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. The boy had always been in awe of his father. For the first decade of the youngster's life, the great general had been away from Carthage. first in Sicily fighting the Romans, then bouncing around Africa to fight the rebellious Libyans and mercenaries. Even when he was near the boy, Hamilcar Barca, the Thunderbolt, had obligations.
There were Carthaginian officials, Chophants, whom Hamilcar had to meet. Syracusan merchants and Numidian horse dealers were granted moments of his time. A steady stream of scarred soldiers from Iberia, Gaul, and even far-off Sparta was always waiting for a pat on the shoulder and a familiar word. Hannibal, that was the boy's name, had rarely received such undivided attention from his famous father, at least until the last several months. Now, something big was happening.
There were more soldiers coming in and out of their big house on the hill looking down at Carthage's magnificent harbors than he could ever remember. He overheard discussions of shipping capacity and the procurement of elephants. A sailor from Gadir, far off to the west, had sat and talked with Hamilcar for an hour in private. That had been the key that told Hannibal what was happening. His father was leaving again, bound for Iberia.
This time, Hannibal wouldn't be left behind with his mother, sisters, and two younger brothers. He was going. To the boy's surprise, Hamilcar had laughed when Hannibal made his demand. It was good that Hannibal wanted to go, Hamilcar told him, because he was, in fact, going. The first half of his education, learning to read and write and count and ride, was over. Now, it was time to learn the real skills that he would need for the rest of his life.
Did he want to fight? To lead? Of course he did, Hannibal told him. He wanted to be just like his father. Now, they were leaving Carthage behind, the city shrinking into the distance behind him as their ship rocked back and forth on the waves. Hannibal felt a pang of sadness and regret, and the thought suddenly struck him. Would he ever see home again? A lump rose in his throat. Tears began to well in his eyes.
He wasn't yet ten years of age, and he missed his mother. Before they left Carthage, Hamilcar had led the boy to the temple to make a sacrifice, and there had been a hard look in the general's eyes. Hannibal remembered thinking that it was the first time he had really seen his father, understood who he was and why men followed him into battle.
Something burned behind those eyes. An ambition that could never be quenched. A hunger for victory that would never be sated. A hatred so profound that it lived at the very core of his being. but it also intrigued him. He felt those same things deep down inside. Where would they take him? After the ending of the First Punic War, Carthage was on the brink of utter ruin. Rebellious mercenaries and a crushing indemnity threatened to destroy everything the city had built.
But all was not lost, thanks largely to one man. Hamilcar Barca, best known as the father of a still more famous general, Hannibal. But Hannibal and his stunning victories didn't come from nowhere. And today, we'll explore what shaped this future. Who can I talk to? Can anyone relate to what I'm going through? Who else understands what it's like to have cancer? Sometimes you don't want to talk about cancer with people you know. You just want to talk with someone who knows how you feel.
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To join, search Macmillan Online Community. I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Ewan Montague and Charles Chumley. The Spy... who duped Hitler. 1943. Winston Churchill wants to capture Sicily, the key to breaking Hitler. Churchill's spy chiefs devise Operation Mincemeat, one of the war's most daring deceptions.
that hopes to make the enemy look in the wrong direction. The success of the plan relies on the unlikeliest of heroes, a deceased homeless man named Glindor Michael. Glindor is given a new name, a cache of fake... war plans and is dropped into enemy waters. Montague and Cholmley now wait to see if German intelligence have been fooled by their ruse. If it fails, then it could spell disaster for Europe.
Follow The Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Duped Hitler early and ad-free with Wondery+. Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. The peace deal Carthage signed with Rome in 241 BC to end the First Punic War was disastrous for the city. Sicily, the arena for more than two centuries worth of battles with Syracuse,
was now permanently beyond Carthaginian control. Tens of thousands of Carthaginian citizens, not to mention substantially more subjects and mercenaries, had either drowned in the Mediterranean or were fertilizing the rich volcanic soil of Sicily. The indemnity Carthage had agreed to pay the Romans could easily bring the city to the
In the few years following the treaty, things got much worse. A rebellion of unpaid mercenaries nearly destroyed Carthage, while the Romans seized the island of Sardinia on the thinnest pretext and dared the Carthaginians to do something about it. Yet just 22 years after the treaty ended the First Punic War, Carthage had not only recovered from this crushing defeat, it had surpassed its previous capabilities and built an empire larger than the one it lost to Rome during the First Punic War.
mine silver filled the city's coffers, Iberian and Gallic mercenaries replenished the ranks of its armies, and most important of all, Carthage had found the genius leader who could turn the city's new reservoirs of manpower and money into stunning battlefield victories. In today's episode, we'll explore Carthage's remarkable recovery from the edge of defeat. There are two core questions.
