642. Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Bloodbath in Africa (Part 3)

0:10It is impossible to withhold our admiration for Hannibal's leadership, his courage and his ability in the field when we consider the duration of his campaigns and the major and minor battles.

0:30the whole scope of his design and its execution. For sixteen years, he waged ceaseless war against the Romans in Italy, and the whole while, like a good pilot, he kept the love and loyalty of his forces. He had with him Africans, Iberians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Italians and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither in their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect. Nonetheless, the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will, even upon men of such totally diverse origins. If only he'd subdued other parts of the world first and finished with the Romans, not one of his projects would have eluded him.

1:19But as it was, since he turned his attention first to those whom he should have dealt with last, his career began and ended with them. So that was the Greek historian Polybius. It's one of those passages that seems written precisely to torment 16-year-old schoolboys and schoolgirls in British schools in the 1940s or something, sort of slogging their way through his torturous prose. Polybius, like him or loathe him, He's our best source for the Punic Wars. And here, in this thrilling passage, he is singing the praises of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal. Now, in today's episode, we are coming to the great showdown of the Punic Wars, one of the most titanic clashes in all history.

2:14This is the showdown between the Romans and the Carthaginians at the Battle of Zama. And we'll come to this in a little while. But first, let's have a little chat about Polybius himself, because Tom, he knew Rome well and he knew the subject very well. He'd interviewed leading figures in the war against Hannibal, hadn't he? He admired the Roman system of government. And actually, he was quite a fan of the Roman imperium more broadly. Yes, even though he was a Greek and so disappointed that you didn't follow up your brilliant impression of Livy in our last episode by doing a Greek accent for Polybius.

2:49I did think about it, but I didn't do it. But you ducked it. Yeah, so Polybius, for reasons that we will come to, he knows Rome very, very well indeed. And he is particularly close to the family of the Scipios. And they are the family that, as we heard in the previous episode, they play the kind of the leading role in Rome's great death struggle with Hannibal. So when it comes to the Punic Wars, Polybius is pretty clearly Team Rome. But even so, as we heard in that opening passage, he can't help but admire Hannibal. And the reasons are self-evident. Hannibal is the man who has led a great army over the Alps into Italy.

3:27He's killed 100 ,000 Romans, perhaps, in three terrible and tactically brilliant battles. and who, as Polybius noted in that passage, had kept a force made up of many disparate peoples in the field for a decade and more in a foreign land separated by the seas from Carthage, his native city. So an unbelievable achievement. Now, the Romans, unlike Polybius, were not generally in the habit of praising Hannibal. And the reason for that is that they feared and hated him too much. But I think with the Romans, if you have their hatred and their fear, they are paying you a kind of compliment. Of course, yeah.

4:16They know the man they are facing. I mean, they know that they are facing one of the greatest generals of all time. Now, that said, by 204 BC, Hannibal's fortunes, this guy who at one point had seemed on the verge of destroying Roman power for good, his fortunes are much much diminished so by 204 BC he's been in Italy for 14 years and you know that is four times the length of the first world war so that gives you some sense of what an ordeal this has been it's been a marathon not a sprint it really has and the problem for Hannibal is that as we heard in the previous episode the Romans have conquered Spain which was essentially the place where he was relying on for reinforcements and for supplies and for money and all kinds of things.

5:05So that's terrible. His allies in Italy have fallen away and he is now essentially cornered in Brutium, which is the heel of Italy. But even now, the Romans are incredibly reluctant to engage him in battle. They just think if we go and fight him, he will defeat us. That is the kind of hoodoo that he has over them and so their plan now is to just bypass him altogether and they're going to do this by invading africa and this strategy had been articulated the year before by the man who has been mandated by the roman republic to execute it so to quote him i shall draw hannibal after me i shall force him to fight on his native soil and the prize of victory will be not some rundown forts in Brutium, Carthage itself.

