The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (37 page)

After dark on the evening before the battle, once the army had eaten its evening meal, this force made its way through rain to its place of ambush. First thing in the morning, some Numidian horsemen galloped across the river and threw javelins at the Roman camp. Their instructions were to lure the consul Sempronius to lead out his army before the men had had breakfast, ford the Trebia, and offer battle. Sempronius, eager to fight before his term of office expired at the end of the year, was only too happy to oblige.

The legions struggled across the rushing river and formed up in battle order. The whole process must have taken several hours and the men were soaking wet, cold, and hungry. In contrast, before deploying, the Carthaginian rank and file had time to warm themselves by large fires in front of their tents. They breakfasted at leisure and groomed their horses. They were given portions of olive oil so that they could rub themselves down to keep their bodies supple.

After all this, the outcome of the battle itself was a foregone conclusion. The foot soldiers faced one another in the center and were evenly matched, but the Punic cavalry on the wings soon drove back their Roman counterparts. This exposed the legions’ flanks to attack. Then Mago’s hidden force suddenly emerged and fell on them from behind. Despite the fact that ten thousand Roman legionaries pushed their way through the enemy line out of the battle and quit the field in good order, the day was lost. Well over half of the Roman army was slaughtered.

On the Carthaginian side, the Spaniards and Africans were more or less unscathed, but the newly recruited Celts suffered heavy losses. Unluckily, the winter continued harsh and, in the coming days, more rain, snow, and intolerable cold took their toll. Men and horses perished. In this weather, Hannibal, riding the only surviving elephant, marched south through marshy terrain on the way to Etruria. He suffered intense pain from a bout of ophthalmia and lost the use of one eye.

For all that, it was the Romans who had been defeated. The Senate was not so much alarmed as energized. A hundred thousand men were conscripted, and Sicily, Sardinia, and Rome garrisoned against possible attack. The losses sustained by the four consular legions at the Trebia were made good. Nevertheless, it was a dark time. Many portents were reported to bode ill for Rome.
A spring sacred to Hercules at the Etruscan city of Caere was found to have flecks of blood in it, and a propitiatory
lectisternium
was held—a banquet at which an image of the demigod reclined on a couch, with the food spread around him. Expensive gifts were donated to shrines of hostile Juno—evidence, perhaps, that Hannibal’s public-relations campaign was working.

LAKE TRASIMENE, IN
Etruria, was shallow, muddy, and humid, a breeding ground of pike, carp, tench—and malarial mosquitoes. Its northern shore was guarded by a line of steep hills. Approached
from the west, some high ground gently sloped down to the lakeside (near today’s Borghetto, in the
comune
of Tuoro). It opened out onto a small plain that extended for a mile or so before closing in again and ending at almost but not altogether impassable heights. Beyond lay the way to the south.

In the spring of 217, the Punic army, well rested after its winter trials, marched down through Etruria, laying waste to the countryside as it went. It bypassed a Roman army led by a new consul, Gaius Flaminius, who immediately set off in hot pursuit. Hannibal reached the lake and turned east into the defile. An idea struck him; here was the ideal spot for an ambush, if only the consul was foolhardy enough to walk into the obvious trap. One of the habits of the Carthaginian was to seek out intelligence on enemy commanders and to tailor his tactics to what he knew of their personality. Flaminius, he discovered, was not without military experience, but as a plebeian he seems to have had a chip on his shoulder and was an impatient leader. He would have felt humiliated by having to take his legions through a devastated landscape, and now be eager for revenge.

This was a correct judgment. Flaminius saw the Punic army enter the defile and followed straight after, setting up camp on the plain. Hannibal’s camp could be seen in open view right at the far end of the lake, but he had stationed most of his troops unseen in the hills, where the ground narrowed and there was no room for maneuver.

In the early dawn of 21 June, Flaminius formed up his troops into column of route and they proceeded along the lakeside. He did not trouble to send out scouts. Visibility was poor, for a heavy mist hung over the water and the shore. So when the Carthaginians charged down from the high ground, the surprise was complete. The Romans hardly knew what had hit them and there was little they could do to defend themselves. Nevertheless, the battle, or perhaps more accurately the bloodbath, lasted for three hours. Flaminius
fought bravely, but at last was struck down by a Celtic lance. Livy takes up the narrative:

The Consul’s death was the beginning of the end. Panic ensued, and neither lake nor mountain could stop the wild rush for safety. Men tried blindly to escape by any possible way, however steep, however narrow; weapons were flung away, men fell and others fell on top of them. Many, finding nowhere to turn to save their skins, plunged into the lake until the water was up to their necks, while a few in desperation tried to swim for it—a forlorn hope indeed over that broad lake, and they were either drowned or, struggling back exhausted into shallow water, were butchered wholesale by the mounted troops who rode in to meet them.

A vanguard managed to push through the Carthaginian line and escape into the hills, but fifteen thousand Romans perished, while Hannibal lost only fifteen hundred men. When the news reached Rome, there was no attempt to hide the magnitude of the catastrophe. A praetor went to the Forum and announced, with becoming brevity,
“Magna pugna victi sumus”
(“We have been defeated in a great battle”).

A YEAR PASSED
, and the date was now 2 August 216. The scene was a windy, dusty plain in Apulia a few miles from the Adriatic coast. High summer in southern Italy brought fierce heat and a permanent chorus of cicadas. Within a space of five square miles, two armies, consisting in total of about 150,000 men, confronted each other. One of the great battles of the world was about to be fought, and has inspired generals down the ages. It is a rare military training college today whose curriculum does not include it.

