Hannibal (6 page)

Hannibal knew all this, and knew also that the disconsolate Roman mission had returned to Rome with the news that Spain was hostile, the Gauls neutral but unfriendly, and only the people of Massilia firmly committed to their cause. When the two new consuls were chosen for the year the most active of them, Publius Cornelius Scipio, drew the lot which determined him to regard Spain as his ‘province’—always the long-term Roman intention. Hannibal heard during the winter that Rome was fitting out a new fleet, and this, followed by Scipio’s appointment, confirmed his judgement that the enemy had their eye on Spain. The siege and sack of Saguntum, which they claimed as an ally, was something that could not be tolerated if Roman prestige was not to be eclipsed among Gauls and Iberians alike. They had command of the sea—Hannibal having little more than a few warships for the immediate protection of shipping between Spain and North Africa—and a landing of the legions in Spain was now to be expected. Hasdrubal received instructions from his brother to take command in Spain should Hannibal be absent at any time during a Roman attack.

So far Hannibal’s master-plan seemed to be bearing fruit. The enemy, conscious of their supremacy at sea, were clearly preparing to transport legions via Massilia for an invasion of the new Carthaginian territories south of the Ebro. But what the Romans could not have imagined was that Hannibal was not preparing to defend his new territories himself, nor even planning merely to cross the river to carry on his campaigns in the north. They themselves would never have envisaged traversing the wild Pyrenees, the unknown lands of savage Gauls, and then the fearsome Alps, in order to engage their enemy. Such a course would be nothing less than fifteen hundred miles of madness…. They had reckoned without the Carthaginian.
 

VI

OPENING MOVES

Hannibal now had his war—and on his own terms. He had most of Spain south of the Ebro united behind him, his brother in command in their strong new city-port, and all the men and more that he needed for his army. Owing to his political strategy the war had been declared by the Romans and it was they who could be seen as having broken the peace treaty with Carthage. This was not unimportant, for it could be quoted to hesitant Gallic tribes as an example of Rome’s lack of faith—and a reminder to them not to take their word when treaties were in the offing. Outmanoeuvred by Hannibal as they were often to be in both political and military terms, it was hardly surprising that in years to come the Romans should coin the expression ‘Punic faith’ to signify untrustworthiness and lack of faith—something of which they were well aware that they had been guilty themselves. They knew they had been wrong over Sardinia and they either were, or had been made to seem, in the wrong over Saguntum.

Hannibal had made careful dispositions of his troops to safeguard Africa as well as Spain, and to ensure that his brother Hasdrubal was not confronted with any problems of loyalty while he was away. He adopted the wise policy of transferring Spanish troops to Africa and African troops to Spain. Polybius may be considered an accurate authority on the state of the military chessboard at the beginning of the campaign: ‘The troops who crossed to Africa were supplied by the Thersitae, Mastiani, Iberian Oretes and Olcades, and numbered twelve hundred horse and thirteen thousand eight hundred and fifty foot, besides which there were eight hundred and seventy Balearians [Slingers]…. He stationed most of these troops at Metagonia in Libya and some in Carthage itself. From the so-called Metagonian towns he sent four thousand foot to Carthage to serve both as reinforcements and as hostages.’ In Spain he left fifteen thousand men, twenty-one elephants, and a small fleet of about fifty warships. As evidence for his documentation of Hannibal’s dispositions Polybius concludes: ‘No one need be surprised at the accuracy of the information I give here about Hannibal’s arrangement in Spain…. The fact is that I found on the Lacinian promontory [in southern Italy] a bronze tablet on which Hannibal himself had made out these lists during the time he was in Italy, and thinking this an absolutely first-rate authority, decided to follow the document.’

