The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (33 page)

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With the departure of Hasdrubal Barca, the effort to keep Spain Punic seems to have shifted still more to those representing metropolitan Carthage, though not necessarily with any more success. To fill the void, Hanno, a new general, was sent over from Africa with reinforcements and money to hire recruits in Celtiberia, where he joined Mago, the remaining Barca brother in Spain.
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Scipio, whose spadework with the Spanish tribes was paying off, knew all about this effort and was determined to nip it in the bud. He sent the propraetor M. Iunius Silanus with a flying column after them. Guided by Celtiberian deserters, the Romans arrived without warning, found the enemy split into two camps, and ended up routing first the largely untrained Spaniards and then the Carthaginians who’d come to their support. Hanno was captured, but Mago managed to escape with all of his cavalry and around two thousand veteran infantry. He eventually found refuge with Hasdrubal Gisgo at Gades (modern Cádiz), Hasdrubal having been basically chased there by Scipio after dispersing his army.
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So 207 ended in Spain not much better than it had in Italy for the Punic cause.

Yet Hasdrubal Gisgo, now pretty plainly the generalissimo in Spain, was far from finished. He still had a base at Gades, plenty of money for mercenaries, and the persistence of a true Carthaginian. By the following spring he and Mago had managed to reassemble the scattered Spaniards and hire still more to put together a force that, if you believe Polybius,
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numbered seventy thousand foot soldiers, four thousand horse, and thirty-two elephants—all intended for a decisive blow against Scipio. Whereas he had refused battle the year before, now Hasdrubal Gisgo crossed the Baetis River, marched to the vicinity of a town called Ilipa (around eight miles north of modern Seville), and sat down on high ground backing an open plain—a clear sign he wanted a fight.
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Scipio arrived similarly predisposed, but probably significantly outnumbered. His force consisted of a basic consular army of two legions and two
alae
, plus an equivalent number of local warriors recently raised from Spanish tribal allies, for a total of around forty-five thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry. As he was setting up camp on the opposite side of the field, Scipio received an unambiguous indication that the Carthaginians meant business: Mago and Masinissa swept toward the legionaries in a coordinated cavalry attack. But the two quickly discovered that this was one hard Roman to catch off guard. Behind a nearby hill Scipio had already concealed an equivalent number of his cavalry, who then galloped out to hit the Punic horsemen in the flank, eventually chasing them back to their lines in considerable disorder.
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And Scipio was hardly through messing with Carthaginian minds. The next several days were repetitious but inconclusive—some desultory skirmishing among the cavalry and light troops, along with the heavy infantry deploying but never advancing to within fighting range. The Punic forces took the field first, lining up with their best troops—the Libyans at the center, flanked by the Spaniards on either side and the cavalry and elephants at the wings. The Romans would then follow in a roughly similar manner—legionaries at the center, the
alae
on their flanks, and their own Spanish troops to the outside, with cavalry covering each end.

Having gotten the Carthaginians used to this routine, Scipio set about wrong-footing them, ordering his men to eat an early breakfast and to march out of camp at dawn, and just to make sure his wake-up call was not missed, he sent his cavalry and
velites
right up to the enemy camp to let loose a wave of javelins.
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Hasdrubal Gisgo reacted reflexively, ordering his own cavalry and skirmishers out to meet the Romans, and his infantry to take the field in the same order and formation as usual—all before anybody had a chance to get breakfast, the same trick Hannibal had pulled on Tiberius Sempronius Longus at the River Trebia. And there would be more, a Scipionic bait and switch. Once out on the field, Hasdrubal realized that the Romans were now lined up with the Spaniards in the middle and the two legions and
alae
flanking them on either side, facing his weakest troops. Yet if he tried to redeploy, he ran the risk of Scipio’s attacking in the midst of the maneuver and creating havoc; so he waited … and waited.
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For Scipio was in no hurry. He let hunger and the heat of the day have their exhausting way with the Punic troops of the line, while his cavalry and
velites
continued sporadic skirmishing with their Numidian opposites. Hours probably passed before he sounded the retreat and opened the files to let them pass through, and subsequently stationed them on each wing.
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At this point the real maneuvering began. Scipio ordered his whole line to start moving forward until they closed to approximately five hundred paces, at which point he had the Spaniards continue to march forward slowly, thereby pinning the Africans. Meanwhile, he broke each of his wings off to operate separately, taking command of the right and leaving the left under Silanus and Marcius, the commander the troops themselves had earlier elected. There followed a complicated evolution, which Polybius describes in highly technical language open to multiple interpretations.
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The choreography seems to have consisted of everybody taking a quarter turn to the right or left in order to form two columns (led by the
velites
and cavalry, and followed by the
triplex acies)
. The commanders then wheeled the columns around and marched toward each Carthaginian flank until, right under the noses of the enemy, they wheeled again, repeated the quarter turn, and re-formed the three-tiered battle line. Since a column of men can move much faster than the same number of men in a line, Scipio managed to very quickly put his cavalry and
velites
on each Punic flank and allow his legionaries to get at Hasdrubal’s Spaniards, while leaving his own Spaniards unengaged.
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The Carthaginians watched it all happen, beguiled, doing nothing until it was too late.