5:57And the man who is speaking these words, he's only 30, but he has already established himself as the greatest military hero in Rome's history. And this is the young, long-haired, smoothly shaved Publius Cornelius Scipio. So in the last episode, we heard how over the previous four years, Scipio had destroyed Carthage's power base in Spain. So by doing that, he had eliminated the manpower and the mineral wealth that had sustained Hannibal's war effort and on which Hannibal had been relying for reinforcements to finish his own war effort in Italy. Scipio had gone back to Rome, hadn't he? We discussed this at the end of the last episode.

6:43He'd gone back to Rome as the great hero of the era, the hero of the Roman people, the darling of the masses. He had won the consulship. He had been appointed to the command in Sicily, and he had explicitly been given license to invade North Africa, quote, if he judged it to be in the interests of the Republic. And Tom, you entered the last episode by saying, we will discover if he does. Obviously, the implication is that he will. And he does. He does think it's in the interests of the Republic, even though there are people in the Senate who are a little bit more cautious, aren't there? Yes. And regular listeners to this series will not be surprised that the guy who takes the lead in opposing this strategy is Fabius Maximus Coctator, the Delea, the guy who back in the wake of late Trasimene had been appointed dictator, so put in supreme control of the Roman state for six months.

7:36And he had adopted this strategy of shadowing Hannibal, of never engaging him in battle, which then provided the template for Roman strategy in the wake of Cannae, and which is still being adopted in 204 BC. He's now, I mean, unbelievably old. He's about 130. And he is a figure of enormous status. So he has the official title, Princeps Sinatus. He's the chief senator. And Fabius had directly accused Scipio in the debate about whether he should be given permission to invade Africa. He accused Scipio of endangering Rome's security by leading an expedition to Africa while Hannibal was still current and present in Italy with his own army.

8:22So Fabius had directly accused Scipio essentially of glory hunting. Your glory matters less to me, he told Scipio, than the welfare of our city. If you really want to destroy Hannibal, then go to Brutium and fight him there, which is, I mean, a very stinging rebuke. and i think it's clearly animated by a kind of personal animus as well as anxiety about strategy and i think it portrays what right from the beginning of scipio's career has been an anxiety on the part of conservative elements in the senate about his character yeah parts this is his youth right and his glamour and his eye for a sort of as it were a roman photo opportunity it's about his hair and his shiny cheeks his claims to have been born from a serpent all of that stuff right his general sense of un-roman-ness of greekness even um and of course we mentioned in the previous episode that while he had been in spain some of the iberian warlords had hailed him as a king a word that for the romans you know is the most sort of shocking and um and toxic label that there could possibly be everything about him just seems wrong doesn't it just seems un-roman it's not just that he's been held king but that he is incredibly popular both with his troops and with the mass of the roman people so in spain in in the wake of his his great victories his soldiers had taken to hailing him as imperator which is the word that means general but which in the long run will become the title that Augustus claims and which gives us our title of emperor.

10:03So it doesn't have that connotation at this point. But nevertheless, it's a straw in the wind. I mean, no one has been hailed in this way before. And so senators back in Rome are anxious about this. And they're also anxious about the fact that he's become consul when he's only 30 and you're meant to be 40. And essentially, he's been swept to power on a great wave of popular enthusiasm. And so there's a sort of nervousness, what will he do with this power, I think. But Scipio, he's not having any of this. And he throws Fabius' criticisms back in his face. And he says that if you block my intention to invade Africa, then I am going to turn to the people and I will get them to force this strategy through.