First, how, just two decades after a crushing defeat in the longest, most devastating war in known history to that point, could the city even contemplate going another round with the paramount power of the Mediterranean? And second, where did the Carthaginians find Hannibal?
The answer to both of these questions lies not in North Africa or Sicily, much less in Italy, but in Iberia. For around 700 years, by the time of the First Punic War, Phoenician merchants and colonists had been present along the Iberian Cove. Carthage had long been tied to these communities, first as a trading partner and then as the dominant power in the Funic Mediterranean.
Those ties almost certainly went back to the foundation of the city sometime in the distant mists of the 9th century BC. But what happened in the two decades between the end of the First Punic War and the beginning of the Second marked a fundamental shift in Carthage's relationship with Iberia. Rather than a loose hegemony over a few colonies and mercantile and military relationships with indigenous peoples, the Carthaginians set about building an Iberian empire.
To be more specific, it wasn't so much Carthage as a whole that set about doing this as some kind of broad-based community project to replace the lost revenues and resources from Sicily. Instead, it was essentially the work of one man and the faction he built around himself, Hamilcar Barka, whose second name is usually translated as lightning or thunderbolt. Now, we've met Hamilcar Barka before, in the waning days of the First Punic War.
He was the general who for years so ably defended western Sicily against the Romans, fighting right up until the final defeat of the last Carthaginian fleet made the outcome of the war obvious. Hannibal was Hamilcar's son, born during the later years of the war. Whatever natural talent for military command Hannibal might have had, it was his father's tutelage, reputation, and years of work that made it possible for Hannibal to become Rome's most lethal enemy.
The Road to the Second Punic War, and Hannibal's Rise, is the story of what Hamilcar and his associates did in the years between the two conflicts. This group of Carthaginian generals and aristocrats is usually known as the Barkids, from Hamilcar's second name, Barka. It's as good a shorthand as we have for them, though it's not a term that was used in antiquity. When we refer to Hannibal as Hannibal Barca, often a necessity because Carthage was utterly full of Hannibals,
It's a convenience rather than a designation his contemporaries used. Whatever we want to call them, the barked efforts in Spain were by any measure an unqualified success. It's often forgotten because of how the Second Punic War ended. I don't think knowing Rome won is a spoiler 2200 years later, but the rapid creation of a Carthaginian empire in Iberia was a massive achievement in its own right.
To understand Hannibal and what made him so uniquely dangerous to Rome, we have to understand the background that made Hannibal possible. That story begins with his father, and that's where we'll start today. One quick note here before we move on. Throughout today's episode, I am drawing on an excellent book by the historian Dexter Hoyos entitled Hannibal's Dynasty, Power and Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247 to 183 BC.
I think this is the best thing that I've read on the background to Hannibal and his family. Hamilcar Barca made a name for himself during his six years commanding Carthaginian forces in Sicily. Rather than engaging the Romans and their local allies in pitched battles, a strategy that had mostly proven disastrous to that point, Hamilcar took control of an impregnable set of highlands and used it as a base from which to launch lightning raids on the enemy. Lightning, hence the nickname Barka.
Polybius doesn't tell us that much about the specifics of Hamilcar's campaigning, but reading between the lines we can piece together a wide-ranging series of expeditions. Naval raids of the Italian coast as far north as Cumi on the Bay of Naples. Striking at Roman overland military convoys and offshore shipping as they attempted to support the ongoing siege of Lilibam.
later attacking the Roman siege camps themselves, making life miserable for the soldiers spending years outside the walls of the Carthaginian strongholds. Despite never having a substantial force at his disposal, most estimates run around 10,000 men at most, which was smaller than a single con. Consul's army, Hamilcar was never caught, never defeated, and never surrendered.
He couldn't win the war with that force, but if he'd been less competent, he certainly could have lost it. When the Carthaginian fleet was destroyed in 241 BC, Hamilcar could only watch from his second fortress on the heights of Eryx. Contemporaries understood the strategic constraints within which he was operating perfectly well. The more or less unanimous opinion in the ancient sources is that Hamilcar was the most gifted commander of the entire First Punic War on either side.
Not all modern scholars agree with this. The historian Dexter Hoyos, who's probably the most knowledgeable author working on these topics, argues that Hamilcar didn't actually accomplish much, and it was his later work that placed his Sicilian campaign in such a positive light.
Regardless, in the end, it was Hamilcar who negotiated the peace that ended the war. He steadfastly refused to hand over his soldiers' weapons or any deserters who had joined him. He was making peace, Hamilcar said, not surrendering. The general returned from Sicily to a Carthage that was reeling from the final days of the First Punic War.
