Hannibal (3 page)

Hamilcar, foreseeing that the finances of Carthage might not be sufficient to meet all her debts at once, had been careful to return his mercenaries to the parent city in relatively small detachments so that their arrears of pay could be met in gradual instalments. The ruling party in Carthage, however, true to a cupidity that was understandable in trading but fatal in other affairs, attempted to haggle with the soldiers and delayed making payment ‘until the whole army had returned from Sicily. The result of this was that the mercenaries revolted, to be followed by the slaves, and then by some of the tribesmen in nearby North Africa. In the vicious struggle that ensued—the ‘inexpiable war’ as the Romans called it—the Carthaginian general Hanno who had been appointed to quell the revolt was twice defeated. Finally, even those Carthaginians in power who were jealous of the Barca family were compelled to call upon Hamilcar. The same generalship that had kept the Romans at bay in Sicily was now turned against the mercenaries and their followers. In a savage campaign that lasted for three years (with no quarter on either side), Hamilcar finally brought the war to an end with the total destruction of the rebels. He had proved himself in his country’s service, both overseas and at home, the greatest soldier of his time. His son, who had grown up with the rumour of war always in his ears, who had heard of his father’s exploits in Sicily and then witnessed at first hand his part in suppressing the great rebellion, was marked as a soldier from his earliest years.

Even while Hamilcar was engaged in this war in Africa the garrisons which Carthage kept in Sardinia became infected by the revolt and made offers of the island to Rome. Italian traders supplied the mutineers with food and arms while the Roman Senate, taking advantage of the situation (and totally ignoring the treaty signed between the two states), demanded the withdrawal of the Carthaginian troops. Going even further, and using the cynical pretext that Corsica as well as Sardinia was a threat to the coast of Italy, Rome proceeded to annex both islands. Sardinia followed the pattern of Sicily: it became a Roman province, the second on the unfolding road of empire. When Carthage ventured to protest at this intolerable behaviour that was contrary to the peace treaty and all civilised behaviour, Rome once again declared war and then increased the amount of indemnity that Carthage was to pay in return for a humiliating peace. The loss of these two great islands, so important strategically to Carthage since they lay on the trade routes to the west, as well as being sources of timber and ore, was a further disaster when coupled with her expulsion from Sicily. For a long time the eastern Mediterranean had been largely barred to the Carthaginians by the Greeks, but now even the western basin of the sea—essential because of Carthage’s interests in Spain—had become heavily threatened.

The ‘peace at any price’ party, concerned solely with seeing their mercantile fortunes revive, was even prepared to conspire against Hamilcar, his family and friends, with the Roman enemy. The Barca clan and their associates had their enemies, of course, among such influential families as that of Hanno (the discredited general), but there was a larger and more powerful group who saw quite clearly the fate of Carthage if she did no more than acquiesce in defeat. There can be little doubt that Hamilcar also had the backing of the people. He had not only emerged with great credit from the war in Sicily, but he had also saved the city of Carthage from the mercenaries and their followers when they had threatened its very existence.

Hamilcar, together with a number of members of other ruling families—including Hasdrubal, nicknamed the Handsome, who became not only Hamilcar’s son-in-law but his right hand in the years to come—saw that the city, as things stood, was doomed. After the annexation of Sardinia it was clear to all but the most purblind in the immediate pursuit of self-interest that the word of Rome could never be trusted. With the central Mediterranean now firmly in their hands, together with command of the sea, it could only be a matter of time before the Romans made a successful landing in North Africa. There was no other direction for the Carthaginians to look but westwards. In Mediterranean Spain, and in Carthaginian settlements such as Gades on the Atlantic coast, where neither Greek nor Roman had yet penetrated, the Carthaginians could make good their losses. There in that broad peninsula, rich in mineral wealth, timber and men, the Carthaginians might yet build a second empire which, once tamed and unified, could challenge the ever-increasing power of Rome.

It is significant of the change in Carthaginian circumstances that when Hamilcar took his leave of Carthage in 237 B.C. with an army bound for the West on this unusual project—the establishment not of trading bases but of a land colony—he did not go with a large armada by sea, but marched along the North African coast. No doubt part of his aim was to recruit troops from the countryside through which he passed, but the almost total destruction of the Carthaginian navy in the recent war meant that the city could only spare some merchantmen to accompany him with stores and essential equipment. Hamilcar’s wife, daughters, and two youngest sons, Hasdrubal and Mago, were left behind in the family palace in Carthage. His eldest son, Hannibal, although he was only nine years old, went with his father on the long march to this new country.

