Hannibal (33 page)

The Carthaginian battle line was now deprived of cavalry on both flanks, Masinissa chasing Hannibal’s left wing from the field while Laelius drove in the Carthaginian horse and routed them. The elephant charge upon which Hannibal had been forced to rely had largely deprived him of such cavalry as he had: The disciplined Roman legionaries now forced back the whole of Hannibal’s front line upon his second (composed of his better troops), but the disorganised Gauls and other mercenaries were not allowed to pass through, being met by a line of spears, and had to retire on to the flanks of the second line, many of them fleeing the battlefield. For a time the contest now seemed evenly matched; the Carthaginians and African levies, coming up fresh against the legionaries, were able to hold them and even press them back. But gradually the discipline of the Romans began to tell and Hannibal’s second line also began to collapse—trying to fall back through the ‘Old Guard’ in the rear, only to be met with the same reception that they had given the first line.

Seeing that his men were about to come up against Hannibal’s finest troops Scipio sounded the recall. It was an example not only of Scipio’s genius in war but also of Roman discipline that, even at this moment in the thick of a bloody battle with the plain piled with dead, they responded to their officers. Scipio at once redeployed his troops in one single extended line to face Hannibal’s fresh ‘Old Guard’. The latter had hardly joined battle and they too, also in a single line, faced the Roman legionaries. This was the beginning of the second phase of the battle, foot soldier against foot soldier, the elephants expended, and the cavalry all away, as Masinissa and Laelius chased the fleeing Carthaginian horse and Hannibal’s Numidians. As the two lines closed, Scipio must surely have prayed that Masinissa and Laelius would not stay too long away pursuing the defeated, but would return to give him the victory. While the two lines swayed back and forth, locked in that ‘bludgeon work’ fighting at which the Romans were always so good, the issue still remained undecided. Then the rising dust and thunder of hooves over the plain told Scipio—and indeed Hannibal—that all was as good as over. Laelius and Masinissa swept back to take the Carthaginians on either wing and in the rear. The horsemen of Numidia, who had served Hannibal so well in the early years in Italy, had finally contrived his ruin. The remnants of the ‘Old Guard’ broke and fled. The battle was over. The Romans had won the war.

Hannibal himself left the scene of his defeat with a small escort and retired to Hadrumetum. There was nothing he could do now but advise the Carthaginians that further resistance was impossible, and to accept the best terms that they were offered. For the first time in his long career he had met his match as a general, but he had been principally defeated by lack of cavalry. Even now other Numidians, under a son of Syphax, were being mustered in the desert to come to his aid, but by the time that they reached Carthaginian territory all was over. The triumphant Romans and Masinissa’s forces annihilated them in what was the last engagement of the Second Punic War—the war which had been initiated by Hannibal sixteen years before, and which ended at Zama.
 

XXIX

AFTER THE WAR

Hannibal hurried to Carthage from Hadrumetum to tell the council that, whatever some might say, there was no longer any hope of success by prolonging the war. Many of the Carthaginians, conscious that their city was still the richest in the world, and relatively untouched by the war, found it hard to believe that all was lost. A characteristic story is told of Hannibal being present at one meeting when a young noble was urging his fellow citizens to man their defences and to refuse the Roman terms, and of Hannibal mounting the speaker’s rostrum and pulling him to the ground. He apologised immediately, saying that he had been so long away, and so accustomed to the discipline of the camp, that he was unfamiliar with the rules of a parliament. At the same time he begged them, now that they were at the mercy of the Romans, to accept ‘such lenient terms as they offered, and pray to the gods that the Roman people may ratify the treaty’. For the terms which Scipio had proposed upon his arrival before the walls of Carthage were better than might have been expected from a conqueror who was dealing with a people that had already betrayed an earlier treaty. Polybius adds that the council recognised that Hannibal’s advice ‘was wise and to the point, and they agreed to accept the treaty on the Roman conditions, and sent envoys with orders to agree to it’.
 