Its once-vaunted fleet was at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Tens of thousands of citizens had probably gone down with the ships, not to mention countless North African subjects, allies, and mercenaries. Financial issues had plagued the city for most of the past decade. An attempt to borrow a massive sum from Ptolemy II of Egypt had been flatly denied several years earlier.
There's no reason to think that recent Carthaginian conquests in Africa and exactions from the territory close to home had done anything but stem the Treasury's bleeding. Trade, the city's lifeblood, had declined dramatically due to the loss of trained sailors and the closing of friendly ports and anchorages.
There were no more Sicilian port revenues or taxes coming in, and it's safe to assume that some members of the Carthaginian elite lost huge quantities of assets with the handover of their estates and warehouses in Sicily. That would have further reduced the state's tax base. On top of that, the Romans demanded a huge indemnity payment, amounting to about a year and a half's worth of state revenues that further strained the city's resources.
But most worrisome of all was the fact that thousands of mercenaries, most of them Hamilcar's veterans from the Sicilian campaign, hadn't been paid in years. Now, with the end of the war, those veterans had been dumped in North Africa, just outside the city that no longer had the resources to pay them for their years of blood and sacrifice. That's something we'll return to shortly. It's difficult for us to reconstruct the situation within Carthage at this time.
We simply don't have much to go on. What we do have is tainted by some combination of a general anti-Carthaginian sentiment, genuine ignorance of internal Carthaginian affairs, and the clouding effects of hindsight bias. We can be fairly certain that the Carthaginian elite, which was just as dominant in the city's politics as the Roman senatorial class, if not more so, wasn't exactly united.
There are good reasons to think that the Carthaginians had deliberately wound down their war effort in Sicily after 249 BC in favor of concentrating on African campaigns closer to home. These campaigns were straightforwardly easier and offered more immediate benefits to both the Carthaginians.
Carthaginian state, and the aristocratic leaders of those campaigns. The driving force behind these African expeditions seems to have been a figure named Hanno, sometimes called Hanno the Great, though what he did to earn that sobriquet is unknown to us.
The apparent Sicily-Africa division has sometimes inspired modern scholars to treat Hamilcar and Hanno as leaders of two opposing factions within the Carthaginian elite. While there were surely some who favored more vigorous action in Sicily and others who preferred expansion in Africa, We simply do not have enough to go on to say that such factions even existed, much less that Hamilcar and Hanno were at odds over fundamental policies.
It's probably more accurate to say that things weren't going particularly well, that Hanno was in a strong position, and Hamilcar risked being tarred as the general who had lost the war. Carthaginian leaders were often crucified for failure and it's not hard to imagine the angry populace demanding a scapegoat.
And now we return to the demobilized soldiers evacuated from Sicily, some of them mercenaries and other conscripted Africans, who totaled around 20,000 men. When they arrived in Africa, they still had their weapons. So far as we know, no attempt was made to disarm them, and an effort to separate them into smaller groups was soon abandoned. They were told to march inland, which were orders they followed for a while, but they soon returned to the vicinity of Carthage itself.
Hanno the Great haggled with them without reaching a settlement, and eventually something snapped. The soldiers exploded into open rebellion and the African subjects of the city joined them. The situation worsened. The rebels took control of huge chunks of the African countryside and seemed to have had a strong sense of their own identity. They called themselves Libyans or the army, a self-conscious way to distinguish themselves from Carthage.
At the height of the rebellion, they may have had as many as 100,000 men underarm. Whatever his talents, Hanno the Great made no progress in fighting them off, and the desperate Carthaginians appointed Hamilcar to raise a second army. This was no small task, because Hamilcar was probably being prosecuted for misuse of funds during his Sicilian campaign and was distinctly out of favor.
In fact, contrary to the idea of a factional split, Hanno the Great may have used his influence to get the charges quashed and Hamilcar placed in a position of command. Hamilcar made an immediate impact. He marched to Utica, nearby Carthage, and raised the rebel siege of the city, which freed Hanno to move around, and then Hamilcar won a series of victories that reclaimed portions of the countryside for Carthage.
A Numidian prince allied to the rebels was so struck by Hamilcar's reputation that he deserted to the general with 2,000 horsemen, and later married Hamilcar's daughter to cement the personal alliance. At first, the conflict was quite civilized. Hamilcar freed his prisoners and encouraged them to join his own army, which many did.
But after a while, it got nasty. The rebels started to torture their Carthaginian prisoners to death, and Hamilcar followed suit. The rebellion intensified, and the two Carthaginian armies joined forces in an attempt to bring the necessary numbers to bear on their enemies.
