The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (2 page)

I

TRACES OF WAR

[1]

P
olybius of Megalopolis peered down from a pass high in the Italian Alps and caught sight of the rich green Lombard plain far below. It was exactly the same inviting panorama Hannibal had shown his half-starved, half-frozen, thoroughly discouraged army seventy-three years before, exhorting them to stay the course on what would prove to be an amazing path of conquest. Quite probably enough bits and pieces of that weary host remained visible for Polybius to be sure he was in the right spot; a certitude denied future chroniclers, and giving rise to one of ancient history’s most enduring and futile controversies: Where exactly did Hannibal cross the Alps?
1
Polybius, for his part, was free to concentrate on questions he found more important.

It was his aim—an endeavor that would eventually fill forty books—to explain to his fellow Greeks how a hitherto obscure city-state on the Italian peninsula had come to dominate, virtually in the course of a lifetime, the entire Mediterranean world. But if Rome stood at center stage in Polybius’s inquiry, Hannibal and Carthage were his foils. Each in their own way had nearly put an end to Rome’s ambitions. Both by this time were dead, obliterated by Rome, but it was the challenges they had posed and the disasters they had inflicted that Polybius found most compelling. For no matter how bad things had gotten, Rome had always responded, had picked itself up out of the dustbin of history and soldiered on. And it was in defeat more than victory that Polybius saw the essence of Rome’s greatness.

It never got worse than Cannae. On August 2, 216 B.C., a terrible apocalyptic day in southern Italy, 120,000 men engaged in what amounted to a mass knife fight. At the end of the fight, at least forty-eight thousand Romans lay dead or dying, lying in pools of their own blood and vomit and feces, killed in the most intimate and terrible ways, their limbs hacked off, their faces and thoraxes and abdomens punctured and mangled. This was Cannae, an event celebrated and studied as Hannibal’s paragon by future practitioners of the military arts, the apotheosis of the decisive victory. Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history. Worse yet, Cannae came at the end of a string of savage defeats engineered by the same Hannibal, Rome’s nemesis destined to prey on Italy for another thirteen years and defeat army after army and kill general after general. Yet none of this would plumb the depths reached on that awful afternoon in August.

It has been argued that Polybius, aware of Cannae’s enormous symbolic import, deliberately structured his history so as to make the battle appear as the absolute low point in Rome’s fortunes, thereby exaggerating its significance.
2
Yet, not only do sheer numbers argue the contrary, but also Rome on this day lost a significant portion of its leadership class, between a quarter and a third of the senate, the members of which had been anxious to be present at what had been assumed would be a great victory. Instead it was a debacle by any measure, so much so that a case can be made that Cannae was even more critical than Polybius believed, in retrospect a true pivot point in Roman history. Arguably the events of this August day either initiated or accelerated trends destined to push Rome from municipality to empire, from republican oligarchy to autocracy, from militia to professional army, from a realm of freeholders to a dominion of slaves and estates. And the talisman of all of this change was one lucky survivor, a young military tribune named Publius Cornelius Scipio,
*
known to history as Africanus. For at the end of many more years of fighting, Rome still would need a general and an army good enough to defeat Hannibal, and Scipio Africanus, with the help of what remained of the battlefield’s disgraced refugees, would answer the call and in the process set all else in motion.

[2]

Two questions spring to mind: How do we know? and Why should we care? For this is, after all, ancient history, among the dimmest and potentially most obscure of our recollections. Putting relevance aside for a moment, it is still necessary to concede a point made by Cambridge classicist Mary Beard: “The study of ancient history is as much about how we know as what we know, an engagement with all the processes of selection, constructive blindness, revolutionary reinterpretation and willful misinterpretation that together produce the ‘facts’ … out of the messy, confusing, and contradictory evidence that survives.”
3

In other words, what we know for sure is entirely limited, and all the rest is basically opinion. This point is driven home by the single sliver of archaeological evidence purporting to show that Hannibal ever actually invaded Italy—an inscription thought to commemorate Fabius Maximus’s capture of the port city of Tarentum and containing the name Hannibal but not a word about Tarentum or Fabius.
4
After all those years, all those battles, that’s it. Speaking of battles, military historians are prone to muddying their boots walking the fields on which mayhem once took place, seeking all manner of insights from the terrain, revelations that they maintain it is impossible to derive from the flat pages of a book. With Cannae and virtually all the other battles of the Second Punic
*
War, this exercise is, well, just an exercise when it becomes apparent that it is impossible to locate the battle sites with any degree of precision; during twenty-two hundred years, rivers change course, lakeshores advance and retreat, contemporary sprawl steamrolls the landscape.
5

All we really have are words, preserved for us in the most haphazard fashion out of a much larger body of literature. So the study of ancient history is roughly analogous to scrutinizing a badly decayed patchwork quilt, full of holes and scraps of material from earlier work. Central to understanding the process of study is an awareness that, besides an occasional fragment liberated from the desert by archaeologists, there will be no more evidence. The quilt is it; everything must be based on a reasoned analysis of the fabric at hand. Plainly the quality and integrity of some of the patches greatly exceed those of the others, so they will be emphasized and relied upon whenever possible. Yet, because of the limited nature of the material, there is always the temptation to fall back on a truly outlandish polka dot or a monumentally garish plaid, if only to figure out where it came from and what it might have meant in its original form. In the end, even among otherwise tasteful and scrupulous ancient historians, something is almost always better than nothing.