In the spring of 218 B.C., having left everything in order behind him, Hannibal moved his own troops out of winter quarters. He set his face to the north and crossed the Ebro. At the beginning of the campaign his army numbered twelve thousand horsemen and ninety thousand foot. In Catalonia, between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, they encountered a number of tough mountain tribes who were not prepared to yield even before so large an army. Their way was fiercely contested and a number of townships had to be stormed before they came within reach of the Pyrenees, ‘after many severe engagements and with great loss’. Perhaps Hannibal had not expected so severe a resistance. It is clear, however, that he had set out with a larger force than he wanted for his Italian campaign, since he left in charge of the new territory, and to keep guard over the passes between Spain and Gaul, one thousand horse and ten thousand foot under the command of his brother Hanno.

By-passing the Greek port Emporiae (Ampurias), Hannibal led the army towards the Pyrenees. Polybius, the most reliable guide to the events of Hannibal’s great march, says at one point that he started at the beginning of summer—unfortunately not telling us whether by this he refers to the departure from Cartagena or to the crossing of the Ebro. Denis Proctor
(Hannibal’s March in History)
comments: ‘The first section of Hannibal’s march, from Cartagena to the Ebro, a distance of about 480 kilometres through country under Carthaginian control, would have been accomplished in under four weeks, so that the whole of it could be described as being “at the beginning of summer”; and since there was clearly no longer delay after Hannibal had unfolded his plan of campaign to the troops than was needed to complete the final preparations for the march, there is no inconsistency in dating his address to the troops in the late spring and the march from Cartagena to the Ebro at the beginning of summer.’

Whatever one’s conclusions about the time that Hannibal started out on the first leg of his campaign—across the Ebro to the Pyrenees—it is clear that there was some underestimation about the time needed to reach the Alps, which he reached later in the year than could have been intended. Hannibal had plenty of information about the Alps and their passes, and he can never have been in any doubt that the ideal time to traverse them was in summer. That he did not do so can be accountable to a late start (quite possible in view of the difficulty of ensuring that the troops came in from their home quarters at the required time), whilst the other likely cause of his being delayed is that he had underestimated the amount of resistance he would find among the tribesmen north of the Ebro.

Once the Pyrenees loomed ahead there can be little doubt that the ultimate destination of the army was revealed, however much it may previously have been a secret among the senior officers and corps commanders. The reaction of many of the troops was predictable: they had not found rich towns and easy loot in the land north of the Ebro; the Pyrenees looked fearsome enough; and now this appalling revelation that they were destined for the Alps. ‘Influenced not so much by the war as by the long march and the impossibility of crossing the Alps’, three thousand of Carpetanian foot turned back. Livy continues: ‘To recall them or detain them forcibly would have been hazardous, for it might have aroused resentment in the savage hearts of the others. So Hannibal sent back to their homes above seven thousand more, whom he had observed were reluctant for the enterprise, at the same time pretending that he had also dismissed the Carpetani.’

His force was now greatly reduced from its original size. Polybius states that the army which went with him through the Pyrenees numbered only ‘fifty thousand foot and nine thousand horse’. This meant that his infantry force, by desertion, by policy, and by losses in battle, had been almost halved and his horse reduced by a quarter. Polybius, who was a distinguished general before he became a military historian, comments with practical wisdom: ‘He had now an army not so strong in number but serviceable and highly trained from the long series of wars in Spain.’ Hannibal may well have reckoned that, in view of the arduous campaigns which lay ahead, he was better off with this diminished force of battle-honed veterans than with one twice the size, less experienced and lacking in determination.

The incongruous element in Hannibal’s army, and the one which has inevitably attracted the attention of historians and non-historians over the ages, was the elephants. Thirty-seven of them, we gather, went with him from Spain, through the Pyrenees, across the Rhône, over the Alps, and into Italy. There is no account of any of them dying during the long march, but it is on record that when the great Carthaginian came down out of the snow and the Alpine peaks into Italy, his elephants were still with him. Why elephants when he had so many horsemen and, as they were to prove, horsemen superior to those that the Romans could field? Three hundred years after the events the satirist Juvenal (translated here by Peter Green) remembered Hannibal with the words:

This is the 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.

