The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (4 page)

The Romans did. But it is important to remember that it was not a matter of preference. They leveraged their weakness into strength because it worked—until they could land a crushing blow. At best, the past only rhymes. The Romans and Carthaginians fought as they did because of who they were and where they came from. Their assumptions, not our own, ultimately engendered reality during the Second Punic War.

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What happened at Cannae, even the decision to have a battle on that day, was as much a result of ritual and tradition as it was a result of choices made by the participants. Hence, an understanding of the battle demands that we step back in time and take account as best we can of the origins and implications of those factors. By the time Cannae was fought, humanity had been waging something we would recognize as organized warfare for a bit more than five thousand years.
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For a long time before, though, we had engaged in other violent pursuits, aggressive activities that had cumulatively provided us with the behavioral and tangible assets that would enable us to become true military creatures—what amounted to the raw materials for war.

Hunting had been central. Our evolutionary ancestors were killing and eating other animals long before we evolved into humans.
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To do this required not just effective strategies; our forebears needed weapons; but both were largely a matter of the size of the quarry.

On the one hand there were the problems and possibilities associated with stalking and killing small game. Many were already prey for other animals and had developed avoidance strategies dependent upon stealth and speed. Being slower afoot, our ancestors needed some means of striking from a distance, and that meant velocity and accuracy. Accomplished bipeds since splitting off from the great apes, hominid arms were free to throw and hominid hands were able to grasp and direct sticks and stones. For a long time that was probably our best trick. Then, sometime far down the evolutionary track, perhaps beginning around five hundred centuries ago, behaviorally modern humans came to understand and exploit the possibilities of mechanical advantage. They began fashioning bolas, throwing sticks, boomerangs, and eventually and most important, slings and bows.
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The last two would become persistent handmaidens not just of the chase, but also of war. For they were efficient killers, and they also provided a measure of physical and psychological safety by dispatching the victim at some distance. But as with other strategies aimed at minimizing risk, there was a cost in terms of potential gain, and this would prove to be a major factor—not just in hunting, but in the kind and motivation of armies that eventually evolved in the ancient world.

Much earlier, when modern humans marched out of Africa and moved north, they found a host of really big animals waiting for them, many congregating in huge herds. This was the tail end of the Pleistocene, a period when the back-and-forth march of mile-high glaciers had stimulated genetic ingenuity and the evolution of a lavish array of megafauna—beasts whose very size was their central advantage in an environment that paid big dividends for heat retention. Together such fauna constituted a movable feast for human predators with the cunning and courage to help themselves at Mother Nature’s groaning board. But it was very dangerous, and slings and arrows would not get the job done.

These beasts were not used to being chased, especially not by bipedal newcomers. This meant you could get in close, but also that you had to get in close. To kill such thick-skinned, thick-skulled behemoths demanded direct confrontation, either deep penetration with a spear or heavy blows to the head with a club or ax. But doing this alone would have been suicidal. So big and lethal were these prey that human males had to hunt together in groups. Evidence shows that earlier humans had hunted big game, but now we had the advanced language skills, imagination, and memory to plot coordinated strategies, and an increased capacity for social cohesion. Over time, the experience of confronting big, lethally aroused animals forged hunting parties into teams specialized to face danger, bonded to risk everything in pursuit of a mutual objective and in protecting members in peril. Hunting parties became brotherhoods of killers, prototypes of the squad-size small units that one day would form the basic building blocks of armies.

Meanwhile, when recounting and celebrating their kills back among the band, it is likely the hunters indulged in dance, and as they shared rhythmic and intricate patterns of big muscle movements, they further welded themselves together. Those dances were choreographic prototypes of the marching and drill that would one day unite armies and create the tactical dynamics of the battlefield.
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In the meantime these fraternities of death-dealing were absolutely without precedent in terms of hunting efficiency, as is evidenced by the excavated bones of a hundred thousand horses driven over cliffs in Germany and by similar finds elsewhere.
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Such epic acts of killing seem to fly in the face of a considerable body of evidence that portrays hunter-collectors as parsimonious killers by inclination, true game managers.
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But there is no real contradiction. Herding is a defense mechanism animals use to make themselves scarce. Contacts between predator and prey will be fewer, and when contacts do come, the predator will be overloaded, having only a limited time and ability to kill. This is why hunting animals at times becomes wantonly destructive. They are just following one of the iron laws of the jungle: kill all you can while you can. It was a variation on this rule that Hannibal’s army would apply to the trapped Roman legions at Cannae many centuries later. But that would require a far different environment and considerable psychological conditioning.

For the time being, aggression among humans was likely to have been mostly much more personal and discrete—concerned primarily with the tangle of issues surrounding mating, dominance, and, when it mattered, territory.
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There is little direct evidence of how this played out, but our own residual behavior along with the behavior of other animals gives us some good leads. Since much of animal behavior hinges on reproduction, confrontations characteristically center on individual competitors, and in most species they are males. And while war as it evolved in the ancient world would become essentially a matter of men acting in groups, the proclivity for individual combat was always present, and in the case of the Romans it was brilliantly exploited.

Given the basic motivation of aggression of this sort, there was also no necessary advantage in going to lethal extremes. Strong, though definitely rescindable, human inhibitions against killing our own are well documented
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and are paralleled by similar disinclinations in other animals. Who would kill, who would not, who killed easily—these are matters not much explored in military history, but they are arguably vital issues, particularly in close combat. Hannibal’s invading army was at its core composed of case-hardened veterans. Freeze-dried in the Alps and then tempered by the blood of countless legionaries, they had learned to kill without qualm or hesitation. This was something the Romans could not duplicate so long as they persisted in fielding armies filled with inexperience.

