The Truth about Hannibal’s route across the Alps

By Philip Ball

Having battled their deadly rivals the Romans in Spain, in 218BC the Carthaginian army made a move that no one expected. Their commander Hannibal marched his troops, including cavalry and African war elephants, across a high pass in the Alps to strike at Rome itself from the north of the Italian peninsula. It was one of the greatest military feats in history.

The Romans had presumed that the Alps created a secure natural barrier against invasion of their homeland. They hadn’t reckoned with Hannibal’s boldness. In December he smashed apart the Roman forces in the north, assisted by his awesome elephants, the tanks of classical warfare. Many of the animals died of cold or disease the following winter, but Hannibal fought his way down through Italy. For 15 years he ravaged the land, killing or wounding over a million citizens but without taking Rome. But when he faced the Roman general Scipio Africanus at Zama in north Africa in 202BC, his strategic genius met its match. So ended the second Punic war, with Rome the victor.

Hannibal’s alpine crossing has been celebrated in myth, art and film. JMW Turner made high drama of it in 1812, a louring snowstorm sending the Carthaginians into wild disarray. The 1959 sword-and-sandals epic movie, with Victor Mature in the eponymous title role, made Hannibal’s “crazed elephant army” look more like the polite zoo creatures they obviously were.

The battles didn’t end with Scipio’s victory, though. Much ink, if not blood, has been spilled in furious arguments between historians over the precise route that Hannibal took across the Alps. The answer makes not a blind bit of difference to the historical outcome, but there’s clearly something about that image of elephants on snowy peaks that makes experts care deeply about where exactly they went.

An international team of scientists now thinks the puzzle is largely solved. Its leader, geomorphologist

Bill Mahaney of York University in Toronto, began pondering the question almost two decades ago by looking at geographical and environmental references in the classical texts. He and his colleagues have just revealed surprising new evidence supporting their claim to have uncovered Hannibal’s path.

The three Punic wars were a struggle for dominance of the Mediterranean region by the two great trading and military powers of the third and second centuries BC: Carthage and Rome. Carthage, a former Phoenician city-state in present-day Tunis, had an empire extending over most of the north African coast as well as the southern tip of Iberia. Rome was then still a republic, and the two states were locked in a power struggle apt to flare into open war, until the Romans annihilated Carthage in 146BC.

Hannibal, son of general Hamilcar who led troops in the first Punic war, gave Carthage its most glorious hour. He is ranked alongside Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and his nemesis Scipio as one of the greatest military strategists of the ancient world, and his alpine crossing plays a big part in that reputation. Most of what we know about it comes from the accounts given by the Roman writers Polybius (c200-118BC) and Livy (59BC-AD17). They make it sound truly harrowing.

As the Carthaginian army ascended from the Rhône valley in Gaul, they were harassed and attacked by mountain tribes who, knowing the territory, set ambushes, dropped boulders and generally wrought havoc. During the descent the Carthaginians were mostly unmolested, but now the mountains themselves threatened mortal danger. The Alps are steeper on the Italian side, and the path is narrow, hemmed in by precipices.

“Because of the snow and of the dangers of his route [Hannibal] lost nearly as many men as he had done on the ascent,” wrote Polybius. “Since neither the men nor the animals could be sure of their footing on account of the snow, any who stepped wide of the path or stumbled, overbalanced and fell down the precipices.”

At length they reached a spot where the path suddenly seemed impassable, as Livy describes it: “A narrow cliff falling away so sheer that even a light-armed soldier could hardly have got down it by feeling his way and clinging to such bushes and stumps as presented themselves.”

“The track was too narrow for the elephants or even the pack animals to pass,” writes Polybius. “At this point the soldiers once more lost their nerve and came close to despair.”

Hannibal tried a detour on the terrifying slopes to the side of the path, but the snow and mud were too slippery. So instead he set his troops to construct a road from the rubble, and after backbreaking labour he got the men, horses and mules down the slope and below the snowline. The elephants were another matter – it took three days to make a road wide enough. Finally, says Polybius, Hannibal “succeeded in getting his elephants across, but the animals were in a miserable condition from hunger”.

Where exactly Hannibal crossed the Alps was a point of contention even in the days of Polybius and Livy. Nineteenth-century historians argued about it, and even Napoleon weighed in. The controversy was still raging a hundred years later. Some authorities proposed a northerly path, past present-day Grenoble and through two passes over 2,000 metres high. Others argued for a southerly course across the Col de la Traversette – the highest road, reaching 3,000m above sea level. Or might the route have been some combination of the two, starting in the north, then weaving south and north again?

