Hannibal Barca

Hannibal Barca a Carthaginian general (247-183 BC), regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of antiquity. From a base in Spain he crossed the Alps with an army that included elephants, defeated the Romans in a series of battles on Italian soil, and came within a hair's breadth of destroying the Roman Republic before being defeated at Zama.

Family and Rise in Spain

Hannibal was born in 247 BC into the Barcid family of Carthage, the son of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who had fought in Sicily during the First Punic War against Rome. As a boy he was brought to the altar by his father and made to swear eternal enmity to Rome, an oath that entered legend and that shaped the whole of his career.

After his father's death the command in Spain passed to Hamilcar's son-in-law Hasdrubal, and Hannibal served under him and learned the arts of war, including the use of cavalry, siegecraft and diplomacy with local tribes. When Hasdrubal was killed in 221 BC, the army in Spain chose Hannibal, then about twenty-six, as its commander.

He consolidated Carthaginian power in the Iberian peninsula in two vigorous campaigns, subduing and winning over neighbouring peoples and pushing the frontier northward. The advance brought him to Saguntum, a city allied to Rome, whose siege and capture in 219 BC became the immediate occasion of the Second Punic War.

The Crossing of the Alps

In the spring of 218 BC Hannibal set out from Spain with a large army, crossed the Pyrenees, moved through southern Gaul, and in the autumn led his forces over the Alps into Italy. The crossing, made in the face of hostile mountain peoples, snow, landslides and the loss of many men and most of the animals, is one of the most famous feats in the history of warfare.

The army that reached Italy is reported to have numbered far fewer than the force that began the journey, and only a small number of elephants survived. Yet Hannibal had achieved complete strategic surprise, arriving in the Po valley with a veteran force at a moment when the Romans expected the conflict to be fought in Spain or Africa.

His first battles in Italy, at the Trebia in 218 BC and at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, were decisive Carthaginian victories achieved by ambush, terrain and superior cavalry. In each case Hannibal drew the Romans into an engagement favourable to himself, and the scale of the defeats shook Roman confidence and won him allies among the Gauls of northern Italy.

Cannae and the Strategy Against Rome

The crowning victory came in 216 BC at Cannae in southern Italy, where Hannibal, outnumbered, enveloped the Roman legions with his cavalry and destroyed an army perhaps three times the size of his own. It is studied to this day as a perfect example of the double envelopment, and the casualties were among the worst ever suffered by Rome in a single day.

After Cannae many of the peoples of southern Italy and Sicily came over to Carthage, and Hannibal's strategy seemed on the verge of success. Yet he chose not to march on Rome itself, judging that he lacked the resources for a siege, and the Romans, refusing to sue for peace, adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle, wearing down his forces and attacking his supply.

The Roman general Fabius Maximus acquired the name Cunctator, the delayer, for this patient policy, which denied Hannibal the decisive battle he needed while Roman strength in manpower and resources slowly reasserted itself. For more than a decade Hannibal held the field in Italy, but he could neither take Rome nor break its confederation of allies.

Zama and Defeat

In 204 BC the Roman commander Publius Cornelius Scipio, later called Africanus, carried the war to Africa and threatened Carthage itself. Hannibal was recalled from Italy to defend his homeland, and in 202 BC the two armies met at Zama, west of Carthage, in the decisive encounter of the war.

At Zama Hannibal's elephants were neutralised and his inexperienced third line could not withstand the Roman legions, while the Roman cavalry under Masinissa, the Numidian king, routed Hannibal's horse and returned to attack his rear. The Carthaginian army was destroyed, and Carthage was forced to accept a harsh peace that stripped it of its fleet, its overseas possessions and its independence in war.

Hannibal survived the battle and afterwards took charge of the civil government of Carthage, where he reformed its finances and its constitution and curbed the corruption of the oligarchy. His reforms made enemies among the ruling families, who denounced him to Rome, and in 195 BC he fled into exile to escape being surrendered to the Romans.

Exile, Death and Reputation

In exile Hannibal served as a military adviser to Antiochus III of the Seleucid empire and later to King Prusias of Bithynia, helping to organise resistance to Rome and continuing to act as a strategist of genius. The Romans, implacable, pursued him from court to court, and in 183 BC, surrounded and facing certain betrayal, he took poison rather than be handed over.

His military reputation has never faded. Even his enemies regarded him as a commander of the first rank, and Roman writers studied his campaigns as the classic lessons in envelopment, surprise and the use of combined arms. Military theorists from antiquity to the modern age, including students of Napoleon, have ranked Cannae among the supreme feats of arms.

He is remembered as the greatest adversary the Roman Republic ever faced, a general who for nearly twenty years fought on enemy soil and came closer than any other to breaking Rome. His career also illustrates the price of defeat: the peace imposed on Carthage after Zama paved the way for the city's final destruction, and his own end in exile became a symbol of loyalty pursued to the grave.

See also

• Second Punic War
• Cannae
• Scipio Africanus
• Carthage