Second Punic War

The Second Punic War was the second of three wars between the Roman Republic and Carthage. The word “Punic” comes from the Latin Punicus, meaning Phoenician, because Carthage had been founded by settlers from the Phoenician city of Tyre. The Romans called it the war with Hannibal, and for later Romans it was the greatest trial their state had ever survived.

The war was fought on several fronts at once. Hannibal spent about fifteen years in Italy, while Roman and Carthaginian armies fought in Spain, Sicily and Sardinia, and a separate war against King Philip V of Macedon went on in Greece. It ended with Roman armies in Africa and Carthage forced to accept Roman terms.

The war is remembered for Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, for Cannae, one of the most complete battlefield victories ever recorded, and for Rome's refusal to negotiate after it. Its outcome made Rome the dominant power in the western Mediterranean and set it on the road to empire.

In the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) Rome and Carthage fought mainly over Sicily. Rome built a navy and won; Carthage gave up Sicily and paid a large indemnity. Soon afterwards Carthage faced a brutal revolt of unpaid mercenaries and subject Libyans (the Mercenary War, 241–237 BCE). While Carthage was weak, Rome seized Sardinia and demanded more money, an act that even the pro-Roman Greek historian Polybius considered unjust.

The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who had fought in Sicily, went to Spain in 237 BCE and built a new Carthaginian territory there, rich in silver mines and soldiers. After his death his son-in-law Hasdrubal (sometimes called “the Fair”) continued his work and founded New Carthage (Cartagena). Around 226/225 BCE Hasdrubal and Rome agreed that the Carthaginians would not cross the Ebro River under arms.

When Hasdrubal was assassinated in 221 BCE, the army chose Hamilcar's eldest son, Hannibal, then in his mid-twenties, as its commander. According to a story he later told to King Antiochus III, his father had made him swear as a boy never to be a friend of Rome.

Saguntum was an Iberian city south of the Ebro that had formed some kind of friendship with Rome. In 219 BCE, after disputes with neighbours allied to Carthage, Hannibal besieged it; it fell after about eight months. Rome sent an embassy to Carthage demanding that Hannibal be handed over. According to a famous story, the Roman envoy Quintus Fabius held up a fold of his toga and said it contained both peace and war; when the Carthaginians told him to give whichever he chose, he let fall war. Rome declared war in the spring of 218 BCE.

Ancient writers argued about who was to blame. Roman tradition blamed Hannibal and the Barcid family's desire for revenge. Polybius distinguished between the pretext (Saguntum), the beginning (Hannibal's attack) and the deeper causes: the anger of Hamilcar, Carthaginian resentment over Sardinia, and Barcid success in Spain. He also pointed out that Saguntum lay south of the Ebro, so its legal status under the treaty was unclear.

Modern historians have added other perspectives: Roman fears of a powerful Carthaginian Spain, the role of the Carthaginian government versus the Barcid generals, and whether either side wanted a big war at all. There is no consensus, and much depends on how far one trusts the pro-Roman tradition.

Rome planned to attack both Spain and Africa, but Hannibal moved first. In 218 BCE he marched from New Carthage across the Pyrenees, crossed the Rhône and then the Alps in late autumn, probably in about fifteen days. Polybius says he arrived in Italy with 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, a figure he took from an inscription Hannibal set up in southern Italy; the army had lost very many men since leaving Spain. Most of his 37 elephants died soon afterwards. The route over the Alps is still debated.

Gallic tribes of northern Italy, recently conquered by Rome, joined him. He defeated Roman cavalry at the Ticinus and, in December 218 BCE, a Roman army at the Trebia river. In June 217 BCE he ambushed the consul Gaius Flaminius beside Lake Trasimene in Etruria; around 15,000 Romans were killed, including Flaminius. Rome appointed Quintus Fabius Maximus dictator. His strategy of shadowing Hannibal without fighting a pitched battle earned him the nickname Cunctator, “the Delayer”, at first as an insult and later as praise.