Fortunately for us, that “something” generally includes things military. Ancient historians were united in their belief that force was the ultimate arbiter of human affairs, and almost without exception wars and their outcomes were at the center of their works. Printing presses were nonexistent, and literacy was the possession of a tiny minority generally clustered around the ruling classes. Military history was not only dramatic and entertaining; it could be highly instructive for those in charge.

To Polybius, plainly the best of our sources, command in battle was “the most honorable and serious of all employments” (3.48.4) and he wrote knowing he had the ear of some of war’s most enthusiastic practitioners. He was not in Rome by accident, or by choice. Polybius was a hostage, a
hipparch
, or master of cavalry, brought there in 167 B.C. along with a thousand of his countrymen to ensure the future good behavior of the Greek region of Achaea, part of the grinding, half-unwilling process by which the Romans eventually stifled Greek freedom. In a city where patronage meant everything, Polybius managed to attach himself to the clan and person of Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of one of the two losing consuls at Cannae, a perch that gave Polybius unparalleled access to the sources he needed for his great project of explaining Roman success. Besides trekking the Alps, he visited the state archives and read old treaties between Carthage and Rome, examined the personal papers and correspondence of important players, traipsed across battlefields, and journeyed to other pertinent locations. He even examined a bronze tablet Hannibal had had inscribed, enumerating his sanguinary achievements before leaving Italy. Polybius also interviewed a number of Cannae’s participants, including two of Scipio Africanus’s key henchmen, Gaius Laelius and the Massylian prince Masinissa, and he possibly even spoke to some of Cannae’s survivors, although they would have been very old.

He also read a lot of history—contemporary or near contemporary accounts that are now lost to us. Key here was the work of Fabius Pictor, a distinguished Roman senator, who after the defeat at Cannae had been sent on a mission to the Delphic oracle to try to figure out what had gone wrong soothsayer-wise. Fabius Pictor is interesting in part due to his kinship with Fabius Maximus, the savvy architect of the strategy of attrition and delay that at least cut Rome’s losses to Hannibal, and also because Fabius Pictor’s history seems to have revealed deep fissures in the Carthaginian government’s support of Hannibal’s invasion.
6
We know that Polybius used the work of L. Cincius Alimentus, a moderately important Roman soldier and politician who had been captured by Hannibal and had struck up a relationship with the Carthaginian invader. Polybius also used the work of Aulus Postumius Albinus, who was consul in 151 B.C. There were probably others on the Roman side.

Remarkably—given the truism of history being written by the winners—Polybius had available to him a substantial body of work that told the story from the Carthaginian, or at least Hannibalic, side. Two historians in particular, Sosylus the Spartan and Silenos from Kaleakte, accompanied Hannibal to Italy and stayed with him “as long as fate allowed.”
7
While Polybius is dismissive of Sosylus as a gossip, the Spartan knew Hannibal well enough to have taught him Greek, and a surviving fragment of his seven-book history indicates some competence. This is significant since some believe that Polybius’s account of Cannae may have actually come from Hannibal himself speaking to Sosylus or possibly Silenos.
8

Even skeptics concede Polybius a place, along with Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, in the first tier of ancient historians. Without his single-book account of the First Punic War, we would know very little about this conflict, the longest in ancient history. His lost recounting of the Third Punic War is thought to have provided the basis of the historian Appian’s narrative, who here is far better than elsewhere. Yet it was Polybius’s rendering of the second war with Carthage that made and preserves his reputation as a great historian,
9
even though the account has a gaping hole in the middle. Fortunately for our purposes, the narrative ends right after Cannae and—with the exception of a few fragments mostly on campaigns in Sicily and Spain—picks up just before the final climactic battle of Zama. Nevertheless, the absence of the middle narrative clouds many issues and leaves us reliant on a single source, Livy, who is more the storyteller and less the analyst. Polybius above all sought the truth, weighing the facts carefully, and characteristically looking at both sides of things controversial; he is the rock on which our understanding of the period is anchored. Still, as scrupulous and fair as Polybius was, his affiliations, sources, and purpose left him with some biases—Scipios, Fabians, and their friends are generally made to look good, and others may have been scapegoated to cover for their mistakes. And ultimately it is his view that Rome and not Carthage deserved to survive. He was also not very good with numbers. His armies are smaller or larger than they should be; at Cannae his dead outnumber those who could have taken part in the battle.
10
There are other incongruities. No one is perfect.

Certainly not Livy, or, more formally, Titus Livius. Recently a prominent classicist joked that Herodotus, historiography’s eternal tourist, sported a Hawaiian shirt.
11
In this vein it is possible to imagine Livy as an ancient version of a Hollywood mogul, capturing the sweep of Rome’s history with a notably cinematic flair. Of Livy’s original 142 books only 32 survive, but luckily ten of those are devoted to the Second Punic War, and it is almost possible to hear marching across those pages the faint thunder of the original score—cymbal, kettledrums, and trumpets—the clatter of short swords striking Gallic shields and the impassioned Latin of senators debating what to do about Hannibal. In all of historical literature it is hard to match the ghastly clarity of Livy’s Cannae battlefield the morning after, as he pans the wreckage strewn with dead and half-dead Romans, shredded survivors begging for a coup de grâce. The man knew how to set a scene. This is also the problem. Livy’s history looks better than it actually is. Verisimilitude is not truth, just the appearance of truth.