569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)

0:10Way Hannibal and the scales! How many pounds will that peerless general mark up today? This is the man, for whom Africa was too small a continent, though it stretched from the surf-beaten ocean shores of Morocco, east to the steamy Nile, to Ethiopian tribesmen and the uncharted habitats of elephants. Now Spain swells his empire Now he surmounts the Pyrenees Nature throws in his path High alpine passes Blizzards of snow But he splits the very rocks asunder Moves mountains with vinegar Now Italy is his Yet still he drives himself on So that was the Roman poet Juvenal and he wrote a satire on the vanity of human wishes.

1:03So a classic case of hubris followed by Nemesis. We actually heard a version of that, didn't we, Tom, a few weeks ago when we did our series about Peter the Great and the rise of Russia. So that was Dr. Johnson that we heard from in 1748 and he was turning Juveniles Latin into English and updating the characters so it was all about Charles XII. That's right, yes. So Juvenal there in that passage, very famous, describes Hannibal crossing the Alps, dissolving boulders and rock with vinegar, invading Italy. But in the long run, he will lose the war to the Romans and end up a defeated fugitive. And Dr.

1:46Johnson, in his updating of it, his equivalent of Hannibal was, as you said, Charles XII, the heroic king of Sweden, whose career followed a very similar trajectory to Hannibal's. the greatest general of his age, but ultimately defeated by Peter the Great. So on one level, you know, an excellent parallel and a parallel that I hope our listeners will enjoy. However, on another level, I think it doesn't work at all because essentially there are very few people except perhaps you and the Swedes who really remember Charles XII. But Hannibal is one of the great brand names of history. So we've already mentioned Vin Diesel, Denzel Washington, and they both want to play him.

2:28Ian Botham, the great England cricketer who crossed the Alps with an elephant for a charity walk. And that thing of Botham doing his charity walk with an elephant, it's pinpointing the single most famous thing about Hannibal, which is the episode highlighted by Juvenal, which is that he crosses the Alps. And even though Juvenal doesn't mention, he crosses the Alps with elephants. And I would say, I mean, wouldn't you? It's not just probably the most famous scene in ancient history. It's one of the most famous scenes in all of history. Definitely. I can remember having a children's book when I was seven.

3:05I can picture where I was when I read this book, where I was in Mrs. Mason's classroom, and the illustrations showing Hannibal crossing the Alps with the elephants, they stuck in my mind forever because it's the incongruity of it. and the sort of lurid, extraordinary colourfulness of this episode. Who would dare to do this to take on the Romans? March all the way with elephants over the Alps. An incredible scene. Yeah, and so that is what we're going to be looking at today. We will be asking why Hannibal wanted to invade Italy, why he chose to take his army with his elephants and everything across the Alps.

3:43I mean, is it the obvious way to go? And is it a brilliant stratagem or is it a disaster? So that's what we'll be finding out today. But before we do that, Tom, remind us where we got to last time. So we ended last time in 218 BC on a cliffhanger, because after years, months of gathering tension, Carthage and Rome are once again at war. And the trigger was this city in Spain called Saguntum, which Hannibal, as the commander of the Carthage Unions in Spain, had taken and sacked, and the Romans had gone ballistic, hadn't they? Yes. So Hannibal would say this city is within the area of Spain that the Romans have agreed should be Carthaginian.

4:25And the Romans say, yes, but Seguntum is an exception because it was an ally of ours. And Hannibal has now sacked it. A Roman embassy goes to Carthage to complain, to demand that Hannibal be handed over to them. And the Carthaginians refuse. And so the Romans declare war and the Carthaginians say, fine, if you want war, then let's go for it. And the obvious point to make about that is that you don't opt for war unless you think you can win it. So the fact that both sides are happy to return to this titanic conflict, both sides think, yeah, you know, we can win this. So we should probably just look at the two sides to kind of work out why first the Romans and then the Carthaginians think that they're going to emerge triumphant from it.

5:11so the romans first it's important to emphasize that to a degree that is exceptional even by the standards of ancient states in the mediterranean they love a war i mean there's a sense that war is the purpose of the roman republic um they are used to winning they expect to win and they are looking forward when they declare war on carthage to the consequent profits and this combines with a sense a kind of almost a mafiosi sense that they should never accept being disrespected and i think if you think of of the roman republic as a kind of massive extortion racket you're not so far removed from the truth so to quote simon hornblower a very scholar of antiquity in his wonderful book Hannibal and Scipio.