Modern sources agree that such a move (whatever it exactly constituted) was not only extremely dangerous in such close proximity to the enemy, but testified to the extraordinary training and discipline of the legionaries involved. Ilipa was plainly a step beyond Baecula and far in advance of Varro’s force at Cannae. By first manipulating the formal rituals by which battles were begun, and then through precise and daring maneuvering, Scipio had overcome a significant numerical disadvantage and had put his force in a position to crush their adversaries. It was a feat worthy of Hannibal himself.
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The Roman horsemen and skirmishers made a point of going after the Carthaginian elephants, panicking them under a cloud of javelins and sowing confusion as the elephants ran amok.
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The Spaniards on the Punic wings put up a surprisingly stout resistance, but outflanked by the
velites
and cavalry and assaulted ahead by the legionary meat grinder, they slowly began to give ground. Meanwhile, the Africans in the middle remained unengaged, unable to force the fight with the Spaniards facing them, or come to the aid of the wings without fatally disrupting the stability of the formation. Their only option it seems was to follow the step-by-step retreat.
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Hasdrubal did what he could to encourage them, but then the Roman pressure caused the Spaniards on the wings to collapse, and everybody seems to have cut and run. The Carthaginian forces appear to have reformed their ranks at the base of the hill backing the battlefield, but the Romans drove them to their camp, which the Romans were about to storm when a sudden and particularly violent cloudburst put an end to the fighting.
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Most of Hasdrubal’s force remained intact, but its spirit was broken. Spanish desertions the next day convinced him that it was hopeless to stay put and try to defend the camp, so he slipped away that night with the remainder of his army. To make it to Gades and safety, he would have had to cross the Baetis, but Scipio with the aid of local guides beat him to the fords. Blocked, Hasdrubal turned in flight toward the Atlantic coast but was quickly brought to bay by Scipio’s cavalry and skirmishers. Once the legionaries arrived, Livy says it was less a battle than “a butchering as of cattle.”
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Hasdrubal escaped with barely six thousand of his men to a nearby hill, which by its very steepness allowed them to defend themselves.

Still, surrounded and without means of supply, their situation was hopeless, the Romans maintaining a blockade apparently aimed at demoralizing rather than annihilating the survivors. Soon enough, Hasdrubal Gisgo fled to Gades, but not before arranging for ships to evacuate him back to Africa. Masinissa also escaped, but only after talking over his options in secret with Silanus, whom Scipio had left in charge while he returned to Tarraco. Mago was the last of the principals to come down off the mountain. He would join Hasdrubal Gisgo briefly in Gades before the latter withdrew; the last of the Barcids in Spain, Mago was also the last to give up the fight there. Abandoned by their leaders, the rest of the army simply evaporated, which allowed Silanus to join Scipio and announce that the war here was over.
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This was premature, but major Carthaginian resistance in Spain was at an end.