10:47So, you know, you, Fabius, and all your conservative allies in the Senate, you will be publicly humiliated. And so Fabius essentially steps down and the conservatives very reluctantly give him the green light. So the summer of 204, Scipio's expedition sets sail from Sicily. He has his troop ships, his troop transports, and they're escorted by 40 warships. Scipio and his brother Lucius are commanding the right wing, as it were. of the fleet 20 ships and the 20 ships on the left wing are commanded by his friend Lelius who we talked about last time and by a young paymaster called Marcus Portius Cato and Cato a name that will recur in Roman history he is a young man with reddish hair and gray eyes he is in his early 30s Scipio is but his political identity is very different isn't it so Cato is the most traditional of the traditionalists the most conservative of the conservatives he is a big admirer of Fabius Maximus and he's an impressive man but he is by no means a natural ally of somebody like Scipio no he's followed all the rules he has this post of the paymaster he's a quaester it's called so he's responsible for keeping an eye on Scipio's spending and that is absolutely the kind of role that someone of his age should have you know he's not swanning around like a console with long hair and talking about snakes right he is performatively conservative that means that he's absolutely not a Scipio soulmate but of course waiting for Scipio in Africa is a guy who absolutely is a Scipio soulmate and that is his old mate Masinissa So we met him in the previous episode.

12:37He's a Numidian king who had fought in Spain, first of all for the Carthaginians and had then changed sides and become a big ally of Scipio and Rome. And Masinissa has every reason to welcome Scipio's arrival with open arms, because just as Rome is engaged in a death struggle with Carthage, Masinissa is engaged in a death struggle of his own. Because people who listened to our last episode may remember, he is not the only Numidian king. There is another king who leads his own federation of Numidian tribes, and this is a guy called Sifax. and Masinissa has been fighting him all his life so as a teenager he had kind of had the beating of Sifax and that was what had then enabled him to travel to Spain and fight for the for the Carthaginians but he's now come back and Sifax is still on the scene and still causing all kinds of trouble and the fact that that Masinissa has come back to Africa as an ally of the Romans means that Sifax, who previously had been an ally of the Romans, has now obviously swung around and become an ally of the Carthaginians.

13:48That's the way diplomacy works. It is. But there's another element, isn't there? So there's one thing that in this story, this story has had everything, of course, except one element. There's one element that's been missing. And it's brilliant to be able to unveil that element now in the third episode of this series. And that element is a woman. I know. absolute scenes and this woman is called sofonisba and brilliant name and exciting person tell us all about sofonisba so she is the daughter of a carthaginian general whose name it will stun listeners to learn is hasdrubal but of course i mean basically unless you're called hannibal or Mago, your name is Hasribal.

14:33And he had been serving in Spain alongside Hasribal Barker. So he was in command of one of those three armies camped out in what was going to become Lisbon when Scipio captured New Carthage. He's gone back to Carthage and he's become the leading figure in the Carthaginian Senate. And he's now that Hasribal and Mago are both dead, he's basically the best general the Carthaginians have with the exception of Hannibal. And this isn't really to say much so fabius maximus i mean very bitchy uh described him as a general who best displayed his speed in retreat so not promising anyway hasdrubal has his daughter sophinesba um and sophinesba is very smart very beautiful very very patriotic um and hasdrubal says to sophinesba look it is your duty to go and marry Sifax and to get a meeting out of your hand and to make sure that he remains as a loyal ally of Carthage.

15:37And so Sofinesba does her duty. She goes off, she marries Sifax, and Sifax thinks she's absolutely great. He adores her. And so this really cements the alliance, which is obviously bad news for Masinissa, because in Africa, if Sifax with his Numidian horsemen and the mass weight of the Carthaginians in Africa, in Carthage, if they combine, Masinista is in real trouble. So he's desperate for Scipio to arrive and provide him with the backing of the legions. And so when Scipio does land in Africa, Masinista is thrilled and he feels it's payback time. And sure enough, neither Haustruble nor Sifax prove any match for Scipio.

16:18and it turns out in fact that Scipio is prepared to play very very dirty against Sifax and Hasdrubal indeed oh no that's poor for Scipio what does Scipio do that's so dirty well so a few months after his arrival he's in winter quarters uh so there's no um campaigning Scipio arranges a truce with Sifax the Numidian king um and his goal is to try and win him back to the Roman cause because Scipio and Sifax had actually met before Scipio had gone as an ambassador to him and they got on well enough. Sifax said no I'm not interested I love Carthage now and I've got this gorgeous wife you know I'm not betraying her.

17:03Scipio then goes on makes a personal visit to Sifax tries to press his case again again Sifax rebuffs him but Scipio notices something interesting about Sifax's camp and that is that all his quarters are made of reeds so not made out of kind of earth or mud or whatever but reeds and then his spies come back from Hasdrubal's camp which isn't far from Sifax's and they say well Hasdrubal's camp their winter quarters aren't made of mud or earth either they are made of wood so Scipio ponders this and then he intimates to Hasdrubal that he might be interested in opening negotiations with him and he floats the possibility that perhaps a peace treaty could be arrived at whereby the romans would keep what they have in italy and the carthaginians could keep what they have in africa and maybe that would be the basis for a settlement well that sounds promising that's nice and hasdrabil is interested in this and so negotiations start opening between his camp and the roman camp and cifax gets involved as well and so the romans when they send their ambassadorial teams to these two camps are really able to scope it out and they work out the best way to set syphax's camp which is made of reeds and hasdable's camp which is made of wood on fire oh dear and so scipio with this information he sends laelius and masinissa to torch syphax's camp which duly goes up um is incinerated uh and large numbers of syphax's men with them and then he sends out another squad to set fire to the carthaginian camp all the carthaginians come rushing out scipio's men are on hand to slaughter them and polybius he thinks this whole wheeze is absolutely brilliant so to quote him of all scipio's many brilliant exploits this it seems to me was the most splendid and inventive but i mean it's it's blatant treachery he's meant to be negotiating it's he's broken all kinds of oaths and it's i think very very rich considering that the romans are endlessly going on about what they call punica of fides so punic faith the sense that the carthaginians are uniquely treacherous but don't the romans take the view that basically it's war so the ideal thing is to kill your enemies and to win actually the romans are very anxious as we will see to present themselves as being on the sides of of right and of the gods okay so i think i think skip here is playing very very dirty there anyway i mean it works for him yeah because he's wiped out large numbers of carthaginian and numidian troops um and even though cyphax and hasdrubal managed to escape the inferno And there's a sense now, I think, that Scipio clearly has the beating of them.

19:44And so it proves because the moment spring arrives, he moves in for the kill. And first he meets with what remains to Sifax and Hasdrubal, so their combined army, in a battle that has the brilliantly Custer-esque name of the Great Plains. So the Battle of the Great Plains. And, you know, Scipio displays tactical mastery yet again. wipes them out. Sifax and Hasdrubal again manage to escape, but 30 ,000 are left as food for the vultures on the Great Plains. And Scipio's cavalry, commanded by Masinissa and Lelius, pursue Sifax. They take him prisoner, and also they take prisoner his queen, the beautiful and patriotic daughter of Hasdrubal, Sofonisba.

20:32And she knows her duty. So we're told that she's actually very like Cleopatra that she was so charming that merely to see her merely to hear her talk was at once to be utterly smitten and so she knows that in this situation with Sifax knocked out she has to marry Masanissa and try and persuade him to jump ship yeah and Masanissa is completely swept away by her I mean she's clearly absolutely gorgeous he immediately marries her and he goes to Scipio and says look I've got this great new wife isn't she tremendous Scipio is appalled because he's very understandably anxious that Sofinesba will try and kind of win Masinissa round to the Carthaginian cause.

21:10And also, it has to be said, he's not very keen on women. This is something that is often said about him, that, you know, women are kind of introduced into his camp and he won't have anything to do with them. Like a sort of Royal Navy officer in the 18th century who won't have women on board ship, that kind of thing. Very much that vibe, I think. I mean, you know, he marries. Right. I don't think he's a great one for having ladies hanging around with him in his camp. And so he essentially tells masinista well it's you know you have to choose between your wife or me and masinista isn't an idiot and so he um he chooses scipio and sofinisba who is composed and dignified to the end um prepares a cup of poison drinks it and as she's dying she berates masinista for for being absolutely useless so that's the end of her and is that the end of women in this in this series well basically until they all end up being enslaved at the very end of our series so okay female listeners can look forward to that um all right so carthage is now staring down the barrel right completely syphax is gone hasdrubal is out they are staring into the abyss basically and this carthaginian senate have no choice now other than to open negotiations with the romans must have been utterly galling for them yeah so they send 30 ambassadors to Scipio and Scipio's terms are predictably harsh so he tells them that Carthage will have to withdraw all her troops from lands beyond Africa the city will be allowed 20 warships no more than that the Carthaginians will have to provision Scipio's army while you know people are sent back to Rome to find out whether the senate agrees to these terms and they will have to pay another kind of Versailles treaty type indemnity in the way that they'd had to do at the end of the previous Punic War.

22:56The Senate is very reluctant to agree to these terms because they can see that it effectively spells, you know, the end of their city as a great power, but they feel they haven't really got any choice. So they say, yeah, well, okay. The terms are taken to Rome and the treaty is there ratified by the Roman Senate. Simultaneously, however, They haven't completely given up the fight because, of course, back in Italy, in Brutium, the heel of Italy, Hannibal and his army are still there. Yeah, I was wondering what had happened to Hannibal during all this. So he's just been hanging around in southern Italy.

23:35Yeah, they say, listen, you're completely wasting your time there. Come back to Africa. We, you know, we really need you. And so they send him a transport fleet. And Hannibal, I mean, he's gutted, absolutely gutted. he spent all this time there and now essentially he's got to recognize that it's been wasted so he he boards the transport ships um with his army and they head back to um to africa and they disembark um at a place called leptis minor which is a port about 100 miles to the south of carthage um and he is aware that you know the peace negotiations are going on so he doesn't want to interrupt them but equally he wants to prepare for the worst i mean suppose the peace negotiations break down and so he maintains his army and he drills it very hard all that summer and summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter by this point the peace treaty has been ratified in rome by the senate and it is sent back to carthage where the carthaginian senate have to ratify it themselves.

24:40And at this point, faced with the prospect not just of losing the war, but of losing their status as the capital of a great empire, essentially accepting that from this point on, they're going to be a provincial second division power. Lots of leading figures in the Carthaginian Senate get cold feet. and they also know of course that they have Hannibal back on African soil and Hannibal is the greatest general of his day if they're facing relegation why not roll the dice and go for it one last time absolutely and so as winter turns to spring and the 16th campaigning season of the war begins it becomes evident that the peace is not going to hold and this is massive for fans of great generals because it's clear that Hannibal and Scipio both of the men who have never in their entire careers lost a battle the greatest commanders in the entire history of their respective cities that these two colossi are going to be going head to head after all i mean it's massive sport it's napoleon and wellington isn't it it's very exciting i mean there's proper tension sort of uh the world cup final is coming pre-match tension yeah pre-match tension so scipio is inland he's moved inland from his coastal base and he is hoovering up towns but obviously the risk for him is as he's hoovering up towns he might be cut off from the sea hannibal um he needs i mean manpower troops is his thing and he is spending the summer drilling his recruits raising troops as many as he can he's got some elephants right 80 80 war elephants i mean the one thing he doesn't have his cavalry which is ironic because cavalry had always been his strongest arm but he does have these 80 war elephants you know i mean he has a serious force um and it takes him all summer essentially to to raise an army that he feels is large enough to to take on Scipio and his legions and finally with the coming of autumn he's ready and at the head of his troops he marches inland making for the town near which Scipio has his base and this town Dominic is called Zama so Hannibal is approaching Zama Scipio is in situ these two commanders drawing near to each other.