In 216 BCE Rome changed course and sent an exceptionally large army under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. At Cannae in Apulia, Hannibal placed his weaker Gallic and Spanish infantry in a forward-curving centre, which slowly gave way while his African infantry on the wings turned inward and his cavalry closed the rear. The Roman army was surrounded. Polybius gives about 70,000 Roman dead; Livy gives 48,200 killed and many thousands captured. Modern estimates vary, but Cannae was one of the bloodiest single days of battle in ancient history. Paullus and many senators died.

After Cannae, many communities in southern Italy, including the large city of Capua, went over to Hannibal, and in 215 BCE Philip V of Macedon made an alliance with him. In 214 BCE, after the death of its pro-Roman king Hiero II, Syracuse in Sicily also turned against Rome. Yet the core of Rome's alliance system in central Italy held firm, and Hannibal never received large reinforcements from Africa. He did not attack Rome directly after Cannae; according to Livy, his cavalry commander Maharbal told him, “You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use one.”

Rome responded with extraordinary measures. It raised new legions, including slave volunteers promised freedom, refused to ransom the soldiers captured at Cannae, and, according to Livy, even performed a rare human sacrifice, burying two Gauls and two Greeks alive in the Forum Boarium. Taxes rose and wealthy citizens lent money to the state. Rome took the war to Hannibal's allies: Marcellus captured Syracuse in 212 BCE after a long siege in which the mathematician Archimedes, who had designed its defences, was killed. Capua was retaken in 211 BCE despite Hannibal's march on Rome to relieve it, and its leaders were executed. In 209 BCE Fabius recaptured Tarentum, and Livy reports that about 30,000 inhabitants were enslaved.

In Spain, the brothers Publius and Gnaeus Scipio were defeated and killed in 211 BCE. Their son and nephew, the young Publius Cornelius Scipio, was given command in 210 BCE. In 209 BCE he took New Carthage in a daring assault, and he defeated Carthaginian armies at Baecula (208) and Ilipa (206), driving Carthage out of Spain. In 207 BCE Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal crossed the Alps with a relief army, but he was defeated and killed at the Metaurus river before he could join Hannibal. Livy tells that his head was thrown into Hannibal's camp.

Scipio persuaded a reluctant Senate to let him invade Africa. He landed near Utica in 204 BCE, and in 203 BCE he burned the winter camps of the Carthaginians and of the Numidian king Syphax in a night attack and won a battle on the Great Plains. The Numidian prince Masinissa, who had fought for Carthage in Spain, became Scipio's ally and took over Syphax's kingdom. Carthage recalled Hannibal and his brother Mago from Italy.

In 202 BCE the two most famous commanders of the war met at Zama. Hannibal's elephants were neutralized when the Roman maniples opened lanes for them to pass through, and the battle was decided when Roman and Numidian cavalry returned to attack the rear of Hannibal's line. Carthage asked for peace.

The treaty of 201 BCE left Carthage its territory in Africa but took away its overseas possessions. Carthage surrendered its war elephants and all but ten warships, agreed to pay 10,000 talents of silver over fifty years, and promised not to wage war without Roman permission. Masinissa was recognized as king of an expanded Numidia on Carthage's border. Scipio received the name Africanus.

The victory made Rome master of the western Mediterranean. Spain became two Roman provinces in 197 BCE, beginning two centuries of often brutal conquest there. The war with Philip V drew Rome into Greek affairs, and within fifty years Rome had defeated Macedon and the Seleucid kingdom. Polybius, writing in the second century BCE, set out to explain how the Romans had conquered almost the whole inhabited world in less than fifty-three years, from 220 to 167 BCE.

Carthage recovered economically. Hannibal became a chief magistrate (sufete) and reformed its finances, but Roman suspicion forced him into exile in 195 BCE. He served Antiochus III against Rome and died by poison, probably around 183–181 BCE, to avoid being handed over. Masinissa's encroachments on Carthaginian land led to the Third Punic War, and in 146 BCE Rome destroyed Carthage.

Italy suffered heavily. Fighting, raids and reprisals devastated parts of southern Italy for over a decade. Roman census figures reported by Livy fall sharply during the war, though historians debate what exactly those figures measured. Tens of thousands of people in captured cities such as Tarentum and Capua were killed or enslaved, and many rural communities were uprooted. Arnold Toynbee's Hannibal's Legacy (1965) argued that the war caused lasting social damage to the Italian peasantry, contributing to the crises of the late Republic; later scholars have questioned how much of that change was due to the war itself.

