Hannibal Page 21
The continuing importance of Cartagena to the Romans—as Carthago Nova—would be evidenced in its strategic venue as a depot for metal production since its Punic establishment, as well as the fact that it became one of three Roman military command centers in eastern Spain, along with their previous base at Tarraco and the other established at Emporion.31
BATTLE OF BAECULA
After Cartagena, Scipio had one decisive battle where he defeated Hasdrubal Barca at Baecula (Baelen) in 208, his first victory in Spain. Now controlling vast reaches of Spain south of the Ebro and Cartagena, this last battle was also in the upper Baetis (Guadalquivir River) region, not far from the disasters that had wiped out his father and uncle. Scipio had an army of about thirty-five thousand soldiers compared with Hasdrubal’s twenty-five-thousand-plus Iberians. This time the Carthaginians and Iberians were trapped in a steep valley when Scipio closed both the road to Baecula and the valley entrance. Hasdrubal moved his army to the heights, but after a few days, he was surprised when attacked on three sides by so many Romans climbing up the ridge. Scipio had pretended it was only a feint or a skirmish of a few troops, and yet Hasdrubal, abandoning his camp, managed to retreat with most of his men. Hasdrubal lost the battle along with many of his Iberian mercenaries and light troops, as well as his baggage and supplies when his camp was overrun by the Romans.
Hasdrubal’s losses were possibly about six thousand dead and up to ten thousand captured, while Scipio lost fewer than two thousand at the Battle of Baecula. Scipio did not pursue the retreating Hasdrubal Barca, who moved west with his remaining army, although Hasdrubal still had a large reserve of precious metal, including gold and silver, to pay his mercenaries. The news of this last defeat reached Carthage, which now knew Spain was lost. Carthage then ordered Hasdrubal to go to Italy and assist Hannibal. Hasdrubal avoided Roman territory and moved as far west and north as possible in late 208, to Galicia near the Atlantic, passing over the western Pyrenees to Gaul. He was also ordered to take his remaining money with him to hire as many Celt mercenaries as he could. Scipio now controlled the Cartagena silver mines and their prolific production, and without Cartagena and the mines, there would be no more revenue from most of Spain, severely diminishing Punic revenue.32
Hannibal still reigned in direct combat on the open battlefield and was capable of similar ambushes that took out senior Roman leadership such as Marcellus and Crispinus or Roman troops daring to confront him. The death of the Scipio brothers in Spain was another Roman tragedy impacting Spain in the short run, but it may have motivated young Scipio, quickly leading to the conquest of Cartagena and Carthaginian control in Spain.
The loss of Cartagena—Carthage’s precious metal depot—and subsequently the loss of all Spain soon after Gades surrendered in 20633 was almost incalculable, with both its wealth in gold and silver as well as its supply of allied Iberian soldiery gone forever. Hannibal would be forced to survive on his own. His presence in Italy would now be a burden on a region severely strained by war. No new numismatic Barcid or Punic presence in coin finds in South Italy after 207 is evidence to some extent of this loss of Spain.34 How much Spanish silver came to Hannibal before 211 is hard to quantify, but some estimates suggest as much as 135 kilograms a day came to him from Spanish mines like the mine at Baebulo alone.35 Spain’s rich precious metal was now forever lost to Carthage.36 What little silver would trickle indirectly from Carthage itself would be inconsequential in comparison.37
After Punic loss of Spain, Hannibal knew his options against Rome were shrinking like his power base at the foot of Italy. He had no ports, no new silver, and was becoming more and more dependent on less-committed Bruttians and Lucanians instead of his veterans, who were old, tired, and dangerously diminished. Yet while his brother Hasdrubal had a fresh army to bring to Italy from Spain, there was still hope.
Had Hamilcar Barca lived to see two of his three “lion cub” sons on Italian soil, one in the South and one in the North, it surely would have made him proud. It might have even given him some vindication over the bitter outcome of the First Punic War, when he knew as a warrior that his merchant-dominated Carthage had capitulated too quickly.
