nothing like money. They had learned most of their tricks from their parents, the Phoenicians, who were the most skillful traders of antiquity.3 Phoenician sailors were the first to establish intercourse with foreigners, an idea which soon proved its worth all over the world. Nobody had thought of it before.4
So pretty soon there was a war that went on for twenty-four years, from 265 B.C. to 241 B.C. It was called the First Punic War because the Latin adjective punicus is derived from the Latin noun Puni, or Pœni, or Phoenicians. When it was over the Romans had the Carthaginian part of Sicily and $4,000,000 damages. Later, they seized Sardinia and Corsica, just for the fun of it, and then there was lasting peace for twenty-two years.
This brings us to Hamilcar, the great Carthaginian general who did so much to lose the First Punic War.5 He hated the Romans something awful, as they had marooned him on top of a mountain in Sicily for several years and made him look very silly. Back home in Carthage, he would gather his family around him and they would all hate the Romans until they almost burst. This was foolish of them, for hatred shows on your face and the people you hate remain just as horrid as ever. They don’t care one bit. They’re too mean to care.
Hamilcar had three sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and Mago, and two daughters, one of whom married Hasdrubal Pulcher, or Hasdrubal the Handsome, no relation. There are eight generals named Hasdrubal in Carthaginian history. It was a poor Carthaginian who didn’t have at least one Hasdrubal in the family. They seemed to think this was a fine way to keep things straight. I don’t know what they would have done about naming Pullman cars.
When his son Hannibal was nine years old, Hamilcar took him into the temple of Baal and made him swear eternal hatred against the Romans, in addition to his homework.6 The boy already had two little wrinkles right between the eyes from hating the Romans. He finally became the most prominent hater in history and just one mass of wrinkles.
Hamilcar also told Hannibal about elephants and how you must always have plenty of these animals to scare the enemy. He attributed much of his own success to elephants and believed they would have won the First Punic War for him if things hadn’t gone slightly haywire; for the war had turned into a naval affair. But even when the fighting was on land, the Romans did not scare nearly so well as expected.7 The Romans had learned about elephants while fighting Pyrrhus, whose elephants defeated him in 275 B.C., and even before that, in Alexander’s time, King Porus had been undone by his own elephants.
Thus, if history had taught any one thing up to that time, it was never to use elephants in war. Don’t ask me why Hamilcar did not see this. The Carthaginian elephants were trained to rush forward and trample the Romans, but only too frequently they would rush backward and trample the Carthaginians. If this happened to you, wouldn’t you notice it? And wouldn’t you do something about it?
Then Hamilcar went to Spain, where he spent eight years in perfecting his plans and was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants. Hasdrubal the Handsome, who took his place, was assassinated a few years later, leaving the command to Hannibal, now twenty-six and well versed in his father’s routine. Hannibal left Spain in 218 B.C. and crossed the Alps into Italy in fifteen days with a large army and thirty-seven elephants, thus establishing a record for crossing the Alps with elephants, and starting the Second Punic War. Taking elephants across the Alps is not as much fun as it sounds. The Alps are difficult enough when alone, and elephants are peculiarly fitted for not crossing them. If you must take something over the Alps, try chamois. They’re built for it.8
Believe it or not, all the elephants survived the journey, although about half of the soldiers perished. Historians state that Hannibal seemed insensible to fatigue throughout the ordeal.9 Nor did he ever give way to despair. Whenever a thousand or so of his men would fall off an Alp, he would tell the rest to cheer up, the elephants were all right. If someone had given him a shove at the right moment, much painful history might have been avoided. It’s the little things that count.10
The number of Hannibal’s elephants, thirty-seven, is said by Polybius to have been inscribed by Hannibal’s own hand on a brazen plate in Italy. Polybius read it himself. Yet a modern historian has recently given the figure as forty, perhaps from a natural tendency to deal in round numbers. Elephants do not come in round numbers. You have one elephant, or three, or thirty-seven. Is that clear, Professor?
Hannibal expected to get more elephants that he had left in Spain with his brother Hasdrubal, but the Romans cut the supply line.11 During his fifteen years in Italy, Hannibal never had enough elephants to suit him. Most of the original group succumbed to the climate, and he was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what had he done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn’t an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention.
Like his father before him, Hannibal never noticed that he made much more progress without any elephants at all. We hear nothing of them at the Battle of the Ticino, and there were only a few at Trebia. The last one died before the Battle of Trasimene, where Hannibal simply erased the Romans for the time being. Hannibal was again fresh out of elephants at Cannæ, the greatest of his victories in the first three years of his Italian campaign. What was I telling you?12
I have a theory about Hannibal’s failure to take Rome when he had the chance after Cannæ and his strange inactivity for the next dozen years, when he only held out and nothing more. He was waiting for something. His brother Hasdrubal reached Italy with ten elephants in 207 B.C., but they behaved so badly that they had to be killed by their own side and Hannibal never saw them. Carthage sent forty more after a while. They were shipped to Sardinia by mistake.
So Hannibal went back home where he could get what he wanted. At Zama, the final showdown of the Second Punic War fought near Carthage in 203 B.C., he had his way at last. He placed eighty elephants in the front line of battle. They turned on the Carthaginians, and Scipio Africanus did the rest.
Hannibal never succeeded in his efforts to stir up another war. The Carthaginians were tired of it all. He tried to interest Antiochus the Great of Syria in a scheme involving elephants and was forced to flee from Carthage when the Romans demanded his person. He then wandered through Asia for years, finally taking refuge with Prusias, King of Bithynia, the only true friend he had left in the world. One day he discovered that Prusias had notified the Romans to come and get him. He took poison, dying at the age of sixty-four, nineteen years after Zama.
Whether Hannibal was a truly great man or only middling, which is my own view, each of us must decide for himself. The Romans accused him of treachery, or Punic faith, for constantly drawing them into traps and killing them. They expected him to behave according to the classic rules of warfare, and they found they could not depend on him. I have not dwelt in much detail upon his military virtues, as they are obvious enough. I have merely endeavored to point out what I believe to have been one of his weaknesses as a strategist and tactician. But I don’t suppose it will do any good. Some people never learn.
Hannibal was no gift to the ladies. Some say he had a wife in Spain. If so, she was lost in the shuffle and nobody took her place. Seems the right girl never came along. That’s about all we know of his private life. Sosilus, a Greek historian who accompanied him throughout his military career, who ate, drank, and chummed with him, wrote it all up for posterity, but he was not in the right literary set, and his hook was allowed to perish. Polybius says it was nothing but a collection of barnyard anecdotes, just intimate, vulgar facts not worth bothering with. Oh, well! We can be fairly certain, at least, that he hated the Romans to his dying day, because he had promised his father to do so. And he probably
