Romans defeated by Hannibal in Apulia.

211—Hannibal’s march on Rome. Capua capitulates to Romans.

210—Romans again defeated in Apulia. Hostilities in Sicily end with Rome victorious.

209—Fabius retakes Tarentum. 12 Latin colonies refuse further military service.

208—Scipio defeats Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal in Spain. Hasdrubal crosses Pyranees into Transalpine Gaul.

207—Hasdrubal crosses Alps into Cisalpine Gaul. Scipio defeats last Carthaginian army in Spain. Hasdrubal defeated and killed at Metaurus river.

206—Mago, Hannibal’s youngest brother, evacuates Spain and sails to Balearics. War in Spain ends.

205—Mago lands in Liguria and captures Genoa and Savona

204—Scipio invades North Africa.

203—Mago dies of wounds. Hannibal recalled to Carthage.

202—Hannibal defeated at Battle of Zama. End of 2nd Punic War.

200—Hannibal becomes Chief Magistrate of Carthage. He reorganizes the city’s finances and holds supreme power for five years.

195—Hannibal forced to flee Carthage and offers services to Seleucid empire in the East.

183—Hannibal commits suicide in Bithynia.

 

 

 

In whichever way I might like to relate my life to the rest of the world, my path takes me always across a great battlefield; unless I enter upon it, no permanent happiness can be mine.

 

Carl von Clausewitz

 

 

A man who exercises absolute authority is constrained to assume a pose of invariable reserve.

 

Alfred de Vigny

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

DEATH IN EXILE

 

Hannibal was sixty-four when he committed suicide in Bithynia. An ageing, defeated war-leader, he had at long last reached the end of even his reserves and will to live. The year was 183 B.C. and the soldiers of his enemy Rome were taking up positions round his house with the intention of killing him or, preferably, taking him back to Italy to be the central figure in a Roman triumph. When that was over, he would be killed in any case.

An outcast from his own city of Carthage, to whose cause he had dedicated his whole life, Hannibal had come to this distant kingdom, bordered on the north by the Black Sea and on the west by the Sea of Marmora, as a guest of its ruler, King Prusias. It would be difficult to imagine a more obscure and tranquil setting than this country villa in Bithynia for the departure from this world of a man whose life had been a hurricane that had shaken the Mediterranean world from North Africa to Spain, France, Italy and Greece. Now, at the limits of the known world—the geographical heart of darkness—this Carthaginian nobleman, who has been described as ‘the greatest soldier the world has ever seen’, was about to take poison.

His implacable enemies, the Romans, had tracked him down to his remote retirement. They could never rest as long as he was alive. Hannibal had waged war against Rome for over sixteen years and had reduced their city and their state to the very edge of physical, economic and moral bankruptcy. He had bled their armies white, and in the course of one afternoon—at Cannae in Italy—had killed upon the field more men than in any single battle in recorded history. In the end he had been defeated, but he had always escaped his pursuers. His armies had long since been disbanded, but he had still survived in those countries of the eastern Mediterranean that had not yet yielded to Rome. He had warned all their rulers that unless they continued to fight against Rome they, would all, one by one, lose their freedom.

Now, at the close or his life, he lived at the village of Libyssa on a quiet inlet from the sea leading towards the Bithynian capital, Nicomedia. Although Hannibal was the guest of Prusias, he had been careful to live outside the city, for he had no wish to call attention to himself. He knew that he had been declared throughout the known world an enemy of the Romans, and that no man, no king, no country was allowed to give him shelter. Prusias in far Bithynia had dared to do so, thinking that his country was so remote from Rome, or even from its ever-growing shadow, that Hannibal could remain unobserved. The king needed the advice of this famous soldier-statesman on the reorganisation of his kingdom.

Then Bithynia found itself engaged in a war with Pergamum, that prosperous city in Asia Minor which had become a client of the Roman state. The forces of Prusias were badly defeated, and he turned to Hannibal for advice. The latter would have been wise, however difficult it might have been, to avoid acting as counsellor to a king who was engaged against a client of the all-conquering Romans. But he had dedicated himself since the age of nine at an altar in distant Carthage ‘never to be a friend of the Roman people’.