Twenty
* * *
METAURUS
After his defeat by Scipio in Spain at Baecula in the spring of 208, yet with much of his army intact, Hasdrubal Barca was again commanded from Carthage to join his brother Hannibal in Italy. This time he made the decision to abandon Spain, since Rome was now establishing its own dominance there. It must have been with some regret that Hasdrubal obeyed, knowing that the wealth of Spain’s silver mines and rich iron was something Carthage could ill afford to lose. Hasdrubal had eluded the army of Scipio in the late fall of 208 by passing with his mixed Carthaginian and Celtiberian force over the low Cantabrian Mountains in the extreme west near a Galician source of the Ebro River. One of several clear differences between Hasdrubal’s and Hannibal’s armies is that Hasdrubal lacked the advantage of the sizable force of Numidian cavalry that his brother had used so well as a tactical weapon in his considerable arsenal.1 The debated original number of soldiers with him may have been fifteen thousand soldiers and fifteen elephants.2
Moving east through Southern Gaul, Hasdrubal wintered there, picking up many Celtic recruits along the way. Because he had started from Spain so late in the year, this was not the best plan of action to spend so much time on his route wintering with an army west of Italy, because it gave the alarmed Romans ample time to prepare for him, as their allies the people of Massilia (modern Marseilles) warned them of Hasdrubal’s coming. Hasdrubal crossed the Alps in the spring of 207. Polybius says Hasdrubal’s arrival in Italy was much easier and quicker than Hannibal’s.3 Appian (ca. 95–165 CE) says that Hasdrubal crossed the Alps using the “same pass” as his brother did almost a decade earlier.4 This is not impossible but unlikely for several reasons, including the ease of marching without resistance from either difficult route or enemies such as the still hostile Allobroges. It is more likely that Hasdrubal used a much lower pass such as the Montgenerve, with much easier conditions, avoiding mountain Allobroges.
HASDRUBAL IN THE PO RIVER VALLEY
After leaving the Alps, Hasdrubal moved east in the Padana but was delayed at fortified Placentia, the same fairly recent (218 BCE) Roman outpost that Publius Scipio and the remaining Roman soldiers had retreated to after both Ticinus and Trebia. At Placentia Hasdrubal attempted to lay siege to the Roman colony, hoping to starve it out. While he waited, he likely thought a victory there might win over more Celts in the region to his new invasion. As the first Roman colony among the Celts of the Padana or Po Valley of what would later be Gallia Cisalpina, or Gaul on this side of the Alps, Placentia’s fortified position was often precarious, sacked multiple times by Celts and Ligurians.5 The Insubres tribe on the west and the Boii tribe on the east were constant threats to Placentia that Hasdrubal hoped to tightly amalgamate under him along with other tribes.
But Hasdrubal’s Placentia encirclement was fruitless, possibly because the Romans had learned to stay put in a siege as long as possible, and as his own resources were being wasted to no effect, he lifted the siege and abandoned hope of taking Placentia. He may have been joined by eight thousand Ligurians around the time he left the area.6
Hannibal certainly thought considerably about his brother’s forces in North Italy in the spring of 207 and hoped to trap Rome between their two armies, but he may have been surprised by how quickly Hasdrubal had crossed the Alps and then possibly assumed Hasdrubal’s siege would last longer, so his timing was thrown off. Added to this, Hannibal was under repeated rear attacks by a Roman army at Grumentum (near Grumento Nova)7 in Lucania as he moved south toward Bruttium along the upper Agri River; he couldn’t free his army from the dogged Romans under Gaius Claudius Nero at his heels, and he was bleeding men and resources from so many skirmishes meant to keep him in the deep south.
The Romans were also well aware that much of Italy lay between the armi
es of two Barcid brother generals, both of whom had been successful against Roman armies in Italy and Spain, respectively. Livy even later raises the specter of Hamilcar Barca, their father, who had been so difficult to dislodge in Sicily during the First Punic War, no doubt on the minds of Rome itself.8 The Romans had not yet fully mobilized, but a large part of their plan was indeed to keep Hannibal from getting anywhere near his brother’s approach into the heart of Italy or to keep both of them away from Rome itself. As long as Hasdrubal was far north in the Padana and Hannibal down in Lucania or Bruttium, the prospect was less dire, but if somehow the unforeseen tactical pincer movement came, the possibility of another debacle like Cannae would be dreadful. No doubt this was also what Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and even Carthage aimed to make happen.
