Hannibal Quotes

“enemies,”
― Ernle Bradford, Hannibal

“He is the sphinx whose riddle still eludes us.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Fabius, as defender of the land, had time on his hands and he also had manpower. He took over the two legions of the consul Gnaeus Servilius and added a further two legions to the army that now lay at his disposal. At the same time he gave orders for all the people who lay ahead of Hannibal’s line of march to abandon their farms, burn the buildings, and destroy the crops. (Centuries later his basic strategy was to be adopted by the Russian general Kutusov against Napoleon.) The people of Italy should withdraw into their land, leaving as little behind them as possible, and he himself—as commander of the only organised army—should avoid a pitched battle at any costs. Guerrilla tactics, harassing the flanks of the enemy, cutting off his foraging parties and gradually bleeding the invader to death, were the methods that Fabius was to employ against the general whom, very wisely, he was unwilling to meet on normal terms.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“But the greatest weakness of the Carthaginian lay in his lack of a political aim of any consequence. His immediate political aim was to seduce from Rome the allies within her confederacy, restoring to them their freedom. But freedom for what?”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Hannibal had no other sure source of reserves but the Gauls of Italy: he was dependent upon them, and the whole success of the expedition was dependent upon him staying alive. His hopes at this time must also have been geared to the possibility of seducing away from Rome the Latin allies, who in many respects formed the bulk of her armies. If he could shatter the confederation that held these states together he could deprive Rome of a principal source of manpower and isolate her. For this reason, both now and in the future, he was careful to make a distinction among the prisoners that he took: Romans were reduced to slave status, but the allies were treated kindly and, whenever possible, sent back to their homes with the message that the Carthaginian had no enmity against them. His war was against Rome.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Roman tactics in battle were comparatively simple and, since they had proved so successful in previous wars, were used against the Carthaginians until the latter demonstrated, by a flexibility designed to match each new occasion, that what had triumphed over Latins and Greeks and Gallic tribes needed adaptation. First of all, the Roman front line would open fire with their throwing spears, following this up with a charge with their swords—somewhat akin to the musket volley and bayonet charge of later wars. If this failed to break the enemy front, the second line, passing through the first on their chess-board principle, would repeat the procedure. The veterans held as reserve could then be used if necessary, while all the time the lightly-armed infantry were skirmishing on the flanks of the enemy, aided by the cavalry. These tactics had served the Romans well in the past—and were to do so in the future—but proved inadequate to deal with a general who modified his own tactics to suit each new battlefield, and who used elements of surprise and carefully laid traps, into which the Romans more often than not were prone to blunder.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“According to Polybius, in the first major engagement between the Carthaginians and Romans in 218 B.C. at the river Trebia the two consuls with their combined forces had an army of 16,000 legionaries and 20,000 allied infantry. The great disadvantage under which the Romans laboured—at any rate in the early phases of the war—was that the consuls were changed every year and, when the two were together, they commanded the combined force in rotation. Such a ‘democratic’ Republican procedure was almost certain to come to grief when matched against the military intelligence, command and will-power of one man—particularly when that man was a genius of warfare.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“The centurions were the backbone of the legions, professional long-service soldiers who took the name of Rome from India to Scotland—the finest N.C.O.s in history.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Livy gives conflicting figures as to the number of men who started out and the number lost in the crossing. Some of these are so exaggerated that they were clearly part of later Roman propaganda, designed to inflate the Roman ego as to the size of the army that their forefathers had faced. For instance, one of the Latin sources which he quotes has Hannibal arriving in Italy with 100,000 foot and 20,000 horse—far more than he started out with. Polybius is more trustworthy since, as he tells us, he had seen the inscription at Lacinium in which Hannibal himself had set down the facts and figures of his campaigns. His account reveals Hannibal reaching Italian soil at the foot of the Alps with 12,000 African and 8,000 Iberian foot, and not more than 6,000 horse. Between the Pyrenees and Italy, therefore, he had lost—mostly in the Alps—some 30,000 foot and 3,000 horse. This more or less confirms one statement of Livy’s, that a Roman who had been a captive of Hannibal left it on record that Hannibal had told him that ‘after crossing the Rhône he lost thirty-six thousand men and a vast number of horses and other animals’.