27:18They've never met before, but it becomes evident the nearer they come that actually they're really keen to meet with the other one. Peace feelers have gone out, and the justification for this is that they're going to have one last attempt at negotiation. But I think basically, they both know that this is very unlikely to result in a peace treaty. They just want to meet each other. There are terms on the table though, aren't there? So Hannibal, for example offers Scipio a deal and he says we can preserve the status quo effectively the Romans you know you can keep Sicily you can keep Spain I mean you know that's the Carthaginians giving up on two massive prizes Carthage however will keep her possessions in North Africa and we won't have to pay a big indemnity there'll be no kind of reparations and we won't have a limit on the size of our navy and Scipio he is not taking that because his terms are very simple they are unconditional surrender yeah i mean he'd already offered terms that didn't involve unconditional surrender but now the carthagin is carrying on the fight he feels well you know it's surrender or nothing um and clearly hannibal's terms are unacceptable to scipio and scipio's terms are unacceptable to hannibal and so the interview comes to an end there will be no more negotiations consequentially battle is now inevitable and this means that the two greatest commanders of the age are about to meet in the ultimate clash of titans well we love a clash of the titans on the rest is history come back after the break and the battle of zama begins hello everyone I am here with some exceedingly exciting news.

29:00Now, as all our beloved club members will already know, one of the very best things of being a member of the Restless History Club is getting access to exclusive members only mini series. That's right. Mini series, not just individual episodes. So these are special episodes every other month, which only club members can listen to no one else and we've got a brand new one coming out this february so that's going to be the very first one of 2026 and it is presented by me and the great art critic laura cumming four episodes and it's about paintings that shed a particularly fascinating light on history and it covers a broad range of times and places so everything from velasquez is las meninas described by many critics as the greatest of all paintings right the way up to Henry Rayburn's skating minister what do these paintings tell us about the times in which they were painted it's really really fascinating stuff and if you are not watching it on YouTube or Spotify if you're just listening to it as a podcast don't worry because we will be sending all our members an email which will be going into greater written detail about the painting but also obviously giving you an image of the painting itself so you can have a quick look at that perhaps before you listen to the episode although i have to say that laura's descriptions of each painting are so good that perhaps you don't even need to look at the painting so if you would like to sign up to that miniseries and to the other five miniseries that we will be doing this year which will be covering everything from history's greatest photographs the vietnam war to england's she wolves then uh you know where to go go to the rest is history.com if you are not already a club member and sign up there welcome back everybody to the rest is history now we promised you the titanic showdown between hannibal and scipio this is the moment towards which not just this series but our previous series about Rome and Carthage have been building.

31:15So Tom we don't have all day so let's just get into the highlights take us through the highlights of this titanic clash. Okay so as we said Hannibal for the first time is weak in cavalry so he's therefore weak on his wings. Scipio by contrast has excellent cavalry he has his own we've mentioned them before the best trained cavalry the romans have ever had and of course he has massinissa's numidians even though they almost miss the battle because massinissa turns up very late so laelius is in command of the roman cavalry massinissa is in command of his numidians and they meet with the carthaginian cavalry route them and chase them from the battlefield now hannibal's strength as we've said is in his war elephants and he places them in the front line 80 of them terrifying sight uh the roman front lines you know they're kind of quaking in their sandals but scipio has prepared for this onslaught and again remember the infantry like the cavalry are very very well drilled much better drilled than any roman army before them in history and so when the elephants charge them they essentially step aside and open up corridors down which the elephants just go rampaging and they kind of burst out the other side and they can be kind of easily tracked down and eliminated that way so that's hannibal's strongest card played and it you know it hasn't worked and so what now happens is that it comes down to the infantry these great rival blocks of men on foot and they advance and they smash into each other and to quote polybius many fell on both sides fighting with fierce determination where they stood but at length the squadrons of massinissa and of laelius returned from their pursuit of the carthaginian cavalry and arrived by a stroke of fortune at the crucial moment and the result dominic listeners is that scipio is able to inflict on Hannibal the kind of wipeout that he had so often inflicted on the Romans the irony of it yeah the irony and Hannibal himself takes horse he manages to flee the disaster but according to Polybius um 20 ,000 of Hannibal's men are left dead on the battlefield and the same number are taken prisoner and the romans by contrast lost only 1 500 men and again to quote polybius this was the result of the final battle between these two commanders and it decided the war crikey so what a turnaround from the battles of late trasamine or can i and a question for you is there a world in which the battle of zama goes differently or do the roman institutional advantages at this point do they outweigh the carthaginian strong points so heavily that there's basically no way hannibal can win this battle i mean anything can happen in a battle right against a less competent commander and against less well-trained troops you can imagine hannibal winning but it's clear that um the effects of the fighting um over you know these these decade and more has been to hone the roman army into a much more lethal killing machine than had been at the start of the war.