6:09Modern analysis suggests that the cause of the changed attitude towards Carthage was that the Roman officer class needed fresh outlets and theatres for aggression now that control of peninsular Italy was secure. So essentially the republic depends on the oiling of their wheels with money, with cash, with loot, and that's why so many of them are prepared to say yes let's go to war with Carthage even though the costs may be enormous. And one reason why they're so keen to do this, presumably, you said they think they can win. I mean, they've got very good reasons that they can win because they have arguably the single most effective and most ruthless killing machine in the ancient world, which is their Roman infantry, right?

6:51Well, they definitely have the most formidable infantry. And it's formidable because it's the expression of a highly militarized civic society. A legion, a legio, is the levy of the entire mass of male Roman citizens. And these legions are highly drilled, well armed. They have immense esprit de corps. They go into battle pretty confident that they're going to win. So very high morale. They're very, very intimidating and frightening. But on top of that, there are just, you know, there are loads of them. The Romans have huge reserves of manpower. And the reason for that is the way that their empire has kind of emerged, because the Romans are very generous to defeated enemies who acknowledge their defeat in the way that a mafia boss is generous to the shopkeeper who hands over a proportion of his takings.

7:52they are offered protection so some of the the cities in italy who've been defeated some are enrolled as roman citizens which obviously then swells the numbers of men who can serve in the legions others are granted kind of associate forms of citizenship which again accrue kind of benefits so the number of citizens that the romans command are not just the people who live in rome they're increasingly scattered in colonies and allied cities across italy and more citizens obviously means larger armies and larger armies mean more conquests and more conquests mean more citizens. So it's a very, very virtuous circle.

8:29So infantry, very, very proficient. But of course, there's now an added dimension to Roman power, which hadn't previously existed, which is that they've defeated Carthage at sea. So essentially, they have control of the shipping lanes, which had never happened before. Carthage's traditional naval supremacy had been destroyed in the First Great War with Rome. And remember also that the Romans have extorted control, not just of Sicily, which is the obvious launchpad for any Roman invasion of Africa and Carthage, but they've also taken Sardinia and Corsica, which are the stepping stones to Spain.

9:09So the Roman strategy effectively is pretty obvious. It's a two-pronged attack. You move legions to Sicily, where they can potentially threaten Carthage. And you have Sardinia, you have Corsica, they can be used to launch attacks on Hannibal in Spain. So kind of two pronged. And that requires two commanders. And this is where the Roman constitution kicks in, because Rome is a republic. And instead of a monarch, which had been kicked out in 506 BC, there are now two heads of state. So the powers of the king are divided up between two magistrates, each one elected for a year. And these magistrates are the consuls.

9:49And to have these two consuls, these two elected leaders who officiate in peace, but also in war, obviously suits Rome's military purposes absolutely ideally. And in 218, the first consul is a guy called Tiberius Sempronius Longus, and he is sent south to Sicily. He has 24 ,000 infantry. He has 2 ,400 cavalry. He has 160 warships. This is very, very menacing for Carthage across the Straits from Sicily. And so this is what he's doing in the summer of 218. He is preparing essentially to invade Africa. Then there's a second consul, a guy called Publius Cornelius Scipio, and he is given responsibility for handling Hannibal and potentially launching an invasion of Spain.

10:41So he's preparing for that. But then there is another Gallic uprising in northern Italy. The Gauls, who are either side of the Alps and have always been a very menacing foe, they've just recently been pacified by the Romans, but they don't like the Roman yoke, want to throw it off. and there is a rebellion in the early months of 218. Scipio manages to defeat the Gauls and he then sets about raising an expeditionary force that is almost as large as Sempronius is down in Sicily. So Scipio has 22 ,000 infantry, 2 ,200 cavalry, 60 ships, but he is delayed in setting off westwards towards Spain and he doesn't leave until August.

11:21But you have a definite sense that the wheels of this Roman war machine are really starting to grind here, of just how intimidating a state it is. So delay or no delay, when you list all those things, it seems inevitable that Rome will win. They have the land power of their infantry. They have sea power. They have unparalleled manpower. They have the kind of resources of their civic culture, their militarized civic culture, which is more formidable than that of any other comparable state. So against all that, when you look at all that, you might well say, listeners may well be thinking, why would he be so reckless as to take on what is clearly, as history will demonstrate, the superpower of the age?