Seeing that the Carthaginians’ great general and their last army were defeated, and that the city lay defenceless—even though the siege would have been hard and long, as the Third Punic War would one day show—Scipio’s conditions of peace were reasonable. As before, all deserters, prisoners of war, and slaves were to be handed over, but this time the warships were to be reduced to no more than ten triremes. Carthage, on the other hand, might retain its former territory in Africa, and its own laws within it, but Masinissa was to have complete control of his kingdom, and Carthage must never again make war on anyone, either within Africa or beyond, without Roman permission. (This effectively ensured that the Numidian kingdom would grow at the expense of Carthage, something which would one day lead to the last Punic War.) Since they had broken the truce, the original war indemnity was doubled, although they were allowed to pay in annual instalments over fifty years. All the Carthaginian elephants were to be surrendered, and no more trained, while at the same time one hundred hostages, chosen by Scipio, were to be handed over for deliverance to Rome. In this way he insured against any further attempts at treachery. As before, the Roman army was to be supplied with grain for three months, as well as their pay until such time as the peace treaty was ratified.

It might have been expected that Rome would demand the surrender of Hannibal himself, considering all that he had inflicted upon them over so many years. This would not have been an unusual condition after the conclusion of such a war, and that it was not made can only be ascribed to Scipio himself who, like many generals under somewhat similar circumstances, had conceived a very great admiration and respect for his opponent. In any case it must have been clear to Scipio that the condition of Carthage was such that without a strong man at the helm the whole curious, mercantile edifice would collapse in ruins. The time would come, within little more than fifty years, that such would be the desire of Rome, but at the moment the Republic was too exhausted to pick up the pieces. To ensure that Carthage fulfilled the terms, paid the reparations, and settled down quietly again in North Africa, a man was needed who fully appreciated how fortunate the city was to have been allowed any acceptable terms at all. That man was Hannibal.

There was, indeed, considerable opposition in Rome to the apparently lenient terms accorded to the defeated. This was understandable enough: for Rome, by the spring of 201 when the treaty was finally ratified, had suffered from seventeen years of unremitting war. Scipio, a young man, much disliked by many of his opponents, a man who had achieved his victories in foreign countries far removed from the desolation of Italy, was telling the bereaved and almost bankrupt senators that they should not squeeze Carthage—in the phrase of a centuries-later war—‘until the pips squeak’. But at the instigation of Scipio’s supporters the decision was referred from the senate to the popular assembly, and the people, as nearly always throughout history, wanted peace. In Carthage things followed much the same pattern; the rich in the council being appalled when they realised that the money for the first instalment of the reparations would have to come from their own pockets; and the people, feeling that Carthage had suffered enough, wanting above all an end to war. In Hannibal they were lucky enough to have found as incorruptible and able a statesman in peacetime as he had been a great leader in war.

While Scipio and his army embarked for Rome, Hannibal, who had been appointed Chief Magistrate of Carthage, set about his massive task of reconstruction. Despite all the years of war, the city’s commercial prosperity had never been deeply imperilled, even after the loss of Spain. One of the reasons for this was that the trade between the Levant and the western end of the Mediterranean had always continued to flow along the North African coast, where the Romans could do little to interfere. Inevitably, from the beginning of his task Hannibal ran up against the hatred of his enemies—the former peace faction that had always declared that trade, not war, was the business of Carthage. They remained deliberately ignorant of the fact that expanding Rome could never have left their city in peace. Ironically enough (something that has happened in later wars), the vanquished found themselves in the position of having nothing to concentrate upon but to rebuild their factories and their fortunes, while the penurious victors were immediately confronted by a further set of problems that demanded nearly all their attention. Rome was now to be engaged with a war against Philip of Macedon, with trouble in Egypt, revolt among many of the tribes of Spain, and increased resistance from the Gauls in Italy as well as from those in Gaul itself. They had discovered that an empire, as so many have done subsequently, is not something that can be easily controlled, but that it is an expanding volcano, which can never be contained until some weakness in its sides or substance permits the fires to roar out—only to be followed by ultimate collapse and inertia.