Many years later, an exile at the court of Antiochus the Great, ruler of Syria, Hannibal explained the circumstances which led to his accompanying his father at such an early age. ‘When I was a boy of nine,’ he said, ‘my father Hamilcar took me with him to offer sacrifice at the altar of Melqart.’ It was natural enough that before this great expedition his father, together with the other officers and nobles who were accompanying him, should take an oath to the ‘God of the City’, the principal god of Tyre and the god to whom Hamilcar had been dedicated. ‘Taking me by one hand,’ Hannibal continued, ‘he led me up to the altar and placed my other hand upon the sacrificial offering. He asked me to swear that I would never be a friend to the Romans, and I did so.’ Livy repeats much the same story—but with a difference. In his account Hannibal was boyishly urging his father to take him to Spain when his father took him by the hand ‘and led him to the altar. He made him touch the offerings and bind himself with an oath that, as soon as he was able, he would be
the declared enemy of the Roman people
[my italics].’ Livy then, accurately it would seem, gives the reason for Hamilcar’s actions: ‘The loss of Sicily and Sardinia was a continual torture to the proud spirit of Hamilcar. For he maintained that they had surrendered Sicily in premature despair, and that the Romans had wrongly appropriated Sardinia—and even imposed an indemnity on them besides—in the midst of their African disturbances.’

There is a distinction to be noted here between Livy’s ‘declared enemy of the Roman people’ and Polybius’ ‘never [being] a friend to the Romans’.

The term ‘a friend of Rome’ was a definition, not a generalisation. It meant that the man or the state in question submitted to Rome and henceforth would not act independently but was unconditionally committed to Roman protection. Unlike an ‘ally of Rome’, who still retained some privileges and elements of freedom, a friend of Rome was more or less a vassal. What Hamilcar clearly had in mind was that his son, both as a private individual and (as he might later come to be) the representative of Carthage, would never accept the ignominy of being a humble dependent of the Roman state, whilst Livy cites Hamilcar’s anger at the action of the Romans over Sardinia and their imposition of a further indemnity of twelve hundred talents as the primary cause of the next war that was to develop between Carthage and Rome.

In the spring of 236 B.C. Hamilcar and his forces crossed from North Africa into Europe. This was a momentous occasion: the invasion of the European continent by a Semitic and African army. Foreshadowing the great Arab invasions of many centuries later, it gave warning that the countries on the northern rim of the Mediterranean basin were no longer safe from any enemy to the south.

III

A NEW EMPIRE

Gades had been known to the Phoenicians for hundreds of years as a trading depot and major port in the tin trade. Operating out of what was at that time a small island, separated by a narrow arm of sea from the mainland (like Tyre itself), these seafarers had then begun to open up the west coast of Africa. It was from Gades that Hamilcar and his Carthaginians now set themselves a totally different objective—the colonisation of Spain. For nine years, conquering or winning over the native tribes, Hamilcar steadily expanded his grip upon the mainland. Carthaginian superiority in arms and their training in disciplined warfare were applied to bringing into being a colonial empire; hostages were taken for surety, and tribute was imposed upon the conquered tribes. Hamilcar was a great soldier but he was less of a statesman, and his rough-handed methods might have meant that Carthaginian Spain would have advanced slowly over the years. His death in battle in 230 B.C., however, left the command of the army to his son-in-law Hasdrubal ‘the Handsome’.

The latter, as Livy puts it, ‘relying more upon policy than upon arms, enlarged the Carthaginian power by establishing friendly relations with local princes and gaining the favour of new tribes through friendship rather than by war’. Gradually by this use of diplomacy the Carthaginian sphere of influence extended across southern Spain from Gades to the Mediterranean, spreading north towards the river Ebro, and finding a new base on the Mediterranean coastline at New Carthage (Cartagena). Here a superb natural harbour, reminiscent of those that they had lost in the central basin of the sea, would provide the base for both merchant and war ships, while the well-forested land, with its readily accessible minerals and other materials, made shipbuilding as natural a project as it had been in Sicily and Sardinia. New Carthage pointed eastwards like a dagger towards the coast of Italy.