Yet now, Hanno and Hamilcar quarreled, that whether the cause was personal or military is unknown. The two men simply could not cooperate, and Carthaginian officials ordered the army to pick a single leader. They chose Hamilcar. I'm John Robbins and joining me on How Do You Cope this week is Rosie Jones. Yes, abuse is hard. But I can go to bed at night knowing that I have been my true. Authentic self. So that's How Do You Cope with me, John Robbins. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hamilcar's election as sole leader of the Carthaginian army didn't end the rebellion. In fact, it got worse. Much worse. The last two African cities loyal to Carthage, Utica and Hippuacra, went over to the rebels' side. Carthage itself was now open to a siege, and that's precisely where the rebel leaders went. However, this was less of a threat than it might seem.
supplies were flowing into Carthage from its former enemies in Syracuse and Rome, who had no wish to see an aggressive new power take root in Africa, while the rebels slowly bled men through months of attrition. Hamilcar was familiar with this kind of approach. After all, it was essentially what he'd done in Sicily, using a siege to keep the enemy pinned in place while his freewheeling troops in the countryside harassed, attacked, and otherwise bothered the besiegers.
The rebels eventually broke the siege and retreated, which is when Hamilcar followed them and trapped much of their force in a narrow gap known as the Saw. They could leave the Saw, Hamilcar promised, if they handed over ten delegates. When the rebels did so, Hamilcar's men pounced and slaughtered all but those ten unfortunates. With the ten leaders in tow, Hamilcar and his deputy commander tracked down the rest of the rebels and sandwiched them between the two Carthaginian forces.
Then, they took the ten leaders and nailed them to crosses within sight of the rebel camp. Enraged, the rebels attacked the second Carthaginian force commanded by Hamilcar's deputy. They took the deputy to the cross of one of the rebel leaders, tortured him, and then nailed the deputy up in his place. They surrounded the cross with another 30 slain high-ranking Carthaginians.
Hamilcar was forced to retreat, and the shaken citizens of Carthage sent out Hanno the Great to serve as co-commander once again. This time, Hanno and Hamilcar were able to come to some kind of agreement, and the rebellion entered its final stage. The last two holdout cities, Utica and Hippuacra, returned to the Carthaginian fold. The last rebel leader was captured and marched through Carthage as part of the victorious generals' triumphal parade before being tortured to death.
It was probably late in 238 BC by this point, less than three years after the end of the First Punic War, and Carthage had barely survived. During this time, Sardinia too had slipped beyond Carthaginian control. The mercenaries stationed there had taken a cue from their brethren in North Africa and risen up. But they so antagonized the Sardinians that the people themselves rose up and ejected the soldiers.
With the war over in Africa, the Carthaginians were regrouping and preparing to recover what they'd lost. perhaps even expand further. Yet now, another problem reared its head. The mercenaries fleeing from Sardinia had made their way across the narrow Tyrenian Sea to Italy.
where the Romans received them warmly. The Romans were preparing their own expedition to Sardinia, and told the Carthaginians that their preparations for taking back the island amounted to a declaration of war against Rome. There was obviously no way Carthage could fight another war so soon. So the city was essentially blackmailed into handing over not just Sardinia, but also a further indemnity payment, adding insult to injury.
For what it's worth, no ancient source, not even Polybius, who's generally pro-Roman, really makes much of an attempt to defend this. It was a blatant seizure by the Romans, and it was understood as such, probably because they had realized that Carthage wasn't down as badly as they had assumed or hoped. In fact, Hamilcar had a plan, one that could restore Carthage to its former prosperity and perhaps even raise it to new heights.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, with his reputation soaring, the citizens of Carthage elected Hamilcar to an open-ended command. He had already begun preparing even before the end of the war with the rebels, and now his goal was clear. Iberia. As the historian Dexter Hoyos points out, Hamilcar was probably inspired by what his rival, Hano the Great, had accomplished in Africa, expanding Carthaginian territory, manpower reserves, and the tax base through conquests close to home.
The sheer scale of the resources available to the Romans must now have been clear to Hamilcar. Without more, more money, more men, more supplies, the Carthaginians could never hope to win another war. While there was still some gain to be had in Africa, there were also dangerous Numidians to the west, the sands of the Sahara to the south, and the Ptolemies of Egypt wading further east. Iberia, by contrast, was an almost completely untapped reserve. Again, it's unclear precisely how, but...
Hamilcar built a faction inside Carthage that supported him. The identities of these supporters are shadowy at best, but they probably included at least some members of the aristocracy, along with a segment of the populace. One Roman tradition relates that the city's elite were opposed to... While there probably was some opposition, our overall impression is one of mutual support between Hamilcar and whoever was in charge in Carthage. This was a Carthaginian state project.
albeit one under Hamilcar's direct control. Whoever his supporters within the city were, they were enough to win election to a new kind of generalship secure funding for the expedition, and set off for the West, all at roughly the same time the Sardinian crisis was unfolding.
The outcome of the Sardinian affair in fact made activity in Iberia all the more necessary as far as the Carthaginians were concerned. It was either that or permanently reconcile themselves to living under Rome's boot. So far as we know, any opposition to Hamilcar was ineffectual. and the faction aligned with him and his successors, namely Hannibal, would retain control of Carthage throughout the Second Punic War. Hannibal, then about nine years old, went with his father to Iberia.
Much later, during his time in exile at the court of the Seleucid king Antiochus, Hannibal himself told Antiochus a story about something that had happened just before he left home. Hamilcar took him, Hannibal said, to a temple of the chief god Baal and performed a sacrifice to secure good omens for the Iberian expedition.
His father asked the boy if he wanted to accompany him west, and when he said he did, Hamilcar had Hannibal swear an oath on the sacrificial victim, to never bear any goodwill toward the Romans. Many modern authors have discounted the story, and Roman sources transformed the oath from never bearing goodwill to always being an enemy of Rome.
However, in its original form, as reported, there's no particular reason to doubt it. A major new venture would indeed require a trip to the Temple of Baal for a sacrifice. There's no reason why the leader of that venture wouldn't bring his son with him. Given what we know of the events that were then transpiring in Sardinia and Hamilcar's personality, resentment of the Romans and revenge for their wrongs would very much have been on his mind at the time.
Moreover, this was a public event. There would have been witnesses among the Carthaginian elite who would remember whether or not it actually happened, and King Antiochus, to whom Hannibal recounted the story 40 years later, was nobody's fool. It's entirely plausible that swearing the oath really did happen, and it really was a formative event for a nine-year-old boy in the presence of his famous father.
It's certain that Hannibal did accompany his father from the very beginning of that campaign, and that the boy idolized Hamilcar until his dying day. Hamilcar's expeditionary force made its way west along the North African coast, probably sailing the inshore route with some components having to march overland to the Straits of Gibraltar.
The army couldn't have been particularly large, not with Carthage barely out of the darkness of the recent rebellion and the two decades of war that preceded it. At most, 20,000 men, along with a few dozen war elephants, accompanied Hamilcar. Still, that was a substantial force, especially if Hamilcar was able to supplement it with hired mercenaries once he arrived in Iberia. But where was he going, and who would be there to oppose it?
It's infuriating that our sources give us so little to go on. The sum total of our evidence is one single paragraph in the work of Diodorus Siculus, along with scattered bits and pieces in the works of other authors. That's nowhere near enough to reconstruct a detailed itinerary. But we can say with some confidence that Hamilcar's target was the area of southern Iberia in the vicinity of the Phoenician colony of Gadir, later Gades, and now Cadiz.
Gadir was one of the oldest Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean. It had long been a wealthy and populous center thanks to the rich silver and copper mines along the Rio Tinto, which are about 60 miles or 100 kilometers northwest of Gadir. There were also excellent agricultural lands nearby. But despite their proximity, those mines
had remained in the hands of indigenous polities for centuries, namely the people who are often called Tartessians. We met them in an earlier episode of this season, Season 5, Episode 24, Iron Age Iberia and the Lost Civilization of the Tartessians. The Tartessians are a truly lost civilization in the most fundamental sense. They left behind almost no writing, their language is unknown, and they were a highly sophisticated bunch.
We can be quite certain that they did quarrel with their Phoenician neighbors in Gadir, who had occasionally had to seek Carthaginian aid against them in centuries past. Despite that occasional support, Gadir was not a Carthaginian dependency. Nor, so far as we know, was any other Iberian settlement, Phoenician or not.
The historian Nathan Pilkington argues that there is not a single scrap of contemporary evidence to support the idea of direct Carthaginian control over any city or community in Iberia. No officials with Carthaginian titles attested in inscriptions, no archaeological finds to suggest anything other than intensive trade, just claims to trading rights and informal relationships.
While Carthage had long recruited Iberian mercenaries and done business with Iberian communities, Hamilcar's new venture was clearly just that. New. This was an imperial campaign, and the Iberians seem to have understood it as such. We may not know much about them, thanks to our lack of sources rather than a lack of their sophistication, but they were clearly nobody's fools.
It's certain they were a diverse bunch. Speakers of Iberian languages, probably related to present-day Basque, lived alongside more recently arrived Celtic speakers, the Phoenician communities mostly along the coast, a small number of Greek colonists, and a variety of others about whom we know far less than we might like.
The fact that several of these different groups were able to put aside their differences and band together to form an army to oppose Hamilcar speaks volumes to the threat that they perceived from this new Carthaginian expedition. With a pair of Celtic chieftains leading them, the Iberians faced Hamilcar in battle.
