570. Hannibal: The Invasion of Italy (Part 3)

0:10Slowly the soldiers moved with lagging steps, dreading that they had crossed the spreading globe only to pass into forbidden realms in defiance of nature and heaven. But Hannibal was having none of it. Not for him any terror of the Alps, not for him any horror at the snows. Shame on you, he cried, to weary of fame and despair of the favour of the gods. Shall we retreat after all we have won before snow-capped mountains, cowed and beaten by cliffs? No, comrades, no Onwards we go Believe me That soon we shall be scaling the walls of Rome That mightiest power And the steep hill of Jupiter At which all his men cheered And found their courage restored So that was Silius Italicus The Punica is the name of that poem He wrote it almost 300 years after Hannibal's invasion of Italy in the reign of the Emperor Domitian.

1:20Tom, it's the longest surviving Roman poem. It was beautifully read, I thought. I was magnificent. Thank you. That's kind. Yeah, really good. It's a shame I had to prompt it, but I'll take it all the same. Now, it's proof, isn't it, of just how deeply the experience of fighting Hannibal and the personality of Hannibal were seared into the Roman imagination. And actually, you get the sense there of their massive respect for Hannibal. You know, he's not a, we talked last time about whether or not they see him as a supervillain. Maybe they do, but they clearly see him as a serious person, as somebody worthy of admiration as well as fear.

1:57Absolutely. And they always acknowledge his supreme genius as a general. And there's kind of certain self-serving quality to that, because obviously if he's the world's greatest general and they've beaten him, that redounds very well to their credit. But I think that what you see there and also what you see in that passage from Juvenal that you read, again, very beautifully in the previous episode. So you've got an epic poet in the form of Cilius Italicus. You've got a satirist in the form of Juvenal. And what they're both fixing on, in particular, as emblematic of everything that makes Hannibal extraordinary, is this feat in crossing the Alps.

2:32And it makes Hannibal seem like Hercules, which is part of Hannibal's plan. And that was what he was kind of going for. Makes him seem superhuman. And to climb the Alps, to fend off all the predatory barbarians that lurk in its snowy wastes, to gaze down from a mountain pass at the fields of Italy, impossible. And yet Hannibal has done it. And we left him at the end of our previous episode. He's climbed all the way up the Alps. He's reached the very summit of the past that he's been aiming for. And he's telling his men, it's brilliant. Here we are. There's nothing to worry about. Italy lies below us.

3:17Let's get down there and take the fight to the Romans. Exciting. So we're in 218 BC, aren't we? Second Punic War. Hannibal, his great strategy is that he's not going to wait for the Romans to attack him. He's going to go for it. He's going to get into Italy. He's going to separate them from their allies. And his aim is Rome itself. an amazing ambition for a Carthaginian general. And so his men, who are very kind of demoralised, they've all got frostbite, they get hungry, they've been attacked by ghouls all the time, all a bit miserable. When they get to this pass, Hannibal, according to Livy, gives his men a very positive briefing.

3:52And he says, it will be very easy going from this point on. There are no more hills to climb, a battle or two, and we will have Rome in the palm of our hands. But of course, Dominic, anyone who has climbed a very steep hill will know that actually going down can sometimes be as tough on the legs as going up. This is a great act of imagination by you, which all great historians have, because you, of course, have never been to the Alps. And yet you can imagine that it's very difficult to go down them. Yes. And particularly with an elephant. And that's the power of imagination, Dominic. Well, it's not just imagination.

4:25It's about your sifting of the sources, isn't it? For sure. Doesn't Polybius, the Greek historian, tell us that it was very difficult and lots of people fell off the mountain as they went down the hill? Shall I read the passage in which he says exactly that? So Polybius says, so this is about the descent and how treacherous it proves. The track which led down the mountainside was both narrow and steep. Since neither the men nor the animals could be sure of their footing on account of the snow, any who stepped wide of the path or stumbled overbalanced and fell down the precipices. Yeah. And this is obviously very bad news for, I guess, for horses or elephants if they slip, because they're really going to make a din.

5:02However, you know, it's got to be done. And as they go down, the snows start to kind of melt a bit and they start seeing pines and other foliage clinging to the rocks. And it all looks to be going great. And then suddenly there's a massive traffic jam and Hannibal is not at the front of the column. But suddenly, you know, elephants are piling up and horses and mules and Spaniards and Balearic slingers and everything. And so he's forcing his way through this ever narrowing path to see what the problem is. And he discovers ahead of him the debris of two separate landslides. And the first landslide has carried away an entire stretch of the mountain.