The southern route was advocated in the 1950s-60s by Sir Gavin de Beer, director of the British Museum (natural history), who published no fewer than five books on the subject. He combed the classical texts and tried to tie them in to geographical evidence – for example, identifying Hannibal’s river crossings from the timings of floods. “All of us more or less follow de Beer’s footprint,” says Mahaney.

For Mahaney, it began as a hobby and become a labour of love. “I’ve read classical history since my ordeal getting through four years of Latin in high school,” he says. “I can still see my old Latin teacher pointing his long stick at me.”

He went looking for clues in the landscapes. Both Polybius and Livy mention that the impasse faced by Hannibal was created by fallen rocks. Polybius, who got his information firsthand by interviewing some of the survivors from Hannibal’s army, describes the rockfall in detail, saying that it consisted of two landslides: a recent one on top of older debris. In 2004 Mahaney found from field trips and aerial and satellite photography that, of the various passes along the proposed routes, only the Col de Traversette had enough large rockfalls above the snowline to account for such an obstruction.

There’s an old, steep track of rubble leading out of this pass – which might conceivably be based on the very one made by Hannibal’s engineers. What’s more, in 2010 Mahaney and co-workers found a two-layer rockfall in the pass that seemed a good match for that which Polybius mentioned. “No such deposit exists on the lee side of any of the other cols,” he says.

He suspects Hannibal did not intend to come this way, but was forced to avoid the lower cols to the north because of the hordes of Gauls massing there. “They were every bit Hannibal’s equal, and no doubt hungry to loot his baggage train,” Mahaney says.

The rockfall evidence was pretty suggestive. But could Mahaney and his team of geologists and biologists find anything more definitive? Since 2011 they’ve been looking in a peaty bog 2,580m up in the mountains, just below of the Col de la Traversette. It’s one of the few places where Hannibal’s army could have rested after crossing the col, being the only place in the vicinity with rich soil to support the vegetation needed for grazing horses and mules.

The researchers rolled up their sleeves and dug into the mire. What they found was mud. And more mud. Not very informative, you might think. But mud can

encode secrets. Taking an army of tens of thousands, with horses and elephants, over the Alps would have left one heck of a mess. More than two millennia later, Mahaney might have found it.

The peaty material is mostly matted with decomposed plant fibres. But at a depth of about 40cm this carbon-based material becomes much more disturbed and compacted, being mixed up with finer-grained soil. This structure suggests that the bog became churned up when the layer was formed. That’s not seen in any other soils from alpine bogs, and isn’t easily explained by any natural phenomenon such as grazing sheep or the action of frost. But it’s just what you’d expect to see if an army with horses and elephants passed by – rather like the aftermath of a bad year at the Glastonbury festival. This soil can be radiocarbon-dated – and the age comes out almost spookily close to the date of 218BC attested by historical records as the time of Hannibal’s crossing.

The researchers then took samples of this disturbed mud back to the lab, where they used chemical techniques to identify some of its organic molecules. These included substances found in horse dung and the faeces of ruminants. There’s some of this stuff throughout the mire mud, but significantly more in the churned-up layer.

What’s more, this section also contained high levels of DNA found in a type of bacteria called clostridia, which are very common in the gut of horses (and humans). In other words, the layer of disturbed mud is full of crap (perhaps not so different from Glastonbury either). Aside from a passing army, it’s not easy to see where it might have come from – not many mammals live up here, except for a few sheep and some hardy marmots.

That’s not all. Microbiologists collaborating with the team think they might have found a distinctive horse tapeworm egg in the samples. “There is even the possibility of finding an elephant tapeworm egg,” says Mahaney’s long-term collaborator, microbiologist Chris Allen of Queen’s University Belfast. “This would really be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

It’s just a shame, he adds, that “the pot of gold is actually a layer of horse manure”. Evidence of elephants at the site would surely be a smoking gun, since you don’t find many of them wandering wild in the Alps.

Meanwhile, Mahaney hopes, if he can find the funding, to mount a radar survey of the entire mire and other mires nearby to search for items dropped by the passing army. “My sniffer tells me some will turn up,” he says – “coins, belt buckles, sabres, you name it.”

Unless they do, other experts may reserve judgment. Patrick Hunt, an archaeologist who leads the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project, which has been investigating Hannibal’s route since 1994, says that the answer to the puzzle “remains hauntingly elusive”. It’s all too easy, he says, for fellow experts to adduce evidence for their favoured route – his team argues for a more northerly path – but until the same methods and rigour are brought to bear on all the alternatives, none can be ruled out. All the same, he adds, Mahaney is one of the best geo-archaeologists working on the question. “He continues to be a trailblazer in the field,” says Hunt, “and I’d love to collaborate with him, because he’s asking excellent questions.”