After Placentia, Hasdrubal sent six messengers on horseback—two Numidians and four Celts—with a sealed letter on the long journey south toward where he expected Hannibal to be, requesting him to meet him halfway down Italy, seemingly “in Umbria.” But Hasdrubal made at least one very foolish mistake. Unfamiliar with the territory and unaware that Hannibal was on the move constantly putting out fires or coming to the aid of his allies, the messengers made it almost all the way to the farthest southern coast of Italy along the Gulf of Taranto but got lost down by Tarentum. The messengers had planned to find Hannibal somewhere around Metapontum, since they apparently knew that Tarentum had been retaken by Rome in 209, but they were discovered and captured by a Roman patrol much more familiar with the region. The first error of getting lost and being captured was greatly compounded by the fact that when their letter was found on the messengers, Hasdrubal had also made everything plain in the sealed letter, which could have also provided sufficient details of his route. Worse yet, the communiqué was possibly also written in Punic, easily translated by Roman military interpreters, instead of being written in a cipher, or perhaps best transmitted only in verbal form. Whether or not the messengers’ interrogation included torture, the damage was irrevocable once the Romans read and acted on the contents of the letter. Moving up the chain of command, the letter came to Claudius Nero. He immediately dispatched the letter to Rome, where he recommended decisive action.
Never having received the letter—maybe not even knowing one had been sent—Hannibal only knew his brother was somewhere in the north of Italy but had no way of connecting without specific details. Part of the irony of this dilemma tells how very different Hannibal’s overall position was in 207 relative to 218 to 216. Before, he had ample military intelligence with a network of spies everywhere, many of them bilingual or trilingual Celts or disaffected local mercenary Italians who could melt into different communities, including those that must have provisioned Roman armies. Hannibal’s line of communication was now far more haphazard, fragile, and easily disturbed.9 His resources were also much more limited—with apparently less silver to bribe for vital information—and his live assets for ground intelligence seemingly greatly reduced.10
One bold move by a united Rome was almost all that was needed. An army under the consul Marcus Livius Salinator now marched north to meet Hasdrubal if he chose the coastal route. It would eventually be reinforced by either two legions from near Ariminum under Porcius Licinius or by another army coming from Etruria if Hasdrubal came via the Apennines. This last force was under previously disgraced Gaius Terentius Varro, who had disastrously abandoned Cannae but still had plebeian electoral popularity. Thus the separate Roman armies hoped to contain Hasdrubal on one or the other side of the Apennines and force him to choose a route—either west of the mountains or along the Adriatic coast—and guard both of these options.11 Now with a force numbering around thirty thousand, Hasdrubal followed the Po River Valley all the way east, possibly on the Via Aemilia, which took him along the Adriatic coast route south past Ariminum.12 There the combined Roman armies of the consul Livius Salinator and the praetor Licinius assembled to stop him. The Senate was also concerned that Hasdrubal would rouse the rebellious Etruscans of Etruria, a region “ripe” for rebellion.13
More dramatic and consequential was that after having followed Hannibal south to Grumentum in the late spring of 207, the other consul, Gaius Claudius Nero, had moved his army about a hundred miles north to Canusium (modern Canosa di Puglia)—very near Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae—when he received the intercepted message about Hasdrubal’s movement around mid-May. Such was the seesaw movements of cat and mouse between the Romans and Hannibal that after Grumentum, Hannibal had also turned around northward to follow the Romans back toward Canusium. Claudius Nero quickly persuaded a divided Senate in late May to let him quickly take a secret force to meet Hasdrubal and to keep Hannibal completely in the dark, thinking he and his army were still nearby. This Roman deception would not have worked either between 218 and 216, but it seemed to take a page from Hannibal’s own tactics.