After the Battle of Lake Trasimene and two routs in a row, the Romans had lost heart. A dictator was appointed for a six-month term of office, the warty Fabius Maximus. He seems to have attracted
nicknames; as well as Verrucosus, he was called Ovicula, or “lambkin.” According to Plutarch, this was

because of his gentle and solemn personality when he was still a child. In fact, his calm, quiet manner, the great caution with which he took part in childish pleasures, the slowness and difficulty with which he learned his lessons, and his contented submissiveness in dealing with his comrades, led those who knew him superficially to suspect him of something like foolishness and stupidity … but his seeming lack of energy was only lack of emotion, his caution was prudence, and his never being quick nor even easy to move made him always resolute and reliable.

According to Cicero,
he had read a lot “for a Roman.”

Fabius raised two new legions and, adding them to existing Roman and allied troops, commanded an army of forty thousand men. He pursued a wise, but extremely unpopular, policy of tailing Hannibal but never offering battle. His idea was to wear down the enemy in the hope that eventually he would make a bad mistake and expose himself to defeat. The policy nearly brought a quick success, for Fabius bottled up the Carthaginians in mountainous territory. On the following night, Hannibal, never at a loss, tied burning brands to the horns of two thousand cattle and set the terrified animals to run around on the high ground. This bizarre ruse worked. The Romans thought they were about to be attacked and the Carthaginians crept away through the concealing dark.

The policy of delay also enabled the elderly dictator to train his new troops and allowed time to heal the Republic’s wounded morale. But public opinion very soon swung against Fabius, who duly retired after his six-month term. A huge army of eighty-seven thousand men was assembled—that is, eight legions plus roughly the same number of allied troops. This would give them the edge over Hannibal, who disposed of only about fifty thousand soldiers.
The two consuls who succeeded Fabius held very different views of the plan of campaign. Lucius Aemilius Paullus, a member of one of the most ancient patrician clans, was a Fabian and believed Hannibal should be starved out of his winter quarters in southern Italy; but Gaius Terentius Varro, a plebeian parvenu much disliked by the
gratin
, argued that Rome should make the most of its advantage in numbers and provoke a full-scale battle as soon as possible.

They tracked Hannibal down to the neighborhood of a small town in Apulia called Cannae, amid the dust and the cicadas. As was the practice, they alternated command daily. Paullus was in charge when Hannibal led his army out and offered battle; he declined the invitation. The next day, Varro accepted the challenge. Immediately after sunrise, he sported the red flag, or
vexillum
, outside his tent, the traditional signal for battle. He formed up his army, with cavalry on the wings and a mass of infantry in the center; the right wing abutted against a river and the left against rising ground.

Hannibal looked carefully at the enemy and noticed that the foot soldiers were short of space, and as a result were in deep formation and rather squashed together. They would find it hard to maneuver. The Carthaginian general formed his troops in a way that would exploit that potential weakness. He lined his Celtic and Spanish infantry in a convex curve opposite the Roman center. Behind them, at either end and out of sight, he placed two substantial detachments of his best troops—Libyan infantry, well-trained and reliable. On his wings, his cavalry faced the Roman horse.

When the fighting started, the Roman center pushed back the Celts and the Spaniards, so that their line changed from convex to concave. Pleased to find more space to fight in, they unwisely continued to press forward until the Libyans suddenly came into view on either side and turned inward to attack them on their flanks.

Meanwhile, Hannibal’s cavalry on his left wing routed their Roman counterparts, commanded by Consul Paullus. With great
self-discipline, the victorious Celtic and Spanish horsemen then disengaged and crossed behind the Roman army to attack the enemy cavalry on the far wing, which fled in panic. For a second time, they pulled away and proceeded to attack the rear of the Roman infantry, which now found itself boxed in on all sides.

The rest of the battle consisted of exhausting hours of blood-slippery butchery. Gradually, the packed mass of Roman legionaries and allies was cut down. Paullus, felled by a stone from a slingshot, fought bravely to his last breath, but Varro escaped with seventy horsemen. He rounded up stragglers and took general charge of the grim aftermath. When he returned to Rome, crowds turned out to greet him “
because he had not despaired of the Republic.” He continued to receive public appointments, although he was never to lead a consular army again. This was Rome at its magnanimous best.

A larger group also managed to extricate itself from the hecatomb, among whom was Publius Scipio, now nineteen years old. He threatened to kill some young noblemen who chattered disloyally of fleeing abroad, and forced them to swear that they would never abandon their homeland.

Seventy thousand Romans lay dead on the battlefield. Twenty-nine senior commanders and eighty senators lost their lives. Cannae was the worst military disaster in Rome’s history. Immediately, the Greek
poleis
and the local tribes of southern Italy switched their loyalty to Carthage. The famous city of Capua and other towns in Campania defected. After the death of the aged Hiero, Syracuse abandoned its long-standing alliance with Rome. Tarentum was captured by a clever trick (although the Roman garrison retained the citadel and control of the harbor).

Rome was inflamed by religious panic, stoked by portents and prodigies. In some inexplicable way, the gods were gravely offended. An embassy was sent to Delphi for advice, and two Greeks and two Gauls were buried alive in the city in a bid to regain divine
favor. This extreme gesture was a sign of the despair and hysteria of the time, for human sacrifice was almost unknown in Roman religious practice.

Everyone could see that the Republic was staring total defeat in the face.

13

The Bird Without a Tail

C
ANNAE APPEARED TO BE THE END OF THE ROAD
for Rome, but although nobody knew it at the time and many years would pass before peace came, the war was already won. This was because Hannibal depended for victory on two factors, and both failed him. These were the expected defection of Rome’s Italian allies and the arrival of reinforcements from Spain.