Scipio was already concerned with a canvas broader than Iberia—broader, it soon became evident, than that of his colleagues in Italy. For he understood that once Barcid power was broken in Spain, the key to getting rid of Hannibal was the vulnerability of Carthaginian home turf. As war opened in 218, the senate had had every intention of invading Africa, but then Hannibal had brought the fight to them instead, and twelve years later they were still distracted. Not Scipio. The summer of 206 found him already working both sides of the African pressure point—not simply the Numidian prince Masinissa, but also his archenemy, Syphax.

Two rival Numidian kingdoms, both of them unstable, occupied central North Africa at this point. Massaesylia, the larger of the two, lay to the west; the other, Massylia, was much smaller and was sandwiched between its near-namesake and Carthaginian territory to the east.
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Both were dominated and manipulated by Punic power but were also restive and rebellious. Earlier the Carthaginians had used Masinissa’s father, Gala, the Massylian king, to drive Syphax, ruler of the Massaesylians, from power.
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Now, however, Gala was dead and his throne was in dispute, while Syphax was back firmly in charge and was anxious to expand his power. Seeking to take advantage of the situation, Scipio first sent his alter ego, Laelius, to convince Syphax to ally himself with Rome, but when the king proved evasive, Scipio sailed over from New Carthage himself.

As Scipio’s two quinqueremes approached the harbor of Siga, Syphax’s western capital, Scipio found to his horror that none other than Hasdrubal Gisgo, on his way back to Carthage with seven smaller but more nimble triremes, had just made landfall and was now in a position to even the score after the shutout at Ilipa. Making the best of a bad situation, Scipio raced into port before Hasdrubal had time to weigh anchor, and once in port, neither man was willing to offend the king by coming to blows in his very harbor.
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So in an unlikely turn of events, and at Syphax’s insistence, Scipio would dine with his most recent mortal enemy, sharing the same couch, and trading pleasantries. Hasdrubal left deeply impressed, not only finding Scipio even more charming than he was lethal on the battlefield, but also concluding that Syphax, if left to his own devices, would soon be under the spell of the general and in the Roman camp. Scipio thought so too, and sailed away assuming he had a new ally. But Hasdrubal had a daughter; history would know her as Sophonisba (the Punic name was Cafonbaal), just one of a string of North African spellbinders from Elissa to Cleopatra, and she would soon have Syphax wrapped around her little finger.

Back in Spain, Scipio apparently wanted to use the rest of 206 to tie up loose ends so he could return to Rome and stand for the consulship.
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But he got more than he bargained for. The Iberian Peninsula remained a fractious place, and ejecting Punic power and making the peninsula Roman proved to be two very different things.

Initially, Scipio and his lieutenants—Marcius in particular—divided up to conduct a series of punitive expeditions against tribes and localities that had withheld their allegiance. Although these expeditions were generally successful, the resistance proved unexpectedly bitter. (The fighters in a place called Astapa, for instance, slaughtered their own women and children before waging a suicidal sortie.
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This should have been a hint; the Romans in fact were poised atop a volcano.)

The first eruption ensued shortly, when Scipio fell ill and rumors began to circulate that he was near death. Not surprisingly, Indibilis was among the first responders, rallying numerous Iberian and Celtiberian warriors and staging a broad-based rebellion.

Worse still, the news of Scipio’s illness rebounded back on his army. Eight thousand troops garrisoning a town called Sucro, complaining that they hadn’t been paid and had been left to stand idle, mutinied, demanding either to be led into battle or sent home and discharged. This mutiny was both dangerous and symptomatic. The exciting and profitable days of campaigning against booty-laden Carthaginians were plainly near an end in Spain; the future was anti-insurgency with its combination of boredom and terror. Thus far, deployment in Spain had proved to be a one-way ticket, with some of Scipio’s troops having been on station for upward of a decade.
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So the promise of a long and inconclusive counterinsurgency campaign had implications far beyond the Sucro mutineers. These implications may be reflected in Livy’s (28.24.13) apparently phony naming of the chief conspirators, Caius Albius (White) and Caius Atrius (Black), the former being from Cales, one of the Latin towns that had refused to supply men in 209, in part because of interminable overseas service.
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