Hannibal Lost
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Transcript of Hannibal Lost
Why did Hannibal fail to convert his victory at Cannae into a comprehensive
defeat of the Romans in Italy in subsequent years?
Soon after the Battle of Cannae, one Maharbal, a cavalry commander, was said to have
questioned Hannibal as to why he did not march on Rome.1 Hannibal might well have
answered that it was neither possible, nor preferable, to arrange the destruction of the city. If
Rome would not enter into negotiations, and the dictator M. Iunius Pera assured Hannibal
they would not, then the war must be fought in Italy, rather than at the Colline Gate. Whether
or not Hannibal apprehended such a rejection, and prepared the Italian counter-strategy in
advance, or was entirely surprised, and forced to adapt his strategy, the fact remains that his
victory thereafter depended very much upon a tactic of last resort. Unable now to fight the
kind of war he had budgeted for, a war which convention told him he should already have
won, he was, after Cannae, subject to new military parameters, which did not suit so well.
Hannibal may still have won, if all had gone well, if the allied communities proved both
amenable and competent, if consuls could be goaded into yet more disastrous battles, if food
could be found and reinforcements gathered, and if Punic lieutenants could uniformly prosper
in Spain and Sicily. The precariousness of this compromised endeavour is self-evident, and it
seems clear that after Cannae, Hannibal’s prospects for victory, far from improving, were
diminished. Thus, the substance of this essay will represent a forensic analysis of how and
why Hannibal failed to conquer Italy. Though, some attention will be paid to the more
complex idea of whether a comprehensive defeat of Roman Italy was ultimately required for
Hannibal to achieve his original end of forcing Rome to the negotiating table.
Assuming Hannibal had envisioned a quick war, a small but expert force, acting under the
supervision of a talented general, may have sufficed. Indeed, the evidence confirms the
assumption. In the aftermath of Cannae, as Livy records, Hannibal dispatched an envoy,
1 Liv. 22.51
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Carthalo, to Rome to discuss terms of surrender.2 At the same time, the Carthaginian was
undertaking to define a treaty with Philip of Macedon, wherein the future international
condition of an already seemingly defeated Rome was to be arranged.3 These are not the
labours of a general anticipating the continuation of a war. Faced with the prospect, after his
rejection by the Senate, of refitting his army for a war of attrition, Hannibal must have been
confronted with the problem of manpower. Polybius recalls that Hannibal commanded, at
Cannae, 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.4 Allied recruits notwithstanding, the number is
low, especially when one considers that Rome was prepared, in the years 214-211, to field,
according to Brunt, over 75,000 legionaries, and multiple consular and pro-praetorian armies.5
Polybius’ recollection that Rome could, only nine years prior, choose from a potential
manpower reserve of over 800,000 is problematic, yet Livy’s recitation of a healthy census
figure of 270,713 may be more credible.6 The Senate was also of a mind to resort to a number
of emergency measures to ensure the replenishment of their forces. Once a situation of
tumultus was declared, magistrates could speed up recruitment by irregularly absorbing
available citizens into their army. Slaves could be confiscated from propertied citizens by the
state, and turned into marines or legionaries, as could freed prisoners, 17 year-olds, and a
mass of proletarii, who could be conveniently reinvented as assidui after a 27% reduction in
the property qualification.7 Overall, a picture emerges of a Roman reserve durable enough to
recover from several of Diodorus’ ‘Pyrrhic victories’, and persist in the face of a mercenary
enemy whose seasoned troops were a perpetually imperiled commodity.8 If it was Hannibal’s
plan to deprive Rome of its reserve by detaching allies, it was a poorly conceived plan, for, as
2 Liv. 22.583 Pol. 7.94 Pol. 3.1145 Brunt in Erdkamp 2011: 676 Pol. 2.24; Liv. Per 207 Liv. 22.57 & 23.148 Diod. 22.6.2
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Fronda makes plain, nothing short of ‘massive allied defections’ would have sufficed, and
massive defections were unlikely, considering the enforced hold Rome had on Etruria and
Latium.9 A comprehensive defeat at this time was as unrealistic as a comprehensive
appropriation of the allied force.