The relationship between the Carthaginians and their Spanish subjects, or allied peoples, is an interesting one, setting a pattern that would become easily recognisable many centuries later when the European powers expanded throughout the world. First of all, the Carthaginians had a superiority in metal-working techniques (hence in weaponry) and, secondly, they came from an old and civilised race, enjoying the use of the alphabet (which their forebears had invented), and inheriting from centuries of warfare a knowledge of strategy, tactics, and discipline when in combat. The Iberians of southern Spain, partly of Berber stock from Africa, were brave enough, but incapable of withstanding either the horsemen or the organised infantrymen whom the Carthaginians brought against them. The latter themselves constituted an officer class, separated from their men by culture, education and background, but intelligently aware that they could not of themselves provide the manpower necessary for large scale warfare. (Again, one is reminded of the British in India.) In religion they inherited the Carthaginian pantheon of their Canaanite forebears, one where human sacrifice—although less and less as time went on—still played its part. On the other hand, the nobles like Hamilcar, his son Hannibal, and the other leaders had been largely influenced by Greek culture. Hannibal had been taught Greek by a Greek tutor, and later throughout his campaign was to take two Greek secretaries with him on his staff.

Under the leadership of Hasdrubal the Handsome the area subject to the Carthaginians was extended from Gades on the west to New Carthage on the east, and northwards as far as Castulo. This fortress-city dominated the Silver Mountains (the Sierra Morena) which now provided the conquerors—and therefore their home city far east in the Gulf of Tunis—with a rich source of the precious metal. It was on the basis of this area of conquest that Hasdrubal the Handsome proceeded to expand. Hannibal’s father and now his brother-in-law were responsible for laying the foundation upon which their great successor was to build. Furthermore, there can be small doubt that the dream of using Spain as a base from which to attack the Romans was always present in Hamilcar’s mind. The thought of vengeance-so often accredited solely to his son—must certainly have worked upon the father, who had known Carthage in its days of splendour and who had witnessed at first hand the perfidy of the Romans over Sardinia. (It is significant that throughout their later histories the Romans constantly refer to ‘Punic faith’, i.e. perfidious and untrustworthy behaviour. It is evidence of their uneasy conscience.)

If some members of the rich oligarchy that ruled Carthage had learned little from their first war against Rome—except a reluctant willingness to entrust the fate of their city and their empire to the hands of Hamilcar Barca—the Romans had learned a great deal. The first conclusion they had drawn, now that they had outstripped the long peninsula of Italy, was the importance of sea power. The aspirations of the northern hill-farmers, who had expanded into an agglomeration of small Italian states, had been completely transformed by their struggle against a mercantile and maritime power like Carthage. The taste of victory on a wider domain than the land had led to a change of attitude. If they were later, under Augustus, to accept the inspired rendering of their history by Virgil that they were descended from the Trojans, the seeds of this myth were certainly sown by the end of the first war against Carthage. It was not too difficult by then for the Romans to believe that the leader of their ancestors had been Aeneas, a figure of Odysseus-like dimensions, who had triumphed (however meanly) over the Carthaginian Queen Dido.

Politically, the first Punic War had brought the Romans to a new maturity. Whereas the tribes or towns on the Italian mainland, which had earlier been conquered by the Romans, had become to one degree or another partners in the confederacy of Latin states, the towns and city-states of Sicily, with a few notable exceptions, became subjects. While the Latins on the mainland retained a certain amount of autonomy and paid no monetary tribute to Rome (supplying instead men and materials for the army), the Sicilians—and the Sardinians—paid tribute in money or in kind. Meanwhile, in the Italian peninsula itself the Romans had extended their northern frontier almost up to the Alps. In the year of Hamilcar’s death they had also made their first major inroad into Greek territory. Disturbed by a constant threat to their eastern sea routes, posed by the pirates from the mountainous Illyrian coast of the Adriatic, they had despatched a powerful naval force to the area. In the course of operations, Corcyra (Corfu), that key to the Adriatic, fell into their hands. But for as long as Rome was concerned about the Carthaginians in the west, so long would Corcyra retain a technical independence—and the rest of Greece with it.