The experienced Carthaginian, with an army full of soldiers blooded against both the Romans and the rebellious mercenaries, made short work of his due opponents. Yet here, Hamilcar left aside the cruelty he had practiced against the rebels. He enrolled 3,000 of his defeated enemies in his army.
and quickly established control of the valuable nearby mining regions, something that wouldn't have been possible purely through a campaign of terror. It's safe to assume that a mixture of coercion and conciliation made this possible, and within a few years, the mints of Gadir were churning out new...
the silver-rich mountains of the Sierra Morena. Resistance collapsed before a battle was even necessary. Many of the enemy chieftain Endortes' soldiers deserted, leaving only a smaller force to be surrounded and cut down by Hamilcar's growing army. Again, however, clemency was the order of the day. While Endortes was crucified and tortured to death, most of the survivors were simply allowed to leave.
Our sense for the chronology of these events is hazy, but they probably happened in 236 and 235 BC. So, within just a couple of years of arriving, Hamilcar Barca had established the foundations of a brand new Carthaginian land empire in southern Iberia. And he wasn't done yet. Injustice, Killer Privilege is a new podcast available exclusively on Wondery Plus. It follows Katia Faber's fight for justice. after her son, Alex Morgan, was savagely killed by an ultra-rich socialite.
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We might start off talking about ice hockey, but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s British sitcom, a lower low instead. I had to use the word nuance in your pitch for a lower low. He's not cheating on his wife. He's French. It's a different culture. If you like me and Mammoth or you like Alice and Fantasy Football League, then you'll love our podcast.
Follow The Socially Distanced Sports Bar wherever you get your podcasts. The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, it's not about asymmetrical overlords. James, podcasting from his study, and you have to say that's magnificent. We can imagine, though our evidence is lacking, that Hamilcar's successes in Iberia strengthened his political support at home.
A self-sustaining imperial operation that produced enslaved captives for sale, freshly minted silver coins, and more favorable trading conditions across a wide swath of rich territory has a way of silencing detractors. Again, I can't stress how little we understand about the internal situation within Carthage at this time. Our overall impression is one of Hamilcar and effective control of the state, but that could mask a lot of discontent.
Events didn't stop in Carthage just because Hamilcar was off campaign. At some point, and we don't know precisely when, the Numidians, or at least some of them, rose up in revolt against Carthage. The situation was serious enough, or the need for Hamilcar to demonstrate control was serious enough, that he sent his son-in-law and right-hand man Hasdrubal back to Carthage to take command. Hasdrubolt brought the Numidians to a decisive battle, defeated them, and put the revolt down in short order.
He imposed a peace settlement that increased tribute payments and presumably recruited among the Numidians, who had already and would continue to play a key role in Carthage's armies. We can only wish that we knew more about the internal organization of Hamilcar's endeavor. The texts give us only a few lines to work with, and the archaeology unfortunately doesn't help much.
The period of Carthaginian expansion in Iberia is brief. It's just a couple of decades long, which is far too short to produce much of an obvious material signature. In most cases, it's impossible to distinguish a particular Carthaginian phase even at archaeological sites we know to have been occupied by them during this time.
Now, this makes perfect sense. The multi-ethnic composition of the army, the use of local intermediaries to establish and maintain control, and the absence of mass migration from North Africa all diminished anything especially distinctive about what was already a brief period. You're just not going to get that kind of resolution out of the material record except in the most auspicious of circumstances.
The exception is coinage, which appears in increasing quantities and is of high quality. Presumably paying the army was the top priority, which again would make perfect sense. Coitage was also an extremely effective way of showing the people back in Carthage what Hamilcar was up to. Hamilcar himself was clearly the generalissimo with wide military powers and responsibilities over both Iberia and Carthaginian territory in Africa.
Whether that meant close cooperation with existing Carthaginian elected offices and institutions or the creation of what amounts to a parallel state structure is hard for us to say. Either way, it's obvious that Hamilcar intended to keep close personal control over all the operations. Hasrubal was both Hamilcar's son-in-law and the most trusted subordinate of whom we're aware, and he would remain so until Hamilcar's death.
Affairs in Iberia were now established enough that both of Hamilcar's younger sons, Hannibal's two brothers, another Hasdrubal, and Mago, traveled west to join him. Hamilcar founded a capital city, perhaps on the site of present-day Alicante, and devoted his energies to taming the southern part of the peninsula and harnessing its massive resources for Carthage.
So far as we can tell, he largely succeeded. The best guess is that the coastline of southern Spain, from Cadiz on the Atlantic in the west to Alicante on the Mediterranean in the east, was under Carthaginian control. So too were the major river valleys leading inland and the ore-rich areas to which they connected.