Beyond Italy, the war was also experienced by peoples who were neither Roman nor Carthaginian. Iberian communities were pressed for soldiers, silver and hostages by both sides; when Scipio captured New Carthage he won Iberian support partly by releasing the hostages held there. Numidian kingdoms were torn between Syphax and Masinissa, and Sicilian and Sardinian communities suffered sieges and reprisals. For many of these peoples the Roman victory meant not liberation but a new, long-lasting overlord.

For Romans the war became a story of national endurance. Livy's books present Roman virtue and unity surviving disaster, and phrases such as “Hannibal ad portas” (Hannibal is at the gates) passed into Latin as a way to frighten children or signal danger. The epic poet Silius Italicus wrote the Punica, the longest surviving Latin poem, about the war.

Hannibal, the enemy, became a hero of sorts: admired for his genius and endurance and pitied for his end. In modern Tunisia, whose capital lies next to the ruins of Carthage, Hannibal is claimed as a national figure of North African history. Carthaginian culture itself, largely destroyed in 146 BCE and known mostly from Roman and Greek sources, is now being rediscovered through archaeology, including debated evidence for child sacrifice at the tophet sanctuary.

In Italy the war has been used for political purposes, most notably in the Fascist-era film Scipione l'africano (1937), which linked ancient Roman victory in Africa with Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Military thinkers have studied Cannae as the model of a battle of encirclement; the German chief of staff Alfred von Schlieffen wrote a series of studies titled Cannae. Many historians note that Hannibal won the battles but lost the war, making the conflict a classic case study of the gap between tactical brilliance and strategic success.

Polybius of Megalopolis (c. 200–after 118 BCE) was a Greek statesman taken to Rome as a hostage, where he became close to the family of Scipio Aemilianus, the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus. His account in Book 3, covering the war to Cannae, survives complete; later books survive only in fragments. He consulted documents, interviewed survivors and walked Hannibal's route over the Alps, and he criticized earlier writers. His closeness to the Scipios may have coloured his portrait of Africanus.

Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) wrote under Augustus. His Books 21–30 give the fullest continuous narrative of the war. He used Polybius and earlier Roman annalists, some of whom exaggerated numbers and invented speeches and episodes, and his aim was partly moral and patriotic. Historians therefore test Livy's details against Polybius where both survive.

Both depended on earlier writers now lost: Quintus Fabius Pictor, a Roman senator who wrote a history in Greek during or soon after the war, and Greek historians who accompanied Hannibal, notably Silenus of Caleacte and Sosylus of Sparta. Only a small papyrus fragment of Sosylus survives. No Carthaginian narrative survives, so the Carthaginian government's aims, and Hannibal's own intentions, must be inferred from hostile or at least foreign sources. Later writers such as Appian, Cassius Dio (preserved partly through Zonaras), Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch add details of uneven reliability.

Strategy: Did Hannibal make a mistake by not marching on Rome after Cannae? Most modern historians think he lacked siege equipment and a secure supply base, and that his strategy was to break Rome's alliance system in Italy rather than to storm the city. The debate then becomes why that strategy failed: loyal Latin colonies, Roman manpower reserves and naval control, and the reluctance of Italian communities to exchange Roman leadership for Carthaginian.

Numbers and places: Ancient figures for armies and casualties are often inflated or schematic, and modern estimates differ widely. The exact location of the Cannae battlefield, the site of Trasimene and above all the route over the Alps have been argued over for centuries. Scientific methods have joined the debate; for example, a 2016 study claimed to find evidence of a mass animal deposit at the Col de la Traversette, a claim other scholars regard as unproven.

Interpretation: Older scholarship often portrayed the war as a clash of civilizations between Rome and a “Semitic” or “Oriental” Carthage, language now recognized as shaped by nineteenth- and twentieth-century prejudices. Recent work, such as the essays in Dexter Hoyos's Companion to the Punic Wars (2011), places Carthage within the wider Hellenistic and Mediterranean world and pays more attention to Iberians, Numidians, Gauls and Italians, whose choices shaped the war as much as those of Rome and Carthage.