Destroy Carthage (22 page)

The exotic variety of the Punic force impressed the ancient
scribes. The Gauls, naked from the waist up, wielded great
slashing swords; the Spaniards, shorter chopping and stabbing
blades. The latter wore tunics of white with scarlet trimmings.
Elsewhere, the Libyans appear to have decked themselves with
arms captured in previous victories for, according to Livy, 'one
might have taken them for a Roman battle line.'

Military interest in Cannae, however, rests not so much in
any particular group or armament but in the classic manoeuvre
for which it has become famed.Hannibal's tactics were based on the expectation that the
dense legions at the centre of the Roman formation would
drive the Gauls and Spaniards back through the Libyan lines,
which would then turn inwards on the legions from either
flank. The crescent would no longer be convex but concave, a
pincer with the Roman legions in its jaws. Success depended
on Hannibal's horsemen taking out the Roman wings - a safe
bet, for cavalry was his strong arm - and, crucially, on the
Gauls and Spaniards giving ground without breaking.

The manoeuvre worked perfectly. As a final stroke, the
Spanish cavalry, leaving the Numidians to complete the rout
of the Roman wings, engaged the rear of the legions to com­plete their encirclement. Aemilius Paulus and eighty senators
fell with 25,000 or more legionaries in the deadly ring.
Another 10,000 of their side were killed or captured later.
Hannibal's losses, about one to six of the enemy's were mostly
in men of the Gallic tribes.

Cannae represented Rome's darkest hour in the Punic wars.
Until now, the Italic confederation had remained intact.
Neither Trebia nor Lake Trasimene, though alarming, had
actually detached components from the Roman alliance. It
took Cannae to crack the structure, topple its weakest towers.
First Arpi (Foggia), in northern Apulia, defected, then a string
of Samnite, Lucanian and Bruttian communities. Lastly, the
great Campanian centre of Capua, second city of the peninsula,
broke away, promised autonomy - ultimately, the hegemony
of Italy - by Hannibal.

At Capua the Punic army went into winter quarters and,
as legend had it, surrendered its fighting spirit to the pleasures
of the neighbourhood. It is true that Hannibal's spectacular
successes were not resumed; that Cannae may be seen as a
watershed. But the general's failure to exploit his triumph was
due to factors altogether more weighty than the seductions
of Campania.

With a single army of limited proportions, lacking siege
machines, dependent on the land for supplies, Hannibal could
not hope to reduce the defences of Rome itself. The one
measure that could conclude the war at a stroke was beyond
his means. Instead, he was obliged to attempt further inroads
on the confederacy, at the same time protecting the defected
cities of Campania and Apulia - a responsibility that dimin­ished his offensive flexibility, substituting defensive needs
foreign to his genius.

For their part, the Romans responded to Cannae with grim
resilience. After an initial outbreak of panic and some human
sacrifice (a number of foreigners and a Vestal Virgin were
buried alive), the people showed their remarkable tenacity.
Boys and even slaves were enlisted to replace shattered armies;
taxes doubled to save a sinking treasury. Auspiciously, the
government readopted the strategy of Fabius. This time, it
brought results. Rome's capacity at least to win back towns
in one theatre while the foe was in another, improved morale.
Hannibal was at last seen to have his own difficulties.

High among them was the problem of manpower. In his
eagerness to win Italian friends, the Carthaginian promised
them freedom from army service. Thus his casualties and sick
could be replaced locally only by volunteers, and they were
few indeed. Help from Carthage was meagre. The Barcids
had planned a land war, and Rome never relinquished com­mand at sea. Nevertheless, after Cannae two expeditions were
fitted out in Africa for Italy, one limited to cavalry reinforce­ments and some elephants.

While the latter, under a commander named Bomilcar,
slipped through to Hannibal, the larger force was diverted to
Spain at the news of Roman gains there. Other Punic troops
landed in Sardinia and Sicily. On the former, they got nowhere.
In Sicily, the death of Rome's old ally, Hiero of Syracuse,
produced widespread rebellions which the Carthaginians ex­ploited hopefully until the rugged Roman general Claudius
Marcellus entered Syracuse.

Hannibal had expected to receive all the reinforcements
he needed by land from Spain. The inspired intervention of
the Scipios - in some ways the Roman counterpart of the
Barcid family - put a stop to that. Gnaeus, with the first ex­pedition to eastern Spain, was not a great soldier but capable
of establishing a footing against the new commander of the
province, Hasdrubal Barca. In 210 the brilliant 'Africanus'
arrived to seize Cartagena (209) and defeat Hasdrubal at
Baecula (Bailen) in 208.