Nor were the Italians who Hannibal did succeed in recruiting of especial value. Those
seduced by Hannibalic treaties of alliance more often than not capitalized on Hannibal’s
rather naïve promise of freedom and autonomy by offering to take him at his word. Indeed,
Hannibal’s Campanian treaty of 216 includes, as Livy relates it, a clause guaranteeing that ‘no
Campanian citizen should have to fight or discharge any duty against his will’.10 Allies who
would not fight for Hannibal, but who still demanded his protection, were not only militarily
useless, but were, in fact, nothing short of a millstone round his neck. Nor were those who did
agree to fight helpful to the war effort. For example, the Bruttian force led by Hanno to the
siege of Locri, upon being denied their due booty after Locri was admitted to the Carthaginian
alliance without a fight, were quite content to abandon their commander, and embark upon a
siege of Croton, from whom they yet hoped to extract a profit, a profit not to be shared with
Hannibal.11 Fronda makes the point that ‘age-old intra-regional competition helped to
undermine the effectiveness of the Hannibalic strategy’, and the Bruttian example certainly
appears to support this idea.12 In effect, once cut loose from Rome, and Roman repression, the
south proved no prize at all for Hannibal. In fact, the situation in the south, post-Cannae,
could be seen as instructive of why Hannibal failed to solicit the massive defections he
needed. Arguably, Hannibal was probably correct in his assumption that the assorted Italian
allies did not love Rome, but incorrect in his belief that they would rebel, precisely because,
as the Bruttian example suggests, they were well aware that, given adequate license, and
9 Fronda 2010: 4210 Liv. 23.711 Liv. 24.212 Fronda 2010: 52
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absent the control of Rome, their own neighbours were a far more incorrigible force. This
appears a more likely explanation than the alternative, that the socii were ‘existentially and
ideologically’ bound to Rome,13 for certainly Fabius had little confidence in such notions.14
For as long as Hannibal was forced to rely upon an unruly and demanding south, no
comprehensive defeat of an organized Roman interior was likely to materialise, and the fact
remained that Hannibal had made an investment in the south, and increasingly lacked the
capital to try elsewhere.
Of course, it is entirely possible that Hannibal, recalling his extraordinary victories at
Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae, and the losses he inflicted on multiple great armies, may have
considered battle itself as a way of neutralizing the Roman manpower advantage. Hannibal
had already proved that vast numbers did not guarantee victory, for, as Fronda points out, ‘the
Romans did enjoy a significant advantage in manpower relative to the forces under
Hannibal’s command at the outbreak of the war’.15 It had availed them nothing in the past, so
one can perhaps understand why Hannibal was yet confident. However, the Roman
introduction of the ‘Fabian strategy’ proved fatal to Hannibal’s aspirations. By reverting to an
evasive posture, denying battle and striking at Hannibal’s allies, rather than at Hannibal
himself, Rome could at last make their manpower work for them. Both Livy and Polybius
demonstrate that even Hannibal’s feigned march on Rome in 211 did not draw out the Roman
army.16 Polybius, too, remarks that, thanks to the Fabian strategy, the Romans remained
‘secure in the knowledge that these same [Carthaginian] horsemen who had defeated them in
pitched battles could not touch them’.17 He also refers to the Roman tendency to ‘dog the
enemy’s movements’.18 Lazenby brings into question the notion that the Fabian strategy was
13 Zimmerman 2011: 28714 Liv. 23.2215 Fronda 2010: 3716 Liv. 26.7-12; Pol. 9.3-717 Pol. 9.418 Pol. 9.3
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actually successful, by pointing out that the Romans still lost decisively at Herdonea in 210,
and twice at Canusium in 209, but to this author’s mind the very fact that Hannibal was
allowed but three such engagements in a decade of total war confirms the value of the
strategy.19 By the end of the Battle of Cannae, Rome had lost some 82,000 men to pitched
battles; the need for a new tactic was self-evident.20 That Hannibal failed to anticipate this
need, and continued to predicate his war on the assumption that the Romans could not adapt,
reveals a profound capacity for miscalculation on his part, of the sort that precluded
comprehensive victory.
The Fabian strategy, insofar as it altered the dynamic of the war, changing a formerly
rapid-fire conflict into a ponderous war of attrition, also served to compromise Hannibal’s
army on an economic level. The Romans could utilise their own existing infrastructure to
support static front-lines, relying on local supply shipments from depots such as that on
Volturnus River, for example, which was in turn supplied by Etruscan and Sardinian
shipments via Ostia.21 Livy recalls that, in addition to the Volturnus store, Rome could afford
to fortify supply depots at Casilinum and Puteoli, and as such ‘send all grain cargoes
immediately to the camp’.22 In stark contrast, Hannibal was largely restricted to living off the
land, a process which not only made supply unreliable, but also guaranteed that Hannibal
could not maintain the kind of static position that Rome favoured, precisely because
‘Campania was less and less able to sustain his army’.23 Nor could Hannibal prevent the
Romans from scorching the land, in an attempt to further restrict his options. Livy recalls a
Fabian law of 215 instructing allies to burn agrarian land and surplus, and Polybius points out
that whenever armies were forced to forage further afield their operational efficiency was duly
19 Lazenby 1996: 4620 Brunt in Erdkamp 2011: 6721 Liv. 25.2022 Liv. 25.2223 Erdkamp 2011: 73
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reduced.24 Nor could Hannibal receive shipments from abroad in the same way the Romans
could, for, owing to Roman naval control of both the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts, and the
Sicilian routes, the Hannibalic force was essentially isolated. Ultimately, one need only
consider the miserable fate of the Capuans in 213, driven to the point of starvation, and unable
to feed either themselves or Hannibal’s army, to realise what little opportunity Hannibal had
of breaking free of his southern fetters, and attaining to a more comprehensive defeat of the
Roman peninsula at large.