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Hannibal seems to have set out from Cartagena about mid-June in 218 B.C. and to have been five months between Cartagena and the plains of the Po. It was, therefore, mid-October at the earliest when he halted at the watershed above Italy and gazed southward. Undoubtedly he had not intended to cross the Alps so late, having hoped, perhaps, to make a start in May. He had been delayed, as has been suggested, by the late arrival of many of his troops from their winter quarters, and delayed again, as we know, by unexpected heavy fighting throughout northern Spain. It would seem, in fact, that his arrival at this point was even later than October, for the setting of the Pleiades would have been visible in the latitude in which he stood during the first fortnight in November in the year 218 B.C.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“The army with which he crossed the Rhône, its hardened veterans full of confidence, its horses, elephants and pack-animals strong and well fed, was gradually being whittled away with every day that passed. Disease and accident, as well as enemy action, must by now have considerably thinned its ranks.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“His force was now greatly reduced from its original size. Polybius states that the army which went with him through the Pyrenees numbered only ‘fifty thousand foot and nine thousand horse’. This meant that his infantry force, by desertion, by policy, and by losses in battle, had been almost halved and his horse reduced by a quarter. Polybius, who was a distinguished general before he became a military historian, comments with practical wisdom: ‘He had now an army not so strong in number but serviceable and highly trained from the long series of wars in Spain.’ Hannibal may well have reckoned that, in view of the arduous campaigns which lay ahead, he was better off with this diminished force of battle-honed veterans than with one twice the size, less experienced and lacking in determination.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“No one had ever conceived that a whole army could be moved from the west, through the passes, and down into Italy. Prior to the arrival of the Carthaginians in Europe, there had been no coordinating intelligence to see the possibility of such a move, nor indeed any reason for it.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Hannibal was always to show that he had an appreciation as a cavalry commander that his enemies never had; at the same time he did not make the mistake of thinking that everything could be left to the horsemen. He knew that their dash and sudden violence must always be reinforced, and ultimately consolidated, by a hard core of disciplined infantry.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“It is even more curious that none of those later commentators on Hannibal (including Livy) ever found anything scandalous to say about his private life. Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, Tiberius, and almost all other Roman rulers of distinction are commonly accused of drunkenness, adultery, fornication, sodomy, or sadism, and the unfortunate Tiberius of almost every aberration that can be found in the textbooks of sexual pathology. The writers of antiquity, in fact, who managed to find some more or less scandalous anecdotes about nearly all the great men in their history, found themselves baffled when it came to Hannibal.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“In the spring of 236 B.C. Hamilcar and his forces crossed from North Africa into Europe. This was a momentous occasion: the invasion of the European continent by a Semitic and African army. Foreshadowing the great Arab invasions of many centuries later, it gave warning that the countries on the northern rim of the Mediterranean basin were no longer safe from any enemy to the south.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“In the years following Hannibal’s birth, his father Hamilcar had fought doggedly and with great skill to preserve the remnants of the Carthaginian garrisons in western Sicily. That he was finally unsuccessful was because the Romans had been quick to learn an all-important lesson—to succeed in the Mediterranean theatre it is essential to have command of the sea. In the early stages of this great war the Carthaginians, with centuries of experience behind them, had found little difficulty in trouncing the Romans in naval engagements and in harrying their coastline. But one of the Roman qualities which would greatly assist them to their successful imperial role was an ability to learn from mistakes.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“(Some points of similarity can be found between the military systems of the British and Carthaginian empires.)”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Carthage was a spider’s web of trade and communications that spread eastward to Egypt and the Levant, and westward as far as scarcely imaginable places beyond Spain. Where the Mediterranean issued between the giant Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta) into the misty Ocean that lapped the whole world round, the Carthaginians had planted trading posts. Their interests extended as far north as Britain and the Baltic, as well as to the Canary Islands, the Cameroons, and possibly even the Azores.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Qart Hadasht, New Town, Carthage to the Romans, was traditionally said to have been founded in 814 B.C. by Phoenician traders who had discovered an ideal site for a trading settlement on a small peninsula well sheltered and deep in the Gulf of Tunis.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal

“Hearing now from his servants that his house was surrounded by soldiers, he is said to have remarked: ‘It is now time to end the anxiety of the Romans. Clearly they are no longer able to wait for the death of an old man who has caused them so much concern.’ His irony mocked his enemies to the last. When the Romans burst into the house they found their great adversary lying dead; even in his very end he had eluded them.”
― Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal