Chapter five

Those of you following the progress of the Rome book I am writing will be pleased to hear that I am getting to the end of chapter five -- which takes the story of Rome from being a power in Italy to being a power in the Mediterranean as a whole. Basically I am talking about 300 BC to 146 BC (the defeat of both Carthage and Corinth), and that includes the Hannibalic war.

To be honest, I have never really taught this period (and it is in teaching that you really get to know something), and -- even worse -- I have always rather reacted against the Boys Own Paper view of Hannibal and his war agaimst the Romans. I mean, to be honest, those elephants were a great PR exercise, but more trouble than they were worth. Elephants are risky in battle -- if they get wounded, they are just as likely to run amok over their own side as over the enemy. Hannibal might have had more success without the big beasts.

But getting down to it, I have found much more vivid and intriguing detail in this period than I had ever imagined. I love the idea, for example, of the elderly Hannibal ending his days advising the king of Syria how to beat the Romans (unsucessfully as it of course turned out).

And I love even more the story of the Syrian prince Antiochus Epiphanes who had been held as a hostage in Rome for several years in the 180s BC and then returned home (in a hostage swap) completey imbued with Roman habits. He apparently dressed himself up in a spruce white toga and went round the centre of his town chatting up voters, like candidates for offices did in Rome. The people of Syria were apparently baffled.

 So actually it's not all about Hannibal and elephants. There are issues of culture and cultural identity here that I'm trying to get my head around.