the western arm of the great bay on which Carthage lay. Close to hand was the town of Utica which Scipio hoped to use as his main base and port for the African campaign. The arrival of the Roman fleet and army so close to their city caused a panic among the Carthaginians that may even have exceeded the state into which Rome had been thrown by the early exploits of Hannibal. Unlike the Romans they had no large standing army, having always depended heavily on mercenaries; they had no reliable allies, and no great general to hand, with Hannibal far away across the sea in Bruttium. One suspects that even so early in the African war there must have been voices raised to recall Hamilcar’s son. The Carthaginians only knew by repute what Hannibal had achieved in Europe, but they must have remembered how his father had saved them before. In the meantime Hasdrubal Gisgo began to raise an army (of indifferent quality) while Syphax, still enamoured of his bride and therefore of Carthage, prepared to aid him with his cavalry. As might have been expected, the latter’s arch enemy, Masinissa, now appeared in Scipio’s camp, promising the help of his own Numidian horsemen. The hatred between these two North African kings is said to have been fuelled even further by the fact that Masinissa had also been a suitor of Hasdrubal Gisgo’s daughter, Sophonisba, and, to echo Livy, ‘Numidians surpass all other barbarian people in the violence of their appetites’. Sex, it seems, as well as politics played a part in the war.

Having achieved his objective, the invasion of Carthaginian territory with an adequate army and fleet, it might have been expected that Scipio would have acted with the same dash and determination that had given him New Carthage and then all of Spain. Instead he seems to have hesitated, almost as if he was daunted by the strangeness and vastness of North Africa. Unlike Hannibal in his crossing of the Alps, Scipio had been able to transport siege machinery in his ships from Sicily, and he had many trained siege engineers among his men who had assisted at the capture of Syracuse. But Carthage on its shimmering bay was undoubtedly much more formidable, and perhaps he did not know of the poor state of morale within the city and its inadequate forces. He never seems to have considered attacking it, but instead began the siege of Utica. It is also possible that Scipio was haunted by the memory of the famous Regulus who, after early successes in the same area during the First Punic War, had been decisively defeated and had died under torture at the hands of the Carthaginians. He had been warned of the fate of Regulus by the Fabians in the Senate and he knew how many of his enemies in Rome would be glad to see his hubristic plans laid low.

In any case Scipio decided to secure his base at Utica before moving to consider an attack on the capital. Even in this objective, however, he was unsuccessful: for nearly forty days the towers and walls of Utica were attacked by land and sea, yet still the defenders held out. Then the relieving force under Hasdrubal Gisgo and Syphax arrived—an army, according to Polybius, larger than Scipio’s and with a formidable amount of cavalry. Obliged to raise the siege, Scipio withdrew his forces into a camp on the headland, where he set up winter headquarters. The first year’s campaign in the land of his enemies had not been a success and he was still held in check on the beachhead where he had landed so confidently earlier that year.

While Scipio was engaged in Africa, the two consuls for the year were in Italy, one, Cornelius Cethegus, watching Etruria and the north in case Mago should move, and the other, Sempronius Tuditanus, guarding Bruttium and Hannibal. Sempronius, ambitious and eager to try conclusions with the Carthaginian, marched down to threaten Hannibal’s last stronghold, the town of Croton. In the first confused clash, while both armies seem to have been on the march, the Romans were worsted, losing about 1,200 men. Unwilling to take any further risks, Sempronius summoned up the proconsul Publius Licinius with his two legions. There were now four Roman and four allied legions moving on Croton, and Hannibal, whose forces by this time can have consisted of barely half that number, prepared to accept battle, the reason no doubt being that he could not afford at this stage to abandon the city and the port. With insufficient Numidian cavalry and practically no trained heavy infantry from Spain or Carthage, his unskilled army was forced to retreat within the walls of the city, losing, so Livy tells us, over 4,000 men. The consul could perhaps claim to have been the first man to have driven Hannibal from the field during all the years in Italy. But his objective, Croton, was still in the hands of Hannibal, who stayed behind the closed gates. He could afford to wait.

Had Hannibal been able to withdraw that year with whatever army and ships he could muster, his appearance on the coast of Africa would have changed the course of the war. The senate and people of Carthage would have rallied their spirits; his very name would have called in the tribesmen and the horsemen in their thousands; Roman morale would have slumped. Scipio had been unsuccessful at Utica and had done little except harry the surrounding countryside; the arrival of Hannibal over the sea behind him would have put the Romans at such a disadvantage that they might have been forced to evacuate. But no word came to summon Hannibal back to the city.

The role of Mago in this phase of the war is not well documented, but from such information as is available, it seems that Mago did not intend to make a conjunction with Hannibal but rather to divert Roman attention to the north, thus preventing the movement of a Roman invasion force to North Africa. His recruitment of Ligurians to his cause was successful, especially since he had shown how he could dominate the whole Gulf of Genoa by his occupation of the two major ports and his fleet’s activity in that area. The Cisalpine Gauls, however, who had shown themselves some-what reluctant to join Hasdrubal when he had come down through the Alps, were even less willing to join a cause that they now saw so far in decline. Their fathers had sprung to arms behind Hannibal, hoping to see Rome destroyed, but despite Hannibal’s successes they had died all over Italy, and such few as still remained with him were pent up hundreds of miles away in savage Bruttium. The Gauls had witnessed the failure of Hasdrubal at the Metaurus river, and this youngest brother of the family, Mago, could hardly move them to risk the wrath of Rome. (They had also learned the benefits of those settled agricultural areas which the Romans made possible, and the simple Homeric warfare of their fathers had become less attractive.)

