Why had Rome permitted the reconquest of Spain? Because she was harassed with class strife, was expanding in the Adriatic, and was at war with the Gauls. In 232 a tribune, Caius Flaminius, foreshadowed the Gracchi by carrying through the Assembly, against the violent opposition of the Senate, a measure distributing among the poorer citizens some lands recently won from the Gauls. In 230 Rome took her first step toward the conquest of Greece by clearing the Adriatic of pirates and seizing a part of the Illyrian coast as a further protection for Italian trade. Safe now on south and east, she resolved to drive the Gauls over the Alps and make Italy a completely united state. To secure herself on the west she signed a treaty with Hasdrubal by which the Carthaginians in Spain agreed to stay south of the Ebro River; and at the same time she made an alliance with the semi-Greek towns of Saguntum and Ampurias in Spain. In the following year (225) a Gallic army of 50,000 foot and 20,000 horse swept down the peninsula. The inhabitants of the capital were so frightened that the Senate returned to the primitive custom of human sacrifice and buried two Gauls alive in the Forum as an appeasement of the gods.20 The legions met the invaders near Telamon, killed 40,000, took 10,000 prisoners, and marched on to subjugate all Cisalpine Gaul. In three years the task was completed; protective colonies were established at Placentia and Cremona, and from the Alps to Sicily Italy was one.
It was an untimely victory. Had the Gauls been left unmolested for a few years more they might have stopped Hannibal; but now all Gaul was aflame against Rome. Hannibal saw the opportunity he had longed for—to cross Gaul with little opposition and to invade Italy with Gallic tribes as his allies.
The Punic leader was now twenty-eight years old, at his prime in body and mind. In addition to a Carthaginian gentleman’s schooling in the languages, literatures, and history of Phoenicia and Greece,21 he had received a soldier’s training through nineteen years in camp. He had disciplined his body to hardship, his appetite to moderation, his tongue to silence, his thought to objectivity. He could run or ride with the swiftest, hunt or fight with the bravest; he was “the first to enter the battle,” says the hostile Livy, “and the last to abandon the field.”22 The veterans loved him because in his commanding presence and piercing eyes they saw their old leader Hamilcar return to them in fresh youth; the recruits liked him because he wore no distinctive dress, never rested till he had provided for his army’s needs, and shared with them all sufferings and gains. The Romans accused him of avarice, cruelty, and treachery, for he honored no scruples in seizing supplies for his troops, punished disloyalty severely, and laid many snares for his foes. Yet we find him often merciful, always chivalrous. “Nothing occurs in the accounts of him,” says the judicious Mommsen, “which may not be justified under the circumstances, and according to the international law of the times.”23 The Romans could not readily forgive him for winning battles with his brains rather than with the lives of his men. The tricks he played upon them, the skill of his espionage, the subtlety of his strategy, the surprises of his tactics were beyond their appreciation until Carthage was destroyed.
In 219 B.C. Roman agents organized in Saguntum a coup d’état that set up a government patriotically hostile to Carthage. When the Saguntines molested tribes friendly to him, Hannibal ordered them to desist; when they refused he besieged the city. Rome protested to Carthage and threatened war; Carthage replied that since Saguntum was a hundred miles south of the Ebro, Rome had no right to interfere, and had, by signing an alliance with it, violated her treaty with Hasdrubal. Hannibal persisted in the siege, and Rome took up arms again, never dreaming that this Second Punic War was to be the most terrible in her history.
Hannibal spent eight months in subduing the Saguntines; he did not dare advance toward Italy while leaving to the Romans so excellent a port for landing in his rear. In 218 he crossed the Ebro, challenging fate as Caesar would at the Rubicon. He had an army of 50,000 infantry and 9000 cavalry, none of them mercenaries, most of them Spaniards and Libyans. Three thousand Spaniards deserted when they learned that he planned to cross the Alps, and Hannibal released 7000 others who protested against his enterprise as impossible,24 It was hard enough to force a passage through the Pyrenees; more unexpected was the fierce resistance of some Gallic tribes allied with Marseilles; a summer of fighting was required to reach the Rhone, and a major battle to cross it. He had hardly left its banks when a Roman army arrived at the mouth of the river.