5:45So the face of the mountain. And the second one has kind of added to the general impossibility of this path that they've got to take down. and it's clear to Hannibal immediately that there's no way that the horses, let alone the elephants, can get past it. And most of his men won't be able to either. The situation is very, very tricky because there are rock falls, there's still snow. You can't go forward. There's no detours that are possible. So it's kind of very, what is it, going on a bear hunt. They can't go over it. They can't go under it. They've somehow got to find a way to go through it.

6:18So what Hannibal does, he orders his men to retreat to a ridge that's looking over this kind of blockage of debris to clear it of snow, to make camp there. And then he thinks, well, what am I going to do? And it's been mentioned by Juvenal in that passage that you read the previous day where he talks about how Hannibal dissolves rock with vinegar. And if there are scientists listening, perhaps they could let us know if this is actually feasible or not. But I'll report what Livy says. Livy says that the job that faces Hannibal is to essentially to clear away the rubble and somehow construct a new path out of the precipice, out of the kind of the sheer wall of rock, because there's no other way down.

7:00So they have to cut through the rock. And the way that Hannibal does this is he solves it by the ingenious application of heat and moisture. Large trees were felled and lopped and a huge pile of timber erected. This, with the opportune help of a strong wind, was set on fire. And when the rock was sufficiently heated, the men's rations of sour wine were flung upon it to render it friable. So that's the vinegar. The wine essentially has become vinegar. They then got to work with picks on the heated rock and opened a sort of zigzag track to minimize the steepness of the descent. And you can see why this is a feat that particularly resonates with Hannibal's enemies.

7:39And I mean, to his admirers, it must have seemed an astonishing feat to carve a road out of the sheer rock. I mean, it really is the kind of the stuff of a Greek hero. Yeah. I mean, clearly there is a measure of truth to this. There clearly was a landslide because otherwise it's hard to see why these reports would have come from. So they do get down. They must be incredibly hungry at this point because they presumably have been delayed on the mountain and they're running short of rations and stuff and it's raining and snowing and all this kind of thing. But finally they do get down, and all is sweetness and light, right?

8:17They arrive in these valleys and we're told that it's sunny and there's streams and they can all have a rest and sort of flop down by the side of a bank of a river or whatever. And what's the plan then? Presumably they're just going to go for it. They're going to strike south towards the sort of the plain of the Po or towards what's now Turin and stuff. I mean, I think even Hannibal recognizes that there's an absolute need for everybody to recharge their batteries. So it's not just the men who are shattered, obviously the horses, the mules, the elephants. You know, there hasn't been much food up on the mountains.

8:48So they are put out to pasture. The troops are given three days R &R. And as you say, they come out kind of pretty near where Tiryn stands now. And it had taken them in all just over a fortnight, so 15 days, to cross the Alps. and it had been five months since the army's departure from New Carthage in Spain. And the whole expedition had come at terrible cost. So by Polybius's reckoning, 50 ,000 infantry had left the Pyrenees and of these only about 20 ,000 remain. So over half have perished on the route. And of the 9 ,000 horses, only 6 ,000 remain. So what Hannibal had done was summed up later by another great general who led his troops over the Alps and was portrayed famously as doing such by David, the great painter of the French Revolution.

9:42That was Napoleon. And Napoleon, of course, very, very aware of Hannibal's example. And he said of this crossing of the Alps that Hannibal had sacrificed half his army merely to acquire his chosen field of battle, the opportunity to fight where he wished to. And I guess kind of hanging in that comment, perhaps people might think, well, was it worth all the effort that Hannibal went to? Was it worth the loss of over half his army? And Dominic, you said in the previous episode, you asked, would it have been possible for Hannibal to fight Scipio on the banks of the Rhône? He could have done that, but that's not actually what Napoleon is saying.

10:18Napoleon's comments on Hannibal sacrificing half his army to get where he wanted to, to get his chosen field of battle, is not meant as a criticism. I mean, this is the kind of thing Napoleon did all the time. He'd sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men to get his army into the position where he wanted to fight. Because what Napoleon is recognising and is clearly the case is that by bypassing Scipio, by refusing to meet the Romans on the Rhine, by getting into Italy, Hannibal has kept the initiative. But Tom, can I jump in and make an observation? Yeah, of course. We compared Hannibal, or you compared him in a previous episode to Charles XII of Sweden, a commander who has a lot in common with Hannibal and with Napoleon.

10:57You know, they're swashbuckling, they're charismatic, they captivate all Europe, they take the initiative, they sacrifice a lot of men for an advantage. And the other thing that all three have in common is they all end up losing. And they do that partly because they throw away men thinking, well, you know, vim and vigor matter more than manpower. But the Romans could have told all three of those people that manpower matters more than anything. And that is exactly the challenge that Hannibal recognizes. Hannibal absolutely appreciates that it is the manpower that the Romans have that is the huge problem.

11:31And that's why he's come to Italy, because his only prospect of defeating Rome is to secure the backing of people in the peninsula of Italy. Okay, that's interesting. So he's sacrificing men now to gain men later. That's his thinking. Absolutely. Because his arrival in Italy is designed to terrify and intimidate the Romans, which it does. And the moment he arrives in Italy, this desperate summons goes from Rome to Sempronius Longus, the consul who is in Sicily with a large task force getting ready to invade Africa. That immediately gets called back. So that's one thing that Hannibal has gained.

12:08But the other thing that Hannibal's arrival does is that it hugely impresses people who are naturally hostile to Rome, of which the most significant are the Gauls who live on the Italian side of the Alps. And Hannibal has to project the aura of a man who can genuinely defeat the Romans, because otherwise the Gauls won't rally to his cause. But if they do, there are large numbers of them. It's more than possible, as we will see, for Hannibal to get the size of his army back to what it had been when he left the Pyrenees. So this achievement of coming down from the Alps, something that people would have thought impossible, especially as he's done it with a load of elephants.

12:48Presumably, he knows perfectly well that as a PR coup, as a propaganda coup, nothing could be better fitted to impress the people he wants to recruit. Yeah, so quote Eve MacDonald, who wrote a wonderful book about Hellenistic life. As news of his approach reached the Roman population, it must have seemed like the coming of a supernatural force. But I think you can say the same about the Gauls, and that's just as important. So he's followed the road of Hercules as Hercules had done. He's descended from the snowy peaks, you know, like a demigod, and he's done it with elephants. it is a stupefying achievement.

13:21And one of the measures of that is that we are talking about it, you know, 2 ,200 years on. The elephants don't all die. Sometimes said they all died, but they didn't all die. Most of them survived the journey. Is that right? We're not told how many survived, but it seems, I mean, essentially all of them pretty much seem to have survived. Okay. You know, again, their arrival creates such a sensation that the effort of bringing them, you know, is entirely justified, I think, just with the kind of the reverberation of the news of what he's done. So now they are the emblem of everything that Hannibal is about, really.

13:55But having said that, obviously he has lost lots of men. I mean, you know, and this potentially is a problem. But immediately, the moment he arrives, there's one tribe who are called the Insubres, who do immediately flock to his banner. And Hannibal's very keen to demonstrate to other Gallic tribes that, you know, he's a friend worth having. So he immediately takes the side of the insubres against a rival tribe, storms their stronghold, demonstrates the fact that he's got the muscle to do what he says he's going to do. And the result of this is that more Gallic tribes across what's now northern Italy, the Po Valley, they pledge to join his banner.

14:32But there is a problem, which is that the vast majority of these tribes are separated from Hannibal by Scipio and his legion. Scipio, the consul, who has come back from Marsilia, from Marseille, to try and block Hannibal's path and is now in the way between Hannibal and the reinforcements that he hopes to get from the Gallic tribes. Is this a problem for Hannibal? Actually, it isn't a problem. it's an opportunity because what he is always looking for what's key to his strategy is engaging the romans in battle and hopefully destroying them and the fact that he now has scipio's legions in his path you know brilliant bring it on he wants to win a decisive battle against the romans before the winter season makes it absolutely impossible for campaigning to continue right because we're in late autumn at this point presumably i mean pretty much winter actually So the winter solstice is approaching.

15:28The snows are starting to blow now in the plains of northern Italy. So there isn't long before it will become impossible. So it's got to be done in a week or two, really, after Hannibal's arrived in Italy. Okay. So where is Scipio at this point? Scipio is approaching from which direction? So he's come up from the coast. So he's coming eastwards. Right. And he's now blocking Hannibal's path. and the first clash between the Romans and Hannibal's men to take place on Italian soil. It happens in the Po Valley. You've got snowstorms gusting across the plains. And so both sides, because the visibility is obviously very poor, send out their cavalry to reconnoiter.

16:12And the Roman cavalry is led by Scipio himself, and he has with him his young son, Publius Cornelius Scipio, who is a figure who will feature quite prominently in the later story of Hannibal. But for now, he's a very, very young man serving at the side of his father. And they go out and they run into the Numidian cavalry. And the Roman cavalry is pretty rubbish. The Numidian cavalry is the best in the world. And so Scipio and his cavalry retreat. They cross a river called the Tichinus. It's clear that they have lost this kind of opening skirmish, but it's not a disaster. Rome knows that its strength always lies in infantry.

16:52Who cares if a few cavalrymen get killed? So he joins up with his main body of men. They zigzag around. Scipio is trying to find the best spot, somewhere that's defensive, but will provide scope for prosecuting the war against Hannibal. And he finds it by a river called the Trebia, and he sets up camp there. and what he is doing now is waiting for Sempronius and his men to arrive from Sicily. So to unite the two big Roman forces. Because he wants to make absolutely certain that he can crush Hannibal. Okay, and Hannibal is camped nearby, isn't he? Now the question I guess is, at this point we're in December and normally both armies would retreat to winter quarters.

17:37Hannibal wants to force the issue presumably to impress he wants to smash the Romans to impress these Gauls that he's keen to bring over to his side is that what he's thinking? Yeah and even the news of the skirmish at the Tichinus where Hannibal has won wins him you know huge plaudits among the local Gauls and now that the Romans have retreated from their path lots of them can come and join Hannibal's cause. Within a very short time of Hannibal's arrival in Italy and his victory at the Tichinus he came with 20 ,000 infantry he's now up to about 28 ,000, 30 ,000 infantry with the Gauls coming in.

18:12He's up to about 10 ,000 cavalry. So again, this sense that the Gauls are swelling his numbers. And this is a huge problem, obviously, for the Romans, because it means now that Scipio wants to force a battle as quickly as possible to try and stop the Gauls from misbehaving. But he needs to wait for Sempronius to arrive. And Sempronius finally pitches up from Sicily, doesn't he? He's sent his men on this kind of forced march and now the romans have far more infantry than hannibal so i'm looking at the notes 38 000 to hannibal's 28 000 although hannibal has more cavalry and the romans are always a little bit deficient in cavalry but interestingly sempronius is also under pressure to force a battle because his consulship is coming to an end and he wants to he wants a victory to round off his time in office so there you have the kind of political pressures of rome you know, acting to sort of force the issue.

19:10Yeah, so Polybius says that Scipio doesn't want to force the battle. Scipio has been wounded in the Tichinus and this has invalided him out. So Sempronius is going to command, you know, against Hannibal now. And Polybius says, oh, Scipio thought it was a bad idea to have a battle. This, I think, is because Polybius ends up a member of the household of the Scipios. And so he's always looking to cast them in the best possible light. it's clear I think that both consuls want a victory for the same reason that it will redound to their glory before they have to lay down their office at the end of the year but also as we've been saying they need to to stamp Hannibal out quickly before the whole of Gallic North Italy rises up to his banner so I think Polybius is wrong there I think it's it's absolutely the Roman battle plan that they are going to force a battle and Hannibal is fully aware of this He knows that the Romans are essentially spoiling for a fight because we've talked before about how he has an incredible mastery of intelligence and how the Romans see this as somehow cheating.

20:10And so they end up so spooked by Hannibal's ability seemingly to read their minds that they claim that he's been going around undercover disguised with wigs of various colours and changes of clothing. Isn't that a classic battle narrative, though, that the enemy king or commander disguised himself as a troubadour or something? And Alfred the Great did this and so-and-so did this. Yeah, but Romans wouldn't do that. That's not at all Roman behaviour. No, I guess they wouldn't. So it's very kind of Punic treachery, all that kind of thing. But Hannibal is clever and he's going to use their urgency against them.

20:43He knows that they're desperate to force the issue and he's going to use that. Yeah, and also the fact that it makes the Romans look bad if they're not going out and fighting. They don't want to look like wusses. And again, Hannibal understands that that's a key part of their psychology, that they're always keen to attack, always keen to take the initiative. And so he works out a battle plan that makes play with that. So the scene of the first great military clash between Hannibal and the forces of the Roman Republic. So it is dawn on a very wintry morning, shortly before the winter solstice. The Romans are camped on the floodplain of this river, the Trebia.

21:24It's icy cold. There are gusts of sleet. And it's so early that the legionaries are only just starting to stir. And then suddenly from the sentries on the watchtower of the camp, they hear cries, the blaring of trumpets. And it's obvious that there is an enemy attack. And Sempronius himself is summoned quickly to the ramparts. And he looks out and he sees below that the attack is being launched by these terrifying Numidians, the much feared Numidian cavalry. And they're riding up to the camp, hurling spears, wheeling back, withdrawing, then coming back, firing more spears and so on. And Sempronius, we're told by Polybius, is convinced that this must be the advance guard of Hannibal's main army who are coming towards him.