GAIUS CLAUDIUS NERO
Gaius Claudius Nero was a member of one of the most ancient and venerable patrician families, the gens Claudia, and also one of Rome’s increasingly more qualified generals as the Second Punic War dragged on. Claudius Nero had been a staff member under heroic consul and kinsman Claudius Marcellus at Nola in 214 during Hannibal’s effort to secure Campania, which was excellent training for a rising officer. Later, holding the military office of praetor and civilian office of propraetor14 in the cursus honorum, Rome’s expected sequence of offices for its elite, Claudius Nero took part in the siege of Capua in 212 and 211.15 Perhaps Claudius Nero was even one of the Roman officers present under Marcellus when the Romans repelled one of the armies of Hannibal at Nola in 214, as discussed in the previous chapter, and who learned then that Hannibal, however brilliant, was not invincible.16 Showing he was a teachable Roman military leader, Claudius Nero had even been wisely using some of Hannibal’s own tactics against him at Grumentum by concealing some of his soldiers and coming at Hannibal from both directions—a successful strategy that Livy said was “taking a page from his enemy’s book.” Although not a very Roman tactic, it resulted in difficult attrition for Hannibal’s troops.17
Whatever his ambitions, Claudius Nero managed to overcome the fears of the Senate that to leave Hannibal and go north to Hasdrubal could be disastrous if Hannibal knew and followed. Out of his army, he chose six thousand of the best soldiers—the cream of veteran Roman soldiers with great stamina and strength—and a thousand cavalry of the same caliber. He left behind the rest to guard Hannibal, leaving on a secret night march in the deepest quiet but with the greatest haste.
FROM VENUSIA TO METAURUS
In order to cover the distance of more than three hundred miles between Venusia (Venosa) and the Metaurus River at an almost unheard-of pace, most likely traveling not far inland along the Adriatic coast but certainly east of the Apennines, Claudius Nero’s small army marched day and night.18 Because the troops traveled extremely light for speed, much of their provisions came from the local people who watched them march by the rich farmland, apparently in generosity for protection. Some of the food came from the Piceni,19 the local Adriatic population, which had never sided with Hannibal. The Roman soldiers had brought little more than their weapons and ate along the way only what they needed. The pace was such that while we do not know how long the march took, it must have been at least seven or more days. It would have been extremely unlikely to make more than thirty miles a day on foot even in fairly open farm country from Apulia northward past Ancona, the chief city of Picenum, originally a Greek colony from Siracusa in the early fourth century. The countryside between Apulia and Ancona itself consists of many rolling hills above a shallow coastal plain, and whether Claudius Nero’s army kept fairly along the hilltop ridges or marched on the coastal plain, his journey was so fast that Hannibal’s scouts had possibly been unaware of his nocturnal exit. If Hannibal even noted the prolonged absence of seven thousand soldiers, he may have been stymied because there was still a substantial Roman army camped at Venusia under the legate (a high officer of the Ro
man army from the patrician or senatorial class) Quintus Catius and possibly one under the proconsul Fulvius Flaccus in the area of Canusium. Hannibal may have been unable to follow even if he did know, since the “curtain wall” of Roman forces numbered about thirty thousand between Venusia and Canusium.20
From the outset, Claudius Nero had first sent an envoy on horseback ahead to his senior coconsul, Livius Salinator, now camped near Hasdrubal, who had also arrived south of Ariminum close to Sena near the Metaurus River and not far from the Via Flaminia.21 Sena, or Senagallia (also Sena Gallica),22 was a Roman colony on the coast in the territory of the former Senones tribe along the Misa River near Ancona. The present Senigallia town is about ten miles south of where the Metaurus River flows into the Adriatic. Hasdrubal was evidently well aware of the presence of the combined Roman army under Livius Salinator and Licinius.
When Claudius Nero’s army arrived as quietly as possible by night, although their direction had been from the south, his scouts had no doubt apprised him of the least likely angle of approach to be discovered by any Carthaginians, who were likely coming directly up the coast now and entering from the east. To complete the deception, Livius Salinator’s army shared its tents with the new soldiers so that the Roman army camp looked exactly as before: no new tents, no visible expansion of space or spreading of quarters that Punic spies would notice by daylight.23 The Romans were cramped and uncomfortable, but the Hannibal-like ruse worked almost perfectly. Against the protests of Livius Salinator, whose day it must have been to order time and place of battle in the shared leadership pattern, Claudius Nero advocated immediate battle the next day despite how tired his men were.