Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. His toes were freezing. The harsh gusts blowing down out of the higher mountains surrounding the path sliced through the thick strips of woolen cloth wound around his feet and legs. Every part of him was cold, colder than he'd ever been before.
from his toes to the icicles hanging from the matted gray hairs of his beard. The gentle winters of North Africa, and even his decade among the high hills and plateaus of Iberia, had never prepared him for anything like this. The Carthaginian thought he knew struggle, that no hardship could possibly face him after a lifetime of fighting and privation. He had felt the heat of the desert wind during the wars in Africa, and the burning pain from an Iberian sword slicing into his leg.
Before all that, he remembered the heat of the Sicilian summers 25 years earlier, when he had been the youthful son of a wealthy merchant family sent to learn the art of command from the legendary Hamilcar Barca. Hamilcar was ten years in the grave, but the Carthaginian was still loyal to his family, and he always would be. There, up ahead, was Hamilcar's son.
He wrote easily in the midst of the marching column as it wound its way through the gorges and valleys between the alpine peaks, always sparing a thoughtful word for an old comrade and remembering some... past deed that marked out an individual. Carthaginian, Libyan, Iberian, Numidian, or even Gaul.
None of that mattered to Hannibal. He played no favorites and cared only for the sole thing that really mattered, victory. Hannibal was everything his father had been and more to the Carthaginians' way of thinking. A brilliant planner before battle was joined. but also cool and collected in the fire of combat, perhaps fonder of getting stuck into a melee than was wise. He himself would never tell the younger Hannibal any of that.
It would only swell the general's opinion of himself. Besides, Hannibal already knew. He was Hamilcar's son in every way that mattered, including his belief in his own abilities. An elephant trumpeted somewhere further toward the front of the column. The sight of the great beasts silhouetted against the treeless landscape was something the Carthaginian would never forget. He had seen marvels in his time, but nothing like this.
with animals born to the forests of North Africa stomping through the ice and snow of an alpine autumn. Not for the first time, the Carthaginian wondered what some future traveler would make of the giant bones left behind by the dead elephants along this trail. Surely they must have belonged to giants or gods or some other fantastical creature.
The reality that a general named Hannibal had marched three dozen war elephants onto an impassable mountain trackway was far stranger. The Carthaginian felt his foot slip on the icy path. Dozens of men and hundreds of pack animals, even some of the mighty elephants, had plunged to their deaths from a careless step off the narrow track. He didn't want to be one of them, and for a moment, he felt the indefinable fear of tumbling into the abyss.
But then he saw Hannibal again, mounted on his horse, encouraging the bedraggled column. He would follow that man anywhere. There are few feats more epic in the historical record than Hannibal's march across the Alps. Fighting through hostile gulls, snowstorms, rock slides, and the teeth of an approaching alpine winter, Hannibal brought an entire army directly into Rome's backyard. The Second Punic War was about to begin.
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because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on, it's about keeping everything secure. Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. When the topic of Rome's enemies comes up, as I'd imagine it tends to if you listen to this show, there are probably a few names that recur.
Alaric the Goth, Attila the Hun, Queen Boudicca of the Esseni, maybe the poison king Mithridates if you're going for a deep cut. But one name stands out above all the rest. Hannibal, often called Hannibal Barca after his less famous but still illustrious father. During the 17 years of the Second Punic War, from 218 to 201 BC, Hannibal came closer than any other opponent to destroying Rome.
Tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Roman and allied soldiers died on the battlefield under Hannibal's direction. For the better part of two decades, he operated in the heart of the Roman sphere of influence in Italy, despite almost completely lacking support and reinforcements from abroad.
And even more than his tactical or strategic genius, Hannibal's broader insights into the nature of Roman power and control led to him very nearly breaking the entire system of alliances that underpinned Roman hegemony. Nor was this the creaking, sclerotic Roman Empire of late antiquity, when generations of feckless boy emperors and power-mad courtiers had already hollowed out much of the state.
This was Rome in its absolute prime, an imperial republic honed to a razor edge by more than a century of continuous warfare. That was the state Hannibal pushed to the absolute breaking point. Let's pick up where we left off last time, as Hannibal took over the Carthaginian imperial enterprise in Iberia from his murdered brother-in-law Hasdrubal, and then quickly found himself facing the wrath of Rome.
Given a series of options about what to do, Hannibal took the most daring and unpredictable step imaginable, invading Italy itself, the core of Roman power, in an attempt to win the victory that had eluded his father Hamilcar during the First Punic War. That's what we'll explore today and in the coming episodes. We'll see how Hannibal did this, how close he came to succeeding, and what allowed the Romans to so narrowly survive a truly existential crisis.
The underlying and often unspoken question here is whether anyone could have taken down Rome at this stage, and that's something we'll explore in weeks to come. But for now, it's enough to say that if anyone was capable of doing it, it was Hannibal. The disastrous culmination of the First Punic War left Carthage nearly in ruin.
Not physically, because the city itself hadn't been sacked or even fully besieged, but in its capacity to raise armies and fleets, fund them, and exert power over areas beyond the immediate hinterland. The treasury was so drained, and dissatisfaction among former soldiers and subject peoples so high, that even areas close to Carthage fell to the rebellious Libyans and mercenaries in the years following the end of the war.
This was a vicious conflict in which mass slaughter and public torture played an increasingly prominent role. It was also a conflict that Hamilcar Barca ultimately won. This victory gave the general, one of the few to emerge from the Punic War with a positive reputation, the political capital necessary to embark on a stunningly ambitious new project.
Rather than extending Carthaginian dominance in North Africa or attempting to regain Sicily, Hamilcar intended to take an army far to the west, to Iberia, to carve out a new imperial dominion. To not just survive but thrive in the new world Rome had wrought, Carthage would need money and men. There were still potential sources of both in Africa, but fighting the volatile Numidians or challenging the powerful Ptolemies of Egypt were risky projects.
At best, the result would be diminishing returns. At worst, the Carthaginians would find themselves in another grinding war with no promise of victory. Iberia offered both greater rewards and a less daunting path to acquiring them. Hamilcar's campaign was an unqualified success, and even his death in 229 or 228 BC, about eight years after its beginning, couldn't slow the momentum. His son-in-law Hasdrubal took over and was, if anything, even more successful.
By 221 BC, when a loyal Celt snuck into Hasdrubal's quarters and murdered him as revenge for the general's treatment of his master, the southern half of Iberia was effectively under Carthaginian dominance. there was really only one possible candidate to succeed Hasdrubal. That was his brother-in-law, Hamilcar's son, Hannibal, who had already proven his worth as Hasdrubal's cavalry commander.
That was a prestigious position that essentially amounted to being second in command of the whole operation. In the Hellenistic world, which the Barkids were intimately familiar with, the cavalry commander was often the king's son and heir. Hannibal had performed admirably in that role, and like Hasdrubal before him, was acclaimed as generalissimo first by the army, and then by a unanimous vote of the citizens in their assembly called the Ham.
Aged just 26 or 27 in 221 BC, Hannibal was already the de facto leader of Carthus. Ironically, so far as we know, he hadn't actually seen the city since boyhood. His entire life had been spent among the army and in the empire his father and brother-in-law had built. With that in mind, it's not hard to see why the historical record so often paints Hannibal as a man who aimed to fulfill a generational plan of revenge on the Roman state.
According to this line of reasoning, the grudge Hamilcar nursed against the Romans found its expression in the famous oath he made his sons swear on their departure from Carthage. Never be a friend to the Romans. Hamilcar had Hannibal swear to the chief god Baal, as the story goes, and the rest of the pieces followed. An empire in Iberia to provide the resources, then a pretext for war, and finally, the long-awaited invasion of Italy. That's the reasoning, and it's deeply flawed.
As we discussed in the last episode, the oath itself is perfectly plausible, especially since the timing aligns closely with the Roman seizure of Sardinia. Why wouldn't a famous general take his son and heir to the Temple of Baal to swear an oath before a major new undertaking? Why would Hannibal lie about that 40 years later in direct conversation with the Seleucid king?
I don't think he did lie. But there's a big difference between never be a friend to the Romans, which is what is actually reported, and always be an enemy, which is how ancient sources tended to interpret the oath. Hamilcar wanted an empire because an empire was a useful thing for an imperial republic to have, not just or even mostly because it would enable Carthage to win the next war with Rome.
And when the actual triggers for the outbreak of the Second Punic War arrive, you can make your own judgments about who's mostly at fault. That was all still in the future and not even particularly salient when Hannibal took over command in Iberia. His first priority was to establish himself as a leader in the mold of his father and brother-in-law, and the way to do that was by active campaigning.
Within 12 months, he carried out two highly successful expeditions, the first probably in the central region of La Mancha and the second further to the northwest. The second very nearly turned out to be a disaster, as the powerful Carpetani tribe attacked Hannibal and his army as they returned home with a massive force. But Hannibal routed them, the first of his extraordinary battlefield victories.
He raced to get ahead of the enemy army and placed a river crossing between them, then cut them down with his elephants and cavalry as the Carpatani attempted to wade through the ford. When their momentum stalled, Hannibal recrossed the river and destroyed the remnants. There was little doubt that he was every bit the commander his father and brother-in-law had been, and Hannibal probably knew it.
The Carthaginian army in Iberia was a highly trained and extremely experienced force, led by a cadre of gifted professionals with direct control of the monetary and manpower resources that sustained it. Hannibal wasn't going to back down to anyone. The Romans' attention had been elsewhere for years.
The Adriatic was one major area of concern, and a new one. Roman armies intervened several times in Illyria, which is present-day Albania and Montenegro, to forestall the aggressive expansion of a new Illyrian kingdom. Roman envoys also took this opportunity to travel to Greece, where they met with representatives of the Aetolian and Achaean leagues, as well as Corinth and even Athens.
This was the first time the Romans had taken a direct interest in the East, foreshadowing events to come over the next several decades. But the Po Valley of Northern Italy, where the Romans fought a series of vicious campaigns with the Gauls of the region, was the most important theater. A Gallic invasion in 225 BC precipitated the largest deployment of soldiers in Roman history to that point.
A staggering 210,000 men in total were under arms for the year. And according to the census numbers that Polybius reports, that was still far from the total that Rome could mobilize. Rome defeated the Gauls on this occasion, but not without difficulty, and it took the establishment of new military colonies to bring a measure of control to the Wild North.
Of course, the Gauls of the Po Valley didn't forget the brutality of this Roman attack, and Hannibal would find the region to be his most fertile recruiting ground in the years to come. Once they finished with the Gauls in 222 BC, the Romans again deployed to the Adriatic, this time in Istria, which is basically the top area of the sea, with both consuls in 221.
It's likely that they were planning another campaign across the Adriatic in 220 BC, perhaps to face off directly with the creaking kingdom of Macedonia. There's no indication that they had a major interest in Iberia or in what Hannibal was doing.
Until this time. At last, belatedly, the Romans seemed to have figured out what Hannibal and the Barcads had been up to for the past two decades. The small but wealthy town of Saguntum lay well to the south of the line that Hasdrubal and the Roman envoys had agreed on. agreed would mark the limit of Carthaginian expansion. It was 170 kilometers, about 120 miles south of the Ebro River, and deep inside territory that had been under Carthaginian control for a while now.
yet Seguntum had always cultivated ties with Rome, probably as a matter of both trade and security. Those ties were one-sided, the Romans essentially ignored Seguntum, but that changed in 220 BC with Hannibal's string of early victories. A pair of Roman envoys sent in New Carthage, Carthagena, the city Hasdrubal had built, where they awaited Hannibal's return from the north. When he arrived, the envoys told him in no uncertain terms both not to cross the Ebro and to stay away from Seguntun.
agreed, then that was as good as an admission that Carthage, and Hannibal specifically, were subject to Rome. If he didn't, they would have a strong case for war, much as Messana had provided at the outbreak of the First Punic War.
Perhaps even during these two envoys' travels, the Romans intervened in an internal dispute in Seguntum and put the leaders of one faction there to death. Confronted by the envoys' demand and their meddling in the affairs of Seguntum, Hannibal told them in no uncertain terms that he would
what they'd done in that city. This was essentially a guarantee that not only would he not treat Siguntham as a Roman protectorate, he would instead attack it at the first opportunity. Both sides were bluffing. The Romans didn't particularly want Guant, another war with Carthage, much less one with Hannibal that would presumably take place in distant Iberia.
But he also wasn't going to be pushed around, especially not when Hasdrubal and the last set of Roman envoys had already agreed on a line of demarcation just a few years before. And tragically, both sides called the bluff. The result was war. Oh, hi, Greg James. Hi, Alice Levine. People might know you from the Rounders podcast you do. It's cricket and people will know you, I guess, from, oh, my dad's in a scandal, whatever.
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It's worth thinking about whether war could have been avoided in 219 BC. In no way, shape, or form was the conflict destined to happen at that time. Even if the structural conditions of two imperial republics maximizing their power and military effectiveness made war more than likely, the precise conditions and triggers for that coming war were fluid and uncertain.
The Roman envoys wanted Hannibal away from Saguntum as a way of demonstrating their hegemony, while Hannibal wanted the Romans out of his business in Iberia. That was simple enough. Had Hannibal made even a token nod to Rome's wishes, they might not have bothered him for years, if ever, while they busily extended their control over the Adriatic. Had the Romans realized who they were dealing with, they might have taken a more delicate line of negotiation.
After all, Saguntum had never been a formal ally of Rome, and it did lay a great distance south of the Ebro, the line of demarcation that they had agreed with Hasdrubal several years before. Instead, both Hannibal and Rome back themselves into a corner. It's worth asking why.
The great historian Polybius, whose account is the backbone of our understanding of these events, has a take. Hannibal was a young man filled with martial ardor. He had met with good fortune in his enterprises and had long been committed to a course of hostility with Rome. After a little more explanation, he continues, quote, Hannibal was wholly gripped by irrational and uncontrollable anger.
Polybius may well have had no idea what Hannibal was actually feeling when the Roman envoys made their demands, but it's hardly implausible that he did accurately gauge the mental state of an ambitious, accomplished 28-year-old general. Nor was Polybius unfamiliar with anger as a motivation for action, even among the powerful. The historian Regina Lohr argues in a recent book that Polybius fully understood the power of emotion, and that for the author, it was completely compatible with reason.
In fact, anger was completely justifiable for Hannibal, considering decades of resentment over Rome's treatment of Carthage. This wasn't the only case in Polybius' text where anger caused a war, and the thread of righteous anger ties together the causes of a great many of the conflicts he discussed. If Hannibal grasped at that time that war was probably going to happen eventually,
He might well have talked himself into believing that his anger was justified, perhaps even beneficial. Anger has a way of narrowing our perception of the potential options available to us. Hannibal was really good at fighting. He had an outstanding army at hand. He probably believed that war was inevitable. And so he let his anger sway him into ignoring any viable off-ramps from the situation. A second war with Rome wasn't something to be entered into lightly.
But our source's impression is one of a hasty decision made in a highly charged and emotional moment. On such moments does the course of history turn, perhaps more so than we might be inclined to admit. And for their part, the Romans delivered their demand in the most bellicose way possible. That was how they did things. Ancient diplomacy was more about threats than compromise. And in this case, it backfired. But war wasn't inevitable. Hannibal's rhetoric hadn't yet been matched by any actions.
He quickly changed that, however, by marching to Saguntum and putting the small but prosperous city under siege. Saguntum's pleas to roam for aid went unanswered. and Hannibal, emboldened, soon sacked Saguntum. He took huge amounts of plunder that he used to both buttress his position in Carthage and fund his next move.
After Hannibal's denial of their demands and his rapid march on Saguntum, a group of five Roman envoys was sent to Carthage with an ultimatum. Hand over Hannibal and any elite Carthaginians who supported him, or Rome would formally declare war. Now, the Carthaginians argued, quite reasonably, that Hannibal had violated no formal treaty. The Romans themselves had never said a thing about Iberia or Saguntum to the Carthaginians.
Even their agreement with Hasdrubal had been informal. It was never discussed or ratified in Carthage. In the end, neither the Roman envoys nor the Carthaginian officials to whom they were speaking made the slightest impression on their counterparts. The Roman envoys formally declared war. We can blame the Carthaginians in general, and Hannibal in particular, whose aggression made war a done deal.
We can blame the Romans for inserting themselves into affairs in Seguntum, far from Italy, that had nothing to do with their immediate interests. Or we can blame them for their high-handedness in the years between the wars. But it takes two to tango, and both Carthage and Rome were ready and willing to fight in the spring of 218 BC.
The Romans expected to fight this coming war in Iberia. After all, that's where Hannibal was, it's where his base of power was located, and it's where the proximate cause of the war was to be found, in Saguntum. But Hannibal had no intention of fighting in Iberia. He had already dispatched his own envoys to the Gauls of northern Italy to gauge their interest in going another round with the Romans.
In another flash of insight, Hannibal realized that his army, largely made up of Iberian conscripts and mercenaries, might desert if forced to fight on their home ground. To avoid this, Hannibal transferred a large chunk of his Iberian forces to North Africa and replaced them with soldiers drawn from Libya and Numidia.
This both ensured that the Carthaginian core territories wouldn't be vulnerable to immediate Roman invasion, and that the soldiers responsible for defending both Iberia and Africa would depend on their Carthaginian overlords. But the masterstroke came when Hannibal decided not to wait for a Roman expeditionary force to find him in Iberia.
The envoys he had sent to the Gauls of northern Italy told him that they were ready and willing to fight Rome. Moreover, they included the intriguing detail that the Alps, the massive mountains separating Italy from the rest of Europe, were in fact crossable. Hannibal would march across southern Gaul, climb the Alpine passes, and take the fight directly to Rome. It's essential to understand that Hannibal, and Carthage more generally, weren't really the underdogs here.
I've repeatedly called Rome and Carthage imperial republics, and that's because they were. In terms of military capacity, Carthage and Rome were much closer to one another than they were to any other power in the Mediterranean and beyond. While Rome had advantages in manpower reserves, Carthage was not a single defeat away from destruction. Especially after the addition of the Iberian Empire under the Barkids, Carthage could fight Rome on something close to an equal footing.
In fact, at the outbreak of the war, Carthage probably had a substantial advantage in the total number of troops under arms. The army Hannibal took with him as he marched north to and then beyond the Ebro River toward the Pyrenees consisted, according to Polybius, of more than 100,000 men in total. Nearly half of those soldiers remained behind, but he still had approximately 60,000 men when he passed through the Pyrenees and began marching toward the Rhone River and the route up into the Alps.
Moreover, that army was almost entirely made up of long-service professionals who knew their business. There was no finer fighting force in the Mediterranean, and Hannibal intended to bring it right into Rome's backyard. The question of Hannibal's journey east is a thorny one, particularly once we start asking about his precise route through the Alps, but the gist of it is clear enough.
There were hostile Gallic tribes along his line of march, many of whom already had dealings with the Romans on top of their natural discontent with a massive army coming through their lands. Hannibal's first task then was to placate or defeat them. Then, he had to cross the Rhone River, a substantial natural barrier even without thousands of Gauls waiting for him on the opposite bank, which they were.
To make matters even more daunting, the Roman consul Publius Cornelius Scipio, father of the famous Scipio Africanus, was waiting near the mouth of the Rhone with his own forces. Scipio had been heading west for Iberia along the coast when news of Hannibal's march reached him. He stopped at Massilia, present-day Marseille, some three days' march downriver from Hannibal's crossing point.
Roman and Carthaginian cavalry even skirmished. That could easily have been dire for Hannibal, but he managed to outmaneuver the waiting Gauls and destroy them, and then begin his ascent into the Alps without Scipio stopping him. For his part, Scipio recognized the danger. He sent his army along to Iberia as planned, but turned around himself to take personal command of the legions that were operating in northern Italy.
Hannibal's march through the Alps has been remembered and portrayed by a variety of authors as a truly epic feat. It's the greatest of the accomplished general's life. While taking several dozen elephants and tens of thousands of men over the mountains is pretty wild, I'm not entirely sold on that. I think it substantially understates how incredible some of Hannibal's other deeds were, and maybe overstates the difficulty he and his army actually faced in crossing the Elf.
It wasn't midwinter. It was autumn. It was hardly an easy time to make the ascent, but also not the worst. The Carthaginians had to fight off hostile Gauls along the way, but they also found plenty of supply.
The precise pass Hannibal took has been debated for centuries. Even Napoleon had a take. Most scholars believe that he used the Col du Clapier, a challenging but traversable route, Recent archaeological evidence points to a quicker but much more difficult pass, the Col de la Traversete, which is nearly 10,000 feet, almost 3,000 meters in elevation.
Analysis of sediments along the Col de la Traversete showed abundant evidence for the passage of large numbers of horses, with radiocarbon dates that roughly matched the period of Hannibal's crossing. This isn't a smoking gun, because other armies could and did cross the mountains at that time, but it's pretty suggestive. If that is the case, then Hannibal's march really was pretty epic, even if the specific incidents recounted in the sources are occasionally suspect.
At any rate, by late autumn, Hannibal and his surviving soldiers, about half the number that had crossed the Pyrenees with him in the first place, descended from the mountains into the Po Valley of northern Italy. Thousands had been killed or rendered unable to continue by the Gallic attacks, the snow and ice, rock falls, tumbles into crevasses, hypothermia, perhaps even starvation. but Hannibal still possessed a formidable fighting force and every ounce of his substantial talent for command.
His first priority was attacking the Gallic Torini tribe, who had been less receptive to his overtures than the other Gauls, and then sacking their capital. One day, a long time in the future, that would become the city of Turin. Waiting for Hannibal further south was Publius Scipio, who met Hannibal's advance near the junction of the Tichinus River and the larger Po. Hannibal's cavalry with the general at the head met Scipio and his cavalry.
First blood went to Hannibal. As he would do so often in the future, he encircled the Roman force, cut them to pieces, and nearly killed Scipio, who was saved either by his son Scipio Africanus or a Ligurian slave, depending on who you believe. The clash pushed Scipio back across the Po, and his Gallic allies deserted him. To make matters much worse, a town garrisoned by some of Rome's Italian allies also deserted. Hannibal freed all the Italians and Latins in the town.
Meanwhile, thousands of Gauls streamed down out of the hills to join Hannibal's growing army. Scipio could only wait for his consular colleague, Sempronius Longus, to join him with a number of legions that had been slated for a, perhaps overly optimistic, invasion of Africa. The two forces faced each other across the Trebia River. It was now definitely winter, and the first pitched battle of Hannibal's Italian campaign was about to begin.
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Follow the Socially Distant Sports Bar wherever you get your podcasts. The Socially Distant Sports Bar, it's not about asymmetrical overlords. James, podcasting from his study. And you have to say that's magnificent. On December 22nd or 23rd of 218 BC, close to the winter solstice, Hannibal's Numidian cavalry crossed the Trebia and threatened the gates of the Roman camp. Sempronius and Scipio waited inside with their legion.
The Carthaginian provocation was enough to stir the Romans to action in the icy early morning. They put on their armor and gathered up their weapons, felt their bellies rumble for lack of food, and stepped out of their tents into a wall of sleet and snow. Assembling and marching down toward the river, Hannibal's cavalry pelted the Romans with missiles and made their lives even more uncomfortable as they crossed the open ground that led down to the Trebia.
Waiting on the other side was Hannibal's entire force of infantry. The Romans began to ford the river, wading through chest-deep waters to make it across, and only adding to their misery in the process. But soon, they made it, only to find Hannibal's entire army drawn up waiting for them fresh and confident.
The Romans slowly moved forward into the heat of the melee, and even began to push the Carthaginians backward in the middle of the line. They had the advantage of greater numbers and heavier equipment. Despite the awful conditions, the Romans had every reason to expect victory.
On the flanks, however, Hannibal's plan soon became clear. He had a huge edge in numbers and quality of his cavalry, and his horsemen soon swept aside the screening Romans, pressing into the vulnerable sides of their infantry block. Even so, the Romans still might have triumphed, if not for one final twist to the Carthaginian general's plan. During his reconnaissance of the battlefield the day before, Hannibal had noticed a useful topographical feature.
A deep water course, densely studded with shrubs and brambles, that was all but invisible if the observer wasn't right on top of it. Hannibal had placed his brother Mago in the depression with a thousand Numidian horse and another thousand infantry. Now, at his signal, Mago and the Numidians pounced on the Roman rear. Most of the infantry were killed or captured in the ensuing encirclement, pinned between the infantry, cavalry, elephants, and the swollen river.
Only about 10,000 survivors managed to punch through the center of Hannibal's formation and escape to safety, along with a few cavalry and the two consuls. Scipio, still recovering from his wounds, hadn't wanted to fight at all. If Polybius is to be believed, he had wanted to rest the army, train the soldiers, and wait for reinforcements before engaging.
Sempronius, by contrast, wanted to attack. His term of office was nearly up, and when the new Consuls arrived, his one chance for glory would be gone forever. In this case, the burning ambition that so characterized the Roman aristocracy and led to so many triumphs was the downfall of thousands upon thousands of men.
The Battle of the Trebia was Hannibal's first major success in Italy. He had effectively destroyed an entire consular army, defeated both consuls in battle, and was surrounded by thousands of some of Rome's most bitter enemies. Again, he released all the captured Italian allies, telling them that he was there not to conquer, but to liberate them from the Roman yoke.
This must have made an impression, and some Italians must surely have been wondering whether Rome was the right horse to back. Still, Hannibal's situation was precarious. The winter was long and vicious, and by its end all but one of his elephants, hundreds of horses, and thousands of men were dead of cold and exposure. Many others must have deserted just to get away from the brutal conditions.
Moreover, the Romans were in no way cowed by their defeat at the Trebia. They simply elected two new consuls, Gaius Flaminius and Gaius Servilius Geminus, and raised more legions from their wealth of manpower reserves. Flaminius, who took up position at Aritium in Etruria, had about 25,000 men with him. Servilius had a similar number at Arminium on the Adriatic, while additional forces garrisoned Rome itself, Tarentum, and Sicily against a Carthaginian attack from the south.
Hannibal had about 50,000 troops in total, most of them probably by this point Gauls recruited from the Po Valley. He had a couple of different options at this point. First, to move through Italy, peeling off Rome's allies one by one. Or second, to move on Rome itself.
The two plans weren't mutually exclusive, but their emphasis did differ. Hannibal opted for the second option, probably driven by the knowledge that a Carthaginian fleet had already sailed past Sardinia toward the Italian coast, where it was waiting to rendezvous with his army. The march west across the Apennines was punishing. Much of the army's baggage and complemented pack animals was lost in the marshes along the Arno River, which were overflowing with spring meltwater.
Hannibal himself developed a nasty eye infection that would eventually cost him half his sight. Flaminius at Aritium could have jumped on Hannibal as he and his forces tried to regroup from their ordeal. Instead, the consul waited, trying to determine what Hannibal was going to do next. That was Flaminius' first mistake.
Hannibal and his army, experienced plunderers all, set about devastating the rich Etrurian countryside. They burned fields of grain and hillsides packed with vines, demolished wealthy villas, and carried off captives into slavery. Then, the Carthaginian army turned east, toward the hills running north of Lake Trasimene.
Flaminius was happy to see Hannibal go that direction, because going east meant that he was getting closer to the other consul, Servilius, who had already sent his cavalry ahead to join his colleagues. Hannibal halted on the hills and waited for Flaminius to follow. Obligingly, the consul did so. That was his second and fatal mistake.
On the morning of June 21st, 217 BC, a dense curtain of mist rose on Lake Trasimene and then covered the hillsides. Flaminius' army was strung out along the line of march, unprepared for battle, with no reconnaissance forces out looking for Hannibal. The Carthaginians, by contrast, were wading in the mist, looking down toward the lake shore. The Romans barely had time to grab their weapons when Hannibal's soldiers descended onto them.
They were so widely dispersed that they couldn't even form a coherent battle line. The mist was so dense that they could hardly see or hear what was happening at any distance. The Carthaginian assault broke Flaminius' army into a series of incoherent mobs, each of which was essentially on its own. To their credit, the Romans fought back hard for three hours, but eventually a Gallic chieftain of the Insubrace stabbed Flaminius to death.
Word of the console's killing spread and resistance collapsed completely. Polybius gives us a truly tragic image of Romans forced back into the lake, their heads barely above water, waiting for drowning or a death blow from one of Hannibal's soldiers.
One chunk of the army managed to break through and escape to high ground, only to be encircled and captured that same night. Servilius' cavalry, unaware of what had happened, arrived a few days later, and the whole mounted force was either killed or captured. In total, more than 10,000 Romans and allies died on the shores of Lake Trasimene, while another 15,000 were captured.
According to Polybius, the disaster at Lake Trasimene was a straightforward result of Flaminius' mindless aggression and incompetence. He gave no consideration to timing and terrain, and had no plan except to engage the enemy. He treated victory as a foregone conclusion, and he had raised the hopes of the mob to such a pitch that soldiers under arms were outnumbered by non-combatants bearing chains and fetters.
That's a damning judgment, and it stands in stark contrast to Polybius' portrait of the calculating, ruthless, and brilliant Hannibal. Now, we can't know whether Polybius' portrayal of the two commanders is really accurate. The whole thing feels like a literary set piece, one that he repeats again later in his narrative when talking about the Battle of Cannae.
But even if Polybius is exaggerating, his portrayal does match quite nicely the cultural pathologies of the Roman aristocracy and the incentives that drove them. Polybius might be projecting that image onto Flaminius, a convenient target, but it's hard not to get the impression that the author was actually talking about elite Romans he himself had known 50 years later.
The historian Dexter Hoyos points out that in these two battles alone, leaving aside deaths in smaller clashes and unrecorded skirmishes, the Romans had lost nearly 55,000 citizen and Italian allied troops. The census of 225 BC, which was unusually detailed, recorded 273,000 adult male Roman citizens and another half million allies capable of fighting. In just a few months of fighting then, Rome had lost about one in every 12 adult males who could bear arms. The demographic cost was staggering.
The political cost was even worse. Every defeat showed Rome's Italian allies that perhaps the city on the Tiber wasn't the biggest, baddest bully on the block. Maybe Hannibal and Carthage were the horses they ought to be backing. We can almost hear the whispers starting to buzz in Tarentum or Capua. Yet despite the massive defeats at the Trebia and at Lake Trasimene, the Allies held firm. For the moment. Without defections, Hannibal abandoned the idea of an attack on Rome itself.
The promised fleet, which would have been necessary for any assault on the city, was deterred from reaching Italy by a much more substantial Roman naval presence in the Tyrenian Sea. So, instead, Hannibal marched east toward the Adriatic, looting with abandon and killing every male Roman citizen his army encountered. At the same time, however, he promised friendship to the Italians.
Carthage was their liberator, he said, not a new master in the Roman mold. All the Italians had to do was abandon their old hegemon and join him. Yet still they refused. Their fear of and respect for the Romans, pounded into them by decades of slogging warfare and generations of service under Roman command, made them realize what a monumental step betrayal would be. None of them were yet keen to try it.
Hannibal set himself and his army up in comfort in Apulia in southeastern Italy. They had plenty of supplies and faced little local opposition. The Romans, however, were determined not to give up. They took a step that hadn't been necessary since the darkest days of the First Punic War, and suspended their normal political system. A dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, took command of the entire war effort, replacing the two elected consuls and setting a strategic agenda.
the Romans would refrain from seeking open battle for the time being. Instead, they would watch and wait. picking off stray groups of Hannibal's men when and where they could without risking another decisive clash. Fabius knew that any such battle would only favor Hannibal and lead to the destruction of yet another army, one even the manpower-rich Romans could hardly afford.
With Fabius lurking, Hannibal decided to move on to greener pastures. Campania, on the far side of the Apennines, where he'd been assured by a group of visiting noblemen that Capua and other key cities were ready to rebel against the Romans. But when he arrived in Campania, with Fabius still shadowing him, no such rebellion occurred. Hannibal was left to ravage another piece of Italy's prime agricultural land without fighting a winning battle.
Fabius' plan was driving his fellow officials and the body of Roman troops into a rage, but it was working. Yet Roman aggression could only be contained for so long. Sooner or later, Fabius's approach would fall out of favor. And when it did, battle would be inevitable.
Rome's greatest defeat, its darkest hour, was drawn near. That's where we'll pick up next time on Tides of History. With the Battle of Cannae, perhaps the most brilliant battlefield victory in human history, that still wasn't enough to win the war. If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.
Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound design by Gabriel Gould for Airship. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening.
I'm John Robbins and joining me on How Do You Coke this week is the musician and actor Will Oldham, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Billy. You know, anything that makes life bearable... is so precious, right? Anything at all that makes life bearable is so precious.
And so it was just like, okay, look smaller, look smaller, look smaller, look smaller. You know, use a microscope to find the things that make life bearable. So that's How Do You Cope? With me, John Robbins. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.