Carthage Must Be Destroyed (52 page)

According to several Roman sources, Hannibal remained in charge of the remnants of his army and kept them occupied by organizing the planting of a huge number of olive groves.
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By 196 BC, however, he had apparently tired of semi-private life, and had decided to enter the political arena as a Carthaginian suffete. He would quickly prove himself to be as dynamic a statesman as he was a general.

By exposing and attacking the abuses and corruption that had for so long been a hallmark of Carthaginian political life, Hannibal quickly built himself a reputation as a champion of the common citizenry. He successfully proposed a new law which stated that the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four’s membership should henceforth be decided by annual election, and that no one should serve consecutive terms. Such a populist move was never likely to have endeared him to the Council of Elders, which he appears to have circumvented entirely.

Animosities were further heightened when Hannibal then announced an audit of public revenues, which he would personally oversee. After conducting a thorough investigation, he supposedly discovered that large amounts of state funds were being lost due to embezzlement by officials. He then declared in the Popular Assembly that if the duties collected on property and port duties were correctly collected there would be enough to pay the indemnity owed to Rome without recourse to extra taxation. Although this must have further boosted Hannibal’s popularity among the people of Carthage, the animosity directed at him by the corrupt officials commensurately increased.
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In adopting such a populist agenda, Hannibal appeared to be following the same political strategy that had so benefited Hamilcar and Hasdrubal Barca nearly forty years previously. Indeed, Hannibal’s deliberate use of the Popular Assembly to push his measures through and limit the powers of the broader elite placed him on the well-worn path of Barcid demagogy. It has been argued that Hannibal was also the driving force behind an ambitious new construction programme which witnessed the building of new residential quarters and the great improvement of the city in general.
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Were some on the Council of Elders worried that these populist reforms were building to a bid for autocratic power? Such concerns would certainly explain the Council’s subsequent move, which was to send reports to Rome that Hannibal was secretly negotiating with Antiochus, king of the Seleucid Empire. Antiochus, whose realm stretched from south-eastern Asia Minor (Turkey) in the west to the kingdom of Bactria (modern Afghanistan) in the east, was now involved in a tense diplomatic confrontation with the Romans over Greece and the Greek cities of western Asia Minor.
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When Roman envoys subsequently arrived in Carthage to investigate the claims, in 195, Hannibal was forced to flee east, travelling via Tyre and Antioch and thence on to Ephesus, where Antiochus had his court. Paradoxically, accusations that Hannibal was in collusion with Antiochus left the Carthaginian with little option but to seek the king’s protection.
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At the court of Antiochus, Hannibal proposed a daring return to Carthage and a subsequent attack on the Italian peninsula.
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The dispatch of an agent to arrange a prior Carthaginian rebellion with the Barcids in North Africa spectacularly failed, however,
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and the Carthaginians, nervous of their new overlords’ potential reaction, quickly informed the Roman Senate of Hannibal’s machinations. Hannibal had grossly underestimated the degree of support which the once lone voice of Hanno now enjoyed at Carthage, and his attempts to secure an opportunity to make good the failures of the past looked increasingly desperate. Snubbed by his own people, the victor of Cannae now found himself on the fringes of Antiochus’ court. Indeed, Antiochus and his advisers must have had serious concerns about the strategy that Hannibal reportedly advocated. According to Livy, his plan was ‘always one and the same, that the war should be waged in Italy; Italy would supply both food and soldiers to a foreign enemy; if no disturbance was created there and the Roman people was permitted to use the manpower and resources of Italy for a war outside Italy, neither the king nor any people could be a match for the Romans.’
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When war between Rome and Antiochus did eventually break out, Hannibal’s strategic advice remained equally quixotic and was, unsurprisingly, politely ignored.
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Hannibal would, however, have one final fleeting taste of military glory. Recognizing that the general’s Punic roots would play well with the Phoenician cities of the Levant, he was dispatched by Antiochus to muster and prepare a small fleet of warships.
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This Seleucid naval force clashed with the Roman fleet off the coast of Pamphylia in Asia Minor, and for some time the left wing, commanded by Hannibal, managed to hold its own against far more experienced and skilful opponents. Eventually, however, the Seleucid ships were driven back and were effectively blockaded in the port of Side. One can only imagine Hannibal’s shock and sorrow to see Carthaginian ships among the Roman fleet.
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With the Seleucids eventually defeated at Magnesia in Asia Minor in 189, Hannibal spent the rest of his life wandering the courts of the Hellenistic East. Although his exact itinerary remains a matter of conjecture, anecdotal evidence places him variously on Crete and in Armenia (where he supposedly helped to build a new city).
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His final refuge, however, was Bithynia, a kingdom in north-western Asia Minor. Here he is said to have continued his career as an urban planner, by creating a new capital, as well as developing the tactic of hurling snake-filled pots on to the decks of enemy ships during battles at sea. Despite the services which he provided for the Bithynian king Pruisas, Hannibal was nonetheless a diplomatic liability. When, in 183, the Roman general Titus Quinctius Flaminius visited Bithynia, he upbraided the king when Hannibal’s presence was discovered. Pruisas, concerned about the repercussions of shielding so controversial a guest at a time when Roman power was growing in the region, immediately resolved to surrender Hannibal. When Bithynian soldiers blocked off all exits from his hideout on the coast, Hannibal, realizing that escape was impossible, took the poison that he always carried with him, thus avoiding the humiliation of capture. As he died, according to Livy, he condemned the Romans for their vindictiveness, impiety and lack of faith.
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Thus the life of Carthage’s greatest son reached its dramatic end.

The final sad years of Hannibal’s life might be viewed as a parable of Roman vengefulness, but in fact his fate had been largely decided by his own countrymen. Tired of his egotistical manoeuvrings to undermine the Carthaginian political system at a time of distinct instability, the majority of the Council of Elders had been desperate to be rid of him. Hannibal’s political failures and misjudgements become more understandable, however, when one considers that, beyond the network of loyalties and relationships that were part of his Barcid inheritance, he was a stranger to the Carthaginian elite, in a way that Hamilcar and Hasdrubal Barca, who had spent their formative years in the city, had not been. With his restless energy and inability to tolerate dissent, Hannibal therefore took his place among that long line of military heroes who would prove themselves singularly illsuited for political office.

In Rome, the news of Hannibal’s death received a mixed reaction. According to Plutarch, some approved of Flaminius’ action, because they ‘thought that Hannibal, as long as he lived, was a consuming fire which needed only to be fanned; for when he was not in his prime, they said, it was not his body nor his arm that had been formidable against the Romans, but his ability and experience coupled with his deep bitterness and hostility’.
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Others, however, ‘thought that the conduct of Titus [Flaminius] was cruel: for it had killed Hannibal when he was like a bird allowed to live a tame and harmless life because he was too old to fly and without tail feathers’.
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Leading the latter party was Scipio Africanus–a fact which some have seen as a reflection of the Roman’s high regard for his erstwhile opponent.
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Scipio was, however, far too much of a pragmatist to allow such sentimentality to cloud his judgement. The Roman hero, who knew the political situation in Carthage better than most, knew that Hannibal now had no chance of rousing a rebellion against the might of Rome.

It could nevertheless be argued that both sides were right. Although Hannibal was certainly no longer a threat in Carthaginian terms, at the royal courts of the Hellenistic kings his name must surely have still conjured up the seductive image of resistance to Rome. Hannibal himself had been quick to realize this, and had soon produced at least one anti-Roman tract–written in the early 180s, and in the form of a speech addressed to the people of Rhodes–in which he outlined the barbarous outrages committed in Asia Minor by the Roman general Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, with the clear intention of turning his audience against Roman power.
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Others too were anxious to appropriate the influence still attached to Hannibal’s name. In the same period a fake letter, supposedly written by the Carthaginian general after Cannae, was in circulation. In it ‘Hannibal’ announced his famous victory and foretold that a rebellion among the Greeks would bring an end to Roman domination of the eastern Mediterranean.
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For many at Rome, therefore, the mere existence of Hannibal, not just at the court of the enemy, but simply as a symbol of resistance, may well have demanded his death.

The reasons for Rome’s pursuit of Hannibal, however, extended well beyond any threat that he himself might still represent, for the divisive feelings which he inspired within the Roman Senate made his pursuit a matter of internal politics also. The persecution of Hannibal was therefore also the persecution of his nemesis turned protector Scipio Africanus. The fate of the two men had always been intimately intertwined, and in the wake of his victories in North Africa the Roman hero had found himself similarly isolated by the political establishment at home. In Rome itself, although a number of his supporters had won elections to high political office, Scipio had achieved very little of worth during his own second consulship, of 194, and he found his ambitions increasingly frustrated by a growing band of opponents in the Senate. Indeed, Scipio’s inability to transfer the success that he had enjoyed on the battlefield to the political sphere appeared closely to mirror the disappointments that Hannibal had suffered in Carthage.

For Scipio, decline had begun when he and his brother Lucius were recalled to Rome from their victorious military campaign against Antiochus. Their political enemies, led by Marcus Porcius Cato, had persuaded the Senate to pass a bill whereby consuls should hold commands for only a single year, and had then attempted to prosecute several of their friends and supporters. The Scipios then found themselves under attack when they were called to account for 500 talents of silver given to them by Antiochus as a term of the armistice. Scipio Africanus did not help himself by haughtily tearing up the campaign account books in full view of the Senate. Sensing weakness, Cato and his supporters continued to press the Scipios, and the more the latter refused to account for the money, the more suspicions grew. Finally, in 184, Scipio Africanus suffered the indignity of being prosecuted in the courts on the charge of taking bribes from Antiochus. Realizing that his enemies were in the ascendant, Scipio now opted to leave Rome for his estates at Liternum in Campania, and Cato, his political aims achieved, let the prosecution drop.
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Within a year, however, the great hero of Zama died a broken man.

That the downfalls of these two great men should follow such similar trajectories is perhaps unsurprising when one considers not only the congruities in their respective political strategies, but also the political systems within which they operated. Scipio, the great hero and a powerful symbol of Roman triumph over Carthage, soon became a dangerous, destabilizing force within a system that centred on the elaborate fiction that all members of its Senate were equal.
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Hannibal’s presence within the political scene at Carthage had proved similarly problematic. His populist reforms, and the concomitant contempt which he showed for fellow members of the Council, presented him to others as a potential autocrat. Confronted with a living hero in their very midst–a hero whose very stature threatened to dwarf those institutions he had been charged to protect–both the Carthaginian Council and the Roman Senate had acted decisively to isolate their former champions. The last age of heroes had come to an emphatic close.

By the 180s BC the benefits of no longer being a great power were becoming increasingly apparent for many Carthaginians. In what has been termed the ‘revenge of the losers’, Carthage was freed from the burdens and responsibilities of war and empire, and thus staged a remarkable economic recovery. Reportedly, just ten years after the end of the war, the Carthaginians were able to offer to settle, forty years early, the entire indemnity that was owed to Rome, a proposal that the latter refused.
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How had this economic miracle been achieved? The answer lies in a number of developments that had taken place in the years after the end of the First Punic War.

First, the loss of Sicily and Sardinia had led to a huge expansion of the settlement and agricultural exploitation of Carthage’s North African hinterland.
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The agricultural infrastructure appears to have survived Scipio’s African campaign relatively unscathed. Despite the Roman military campaign in the last years of the Second Punic War, North Africa did not suffer the same devastation as certain parts of Italy. Even Scipio Africanus’ scorched-earth policy in the Medjerda valley had been a strictly limited operation, designed solely to force Hannibal into open battle. Just one year after the end of the war, therefore, the Carthaginians were able to supply 400,000 bushels of corn to Rome and to the Roman army in Macedonia.
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This was followed in 191 by the offer of a gift to Rome of 500,000 bushels of wheat and 500,000 bushels of barley for its war with Antiochus.
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Twenty years after that a further 1 million bushels of corn and 500,000 bushels of barley were sent for Roman forces fighting in Macedonia.
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