Hasdrubal spared no effort but was lacking in maturity.
Disengaging from Scipio, he made a brave attempt to join
his kinsman in Italy but was vanquished and slain after cross­ing the Alps by a Roman army forewarned of his intentions.
His head was delivered to his brother by the Romans.

All considered, it is a tribute to extraordinary ability that,
for a decade after Cannae, Hannibal maintained his undefeated
record in Italy, eluding larger forces, snatching local successes,
always waiting for the backing that never came. Livy wrote
of his achievement:

For thirteen years he waged war far from home, not with
an army of his own countrymen but with a miscellaneous
crowd gathered from many nations - men who had neither
laws, nor customs, nor language in common, differing in
costume, arms, worship and even gods. And yet he kept
them together by so close a tie that they never fought among
themselves or mutinied against him, though he was often
without money for their pay. Even after Hasdrubal's death,
when he had only a corner of Italy left to him, his camp
was as orderly as ever.

Finally, another brother, Mago Barca, forsaking Spain, sailed
to Liguria by Minorca (Port Mahon - Mago's Harbour
-
com­memorates the visit) to rally the Gauls to his banner. As a
diversion in Hannibal's favour, the bid failed. Scipio did not.
Persuading a reluctant senate to allow his invasion of Africa,
he landed in 204 and besieged Utica. Carthage, in alliance
with Masinissa's rival, Syphax of Numidia, challenged Scipio.
He made sport of them. Burning their camps as a preliminary,
he routed the Carthaginians at Souk el-Kremis, on the upper
Bagradas.

In the autumn of 203, allegedly a bitter man, Hannibal
sailed from Italy to the aid of his native land - and to Zama.

As already recounted, Rome and Carthage lived at peace for
half a century after Zama. Sedulously, the Carthaginians paid
their war debts. Industriously, the people wrought an 'econ­omic miracle.' Like the great flocks of doves which sometimes
arrived to join the birds in the temple precincts - the ancients
thought they accompanied the gods on their travels - prosperity
settled again on the Punic realm.

In the country estates of the landed proprietors, bright
flowers blossomed among olive and fig trees, emblems of divine
blessing, the supply source of questing bees. Carthaginian
bees were valued not only for their honey but for the reputedly
superior quality of the wax produced, used in medicine and
encaustic art. Little was wasted on the limited growing lands
of the
chora,
the agricultural region of Carthage.

The proprietor, surveying his irrigated orchards, his long-
horned cattle, his domesticated gazelles and ostriches, from
the cool logia which perhaps overlooked a lagoon in which
flamingoes fed, was no absentee landlord in the style of the
Roman
latifundiary.
Like his city brother, the Carthaginian
country gentleman was a profit-conscious master dedicated
to increasing production. Not the least of the exertions ex­pended in field and orchard were his own.

In the city itself, amid thoroughfares teeming with seamen,
traders, factory workers, market-gardeners from the Megara,
the same devotion to productivity was evident. Pottery, the
chief medium of working utensils, was manufactured and sold
on a vast scale
-
the thousands of jars and pitchers devoted to
the dead representing a constant market, let alone those for
industrial and domestic use.

Seldom a 'quality' manufacturer, the Carthaginian potter
concentrated on mass production of low-priced articles. Punic
kilns, connected with workshops, cellars and storerooms, were
much like those still used in Tunisia. One pottery discovered
in modern times in a well-preserved condition contained thou­sands of vessels of various shapes and sizes awaiting sale.

The industry also supplied cheap religious imagery, figurines
and even life-size statues, in clay, some cast from Greek
models. The devotion of the Mediterranean peoples to divine
objects, commonly placed in houses, private chapels and
graves, or used as offerings at temples, created a continuous
demand for terracotta gods and goddesses which Punic work­shops met by the gross. They did a brisk trade, too, in pottery
medallions depicting deities.

The largest employers of craftsmen in Carthage, especially
in wartime, were the armaments and shipbuilding industries.
The number of employees for the Carthaginian arsenal is not
known, but it has been estimated that there were about 1,600
metal workers, probably in several workshops, and a sub­stantial force of carpenters making siege machines, shafts for
javelins, and so on. It seems likely that the total would have
been somewhat greater than that for the provincial arsenal
at Cartagena, which employed 2,000 people (according to
Polybius).