12:10I think partly because he doesn't want to give the Romans an opening in Spain. And partly the reason he doesn't want to give the Romans an opening in Spain is because Spain is the key to his power and to his city's power. So it has provided him with mineral riches. And as the Romans famously know, the sinews of war are gold. Hannibal has lots of precious metal. He has probably the most highly trained, the most battle-seasoned army anywhere in the Mediterranean. You know, he's absolutely honed it. The other thing he has honed is his own capacities as a general, which he has been in the saddle since childhood.

12:54And basically, he's backing himself. So he genuinely thinks all this is enough to outweigh the institutional advantages that Rome has. Yes, because he has a strategy. And this is a strategy that I think has clearly been informed by himself, by his father, Martha Hamilcar, by all the officer corps in Spain, reflecting on the reasons for Carthage's defeat in the first Punic War. They've obviously worked out what the issue is. And they have realized that the key to Rome's military success, the reason that she can grind on no matter how many defeats she suffers, is these incredible reserves of manpower, which are dependent on her control of Italy.

13:40And the only way to stop and cut off the hydra's head, if you like, is to persuade the states and the cities in Italy that are allied to Rome to abandon their alliance, to throw off their subordination to Rome. And the only way that Hannibal has any prospect of doing that is to attack the Romans where it will hurt, namely in Italy itself, which the Carthaginians had not done or even thought to do in the first Punic War. It's a strategy that is immediately bolder than anything that the Carthaginians have attempted before. And of course, the other benefit of it is that if Hannibal is able to launch a successful invasion of Italy, then it will distract the Romans from invading Spain and crucially Africa.

14:29Because even if Hannibal defeats the Roman invasion of Spain, he won't be able to stop the Romans from invading Africa and blockading Carthage and possibly kind of bringing her to defeat. So I think he settled on this as being the only way that he can win. But obviously, it does raise a massive problem, which is how is he actually going to get to Italy when Rome controls the seas and has occupied Corsica and Sardinia? Because it's not going to be safe for Hannibal to ferry his troops on ships to Italy. So he's got to travel by land so now we're approaching the issue of the alps and the elephants because if he's going by land he's going to have to go through gaul he's going to have to go across the top of the pyrenees through gaul and then back down across the alps into italy so this raises the issue of gaul right which is in between his possession the carthaginian possessions in spain and the roman empire in Italy.

15:25Who do the Gallic tribes support? They're independent, right? They don't have, they're not pledged to one side or the other. Well, there are some Gauls in Northern Italy who have been conquered by the Romans. And obviously the Gauls can read the runes. They know that the Romans are very expansionist, so they're nervous. And so Hannibal thinks, well, there's something here to play with. And so he sends ambassadors early in 218 to negotiate with the various tribes and say, look, you know, can you give me safe passage? I'm on your side. I'm going to help defeat the Romans. And a number of his agents do come back and say, yes, the Gauls are kind of interested in this.

16:02You know, various tribes, not all of them, but various tribes will offer you help. And they've been scattering, you know, gold and silver to try and facilitate safety of passage. and at the same time Hannibal has spies in in Rome so he's keeping track of the kind of the various developments there and this reflects the fact that obviously launching a land invasion of Italy is clearly a massive gamble and he's reluctant to do it without all the information that he can get and he goes to great lengths to get that information and this again will be a theme of his strategy and it's one of the reasons why Roman historians of which Livy is the exemplar later will basically say he cheats because he's always on top of information.

16:48You know, he has this kind of almost supernatural ability to know what is going on. And the Romans see this as basically not being fair, really. I don't think that's really cheating. I think that's just good intelligence, but that's by the by. And he must know that this is a massive gamble, right? He's staking everything, all the power that he's built up in Spain. If he's going to launch this attack on Italy through Gaul, you know, it could go horribly wrong for him. it could. And so not only is it important to get as many kind of neutral tribes to come over to him as possible, but just as importantly, he needs the backing of the gods.

17:25So we mentioned in the previous episode, Livy's accusation against Hannibal, that he disrespects the gods, that he has no time for them, that he scorns them. I mean, this is absolutely not true at all. And in fact, Livy himself records a very momentous example of Hannibal's readiness to show respect to the gods because he writes about how soon after the fall of Saguntum, so probably in the spring of 218, Hannibal stages a great review of all his troops and then having done that, I'll quote Livy, he went to Gardes, which is Cadiz, there to discharge his vows to the Tyrian Hercules and bound himself with further vows for the continued success of his venture.

18:07So the Tyrian Hercules is a god called Melkart. Gades is one of the oldest Phoenician settlements. So Melkart is a god who's been brought there from Tyre in what's now Lebanon. Melkart is the divine patron of Tyre, but also of Hannibal's dynasty. And he probably goes there in the spring, which is a time when Melkart a bit like Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead so it's this idea of the great hero coming back to life and the parallels with Carthage returning to her ancient hegemony in the western Mediterranean is kind of very very obvious but there's a further reason why Hannibal would have wanted to identify himself with Melkart and to get Melkart's backing is because there's enormous propaganda value, not just for the Carthaginians, but for the Romans and for the broader Greek world, because Melchor across the Mediterranean is universally identified with perhaps the most famous and formidable of all the Greek heroes, who is Hercules.

19:09So the strong man with the club and the lion skin. And of course, Hercules is a great slayer of monsters. That's what he does. He roams the world killing monsters. And one of these adventures, according to Greek mythology, had brought him all the way from Greece to the Atlantic. And this is why the Straits of Gibraltar are known to the Greeks as the Pillars of Hercules. Hercules is meant to have set up pillars there. And then from the Pillars of Hercules, he travels back through Spain, across the Pyrenees, through southern Gaul, over the Alps. and he comes down into Italy and imposes himself on the Italians and conquers Italy.

19:50So you can see why this idea of there being a road of Hercules taken by an ancient hero who travels from Spain to Italy and is a great conqueror, you can see why Hannibal would want to identify himself with that. And I think that although we don't have Carthaginian direct propaganda. There is a garbled story in Livy that enables you to kind of get a handle on what Hannibal might have been doing with these kind of stories and myths. So the story in Livy is that Hannibal is coming back from Gades, where he's been making sacrifice to Melcart, aka Hercules, and he's leading his army along the road of Hercules from New Carthage up towards the Ebro, which is the frontier of Carthaginian Spain.

20:36And then he has a dream. In this dream, he saw a man of godlike appearance who claimed he had been sent by Jupiter, the king of the gods, to guide Hannibal to Italy. And this godlike man tells Hannibal, don't look behind you. But Hannibal can't help himself. And he sees behind him a snake of an amazing size sliding along and causing massive destruction to trees and bushes, a deafening thunderstorm following in its wake. Hannibal asked the young man what the monstrous apparition was and what the portent meant. He was informed that it was the destruction of Italy and that he should simply proceed on his journey, asking no further questions and leaving destiny shrouded in darkness.

21:17And people may be wondering, well, you know, what on earth is all this about? There's a brilliant essay by Richard Miles, who demonstrates, I think, conclusively that the story originated with Hannibal and his propagandists, and that the unnamed supernatural guide, this young man who appears to Hannibal in the dream, is Hercules, and that the monster that he sees is the hydra. And the hydra has these great necks. You cut off the neck and another one grows back. And it's very like the Roman legions. And in fact, Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, who had invaded Italy and introduced the Romans and the Carthaginians to elephants, so a few decades before the First Punic War, he had explicitly compared the Roman Republic to the Hydra.

22:01And I think Hannibal and his propagandists are making kind of play with that. Hannibal is being told, you will kill the Hydra. You will be able to cut off all its necks, and it will become just a kind of bleeding stump. Okay, so with that kind of propaganda, you get a sense of Hannibal's mission, his kind of ideological enterprise. But we also have some sense of the logistics, don't we? The kind of muscle with which he thinks he can win. Because some decades later, a Greek historian Polybius saw a tablet on which it was written how many troops Hannibal had brought with him. 90 ,000 infantry, 12 ,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants.

22:36So this is a pretty formidable force by, I mean, a very formidable force by the standards of the ancient world. And this is the sort of the, this is the cream of the kind of Carthaginian military elite who are traveling with him, right? Yes. So these men, most of them are not actually Carthaginians. as you said, the highest ranking officers are. They're very loyal to Hannibal. They've been battleforged by serving alongside him. They've been encouraged by Hannibal and by Hannibal's predecessors, always to show initiative, always to show independence of action. There's a legacy there, I think, of Hannibal's early record as a cavalry commander, an emphasis on seizing the moment by the scruff of the neck and always taking opportunities where they arise.

23:21And I guess the most celebrated of these officers is a man called Mahabal, who at the siege of Saguntum after Hannibal got wounded in the thigh, he deputized for him. He may have been Hannibal's nephew. He seems to have kind of, if not, maybe married into the Barkid family. And he will prove himself a very great cavalry commander like Hannibal himself. And so too will Hannibal's youngest brother, Mago, who, like Hannibal, has been raised by his father to be a very, very proficient military operator. So again, it's like the cadre of young men around Alexander. Hannibal's officers are incredibly battle-hardened.

24:04I mean, very, very effective, as time will prove. But the mass of Hannibal's army, these are not, as Rome's is, a kind of citizen army. They are, by and large, either people conscripted from native peoples, so Libyans from Africa, Iberians from Spain, or mercenaries. So very, very multicultural. And traditionally, I mean, I always remember the books I read about this as a child, that this was cast as a real problem, that the Carthaginian army was a babel of different tongues, unlike the Romans, who all spoke the same language and shared the same civic ideals. But I think it's pretty clear that actually the multicultural quality of Hannibal's army is actually, it helps him.

24:51Diversity is its strength in that sense, because it's so much more varied. And because all the various troops that he's recording from kind of the various elements of the Western Mediterranean, they each have specializations. So the Iberian infantry, for instance, very famed for their swordsmanship. And the Romans actually, in the long run will adopt the Spanish sword, the gladius, stabbing sword used to eviscerate, cut open the guts. The Iberians also have the falcata, which is a kind of elegant, curved sword used for cutting and again for thrusting. So very, very fearsome bodies of swordsmen.

25:30Then you have the balearic slingers. And when I was a child, I was obsessed by balearic slingers. I just loved the word balearic. And I guess for lots of people listening, balearic will kind of summon up images of ibiza and right you know clubs and things probably not you dominate and then you have cavalry from numidia in north africa kind of berbers i guess so they live in what today would be morocco algeria and they essentially a bit like the mongols live on horseback and it was noted of them that they use no bridle or bit and rode bare back but they they're almost like centaurs they just kind of live on their horses and these are easily the best light cavalry in the world.

26:10So you have incredible variety there, much more varied military forces than the Romans can command. And of course, most famously of all, Hannibal's expedition has elephants. And we mentioned how Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, the Greek king, had brought them over to Italy. But he's inspired by the example of Alexander, who had met them in India. He had when he was fighting Porus. When he's fighting Porus, yes. And since that time, elephants have become the most fashionable thing that any self-respecting kind of greek warlord would want i think the reason for that is that they are so expressive of sheer power they terrorize you know the you're an infantryman standing there you have a massive great elephant rushing at you i mean it's it's overwhelming and so if you have kind of gargantuan ambitions as greek generals and kings tend to, you can see why an elephant is the perfect embodiment of that.

27:05And on that, it's interesting that Rome, which is a republic, never really, they never employ elephants. It doesn't really seem to have meshed with their tactics. But the Carthaginians do use them, because their armies are much more kind of mix and match. You take a bit of this, you take a bit of that. And they have been using them since at least the 260s BC. So by Hannibal's time, they're pretty used to, you know, deploying them tactically. They know how they can be used. And people may be wondering, where do these elephants come from? There is certainly one elephant in Hannibal's expedition that comes from India because he is called Cyrus.

27:43He has one tusk, apparently kind of a real bruiser. And he's called Cyrus, which means the Syrian, obviously, because he's come from the east. So ultimately from India. But most of the elephants in Hannibal's train seem to have been brought from the uh from the from the atlas mountains from the coast of morocco and they obviously there are no elephants there now they've gone extinct but back then there were there were quite a lot they were native back then they're not brought from across the sahara no so they're from north africa and they're slightly smaller than the indian elephants so eight feet tall rather than nine feet tall um and they unlike um cyrus where you can strap it so like the elephant and castle you can put a you know a castle on the back uh like in return of the king those massive elephants an elephant i mean they're not quite as big as that but hannibal is able to ride on cyrus you know because you can put a kind of great castle on cyrus's back but you can't put them on the backs of the smaller north african elephants so in a sense the elephants themselves are the towers they are kind of great they're like tanks i suppose right and again i think one One of the reasons why Hannibal is so keen to take them is for the propagandistic purposes, as well as the purely military ones, because it's expressive of kind of a divine ambition.

29:04I mean, who would think of taking elephants across the Pyrides, across the Alps? I mean, you know, unheard of. Well, Hercules would. That's the kind of thing he would do. Yes. So Hannibal wants to, he wants to awe as well as shock, I think. So the question, Tom, can he actually do it? Now, Hercules had done it, but he was the son of Zeus. He was, yes. Hannibal is only the son of Hamilcar Barker. So the big question is, can he actually get all these elephants and all of these troops and all of these slingers paid with women and these people with their elaborate swords, can he get them across Gaul, up into the Alps, and down again the other side?

29:44It's one of the most extraordinary enterprises in all history. And after the break, we will find out whether or not he does it.