If Mahaney can secure firm evidence – such as chemical or microbial fingerprints of elephant faeces – it would be the culmination of a personal quest. “The Hannibal enigma appealed to me for the sheer effort of getting the army across the mountains,” he says. “I have been in the field for long times with 100 people, and I can tell you it can be pandemonium. How Hannibal managed to get thousands of men, horses and mules, and 37 elephants over the Alps is one magnificent feat.”

THE MYSTERY OF HANNIBAL'S ELEPHANTS | By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

ARCHEOLOGISTS have tried. Students of ancient climate and ecology have tried, too. But

no one has yet come up with a satisfactory answer: Where did Hannibal get the elephants for his heroic march across the Alps to attack the homeland of the Romans?

The question was raised anew in the Sept. 6 issue of New Scientist, a British magazine. Derek Ager, a geologist, wrote an article casting doubt on all of the proposed sources of Hannibal's elephants.

Once there were elephants nearly everywhere, but by the time of Hannibal's march in 218 B.C. they had already dwindled to the two species extant today, the Indian, or Asian, elephants and the African ones.

If he had had a choice, Hannibal would presumably have gone into battle with Indian elephants, which had been used effectively a century before in charging against the forces of Alexander the Great. Indian elephants are not quite as large as the African species but much more easily trained, which is why they are favored by zoos and circuses. It is also the reason Indian elephants are seen tramping through fictional Africa in old Tarzan movies.

The bigger and ill-tempered African elephants are distinguished by their larger, fan-shaped ears, flat foreheads and concave backs.

But how did Hannibal, in Carthage, on the Mediterranean in present-day Tunisia, get a troop of elephants all the way from Asia? Or from south of the Sahara, the bush habitat of the larger African species?

Elephants have a voracious appetite. Mr. Ager noted that an adult male African elephant eats some 400 pounds of vegetation a day. Even though the North African climate was slightly

wetter then and the Sahara not quite so extensive, conditions were still not conducive to transporting hungry elephants.

Historians speculate that a few small elephants could have been brought down the Nile Valley into Egypt, or by the Red Sea, and then bred in captivity, but there is apparently no record of this. Nor is there any record of the large African species being indigenous to North Africa in the time of Hannibal. Drawings of elephants appear on the Tassili Frescoes in the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, but a recent British expedition determined that the drawings predated Hannibal.

Many historians believe a likely source of Hannibal's elephants could have been the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria. Living there at the time was a forest subspecies of the African elephants. These were smaller animals, standing about 8 feet tall at the shoulders in contrast to the 11-foot-tall sub-Saharan animals. The Atlas elephants later died out as the region grew increasingly arid.

Presumably these animals would have been just as difficult to train and would have been less imposing in warfare. In ancient military campaigns elephants hauled supplies and served somewhat the same function as modern tanks.

In his 1955 study, ''Alps and Elephants,'' Gavin de Beer, who was director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote, ''Not only did the elephants' appearance, their smell, and the noise of their trumpeting alarm both men and horses opposed to them, but they were highly dangerous when charged, fighting with their tusks and their trunks and trampling down their opponents.''

For these reasons, commenting on the small Atlas elephants, Mr. Ager said, ''I find the idea of Hannibal's using small elephants unsatisfying.''

By most accounts Hannibal's invasion force in 218 B.C., assembled in Spain, included 100,000 men and 37 or 38 elephants. Mr. Ager notwithstanding, many historians tend to accept Mr. De Beer's conclusion that most of these elephants were African, either from the Atlas Mountains or from south of the desert.

The evidence is a Carthaginian coin, struck in the time of Hannibal, that bears an unmistakable image of an African elephant. Coins are often valuable to archeologists, and here it is about all historians have - a coin and a story told after the Second Punic War. Hannibal dealt the Romans under Scipio several crushing defeats but ultimately failed to seize Rome itself.

Only one of the elephants survived the war, it seems. This was the elephant Hannibal himself had often ridden. Its name, according to the story, was Surus, meaning ''the Syrian.'' Because the Ptolemies of Egypt, successors to Alexander, were known to have seized some Indian elephants as booty in their campaigns in Syria, it seemed likely that some descendants of those elephants had found their way to Carthage. Egypt and Carthage enjoyed good relations in those days. Mr. De Beer, citing the story of

Surus, concluded, ''It is therefore almost certain that Hannibal's elephants included at least one Indian.''

The Battle of Zama | Peter Fitzgerald

On October 19th in the year 202 BC a big battle commenced that finished a great war. The battle in question is the Battle of Zama and the war that finished because of the outcome of this battle is the Second Punic War.

The Second Punic War was a battle between the Roman Republic and Carthage. The army of Carthage was commanded by the infamous ancient commander Hannibal.

Prior to the Battle of Zama

Before the battle commenced there had been many battles and much bloodshed at the hands of both armies. 16 years before the battle, the Carthaginians marched across the Alps under the leadership of Hannibal and started winning important battles against the Romans.

The Romans decided they wished to remedy the situation and find a way round the formidable Hannibal so tactics were changed and a new direction was taken. This new direction came in the form of Roman commander Scipio Africanus who had an interesting idea which was to form the backbone of the battle.

Scipio Africanus decided that while Hannibal was in the southern peninsula of Italy, to let him stay there while the Roman army headed to Africa to invade the Carthaginian homeland. This would then finish the war without battle with Hannibal.

In 203 BC Scipio Africanus landed in Africa while Hannibal was still in Italy. Once in Africa Scipio won some landmark victories, most notably the huge victory at the Battle of the Great Plains. This manoeuvre by Scipio and the big victories he achieved caused the

Carthaginians to call Hannibal back to the homeland for commanding their army in a defensive capacity.

The Battle of Zama

After Hannibal managed to make his way back with his army to Carthage, he collected local citizens along with his veteran force from Italy and made on his way to face the Romans commanded by Scipio.

Hannibal was the first to reach the battle point, a place called Zama Minor not far from Carthage. The battle was to take place on the plains as it gave Hannibal a great vantage point for using his cavalry, unfortunately he never thought about the prospect of the Romans having a stronger cavalry force.

Hannibal had 51,000 men, of which 45,000 were infantry and 6,000 cavalry (including 80 war elephants). Scipio had 43,000 men of which 34,000 were infantry and 9,000 were cavalry.

Both armies faced one another in three straight lines and cavalry on the flanks.

Hannibal was the first to engage in battle, this was done by sending his war elephants along with a skirmishing group. The Romans retaliated with their skirmishers and by blowing their horns as loud as possible to scare the elephants. This move with the horns actually partially worked as a group of the war elephants turned back and completely disrupted Hannibal’s left flank.

A group of Roman cavalry made up of Numidian cavalry was sent to mop up the left flank of Hannibal’s army, which also happened to be made up of Numidian cavalry. In the end there was no left flank of the Carthage army left as the flank simply left the field (for reasons unknown).

While all this was occurring the other war elephants had simply been lured to the back of the Roman lines and despatched of.

The left flank of the Roman lines was made up of cavalry; this cavalry was then sent against the right flank cavalry of the Hannibal line. Hannibal made his cavalry leave the battle field with the Roman cavalry in pursuit, literally rendering them ineffective.

The Romans now marched their central lines on to the Carthage forces. Hannibal in response sent his first two lines forward, the first line of which was pushed back and the second line charged forward causing big losses of the Roman lines.

The Romans reinforced their second line to stop the rout of Hannibal’s army on the Roman forces, this move caused Hannibal’s second line to get annihilated and the third line to push out to the wings.

The cavalry chasing the Carthage cavalry came under attack off the field as the Carthage cavalry turned back to do battle, but this ploy didn’t work as the Romans slaughtered the Carthage cavalry.

The Romans now formed one large line and engaged in battle, a fierce battle that was carrying on for some time. This was until the Roman cavalry returned and encircled the rear of Hannibal’s men and started tearing through them.

A large portion of the Carthage army, along with Hannibal, fled the battlefield.

The outcome of the battle was a resounding victory for the Romans. The Romans lost 5,500 men while the Carthage army lost 20,000 and also had 20,000 captured as prisoners.

Ancient Rome’s Darkest Day: The Battle of CannaeEvan Andrews

It was the bloodiest battle the ancient world had ever seen. During the Second Punic War on August 2, 216 B.C., a Carthaginian army under the general Hannibal clashed with eight Roman legions near the Italian city of Cannae. Though heavily outnumbered, Hannibal used a famous double-envelopment tactic to surround the Romans and trap their army. By the time the slaughter finally ended, at least 50,000 legionaries lay dead and Rome faced the greatest crisis in its history.

In 216 B.C., the Roman Republic was embroiled in the second of what would eventually be three devastating wars with the North African city-state of Carthage. What had begun some 50 years earlier as a territorial dispute had devolved

into an existential duel, with both powers vying for supremacy. Rome had emerged the victors in the First Punic War, but at the start of the second conflict in 218 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal had staged an audacious invasion of Italy via the Alps. Since then, his mercenary army of Libyans, Numidians, Spaniards and Celts had rampaged across the countryside, laying waste to farmland and trouncing Roman legions. In just two major battles at the River Trebia and Lake Trasimene, Hannibal had used his military genius to inflict as many as 50,000 casualties on the Romans.

Following these early losses, Rome adopted a delaying strategy that sought to cut off Hannibal’s supply lines and avoid the pitched battles that were his stock-in-trade. It was a canny tactic, but one the hyper-aggressive Romans would not embrace for long. In 216 B.C., they elected Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus as co-consuls and equipped them with eight legions—the largest army in the Republic’s history. Its mission was clear: confront Hannibal’s army and crush it.

The chance for a showdown arrived later that summer, when Hannibal marched into southern Italy and seized a vital supply depot near the town of Cannae. Varro and Paullus gave chase, and by early August the Romans and Carthaginians were both deployed along the River Aufidus. According to the ancient historian Polybius, Hannibal had around 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry at his disposal (his famous war elephants had all died by 216). The Romans boasted some 80,000 troops and 6,000 cavalry.

On the morning of August 2, the two armies assembled on a hot, dust-blown plain and prepared for battle. The Romans set up in a traditional block formation with a mass of infantry protected by cavalry on both wings. Varro—the commander on the day—hoped to use his legions like a battering ram to break the center of the Carthaginian lines. Hannibal expected this, so he arranged his army in an unconventional formation designed to use the Romans’ momentum against them. He began by positioning his weakest troops—his Gallic Celts and Spaniards—at the very center of his line. He then placed his more elite, battle-hardened Libyan infantry slightly to the rear on both flanks. The cavalry took up positions on the far left and right wings. When fully assembled, the Carthaginian line resembled a long crescent that bulged outward at its center toward the Romans. Never one to lead from the rear, Hannibal assumed a post at the front alongside his Spaniards and Gauls.

At the sound of trumpets, the two sides surged forward and the battle commenced. “Now began a great slaughter and a great struggle,” the historian Appian later wrote, “each side contending valiantly.” Light infantry initiated the fight by probing one another’s lines and hurling javelins, spears and projectiles. The first decisive

maneuver followed when Hannibal’s heavy cavalry, under the command of an officer named Hasdrubal, stampeded into the horsemen on the Romans’ right flank. In short order, the superior Carthaginian riders had all but obliterated their Roman adversaries.

Back at the infantry battle, Hannibal’s bare-chested Gauls and Spaniards collided with the main body of Romans in a whirlwind of swords, spears and shields. As the troops slashed and stabbed at one another, the Carthaginian center was slowly pushed back, reversing its formation from an outward bulge into a concave pocket. This was all part of Hannibal’s plan. By giving the Romans the impression they were winning, he was only luring them into a space between the still-unengaged Libyan troops on the edges of his formation. With their spirits soaring, thousands of legionaries had soon streamed into the pocket in the Carthaginian line. When they did, they abandoned their orderly shape and became bunched together.

Hannibal now gave the order that would spell the Romans’ doom. At his signal, the Libyans pivoted inward and attacked the advancing legionaries’ left and right flanks, closing them in a vise. Hasdrubal, meanwhile, galloped across the battlefield and helped rout the cavalry on the Romans’ left wing. Having shorn the Romans of their mounted support, he then wheeled his force around and pounced on the legionaries’ unprotected rear. The surviving Romans—perhaps as many as 70,000 men—were totally encircled.

The memorial stone commemorating the Battle of Cannae. Hannibal’s trap was complete, but the battle was still far from over. The corralled legionaries showed no signs of surrender, so the Carthaginians closed in and began the grisly work of cutting them down one man at a time. Over the next several hours, the plain at Cannae turned into a killing field. A few thousand Romans broke out of the encirclement and fled, but with no room to maneuver, the rest were slowly hemmed in and slaughtered. “Some were discovered lying there alive, with thighs and tendons slashed, baring their necks and throats and bidding their conquerors drain the remnant of their blood,” the chronicler Livy later wrote. “Others were found with their heads buried in holes dug in the ground. They had apparently made these pits for themselves, and heaping the dirt over their faces shut off their breath.” Ancient sources differ, but by sunset, anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 Romans lay dead and thousand of others were captured. Hannibal had lost some 6,000 men.

Word of the massacre at Cannae sent the city of Rome spiraling into a panic. “Multitudes thronged the streets,” Appian wrote, “uttering lamentations for their relatives, calling on them by name, and bewailing their own fate as soon to

fall into the enemy’s hands.” In their desperation, the Romans dispatched a senator to the Greek oracle at Delphi to divine the meaning of the tragedy. They even conducted human sacrifices to appease the gods. While Hannibal ultimately decided that his army was too weak to march on Rome, Cannae had still pushed the Republic to the brink of collapse. In just one day of fighting, the Romans had lost at least seven times as many soldiers as were later killed at Battle of Gettysburg. “Certainly there is no other nation that would not have succumbed beneath such a weight of calamity,” Livy wrote.

