The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal & the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic

by Robert L. O'Connell

For no matter how bad things had gotten, Rome had always responded, had picked itself up out of the dustbin of history and soldiered on. And it was in defeat more than victory that Polybius saw the essence of Rome’s greatness.

So the study of ancient history is roughly analogous to scrutinizing a badly decayed patchwork quilt, full of holes and scraps of material from earlier work.

Verisimilitude is not truth, just the appearance of truth.

We have avoided such a fate, but had there been such a thing as World War III, there is little doubt that much of what we call our civilization would now lie in ruins. At last we may have learned there is and must be a limit to war.

Soon enough, Roman armies would look to their commanders and not the state to ensure their future. And should the commander choose to march on Rome, they would follow him. This is a lesson that should never be forgotten.

They leveraged their weakness into strength because it worked—until they could land a crushing blow.

Hunting parties became brotherhoods of killers, prototypes of the squad-size small units that one day would form the basic building blocks of armies.

All the other forms of warfare that sprang up in the ancient world were also motivated by some kind of societal shortcoming; it was just too costly to fight for any other reason.

Because such armies and the tyrannies they served enlisted the fundamental loyalties of so few, they were brittle and prone to collapse.

This imparted a cynical “great game” mentality among many of the players,

This was very much a world where, to paraphrase Thucydides,38 the strong did what they could and the weak did what they must.

Win, or die in place; there was to be no alternative.

At rock bottom Rome was a place made by war; warfare was in essence the local industry.

Meanwhile, within the chariot a slave held a golden wreath above the general’s head and whispered in his ear that he was not a god.

Empiricism, not originality, made Rome. The evolution of Rome’s institutions was ultimately driven by what worked; this helps explain the ramshackle cast of what emerged.

Romans did not proceed from theory, nor were they too proud to learn from others—even their enemies. They took what they saw, tried it out, and if it was successful, it became Roman.

In Roman terms virtus was balanced by disciplina, which was seen primarily as a brake on excessively aggressive behavior.

Roman commanders and Romans in general were proverbially offensive, and their style of fighting and their past successes gave them confidence that they could chew through any adversary.

Hannibal was that kind of leader. Always cagey, but when the odds were with him, he never turned his back on a fight.

He had been over the ground repeatedly, to the point of understanding that if he deployed with his back to the wind Vulturnus, the dust might blind them. (Livy 22.46.9) He knew the Romans, could read them like a book.

Success, on the other hand, demanded not just a masterful general, but a veritable “band of brothers” as subordinates to carry out not just the substance of his plan but its intent.

Unlike in Rome, where military power and glory lay at the root of everything, it was money that mattered in Carthage.

The Carthaginians should have known better, that their wealth could not protect them in a world ruled by war.

another characteristic Punic military delusion, a reliance on war elephants.

Wealth had bought endurance in the form of successive mercenary forces, but in the end this beast would turn upon its master in the most disastrous way, not simply biting the hand that fed it but going for the throat.

Still, it is the province of a certain kind of genius to remain forever ineffable. In the modern idiom, think Ronald Reagan, FDR, Thomas Jefferson; being indescribable may have been the touchstone of Hannibal’s endless tactical wizardry.

“You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but you don’t know how to use one.”

Hannibal’s army would move or not move according to the rumbling of its stomach, and as much as anything else, the Romans’ understanding and manipulation of this most unrelenting fact of life would save them from defeat.

All that is necessary to know really is that he did it, and this is not only beyond dispute, but it overshadows all else, since this accomplishment set the conditions for one of the most important wars in recorded history.

“Hannibal knows many things, but Rome knows one big thing,”

But if he held the spotlight throughout, he left the stage a loser. In the end he was smacked down by the central non sequitur of the Western way of war: victory in battle does not necessarily mean victory in war.

the Punic commander knew a “decisive engagement should never be undertaken on any chance pretext and without definite purpose.”

He was, to use the modern idiom, “preparing the battlefield,” specifically that portion that lay between the opposing commander’s ears.

Hungry, wet, and cold—even for soldiers as tough as Romans, this was not a good way to start a battle.

But in the first contest he had already revealed the qualities that would make him one of the greatest soldiers who ever lived—his X-ray vision into the minds of his opponents, his trickiness and penchant for surprise, his judicious use of his men, both in their care and feeding and also in how he applied each force component to maximum advantage.

Here was an adversary who not only learned from his mistakes, but found ways to leverage them to his own advantage. He was dangerous not only on the battlefield, but anywhere in his vicinity.

Existentially, the army was at the center of Rome’s conception of itself. Losing in this fashion and leaving an invader free to ravage the Italian countryside was humiliating almost beyond the capacity of words to describe.

For like the hedgehog, Fabius Maximus understood one big thing—Hannibal’s never ending need to feed his army. To win, Rome did not have to defeat him in battle; they had to simply restrict his ability to provision his troops.

Temperamentally, it was an army likely to overreact—prone both to excessive enthusiasm and passive despair. Judging by his plan and its results, this was exactly what its Barcid nemesis anticipated.

In a life-and-death struggle, confidence is crucial, and the recent past had given these men every reason to believe in their own fighting skills, as well as their commander’s ability to drive opponents into positions of utter vulnerability and near helplessness.

Roman skirmishers were men either too young or too poor to take their place in the maniples. The Carthaginians were specialists—screening and harassment was their business.

Hannibal’s genius as a commander was his ability to devise and execute a plan that used all the parts in concert to swallow and digest a much larger prey.

Because this approach would play into Hannibal’s own scheme and lead to a great disaster, it is easy to dismiss the plan as nonsensical. It wasn’t.

Yet war is truly terrible, and to turn our eyes away from its results is in itself an act of cowardice.

Hannibal’s great victory, his tactical masterpiece celebrated through the ages, produced, in the end, little more than corpses.

“So the gods haven’t given everything to one man; you know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but you don’t know how to use one.”

Rome had lost a great battle and needed a scapegoat. Rather than blame the strategists and commanders who had planned it, the powers that be turned on the survivors.

What the Roman generals hadn’t counted on was the ancient equivalent of a rocket scientist organizing the city’s defense … none other than Archimedes, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived and, unfortunately for the Romans, a weapons designer of rare creativity.

What made history’s conclusion so decisive was that even though Hannibal continued to operate brilliantly at the tactical and operational level—he remained virtually as tricky and lethal as ever—his strategy failed. His was a supreme overreach in the face of overwhelming power.

Quite plainly, at the operational and tactical levels of war Hannibal and his army had lost none of their edge, but that edge was nearly irrelevant strategically.