When Scipio returned to Rome that year he was naturally accorded a triumph. His achievements in Africa had been outstanding, and not even his enemies could deny that he had brought the war to a triumphant conclusion. At the head of his conquering troops he rode through the garlanded streets, while the war-elephants of Africa, which had been shipped from Carthage, dazzled the people with their strangeness and their trumpeting. Scipio was given the cognomen Africanus, ‘the first general who was distinguished by a name derived from the country which he had conquered’. Understandably he was the hero of the hour and could probably have been made perpetual consul or even dictator, as Julius Caesar was to become a hundred and fifty years later. Wisely, he refused any such honours and seems to have been content to live the life of a gentleman of leisure, indulging in his passion for Greek literature and for good conversation, both traits which had been evident when he had been at Syracuse, and which had made him suspect to an older and more dour generation of Romans.

From the end of the war and for seven years afterwards, Hannibal devoted himself to the affairs of his country and to rebuilding the mercantile prosperity of Carthage. No longer the great expatriate, he devoted himself exclusively to Carthaginian home affairs and to ensuring that his country kept faith with the Romans. It can be questioned whether or not he still harboured any thoughts of revenge, for Carthage’s power base in Spain was lost to her, she had no navy, and the Romans had control of the sea as well as dominating the Mediterranean basin by land. At the same time he must have kept an eye on the Roman progress in the east, where the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 B.C. gave Rome her great victory over Philip of Macedon, breaking Macedonian power for ever. Philip was forced to give up his fleet, his possessions in Greece, and pay a large war indemnity, as Carthage had done and was still doing. It was probably Hannibal’s financial skill in ensuring that Carthage could meet these demands—demands which the Romans had expected would go unfulfilled, thus giving them the opportunity to invade—that caused the Roman hatred of him to revive. He had, too, many enemies among the rich citizens at home, for he had denounced a number of highly-placed officials whose peculations he had uncovered.

The Barcid family, for all its services to Carthage, had always had its rivals and enemies, and there were also those who liked to lay the blame for the recent war entirely on Hannibal. The commercial revival of Carthage, inspired and directed by him, had now aroused Roman jealousy and resentment. It was not surprising, then, that these two factions should become allied in the desire to see him removed from office. It was Scipio who intervened on behalf of his former enemy, pointing out that it ill befitted them to meddle in purely Carthaginian affairs, but the feeling against Hannibal could not be permanently contained. In 195 a commission was sent from Rome to Carthage, alleging that he had been helping an enemy of Rome.

This enemy was Antiochus the Great of Syria, whose ambition was to recreate the eastern empire of Alexander the Great, and who had already established his hold over Palestine, Phoenicia and Cyprus. It is more than likely that Hannibal saw in Antiochus the one ruler in the East who might challenge Rome, and restore a balance of power in the Mediterranean that would allow Carthage once again to assert its old supremacy over Spain and Sicily and the other central islands of the sea. Whether there was any correspondence between them is something that will never be known. Certainly the Romans claimed that there was, and it was on this charge that their envoys now proceeded to Carthage. Cato the Elder, who had served under Scipio in Sicily and who was deeply envious of the latter’s fame and position, was now consul and he was determined to have Hannibal brought back to Rome.

When the word reached him of what was afoot, Hannibal was under no illusion that his enemies in Carthage would not betray him to the Romans. He managed to leave the country by a series of clever evasions reminiscent of his skill upon the battlefield. Having received the Roman envoys and had them escorted to their quarters on the Byrsa, he was seen about the city as usual during the day. At nightfall, however, on the pretext of going for a ride in the cool of the evening he slipped off to a villa of his not far from Hadrumetum, where he had a ship prepared, his personal belongings and private fortune already embarked, and a faithful crew awaiting him.