Yet even in their darkest hour, the stubborn Romans simply refused to yield. Following a brief period of mourning, Rome’s senate rejected Hannibal’s peace offers and refused to ransom his Cannae prisoners. The citizenry was put to work making new arms and projectiles, and the crippled army was rebuilt by lowering the recruitment age, enlisting convicts and even offering slaves their freedom in exchange for service. For each of the Roman legions destroyed at Cannae, several more were eventually raised and committed to the field.

While his enemy fell back on its overwhelming manpower, Hannibal only grew weaker. He

continued to maraud through Italy for several years in search of a second Cannae, but his isolated army slowly withered away after not enough of Rome’s allies rallied to his cause. The Romans’ miraculous comeback continued in 204 B.C., when the general later known as Scipio Africanus launched an invasion of North Africa with some 26,000 men, many of them survivors of the humiliation at Cannae. Hannibal was recalled from Italy to defend the Carthaginian homeland, but in 202, Scipio decisively defeated him in the war’s final clash at the Battle of Zama.

The Second Punic War effectively ended Carthage’s reign as a military power, allowing Rome to tighten its grip on the Mediterranean and begin building its empire. Even in defeat, however, Hannibal had cemented his place in the pantheon of great military commanders. The Romans built statues of him to celebrate their triumph over a worthy adversary, and his victory at Cannae later became a subject of fascination for generals ranging from Napoleon to Frederick the Great. Dwight D. Eisenhower described it as the “classic example” of a battle of annihilation. Nevertheless, Hannibal’s tactical masterpiece had not been enough to break the Romans. He had won a legendary battle at Cannae, only to leave his enemy even more determined to win the war.

Why Hannibal Lost | BY RICHARD A. GABRIEL 

Among the basic distinctions in warfare is the difference between tactics and strategy. The term tactics refers to the operational techniques military units employ to win battles. Strategy, on the other hand, addresses the broader political objectives for which a war is fought and the ends, ways and means employed to obtain them. For strategy to succeed, there must be at least a rough connection between tactical objectives and the broader objectives for which the war is waged. Otherwise, battles become ends in themselves, often with grave strategic consequences.

Such was the case with Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general widely considered one of history’s most able and talented field commanders. He invaded Roman Italy in what historians still regard as a classic campaign, won every major engagement he fought and yet ultimately achieved none of Carthage’s strategic objectives.

In his view armies fought until it became clear to the political leadership of the losing side there was nothing more to be gained by further combat

Born in 247 BC, Hannibal was the son of Carthaginian general and statesman Hamilcar Barca, who rallied his

North African nation-state from defeat in the First Punic War (264–241 BC) to conquer much of Iberia (present-day Spain) before his death there in battle in 228 BC. Hannibal had essentially grown up in military service, and following the 221 BC assassination of his brother-in-law Hasdrubal, who had replaced Hamilcar, Hannibal took charge of the Carthaginian army. He soon proved a brilliant field commander who applied his intellect and martial skills to the singular end of winning battles.

Again, however, battles are the means to a strategic end, not ends in themselves. Hannibal, a sworn enemy of all things Roman, lost sight of that fact when he launched the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). While the conflict would rage across the Mediterranean world, victory in Italy was Hannibal’s sole objective. To achieve it, he marched the bulk of his army in Iberia across southern Gaul (present-day France) and, famously, over the Alps into the Roman heartland.

Hannibal approached his operations in Italy not as one campaign in a larger war but as the only campaign in the only war. He seemed to believe that if he won enough battles, he would win Italy, and if he won Italy, victory would be his. Ultimately, however, his confusion of tactics with strategy caused him to commit a number of operational failures that led to his defeat in Italy. And his loss there was to have dire consequences for Carthage.

Wars evolve within the cultural contexts adversaries bring to the conflict. For Romans war was a straightforward predatory exercise employed to destroy an enemy’s regime. Battles were means to the larger political ends of conquest, occupation and economic exploitation. To accept defeat risked having an enemy impose such conditions on one’s own citizens, something Rome would pay any price in blood and treasure to prevent. Romans fought wars until decisively won. Only then did negotiations follow.

Hannibal’s perspective on war was rooted in the influence of Hellenistic culture. In his view the object was not the destruction of an enemy’s state or political regime. Instead, armies fought battles on one another’s turf until it became clear to the political

leadership of the losing side there was nothing more to be gained and perhaps much to lose by further combat. The antagonists then entered into negotiations and reached a settlement of a commercial or geographic nature. Hannibal believed his battlefield victories would force Rome to the negotiating table. This Hellenistic approach restrained Hannibal from attacking Rome itself when presented two opportunities—first after his 217 BC victory at Lake Trasimene and again after Cannae just over a year later. In Hannibal’s mind an attack on Rome was unnecessary to the final outcome of the war.