As can be seen, Hannibal was confronted with innumerable logistical problems upon
relocating to the south of Italy after the Roman rejection of his peace. These require treatment,
but so too does the nature of the Roman rejection itself, and the particulars of the intractable
Roman character. Fronda is content to label any such discussion of the Roman character, as a
factor behind their victory, as ‘nebulous’.25 But one might equally argue that just as no
examination of the Persian Wars would be complete without some analysis of the peculiarities
of the Spartan mindset as a factor effecting resistance, so too no examination of the
Hannibalic War can be satisfactorily concluded without consideration of the psychology of an
unconventional Roman people. According to Livy, ‘no other nation could have suffered such
tremendous disasters and not been defeated’.26 The extreme extent to which the Senate was
unwilling even to consider retreat can perhaps be gauged by examining some few of the
extraordinary tactical and legislative provisions enacted, of which many must have stunk in
the nostrils of the conservative elite, and were yet retained. The Fabian strategy of evasion
and harassment itself ran contrary to the martial mentality of the Romans, and even Fabius’
own magister equitum, Minucius, branded the tactics ‘feeble and dilatory’.27 The arming and
fielding of slave and criminal armies, and the relative enfranchisement of the proletarii also
24 Liv. 23.32; Pol. 1.1725 Fronda 2010: 4826 Liv. 22.5427 Pol. 3.90
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struck at the heart of the ancestral status quo, or ‘constitution’, that at any other time the
Senate was self-evidently loath to tamper with.28 Likewise, the empowering in 216 of the
triumviri mensarii, with exceptional powers to appropriate the wealth of prominent citizens,
and the passing of the tributum duplex in 215, evidences a controversial willingness to bleed
the otherwise inviolable noble houses.29 Livy’s comment, that ‘honour must give way to
expedience’,30 perhaps encapsulates the anomaly of resorting to un-Roman solutions in order
to effect a distinctly Roman inflexibility, which, as Zimmerman makes plain, was ‘a
precondition of the later victory’,31 and an important factor contributing to Hannibal’s
inability to comprehensively defeat the Romans either at home or in Italy.
These are all salient explanations of Hannibal’s inability to overrun Italy, and yet this line
of analysis presupposes that Hannibal did indeed intend to do so. Arguably, this is to miss the
point entirely, for one might well argue that Hannibal’s original end, to strain Roman and
Italian resolve to the point of negotiated capitulation, could still have been achieved even
while the Carthaginian was confined to the south. In effect, Hannibal only required a foothold
in Italy to ensure that the war was prolonged, and it follows that for every year the war
persisted, the Italian desire to fight would be eroded, and the Roman state weakened.
Essentially, Hannibal’s only strategic obligation was to maintain the war on Italian soil;
comprehensive conquest was not strictly necessary. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest
that by 209 Hannibal’s strategy of death by a thousand cuts was working, for Livy describes
how even in Latium those of the 12 colonies who announced that they could no longer supply
Rome with troops did so in order to try and induce Rome to turn their thoughts towards ‘a
treaty of peace’.32 Lazenby certainly appears convinced that it would be ‘the long drawn out
misery of constant war service and devastated fields’ that would vindicate Hannibal’s plan, 28 Liv. 22.57, 23.1429 Liv. 23.21, 23.31, 26.3630 Liv. 23.1431 Zimmerman 2011: 28732 Liv. 27.9
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rather than any sort of Italian conquest writ large.33 If this be the case, and the argument does
seem intuitive, one might simply argue that the only reason Hannibal failed to defeat the
Romans in Italy was because his colleagues failed to defeat the Romans in Spain, insofar as
the latter loss necessitated in the final instance Hannibal’s return to Africa.
Ultimately, the sheer volume of complex military, economic, strategic and geographical
variables with which Hannibal had to wrestle while entrenched within Italy rendered the
Carthaginian’s plan supremely ambitious. A clear picture emerges of a Hannibalic force less
and less able to prosecute the war on its own terms, much less seize, or re-seize, the initiative.
Hannibal’s army was merely holding on after Cannae, in the hope of extracting a peace that
was never likely to be provided by a Roman state that did not negotiate while vulnerable.
Though it is not necessary to regard Hannibal’s enterprise as doomed, it does seem quite clear
that a comprehensive victory, an Italy-wide reenactment of Cannae, was not possible.
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33 Lazenby 1996: 43
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Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica
Livy, Historiae Ab Urbe Condita
Plutarch, Lives
Polybius, Histories
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