Hannibal was now reaching adulthood, and he was completing a thorough education. By chance, we happen to know the identity of one of his teachers, a Spartan named Saucilus, who taught Hannibal Greek and may well have been a soldier himself. Sausilla stayed with Hannibal throughout his many years of campaigning in Italy and even wrote a history of his time with the Carthaginian general, which was widely read in antiquity but unfortunately no longer survives.
The upshot is that we can imagine an extraordinarily diverse and highly accomplished group surrounding the young man as he came of age. There were Carthaginians of all stripes, of course, but there were also Greeks like Saucilus, Libyan conscript soldiers, Numidian princes and expert horsemen, Iberian-speaking mercenaries, Celtic chieftains, and even a few Romans, who were then becoming more active in Iberia.
Hamilcar was now between 45 and 50 years old, and he could look at his sons, his son-in-law, and his growing empire with some measure of satisfaction. If another war with Rome did break out, Carthage would have access to the money and men necessary to make a real fight of it. Hamilcar didn't live to see the outbreak of that war. Probably in the winter of 229-228 BC, the general took his army up into the mountains of southeastern Spain to besiege a holdout fortress.
The site was probably fairly small but well defended, and so Hamilcar sent most of the army back to the coast to hole up for the winter while he continued the sea. He must have felt secure since he kept two of his sons, Hannibal and Hasdrubal, with him. A king of people known as the Orisi, a nearby tribe, showed up with his army, and he pledged their friendship to Hamilcar. But then the Orisi turned on Hamilcar and attacked.
The course of the battle is unclear, and later sources report some wild details. But the essence is that Hamilcar took his two sons and sent them away to safety while he rode away in another direction to draw off their pursuers. The Orisi and their king followed Hamilcar. In one final act of defiance, he threw himself into a swollen mountain stream where he drowned. Hannibal and Hasdrubal both got away, but the architect of a new Carthaginian empire was dead.
This could have been a disaster for Carthage. Hamilcar was a singular figure. Contemporaries judged him in overwhelmingly positive ways, focusing on his generalship, his political acumen, and the then-unknown importance of the ways he shaped his son, Hannibal. Modern scholars have been less charitable, they question whether he actually accomplished much during the First Punic War, and point to the brutality with which he dealt with rebels in Africa and Iberians during the conquest.
There's always a place for revision, and contemporaries aren't always the best judges of an individual's true impact. but I am more sold on the ancient than modern assessments of Hamilcar. The kind of low-intensity warfare he conducted in Sicily doesn't lend itself to the kind of striking literary set pieces that later accounts can focus on. Are sources for what was happening in Carthage or garbled and highly biased at best, non-existent at worst?
And even if he perhaps didn't deserve the heights of brilliance ancient authors ascribed to him, Hamilcar also never really messed up. He, unlike many of his contemporaries who held high command in Carthage, never ended up nailed to a cross for incompetence or being murdered by his own troops.
Nobody, not even Hannibal himself, could have won a land war in Sicily, and dying to save your sons after conquering half of Iberia isn't the worst way to go out. The closest parallel with what Hamilcar accomplished was probably Pericles during Athens' Golden Age.
Hamilcar was the leading citizen of an imperial republic, the architect of a wide-ranging imperial policy, and the key leader around whom a dedicated faction could gather. It wouldn't have been especially surprising if everything fell apart with his death, but as in Athens when Pericles died, It didn't. The primary reason things didn't fall apart was Hasdrubal, Hamilcar's son-in-law, who had accompanied him to Iberia and handled the Numidian revolt on his father-in-law's behalf.
One source tells us that the army acclaimed Hasdrubal as general following Hamilcar's demise. If that's true, then it probably represents a vote not of the whole rank and file of the army, but the rather fewer Carthaginian citizens who happen to be with them in Iberia. After some intervening time, the citizen body in Carthage itself approved the choice, and Hasdrubal set about continuing Hamilcar's work.
He took a different approach, though. Hasdrubal wasn't Hamilcar, and probably to his credit, he didn't try to be. He had other ideas about how to lead, and luckily for Carthage, those turned out to be quite perceptive and far-reaching. He married an Iberian princess, physically linking himself to his new allies, and he was acclaimed supreme general, quote, by all the Iberians, though whether that means the army contingents or some assembly is unknown.
The specific term the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus uses for this is strategos autokrator, a term with wide resonance in the Greek world. This was the position the tyrants of Syracuse had used to build up their power, and throughout the Hellenistic world, even the most autocratic monarchs sought to be acclaimed as leaders of alliance.
It's obvious that the Barkids were a highly cosmopolitan and sophisticated group, and they cast about widely for models of leadership and political control that they could use to buttress their authority. One source, which was known to Polybius but doesn't survive, tells us that Hasdrubal was effectively aiming for a coup in Carthage. After defeating the Orisi who had killed Hamilcar and consolidating his position in Iberia, Hasdrubal took a trip to Carthage.
