The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (5 page)

As time passed, similar cadres of elite warriors would provide the cores of the ancient Middle East’s armies, fleshed out by a multitude of temporarily dragooned and highly expendable foot soldiers. Lacking the motivation and sense of common purpose necessary to advance onto what amounted to ground zero, about the best that could be done with such troops was to provide them with a long-range weapon—typically a bow—to support the leadership and their retainers as they fought it out hand to hand in and around chariots, or later on horseback.

Though large and superficially impressive, such force structures were not inherently very effective; paradoxically, being effective was only partially the point. Looking beneath the rapacity of rulers reveals that armies of this sort addressed the inherent instabilities of societies that were driven by more people digging more ditches, to grow more grain, until natural disaster, crop failure, and epidemic disease suddenly reversed the spiral and dictated retrenchment. The demographic roller coaster was impossible to escape, but the bumps could be smoothed by military action. Imperial forces might lurch forward to capture new laborers, or in times of overpopulation they might capture more land—or simply self-destruct, leaving fewer mouths to feed. Because such armies and the tyrannies they served enlisted the fundamental loyalties of so few, they were brittle and prone to collapse. So the history of the ancient Middle East came to be littered with military disasters, and empires and dynasties in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia came and went with dramatic suddenness. Still, their logic was compelling. So new tyrannies arose on top of the old and few eluded their grasp.

One group that tried with some success inhabited a string of independent little cities along the coast of what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Israel; this group came to be known collectively as the Phoenicians. Literally backed up against the sea by the aggression of imperial behemoths, the principal Phoenician centers—Berytus (modern Beirut), Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre—transformed themselves into commercial dynamos, thriving not just on trade but on the concept of value added, turning murex snails into royal purple dye, the cedars of Lebanon into ornate furniture, and, much more commonly, glass into trinkets, beads, and gewgaws.
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For the Phoenicians were among the first to produce and trade manufactured goods in truly huge quantities. And they did so by virtue of a key invention, the ancient sailing vessel, capable of transporting goods measured by the ton, rather than the pound, the entire length of the Mediterranean basin.

The sea was not simply an avenue to wealth; it was a refuge from imperial land power. This standoff was inadvertently depicted in an Assyrian inscription describing King Luli of Tyre slipping a five-year siege, escaping literally out his city’s back door, to join the fleet and go elsewhere.
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Partly to avoid Assyrian pressure and parly in anticipation of the Hellenic Greeks, who also were starting to move into these waters, Phoenicians in the late ninth century B.C. began to plant colonies dotting the shores of the western Mediterranean, the most famous being Tyre’s settlement of Carthage. Unlike the Greeks, the Phoenicians did not care to control the hinterlands, and confined themselves instead to enclaves that served as trading posts and havens for shipping. The posts were placed at intervals of around one day’s sailing time and were set on sites that sought to duplicate the small coastal islands, rocky promontories, and sheltered harbors of the Levantine cities. The key to survival and prosperity—besides fending off and buying off land power at home—was to keep the trade lanes open out there.

War for Phoenicians became a matter of expedience, a necessary part of doing business in an increasingly competitive environment. Phoenicians certainly fought a number of massed battles at sea—most memorably at Salamis—but formalized naval combat was arguably less important than the suppression of piracy through relentless coastal patrols, more of a policing than a military role.
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This is important to our story, because it was this focus on policing rather than on warfare that was inherited and instinctively practiced by one of our two protagonists, the doomed city of Carthage.

The military outlook of the other protagonist, Rome, was deeply conditioned by the Phoenicians’ maritime rival, the Greeks, but by the Greeks at home, fighting on land. For there had emerged on the Hellenic mainland a patchwork of city-states, each one dedicated to its own self-determination, and all engaged in an eternal melodrama of war, alliance, and betrayal. This balance of power, like the earlier one in Sumer, spawned between 675 and 650 B.C. a tactical reliance on that characteristic formation of the martially enthusiastic, the phalanx. For the citizen-soldiers of Hellas, this battle formation was a profound expression of their sense of social solidarity; fighting together, risking it all shoulder to shoulder, was at the heart of their civic existence. But if asked who best defined their fighting spirit, those in the rank and file would have almost certainly pointed to a blind poet several centuries earlier, who recounted the deeds of heroes still four centuries further back in time, Mycenaean aristocrats who were anything but corporate combatants.