34:35They're much better drilled. They have the gladius now, this stabbing sword that they've borrowed from the Spaniards. It makes their infantry superb. But the other factor I think which dooms Hannibal in this battle is, as we said, he doesn't have cavalry. And Hannibal's great genius has always been for coordinating infantry and cavalry. And it just doesn't work. And the one card he really had, his elephants, the Romans know how to deal with them. They're frightening, but they know how to cope with them. How much do those factors, so the extraordinary preparedness and proficiency of the Roman infantry, but also the Carthaginian lack of cavalry, how much do they reflect a deeper issue, which is Rome's institutional resources compared with Carthage's economic resources, manpower and so on?

35:20I mean, absolutely, because Rome's great strength throughout has been her manpower. And Carthage has always opted to rely on mercenaries. so it's that classic thing where basically you can lose and lose and lose but one day if you win you win the whole thing yeah if you're the bigger power essentially and by this point rome is indisputably the bigger power because um over the course of the war she has occupied the whole of sicily and spain of course yeah and she's in the process of conquering the um the road that joins uh spain to italy which will become the provincia or provence as it's still called to this day so southern france southern gaul so the carthaginians have rolled the dice hannibal has gambled and he has lost and the result of this i mean they probably thought well we have nothing to lose but they do but now they discovered precisely what they do have to lose because scipio's terms when they return to the negotiating table are that much harsher precisely because the carthaginians didn't agree immediately so the indemnity is going to be even bigger and uh what is more it's going to be paid over 50 years so that is a deliberate policy of tying the carthaginians down crippling their economy for half a century.

36:28They cannot go to war without explicit Roman permission. So that essentially means that the Romans have now taken over Carthage's foreign policy. And previously, they'd been permitted 20 warships. Now they can only have 10. But the guy who is laughing, I mean, the guy who's really come out well from this, of course, is Masinissa, the Numidian king. And Scipio confirms him as king, not just over his own tribal federation, but over Sifax's, Numidians as well. And I think even more faithfully, and whether this was a deliberate policy to create trouble or not, it's unclear, but I mean, it definitely will create trouble.

37:09The peace terms imposed on the Carthaginians obliged them, and I quote, to restore to Masinissa all the houses, territory, cities, and other property which had belonged to him or to his ancestors. So effectively, this is to leave Carthage with its own hinterland but what the borders are between that hinterland and Numidia is very unclear and you know Masanissa will obviously have one point the Carthaginians will have another Masanissa is an ally of Rome the Carthaginians are not allowed to go to war without Roman permission you can see that it is you know this is going to be a sea of troubles for the Carthaginians.

37:51Yeah, and it will give Masinissa all kinds of opportunities, won't it, for bad behaviour in the future. So there are a lot of Carthaginians, presumably, when these terms come in, even now, after their defeat at Zama, they must still be thinking, God, is there anything we can do to avoid signing up to this? You know, rather like, I mean, the obvious comparison is Germany at the end of the First World War, right? I mean, that's the shadow that's hanging over this whole story. Or Hitler in the bunker. Right. Could you go down in flames? Yeah, it's that bad. And there is actually a Carthaginian senator called Gisco who stands up and makes this case to a public assembly.

38:28But Hannibal hears him and he is infuriated and he physically hauls Gisco down from the rostrum where he's standing with his own hands. And this is not acceptable behaviour at all. And so everyone is very cross with him. And Hannibal apologises very gracefully. And he says, look, I haven't been in the city since I was nine or whatever. I've been living in an army camp all these decades. My manners are very rough and ready. So I do apologise. However, he then goes on to say, Gisco is mad if he thinks that these terms from Scipio are bad. They could have been much, much worse. And he says, you know, we will still be governing ourselves.

39:12There will not be a Roman garrison planted in the middle of our city. We still have, you know, our hinterland. And that hinterland is very rich and prosperous and fertile. And he says he makes an appeal to the Carthaginian people. I beg you not even to debate the matter. Instead, pray with one single voice that the Roman people will ratify Scipio's terms. And of course, Hannibal is the great enemy of Rome. He is the man who, year after year after year, has been in the front line fighting the Romans. And for him now to say we have to make peace means that there can really be no arguing with the case that he's making.

39:50Yeah, of course. If the guy who's the hero of the Carthaginian cause is saying, let's do a deal, they're clearly going to do a deal. And so in the long run, they do. The Carthaginians agree. Scipio in Rome gets approval from the Senate for his treaty. and at last i mean this great war i mean capital g capital w a war that has gone on for almost 20 years it is over and actually this is kind of um the end for both hannibal and scipio as well because their time in the sun you know the opportunity to shine has now been been taken away it's certainly the end of their military careers neither of them will command armies ever again.

40:35But Hannibal, I mean, he remains the dominating figure in the Carthaginian state. And he actually proves very impressive as a civilian leader. He streamlines the finances in Carthage. There's kind of endless fraud, embezzlement and so on. And he appreciates that Carthage is going to need every last bit of coin that it can scrounge together. and he also democratizes the carthaginian government so he is essentially a populist he's not popular with his fellow carthaginian aristocrats but he's very very popular with the mass of the carthaginian people and so he introduces reforms that are designed to weaken the hold of the carthaginian aristocracy on the justice system and simon hornblower a great ancient historian author of a brilliant um dual biography of hannibal and scipio describes him as an energetic left-wing innovator left-wing innovator the tony ben of uh wow of carthaginian history um i mean obviously this means that loads of his his fellow senators have even more reason now to loathe him i mean not only are they jealous of him but they they're resentful of him that he's kind of trying to undermine their power but you know he remains massively popular with the carthaginian people and so for now hannibal seems safe enough something quite american about i think the americans love electing generals as presidents and he has returned from the war okay he hasn't won i mean so he's an american general who's um been serving in vietnam but uh he has returned with his luster undimmed i guess for the ordinary carthaginians and what about scipio so So Scipio surely must now sort of glitter as the greatest hero in the Roman pantheon.

42:24He's trailing clouds of glory and he is given a stupefying succession of honours. So he's given a triumph. Interesting that he doesn't insist that Hannibal walks in that triumph. It reflects the fact that Scipio continues to respect Hannibal and that treating Hannibal with respect in a way burnishes his own glory. Because if you humiliate Hannibal, then in a sense, you're downgrading him as an enemy. so i think that's probably what's been going on in scipio's mind anyway he has his triumph he's awarded uh fabius by this point is dead so the title of princeps sonatus chief senator is vacant so scipio takes it and he's given the title of africanus um so scipio the african meaning that he has essentially defeated the africans and livy notes that he was the first general in rome to be celebrated by the name of the people he had conquered.

43:15So Scipio Africanus, I mean, he's clearly a massive, dominating, glamorous, prestigious figure. But it's interesting that he seems to have adjusted less successfully to civilian life than Hannibal. And we've been comparing him on and off throughout this episode in the previous one to the Duke of Wellington, who fought a war in Spain and then met with the greatest enemy of his country and defeated him in a climactic battle that ended that enemy's career. So you could think of Zama as the, you know, the Waterloo of the Punic Wars. And then like the Duke of Wellington, who became prime minister and was a terrible prime minister, Scipio finds it hard to take the Senate with him.