The source in question is actually Roman. It's an early historian named Fabius Pictor. conflated real discontent over Barkid dominance with an attempt to seize the state on the model of a Greek tyranny. That's still interesting because it tells us that the Barkids had opponents who clearly saw their dominance and didn't like it, but that's not the same thing as Hasdrubal trying to make it
There are scattered and difficult-to-interpret signals of shifts within Carthaginian politics. The rise of the Barkids seems to correlate with a more democratic or popular style. Some of the old oligarchic institutions that had been prominent earlier effectively disappeared during this time, especially a body known as the Council of 104.
It is extremely likely that Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and then later Hannibal all wanted to open Carthaginian citizenship beyond the traditional limits to enlarge the citizen body. It's pretty clear that they looked at Rome, saw that the Romans were prone to doing that, and saw that it gave them advantages. They wanted to try the same thing. Now, whatever happened in Carthage, Hasdrubal wasn't at all diminished by it.
When he returned to Iberia, he founded a brand new city, New Carthage, which is today's Cartagena. This was an ambitious project. It was one that would both cement Carthaginian rule and greatly burnish Hasdrubal's reputation, much as Hellenistic rulers routinely founded new cities as models.
Now, at last, the Romans seem to have realized exactly what was happening in Iberia. There are scattered but unreliable statements to suggest that they had been monitoring barcode activities prior to this, but by now it's undeniable. Hasdrubal, when pressed by Roman envoys, agreed to a preliminary treaty. He would stay to the south of the Ebro River, which was some 200 miles or 300 kilometers north of his new city, Carthagena, which was already near the northern limit of Barkad control.
There's no indication that either the Romans or the Carthaginians were explicitly preparing for a new war, despite many inferences to the contrary over the centuries. These people weren't morons. They understood that the structural conditions of political life in the Mediterranean made conflicts inevitable. The Romans were careful to slap down the Carthaginians when it seemed like they might again become a threat in Sardinia or Sicily.
But that is not the same thing as a decades-long preparatory campaign for a second and bigger war. Whatever oaths Hannibal might have sworn in his youth, or whatever grudges Hamilcar and Hasdrubal obviously nursed. With their concerns allayed, the Romans left, and Hasdrubal got back to work. He seems to have been a subtle and skilled diplomat, and while we're told that he quote-unquote conquered Iberia up to either the Ebro or more likely the Tagus River, imposing Carthaginian dominance
was more a matter of finding beneficial relationships than force of arms. We do not need to envision an imperial occupation with regular garrisons and patrols. It was alliances, elite networks, and service for pay in Carthaginian armies that bound Iberian communities to Hasdrubal and his project. But not all Iberian communities, even those south of the Ebro, were on board. The most prominent of these was Sagun.
on the east coast of Iberia, deep within the Carthaginian sphere, which had been cultivating Rome as a potential ally since at least 225 BC, if not earlier. The Romans made no explicit commitments to Saguntum at this time, but as we'll soon see, the sea were already planted for the conflagration to come. And what of Hannibal during these years? We don't know much. Hasdrubal did appoint him commander of his cavalry, probably in 224 BC, which would have made Hannibal around 23 years old.
He was clearly being groomed lines, we can infer that Hannibal was already leading independent campaigns at this time. He was winning battles and conquering cities. And as the historian Dexter Hoyos points out, while Hasdrubal had a reputation for diplomacy, he clearly didn't neglect a more direct approach.
Every sign points to the army in Iberia having an extremely high level of competence and readiness, and it was obviously a tool he employed with some regularity. Harsh measures were never off the table. In fact, this was what led directly to Hasdrubal's death. Hasdrubal had an Iberian, probably Celtic, chieftain executed for some offense. One of the man's followers then snuck into Hasdrubal's quarters at night and killed him in return. This was in 221 BC.
Hasdrubull had been in charge for seven or eight years, and in that time had furthered and strengthened the project Hamilcar began nearly two decades before. The entire southern half of Iberia was under Carthaginian domination of varying kinds, with all its vast mineral and agricultural wealth and millions of inhabitants. The resource gap between Rome and Carthage had been the deciding factor in their first war. In the second, Carthage would have a fighting chance.
But who was to succeed Hasdrubal? There was one obvious candidate. He had the pedigree of an illustrious father and brother-in-law. He'd already held high command. And nobody, it seems, doubted his competence. Now was the time for Hannibal, then just 26 or 27 years of age, to step up and lead. He did, and Rome shuddered at the consequences. That's where we'll pick up next time on Tides of History.
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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 Lewy. Thanks again for listening. Until next time from Wondery.
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost. And ultimately, you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names, about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph.
people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.