Hannibal led his troops north toward Vienne and then struck eastward into the Alps. Celtic hordes had crossed those ranges before him, and he too might have done it without extraordinary hardship had it not been for the hostility of the Alpine tribes, and the difficulty of getting his elephants through narrow or precipitous passages. Early in September, after a climb of nine days, he reached the summit and found it covered with snow; there he let his men and animals rest for two days and then began the downward march through passes steeper than the ascent, over roads sometimes buried by landslides and often paved with ice. Many soldiers and beasts lost their footing and tumbled to their deaths. Hannibal spurred on his despairing forces by pointing out to them, in the distant south, the green fields and sparkling streams of Italy; that paradise, he promised them, would soon be theirs. After seventeen days in the Alps they reached the plain and rested. So many men and horses had been lost in the crossing that the army was now reduced to 26,000—less than half the force that had left New Carthage four months before. Had the Cisalpine Gauls resisted him as the Transalpine Gauls had done, Hannibal’s progress might have ended there. But the Boii and other tribes welcomed him as a savior and joined him as allies, while the recently established Roman settlers fled southward across the Po.
Faced with this second threat in seven years to the very life of Rome, the Senate mobilized all its resources and called upon the states of Italy to unite in the defense of their land. With their help Rome raised armies totaling 300,000 foot, 14,000 horse, and 456,000 reserves. One army, under the first of many famous Scipios, met Hannibal along the Ticino—a small river flowing into the Po at Pavia. Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry put the Romans to flight, and Scipio, dangerously wounded, was saved by the brave interposition of the son who was destined to meet Hannibal again at Zama sixteen years later. At Lake Trasimene Hannibal encountered another Roman army, 30,000 strong, led by the tribune Caius Flaminius, and accompanied by slave dealers bringing fetters and chains for the prospective prisoners whom they hoped to sell. With part of his forces Hannibal decoyed this army into a plain surrounded by hills and woods that concealed most of his troops; at his signal the hidden columns debouched upon the Romans from every side and killed nearly all of them, including Flaminius himself (217).
Hannibal now controlled all northern Italy, but he knew that he was still outnumbered ten to one by a resolute foe. His only hope lay in persuading at least some of the Italian states to revolt against Rome. He released all prisoners whom he had taken from Rome’s allies, saying that he had come not to fight Italy but to set it free. He marched through flooded Etruria, where for four days no dry land could be found on which to pitch a camp; crossed the Apennines to the Adriatic, and there allowed his soldiers a long interval to refresh their energies and heal their wounds. He himself suffered from severe ophthalmia, took no time to treat it, and lost the use of one eye. Then he marched down the eastern coast, inviting the Italian tribes to join him. None did; on the contrary, every city closed its gates against him and prepared to fight. As he moved south, his Gallic allies, interested only in their northern homes, began to desert him. Plots against his life were so numerous that he had to assume ever new disguises. He begged his government to send him supplies and men by some Adriatic port; it refused. He asked his younger brother Hasdrubal, whom he had left in Spain, to organize an army and cross Gaul and the Alps to join him; but the Romans had invaded Spain, and Hasdrubal did not dare to leave it. Ten years were to pass before his coming.
Rome now adopted against her greatest adversary his own baffling policy of caution and attrition. Quintus Fabius Maximus, made dictator in 217, created an adjective by delaying as long as he could a direct engagement with Hannibal; in time, he believed, the invaders would be reduced by hunger, discord, and disease. After a year this “masterly inaction” irritated the Roman populace; the Assembly overruled the Senate, as well as all precedents and logic, by electing Minucius Rufus codictator with Fabius. Against Fabius’ advice Minucius advanced against the enemy, fell into a trap, was severely beaten, and thereafter understood why Hannibal said that he feared Fabius, who would not fight, more than Marcellus, who would.25 A year later Fabius was deposed, and the Roman armies were entrusted to Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Caius Terentius Varro. Paulus the aristocrat counseled caution; Varro of the plebs was all for action; and as usual, caution lost the argument. Varro sought and found the Carthaginians at Cannae, in Apulia, some ten miles from the Adriatic coast. The Romans had 80,000 infantry, 6000 cavalry; Hannibal had 19,000 veterans, 16,000 unreliable Gauls, 10,000 horse; and he had lured Varro to fight in a broad plain ideal for cavalry. He had placed the Gauls at his center, expecting that they would give way. They did; and when the Romans followed them into the pocket, the subtle Carthaginian, himself in the thick of the fray, ordered his veterans to close in upon the Roman flanks and bade his cavalry smash through the opposed horsemen to attack the legions from behind. The Roman army was surrounded, lost all chance of maneuvering, and was almost annihilated; 44,000 of them fell, including Paulus and eighty senators who had enlisted as soldiers; 10,000 escaped to Canusium, among them Varro and the Scipio who was to win the surname of Africanus Maior (216). Hannibal lost 6000 men, two thirds of them Gauls. It was a supreme example of generalship, never bettered in history. It ended the days of Roman reliance upon infantry, and set the lines of military tactics for two thousand years.