When the Romans refused to discuss peace even after the disaster at Cannae, Hannibal’s plan began to unravel. It was one thing to expect the Gauls to join his campaign against Rome, but the assumption that Rome’s Latin allies or Roman colonies would join in any significant numbers was wholly unfounded, based on a lack of understanding of Roman culture and history. Had this not been clear to Hannibal before, it must surely have been after Cannae. As a fallback he sought to create a confederacy of Italian and Greek states that would become de facto protectorates of Carthage once the war was over.

For Hannibal’s plan to have any chance of success required sufficient manpower to accomplish two things: First, to hold the towns and cities while protecting agricultural resources necessary to feed the occupying troops; second, to sustain a large field army to deal with any Roman offensives. The problem was it required far more manpower than he possessed or could possibly raise and supply in Italy alone.

Hannibal’s revised plan, therefore, depended on Carthage to provide manpower and logistical requirements from outside Italy, something it refused to do for sound strategic reasons. Moreover, the plan gave no consideration to the ability of the Roman navy to blockade southern Italian ports and disrupt supply convoys from Carthage. Most important, Hannibal’s southern Italian confederacy was essentially a defensive strategy that left intact and unchallenged the Roman manpower and resource base north of the Volturnus (Volturno) River, thus enabling Rome to

rebuild its armies until ready to resume the offensive. Even if it coalesced, Hannibal’s league of rebel towns in southern Italy could not impede Rome’s war effort sufficiently to induce it to seek peace.

Hannibal’s failure to attack Rome was his greatest tactical mistake. The Roman historian Livy tells us that when Carthage recalled Hannibal in 203 BC, he called down “curses on his own head for not having led his armies straight to Rome when they were still bloody from the victorious field of Cannae.” But history must regard Hannibal’s failure to attack Rome within the context of his greater failure to understand the strategy that guided the conduct of the war.

Both Carthage and Rome viewed the war in a far broader strategic context than did Hannibal. Rome sought to preserve gains it had obtained during the First Punic War and perhaps seize Iberia, while Carthage aimed to retain Iberia and recover territory in Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily it had lost in the previous war. Rome clearly perceived Carthage’s strategic intent: Of the 11 legions deployed after Hannibal arrived in Italy, two were sent to Iberia, two to Sardinia, two to Sicily and one to the port of Tarentum (present-day Taranto) to block any invasion by Philip V of Macedonia, though he had yet to ally with Hannibal. Only four legions deployed within Italy to meet Hannibal’s invasion.

Had Hannibal also taken the broader perspective, he would have understood that an attack on Rome would have made sound tactical and strategic sense. A march on the capital after his victory at Trasimene would have forced the Romans to come to its aid, drawing off their forces from outside Italy. By then only one intact legion, at Tarentum, remained to defend Rome. At Trasimene, Hannibal had destroyed Gaius Flaminius’ army, while his subordinate Maharbal had destroyed Gnaeus Servilius Geminus’ cavalry. The two nearest Roman legions were on Sardinia, but 70 Carthaginian warships patrolled its waters to prevent Roman troop transports from reaching the mainland.

Had Hannibal immediately marched on the capital, even as a feint, Rome would have been forced to recall

some of its legions, exposing Sicily, Sardinia or Iberia to Carthaginian attack and invasion. His failure to act represented a lost opportunity even he, in hindsight, realized might have turned the tide of the war.

At the outbreak of war Carthage had initially given Hannibal a free hand, having had little choice but to support their field commander in his Italo-centric strategy. But after Cannae, when it became clear Rome could not be forced to the negotiating table, Carthage favored a more direct approach to regaining its lost possessions.

What Carthage wanted most from the war was to retain possession of Iberia, with its lucrative silver mines, commercial bases and monopoly on the inland trade. It also wanted to recoup its bases in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and some of the offshore islands and thus control the sea-lanes in the eastern Mediterranean. After Cannae, Carthage moved to secure these possessions by reinforcing them, as in Iberia, or attempting to seize them militarily—as in Sardinia, Sicily and Corsica. If Carthage could establish a significant military presence in its former possessions, it would be in a strong position to retain them once the war ended and negotiations ensued.

Hannibal’s superiors viewed his operations in Italy as little more than a localized campaign designed to tie down as many Roman legions as possible while they brought military pressure to bear at more important strategic locales. It had wisely revised its strategic approach and objectives—a direct consequence of Hannibal’s failure to realize his myopic goals in Italy.