In the summer of 203 Mago seems to have crossed into the area of the Po, thus concentrating the attention of the Roman legions to the north. Clearly he hoped for a rising in Etruria against the Romans. Whatever the intention, Mago was engaged in a major battle with the Romans on Italian soil in 203. It seems to have been hard-fought, with considerable losses on both sides, but with the Carthaginian forces yielding the day. During this action Mago himself was seriously wounded, and withdrew with the other survivors into Liguria. This was to be the last major engagement in Italy between Carthaginians and Romans in the course of the war. On his arrival in Liguria, Mago found instructions awaiting him to return with his ships and men to Carthage. The mother-city, threatened by Scipio, was now on the defensive. The Italian venture was, to all intents and purposes, to be abandoned. Mago died of his wounds as his fleet passed Sardinia—that island of timber and minerals which was now under Roman control, but which had once been one of the largest of the many Carthaginian island-colonies that had threatened Rome.

During the winter of 204-203, while Hannibal remained in Croton and his brother Mago prepared for the spring offensive that led to his death, Scipio was busy in North Africa. He had failed to capture Utica, and the opening of his campaign had not yielded the success that he may have expected after his experience with the Carthaginians in Spain, but he had never ceased to work at his overall strategy—the defeat of Carthage with, as ultimate aim, the incorporation of the city’s North African empire into that of Rome. (No man may claim more credit—or blame—for the nurturing of the Roman empire than Publius Cornelius Scipio, who has been hailed in the twentieth century by the British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart as ‘greater than Napoleon’.)

Realising that the Numidian Syphax was possibly of more consequence than Masinissa, commanding more forces—and forces on which Carthage was largely dependent—Scipio decided to try to detach him from his allegiance. Throughout the winter envoys moved back and forth between the Roman and the Numidian, Scipio pretending to an authority which was never his—that of being able to make a peace treaty without any reference to Rome—and Syphax suggesting an end to the war by an agreement between Scipio and Hannibal that the one should leave Africa and the other Italy. The negotiations were protracted, for Scipio could easily divine that Syphax only wanted the Romans out of the way so that he could finally destroy his hated rival Masinissa and take over all his kingdom. When the Roman envoys went to visit the camps of their enemies they were always accompanied by senior centurions, disguised as grooms and servants, who took the opportunity, while their ‘masters’ were in conference, of making a careful study of the camps and the disposition of their enemy. Upon their return they reported that discipline was lax, morale low, and that the Carthaginians were housed in wooden huts, while the Numidians lived in reed tents, a great many of which were not even within the stockade of the camp.

By the early spring of 203 Scipio was ready for his offensive. He sent a message to Syphax that he was ready to conclude a treaty but that he had some opposition—which he hoped to overcome—from his senior officers, and this meant that he must, for the moment, break off negotiations. Syphax and Hasdrubal Gisgo took this to mean that in due course Scipio would be able to persuade his fellows of the good sense of a treaty, and they sent back a reply that for their part they were only too willing to agree to the terms that had been discussed. Scipio now knew not only the disposition of the enemy, but that their morale was low and that they eagerly sought peace. His whole behaviour was far from in accordance with that old Roman tradition of good faith, which their historians liked to contrast, unjustly, with so-called ‘Punic’ faith. Indeed, it would seem that the Carthaginians often behaved more scrupulously than the Romans. Hannibal’s conception of the honours of the battlefield, for instance, always entailed paying the proper respects to the enemy dead, while Claudius Nero after his victory at the Metaurus river had descended to the level of cutting off the head of Hannibal’s brother, preserving it, and then throwing it into Hannibal’s lines at night.

Scipio, having induced a feeling of relaxation among his enemies, now began to move. He reopened the siege of Utica by land and sea, sending round his fleet—newly launched after the winter—to blockade, while the main engines of war were dragged from his camp for the land attack. All this was no more than a blind to distract the Carthaginians from his real intention, and possibly to convince Syphax and Hasdrubal Gisgo that he was continuing to play at a war that did not really threaten them, whilst waiting for his Roman opposition to be persuaded that a peace treaty should be sought. His clever diversion succeeded, and the Carthaginians and Numidians felt secure that he was doing no more than repeat his tactics of the previous year. Then Scipio struck.

One night, the Roman officers suddenly began to move their men out of camp as soon as the trumpet-call announcing nightfall had been sounded. Some seven miles lay between them and the enemy encampments, which they reached about midnight. Scipio’s right-hand man, Laelius, was assigned together with Masinissa and his horsemen to attack the Numidian camp while Scipio attacked the Carthaginians. With the attentions of the Carthaginian and Numidian leaders concentrated upon Utica, and relaxed by the long-protracted peace negotiations as to their state of preparedness, their camps were vulnerable targets. Masinissa’s Numidians had no difficulty in riding in amongst the camp of Syphax and setting fire to the reed huts—they were accustomed to living in them themselves and they knew how readily they would blaze. There was a wind blowing, possibly a southerly at that time of the year, and in a short while the whole encampment was on fire. As the drowsy occupants rushed out, thinking that no more than an accident had happened, they were cut down by Masinissa’s horsemen. Alerted by their sentries of the holocaust in the neighbouring camp, the Carthaginians began to leave their wooden huts—unarmed spectators. As they did so, Scipio’s Romans (many still smarting from Cannae) fell upon them. The Carthaginian camp too was burned to the ground, and the Carthaginians were killed in their thousands.