The use of elephants in warfare was almost as old as the history of war in the East, although the first historic mention occurs in the campaigns of Alexander the Great when, in 331 B.C., he defeated King Darius III of Persia, who had fifteen elephants in his army at the battle of Gaugamela. These beasts, trained for war, and mounting howdahs on their backs from which archers could shoot down at the foe, were of the Indian variety, about ten foot tall at the shoulder. Most of the elephants used by the Carthaginians in warfare, however, were African and not Indian elephants, but, as Sir Gavin de Beer has pointed out, they were not the African bush elephants, which are even larger than the Indian, but African forest elephants which stood a little under eight feet at the shoulder. Coins minted at Cartagena at about the time of the opening of the Hannibalic War depict this type of African elephant, as is proved by the relative size of the mounted driver to the animal, and the concave back, large ears, and ribbed trunk which distinguish the forest elephant from the other two varieties. ‘The relative small size of the African forest elephant’, Sir Gavin writes, ‘means that they were not much bigger than horses, and their passage over mountains cannot have been attended with as much difficulty as the Indian variety would have en-countered.’

Their drivers are always referred to as ‘Indians’ because the Egyptians, when they had first started importing elephants for work and warfare, had brought their trainers from India where—unlike Africa itself—elephants had long been used in the service of man. Elephants were mainly employed by Hannibal against cavalry whose horses, not having been trained to them, were terrified by the sight of them and their smell and trumpeting, while native tribesmen were also put to flight by their awesome size and appearance. (Centuries later, during Caesar’s second campaign in Britain, an Indian elephant, mounting a howdah with archers aboard, struck terror into Cassivelaunus and his Britons, and facilitated the Roman crossing of the Thames.) It is probable that one of Hannibal’s elephants was of the Indian variety; it was singled out for mention during the campaign in Italy and its name is given as Surus, ‘the Syrian’, and Syria was the area from which Indian elephants had long been obtained.

‘While Hannibal was thus attempting to cross the Pyrenees, being greatly concerned about the Celts because of the natural strength of the passes,’ writes Polybius, ‘the Romans…on the news reaching them sooner than they had expected that Hannibal had crossed the Ebro with his army, determined to send the Consuls Publius Cornelius Scipio and Tiberius Sempronius Longus with their legions, the first to Spain and the second to Africa.’ The Roman intention of striking directly at the heart of Carthage while at the same time attacking her new empire in the west was sound enough. What they could not have allowed for was that the Boii Gauls in northern Italy, elated by the news that Hannibal was on the march, revolted from Rome and, calling upon their old allies the Insubres to join them, overran the land which the Romans had been carefully colonising. The Gauls showed their usual dash and fire and, catching the Romans off guard, caused them to revise their previous plans. The legions destined for Spain could not be spared until the trouble in Cisalpine Gaul had been settled. The invasion of North Africa had to be postponed. The Gallic allies, upon whom Hannibal was relying when he himself would appear above the skyline of northern Italy, had already proved their worth. Rome, which had counted upon defeating the Carthaginians by attacking them at home and in Spain, now found her own territory threatened. Meanwhile the Carthaginian army, probably by the comparatively easy Col de Perthus route, was passing through the Pyrenees.
 

VII

ACROSS THE RHÔNE

Hannibal’s first task was to come to friendly terms with the Gauls in their territory north of the Pyrenees. Sending ahead ambassadors to explain that his intentions were peaceful, he arranged to meet the local chieftains at Ruscino (Castel-Roussillon). Here he succeeded in convincing them that his war was with Rome, and that his army was marching against the enemies of their race and to aid their cousins in northern Italy. After some discussion they accepted his word—and his bribes—and allowed him to pass freely through their territory. Difficult terrain lay ahead: the vast, marshy expanse of the Rhône delta, scarcely tamed two thousand years later, and astonishingly primitive then. It was strange indeed to these Spanish and North African troops, accustomed to mountains, to long savannahs, or to the expanses of the desert, but not to a wild water-world.