Hannibal felt betrayed by Carthage after Cannae. When in 203 BC his superiors ordered their commander to abandon his Italian campaign and return to Africa, Livy records that Hannibal “gnashed his teeth, groaned and almost shed tears.” He openly blamed Carthage for its failure to support his campaign with troops, supplies and money. “The men who tried to drag me back by cutting off my supplies of men and money are now recalling me,” he is said to have complained, adding that his defeat came not at the hands of

Romans “but the Carthaginian Senate by their detraction and envy.”

As with many of history’s great field commanders, Hannibal had succumbed, at least in part, to his enemy’s superior logistics.

Hannibal’s accusation that the Carthaginian Senate had failed to send him critical supplies and troops when most needed was dead on. Throughout the course of the Second Punic War, Carthage sent Hannibal only one resupply expedition—a marginal force of 4,000 Numidian horse, 40 elephants and some money in 215 BC. After that he received nothing, as Carthage had redirected its resources to a strategy in which victory in Italy no longer occupied a central place.

Carthage’s failure to properly resupply Hannibal cannot be blamed on a lack of available resources. Indeed, the manpower and resource base of the Carthaginian empire was greater than Rome’s. The troop and resupply expeditions Carthage sent out in support of military operations during the Second Punic War were substantial, in some cases larger than Hannibal’s entire army in Italy. In 215 BC, for example, Carthage sent to Iberia 12,000 infantry, 1,500 cavalry, 20 elephants and a quantity of silver with which to hire mercenaries. Later that year it sent an even larger force to Sardinia. In 213 BC.

Carthage dispatched to Sicily 25,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 12 elephants. In 207 BC it sent to Iberia 10,000 additional troops to replace losses from the Battle of Baecula. Finally, in 205 BC Hannibal’s brother Mago and a force of 12,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and a number of elephants invaded Liguria in northern Italy.

Carthage was able to resupply and reinforce its armies in the various theaters of operations thanks to its ready supply of transport ships—not surprising for a commercial and shipbuilding nation-state that could construct or hire from traders as many transports as needed for any contingency. Moreover, the Roman naval presence off southern Italy was never sufficient

to cover all bases at once, so there was no good reason why supply transports could not have gotten through to Hannibal.

Right up to war’s end Carthage had more than enough men, materiel and transports to support Hannibal in Italy. It simply chose not to send them.

Ironically, Carthage’s strategic shift away from Italy after Cannae came at a time when Hannibal’s momentum was at its zenith. Paradoxically, it was his very successes in the field that led Carthage to reconsider its strategy. When Mago returned to Carthage in 215 BC to request troops and supplies for Hannibal, he addressed the Senate. At that meeting Hanno, head of the faction that had opposed the war from its outset, asked Mago the following questions: “First, in spite of the fact that the Roman power was utterly destroyed at Cannae, and the knowledge that the whole of Italy is in revolt, has any single member of the Latin confederacy come over to us? Secondly, has any man belonging to the five and 30 tribes of Rome deserted to Hannibal?” Mago had to answer they had not.

“Have the Romans sent Hannibal any envoys to treat for peace?” Hanno continued. “Indeed, so far as your information goes, has the word ‘peace’ ever been breathed in Rome at all?” Mago again replied in the negative. “Very well then,” Hanno concluded. “In the conduct of the war we have not advanced one inch: The situation is precisely the same as when Hannibal first crossed into Italy.” Hanno’s point was that Hannibal’s strategy to bring Rome to the negotiating table by defeating its armies in the field had already failed. If none of the Latin allies or Roman tribes had deserted by that point, it was highly unlikely any further defections in the south of Italy or additional victories Hannibal might win there would prompt Rome to seek peace.

The strategic ground shifted beneath his feet, reducing a commander who had once ruled the battlefield to little more than a sacrificial pawn

If Hannibal could not destroy Rome on its own soil, as Carthage believed, then what was the point of the war? In true Hellenistic fashion the Carthaginian statesmen decided their priorities lay in maintaining control of Iberia and perhaps regaining Sardinia, Corsica and other areas lost earlier. If that was the strategic objective of the war, then how did Hannibal’s continued presence in Italy contribute to that end? The answer was to tie down as many legions as possible in Italy while Carthage concentrated its efforts in the other theaters of operations. Italy became a sideshow, and Hannibal was left to his fate so that when the war ended, Carthage might be able to hold on to what it had won elsewhere.In the end Hannibal failed in Italy not because he was defeated on the battlefield but because his tactical victories had not contributed to Carthage’s overall strategic objectives. After Cannae the strategic ground shifted beneath Hannibal’s feet, reducing a commander who had once ruled the battlefield to little more than a sacrificial pawn in a much larger game he never really understood. MH