22:11And so he doesn't want to be caught out. So he orders all his men to form ranks, to advance and to chase off the Numidians. And Scipio, according to Polybius, how accurately or not, we don't know, says, hey, steady on. This could be a trick. The legionaries haven't had their breakfast. Dominic, they've got to have a breakfast. I approve of Scipio. Scipio is a man of great sense. But while Sempronius is saying, no, we haven't got time for breakfast. We need to get out there and crush the Carthaginians. So he orders his cavalry out to drive off the Numidians Who promptly start retreating before the advance of the Roman cavalry And the legions who are now in full battle formation Stomachs rumbling, wistfully thinking of bacon and eggs Start marching out into the sleety dawn Across the floodplain towards the Trebia And this is personal for you, isn't it Tom?

23:00Because you told me before we started recording That you'd had a very poor breakfast at Greg's this morning So this is like your It's no wonder that you're narrating this for such vim and vigour I mean, this is total immersion for you. Yeah, I really feel for the Romans. So out the Romans go, cavalry first, seemingly chasing off the Numidians, infantry behind, squelching through the mud down towards the river Trebia. The Numidians splash their way through the river Trebia. Roman cavalry follow. The infantry now have to do the same. So they come out on the far back. Not only have they not had any breakfast, they're now sodden.

23:35It's icy. You know, their tunics are starting to freeze to their legs, but they carry on marching forwards. They are aware that there might be a risk of an ambush. And so those on the right flank, as they're advancing towards the Carthaginians, are looking out for any clumps of trees because they know that there is nothing that Gauls in particular enjoy more than hiding in trees and then pouncing out and attacking in the rear. But Dominic, there are no trees. There are no trees. So I'll give you Polybius' account of what there is of the landscape. The train is flat and featureless. There are no woods to be seen, only a watercourse with high overhanging banks that were densely overgrown with thorns and brambles.

24:16But obviously, there's no possibility that anyone could be hiding there because that would just require supernatural qualities of deception and treachery to do something like that. I think we can discount that watercourse with the thickly brambled banks, can't we? Yes. No prospect at all of anyone hiding there. So ahead of them now, emerging through the sleet, the sun is, I guess, by this point, kind of struggling to emerge through the grey cloud. The Romans see the Carthaginian battle line. Infantry in the centre, as is traditional, cavalry on the wings, and a screen in front of the cavalry, the elephants.

24:56And the elephants are a sufficiently intimidating sight. This is unsettling. Even if you had breakfast. Exactly. The Carthaginians, the Romans start to realise, have the look of many who have had a nice breakfast. Oh, no. And apparently also they've protected themselves against the sleet by oiling themselves. Would that protect you? I think that's laughable. I always wondered about this. Apparently it is. Well, if you're pouring with rain outside and you went out, smeared yourself in oil, people would laugh at you, I think. Well, yeah, because I suppose we have, you know, thermal underwear and things, waterproofs, which they probably didn't have.

25:29But if you didn't, maybe you could use oil. Anyway, this is what we're told. They look good. They're glowing. They're warm. They're well breakfasted. And so when the battle is joined, you might think the Romans are already defeated. Not a bit of it. Oh. Because they're just the best heavy infantry in the world. And also, of course, they outnumber the Carthaginian infantry. So they press forwards and they start doing their stuff. They start stabbing and eviscerating and slicing open the guts of the Spaniards and the Libyans and the Gauls who are facing them. And so guts start to spill out and it mingles with the mud and the slush and it becomes ever more slippery.

26:07I mean, a hideous sight, both sides fighting increasingly desperately. But meanwhile, on the wings, first the elephants and then the Carthaginian cavalry have rolled back the Roman cavalry, who were always outnumbered but just find it impossible to fight against elephants and Numidians. And then they wheel in and start to attack the flanks of the Roman infantry. So there's a slight sense in which the Romans are, well, I mean, three sides of their formation is now kind of surrounded by Carthaginian forces. And then Dominic suddenly in the Romans rear, a terrible cry. And it is coming from the watercourse.

26:46You remember with those brambles. And it's not just infantry that's been hidden there by Hannibal. It's horses as well. So the men have been lying there with their horses lying down. Some 2 ,000 Numidians, half of them cavalry, half infantry. And they've been stationed there under the command of Mago, who is Hannibal's younger brother. So in the film by Vin Diesel, I don't know who'd play him. He's a kind of hip young gun. Maybe Tom Holland. I don't know. You'd hate that though, wouldn't you? No, I'd love it. You'd absolutely hate that if Tom Holland was in a film about Carthage and Rome. Anyway, Mago is brilliant, tremendous commander.