In any case, this killing without qualm or hesitation was so inherently frightful that it had to be enfolded, disguised, and regularized, and once again characteristic forms of aggression within species seem to have provided the context. Among mammals we see a clear pattern of ritualization in combat, with opponents normally following rules—or at least stereotyped behavior—and employing their defense mechanisms symmetrically—antler versus antler in deer and moose, for instance. Noise, visual impressions, and particularly size are important, with dueling animals reacting in ways that make them appear louder, bigger, and more frightening. Ritualization also has a temporal and a spatial dimension, with combat normally being staged at regular intervals synchronized to the female reproductive cycle and sometimes at a habitual venue. So too the human armies of the Second Punic War would often gather at a certain time to fight by mutual consent on fields carefully chosen for battle. Trumpets would blare, drums would pound, and within the ranks soldiers would don crested helmets to make them appear taller, uttering their most horrible war cries, fortifying their spirits to close face-to-face and match sword against sword to confront at last war’s terrible reality. Now, these patterns do not extend across all species, nor did they characterize all the forms of ancient warfare, but they do represent recurring themes and are clearly different from the characteristics of predation, which is far more pragmatic, spontaneous, and indiscriminate.
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Logic points to us having enlisted both the characteristics of predation and the aggression associated with reproductive dominance, along with the weapons we developed and the attitudes we accumulated through participation in each, and then enfolded them in the institution we invented and now call war.

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It’s hard to put a finger on exactly when true war started—not just occasional group or individualized mayhem but regularized societal violence. The best bet is that it ignited initially to protect one of several rich but temporary food sources, and eventually took off in a sustained way several millennia after people first settled down in the ancient Middle East to raise crops and domesticate animals.

Briefly put, the logic of this agronomy pushed nascent shepherds and their flocks out away from the farmers and their crops and into the beginnings of an independent existence. Life was tough out there, though, and the magnet of stored grain seems to have drawn the herdsmen into an intensifying syndrome of raiding agricultural settlements, a syndrome that reached a crisis point around 5500 B.C. This makes sense, because around this time the farming communities dotting the region began building walls around dwelling areas, stone shields against hostile outsiders.

At a later date in the timeline, pastoralism got a true leg up when shepherds learned to mount horses, which enabled them to move out onto the Inner Asian steppe. Out there they would continue to live a life of riding and rustling and raiding that would periodically lead them to spill off the high plains and descend on settled societies both east and west, with temporary but devastating effect, all the way up through the thirteenth century A.D. and the epic advances of Genghis Khan’s Mongols.

These Inner Asian steppe horsemen were truly men apart, well away from the main military thread of our story. But they raise an important point. As frightening and bewildering as were their attacks to the victimized, they were not without purpose, mere random violence. They were acts of organized theft, specifically addressing a societal shortcoming, the periodic collapse of their flocks. All the other forms of warfare that sprang up in the ancient world were also motivated by some kind of societal shortcoming; it was just too costly to fight for any other reason.

Back down on the farm, the seeds of war had taken hold independently, and agricultural communities had begun fighting regularly among themselves for territory and dominance. We get an excellent picture of how this evolved among the competing Sumerian city-states on the flatlands bordered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now still contentious Iraq. In particular we have two very suggestive relics, the first of these being a fragmentary victory monument carved around 2500 B.C., known today as the Stele of the Vultures.
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It is a stone snapshot of the Sumerian order of battle, and it reveals a basic split. Out front, armed for single combat, is Eannatum, ruler of Lagash, symbolically looking forward to a day in the Middle East when elite warriors would seek out and fight equals while a host of lightly armed underlings would do their best to stay alive. But in the Stele of the Vultures, Eannatum is backed up by something entirely more lethal—an infantry column, all wearing helmets, advancing shoulder to shoulder behind a barrier of locked rectangular shields and presenting a hedgehog of spears—a full-fledged phalanx. Military historians have mostly overlooked the implications of this early depiction of a phalanx, and have focused instead on the development of this presumably advanced infantry formation by the culturally resplendent Hellenic Greeks almost two thousand years later. Actually, the technical and tactical requirements for a phalanx are simple. What’s needed is a willingness to confront adversaries at close quarters and to face danger in a cooperative fashion—the big-game hunter mentality. This is where our second relic becomes telling.

We have preserved on clay tablets the written chronicle of a ruler thought to be roughly contemporaneous with Eannatum. The ruler is Gilgamesh of Uruk, humankind’s initial literary hero. Among the accounts of Gilgamesh’s exploits is a suggestive tale of a war with the rival city of Kish over water rights. The action opens with Kish having warned the men of Uruk to stop digging wells and irrigation ditches on disputed territory. Gilgamesh wants war but plainly lacks the power to make the decision stick. Instead, he must go before a council of elders, and when they rebuff him, have their decision reversed by an assembly of all the city’s fighting men.
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Those who would bear the brunt of combat had a clear and direct interest in the outcome, and it stands to reason that they might willingly have taken their place in the dangerous but decisive phalanx. War at this time and place was a cooperative endeavor all about preserving and enforcing the balance of power among multiple independent political entities; but that was not the future in the Middle East, nor was the future of the region’s infantryman to be found in the tight-knit ranks of the phalanx.

The sheer drudgery involved in irrigated agriculture, combined with the massive populations it was able to feed, meant that the dynamics of governance were heavily weighted in the directions of compulsion and rigidly enforced pyramids of power. Meanwhile, the balance among the competing city-states of Sumer proved transitory and was overturned in the middle of the twenty-fourth century B.C. by a single player, Sargon, who proceeded to implement a blueprint for imperial tyranny. His agents fanned out across the alluvium, framing the structure with tax lists, trustworthy locals, garrisons, royal governors, and, kept close at hand, a picked body of heavily armed retainers.
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