The story of Homer’s
Iliad
is a tale of rowdy individualists engaged almost exclusively in single combat, as much for personal prestige as for military advantage.
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But the poet portrayed them and their deeds in such a compelling manner that he not only convinced Greeks how to act when they fought one another; his words transcended time and place to cement the foundation of war in the West. Above all, combatants were aggressive, matching arms symmetrically, first taking turns casting spears, then moving closer to stab with an extra spear, then still nearer to finish things with their swords—he “who fights at close quarters” was a frequent and positive Homeric epithet.
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The greatest of the heroes—Achilles, Hector, Diomedes, and Ajax—are among the biggest, loudest in their war cries, fleetest afoot, and inevitably armored—characteristics that would be deeply admired and highly influential throughout the course of Western armed combat.

Anything less confrontational was disdained. Diomedes speaks the mind of the Homeric warrior when he addresses Paris, the adulterer and the only major figure in
The Iliad
to place principal reliance on the bow: “You archer, foul fighter, lovely in your locks, eyer of young girls/If you were to make trial with me in strong combat with weapons, your bow would do you no good at all.”
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All of this the Hellenic Greeks mainlined, injecting its essence into their phalanx, where, armed as individual combatants, they fought collectively but with the same confrontational willingness to close, an aggressive zeal that would one day cut like a knife through the bow-based armies of the East. Meanwhile, this spirit spread westward.

Beginning in the eighth century B.C. the Greeks began settling along the coasts of Sicily and southern Italy, an area the Romans would come to call Magna Graecia.
The Iliad
being the Greeks’ favorite story, they almost certainly brought it with them. (It appears that the first literary reference to the poem was scratched into a clay drinking vessel, circa 730 B.C., that was excavated from a grave on the island of Ischia in the bay of Naples.) Plainly, the military institutions of the Greeks had an influence farther north. Whether indirectly, from contact with their deeply hellenized neighbors the Etruscans, or from actual observation of Greek fighting techniques, by around 550 B.C. the Romans adopted their own version of the heavy-armored phalanx, a change recorded in the so-called Servian reforms.
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While the ups and downs of their subsequent military adventures would lead the Romans to move dramatically away from the phalanx, the style and substance of the changes they made give every appearance of a continuing Homeric orientation, still fighting in formation but as individual combatants, in a routine notably similar to that followed by the heroes of
The Iliad
.

The impetus for that transformation began in 390 B.C., when a truly shattering event occurred. A band of thirty thousand Gauls, an amalgam of the tribal peoples living to the north, crossed the Apennines in search of plunder and descended upon the Romans. Physically much larger and wielding long swords with frantic abandon, these Gauls literally engulfed the Roman phalanx at the River Allia. To compound the trauma, the marauders then swept down on Rome, thoroughly sacking the place. Livy (5.38) pictures the refugee Romans watching forlornly from a nearby hill, “as if Fortune placed them there to witness the pageant of a dying country.” Yet their resolve was unbroken, and with all else lost they looked “solely to their shields and the swords in their right hands as their only remaining hope.”

The episode on the hill may have been apocryphal, but the sentiment was real enough. Also, from this moment the Romans nurtured a nearly pathological fear and hatred of Gauls, a dread brilliantly exploited by Hannibal. By the time of Cannae, after a long string of Roman reprisals and incursions into the Gauls’ tribal areas, the feeling was certainly mutual. Despite Roman portraits of them as a bunch of drunken louts and fair-weather warriors, the Gauls were formidable combatants and were imbued with a berserker’s aggressiveness. It’s a stretch to imagine the Gauls reciting Homer around the campfire, but their penchant for single combat, their theatrical acts of courage, and their sheer bloodlust would have made them right at home on the plains of Troy. Basically, this was the fighting profile of their tribal cousins stretching all the way to Spain. All of them would be at Cannae fighting for keeps. Was it any wonder that battle ended so decisively?

[6]

By 216 B.C. the Mediterranean basin had coalesced into what amounted to a single strategic environment, composed of a relatively small number of powerful state entities. While there were some economic overtones, this was largely a political and military phenomenon, with the leadership of the major players diplomatically in touch and aware of basic power relationships, though these were certainly subject to miscalculation. Like its East Asian analogue, which had been unified just five years earlier under China’s first emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, the Mediterranean system was ripe for further consolidation. But in the West this was only dimly apparent, nor was it in any way clear who might emerge preeminent.

A Greek, or rather a Greek from Macedon, was probably the best bet. More than a century earlier, an astonishingly talented father-and-son team from this unlikely backwater at the northern edge of Greece had set the wheels of change in motion. First, the father, Philip, through a combination of ruthlessness and military brilliance, had managed to temporarily consolidate the ever fractious mainland Greeks, and then had been promptly assassinated. At this point his son and collaborator, Alexander, seized opportunity by the throat and led Greeks and Macedonians all on a great crusade to avenge Persia’s two invasions of Hellas a century and a half earlier. By the time Alexander died in Babylon in 323 B.C., he had proved himself to be an even greater soldier than his father. Using an updated, extended-spear Macedonian version of the phalanx and a wickedly effective heavy cavalry, he had managed to obliterate a series of bow and elite dependent Persian hosts and in the process had brought the entire ancient Middle East under his sway.

Unity, however, did not prove the order of the day. Instead, a pack of successors grabbed what they could, and then battled one another for more in an epic series of internecine struggles, which a century later left Egypt under the Ptolemys; most of the remainder of the Persian empire in the hands of the Seleucids; and left Macedonia, phalanx central, ruled by the descendants of one of Alexander’s original generals, Antigonus the One-Eyed. Because Alexander’s successors were all Macedonians, they basically fought alike, depending on a steady supply of phalangites and cavalrymen. They also needed full-time men-at-arms to maintain control, and this basically put a premium on military professionals, particularly in the east but also elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The century of fighting had prompted Greeks in general to think seriously about war, to expound upon tactics and strategy, to work out the possibilities of siege craft, and to elaborate naval warfare. Greeks and Macedonians, officers and underlings, military men for hire, they were considered state of the art.

This imparted a cynical “great game” mentality among many of the players, particularly the Hellenistic states and their martial offspring. Dramatic rises and falls, sudden desertions, and transfers of allegiance littered a military landscape where war-hardened mercenaries were the coin of the realm. For the most part the system bred a certain pragmatic restraint. Battles were rarely waged for any strategic purpose greater than as a test of strength.
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A single decisive victory was usually sufficient to determine a war’s outcome in an environment where nobody in his right mind remained on the losing side for long. Because troops were basically interchangeable, it was plausible for the defeated to hope for a place in the ranks of the opposite side. On the other hand, the system’s very cynicism might lead the victor to conclude that the vanquished were worth more on the slave market, a possibility attested to by the practice of keeping plenty of chains and manacles handy.
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This was very much a world where, to paraphrase Thucydides,
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the strong did what they could and the weak did what they must. There has been a recent interest in ancient history by conservative scholars, in part, it seems, because they find today’s post-cold-war world deceptively dangerous and see parallels with the earlier period. But the time we are talking about was far crueler, one in which force was essentially its own justification, and the consequences for weakness were utterly threatening. For instance, the prospects presented to fortified towns and cities when besieged were: surrender and suffer, or resist, and if you fail, suffer much worse. Citizens of places that fell might expect to be subjected to indiscriminate slaughter and rape initially, and later quite possibly sale into slavery. This did not always happen, but it was frequent enough. For soldiers, fate was simple and stark—win, and so long as you weren’t wounded badly or killed, you prospered. Lose, and you might very well lose everything. Still, if your alternatives were drudgery and victimization, the soldier’s life might be short and dangerous, but at least it was exciting.