The World

Back in Rome, panic beset the city. Four traitors, Gauls and Greeks, were buried alive on the Forum, a human sacrifice to save the republic, which had lost 200,000 men. Its Italian and foreign allies, including Macedonia, defected to Hannibal. Fabius Warty Delayer restored order, purifying the city with religious rituals. When the tribunes of the army discussed abandoning Italy, young Scipio plunged in and drew his sword, making them swear ‘with all the passion in my heart that I will never desert our homeland. If I wilfully break my oath may Jupiter, Greatest and Best, bring me and my familia a shameful death! Swear the same oath!’ They did. The Romans held their nerve.

The two older Scipios had been sent back to Spain where they won victories against Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal Barca, but now in 211 BC they were both killed. Eager to avenge his father, the younger Scipio, aged twenty-five, requested the command and, since no one else offered themselves, he and his army landed in Spain, where in 209 he defeated Hasdrubal, who was about to leave with reinforcements for Hannibal. Scipio combined dynamic energy with measured diplomacy: as he was notorious as a womanizer, his men hoped to please him by presenting him with a prisoner – the most beautiful woman in Spain – but he returned her to her fiancé, a Spanish chieftain who gratefully joined the Roman side.

Hasdrubal Barca set off with reinforcements for his brother, managing to cross the Alps with another corps of elephants and break into Italy, but on the Metauro River he was killed in a clash with a Roman army commanded by Gaius Claudius Nero, scion of a great patrician clan and ancestor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors, who had Hasdrubal’s head tossed over the fence into Hannibal’s camp.

Two Barca brothers were left alive: Hannibal had now been in Italy for almost fifteen years; he was undefeated, but Rome was undefeatable. He could not deliver the killer blow. The Romans’ losses were punishing, but they an advantage over the Carthaginians – 500,000 potential soldiers of whom somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent served annually while Hannibal depended on mercenaries, and the bad news kept coming. Scipio defeated Mago and conquered Spain; the Numidians rebelled; and Hannibal’s enemies criticized him in Carthage just as Scipio was persuading the Senate to let him attack Africa. Warty Delayer opposed him, but in 204 Scipio, consul at thirty-one, commanding 35,000 men, landed in Africa.

Scipio persuaded the African prince Masinissa, son of a longstanding Carthaginian ally, to change sides. Masinissa – ‘the best man of all the kings of our time’, a shrewd and resourceful Numidian cavalryman who fathered forty-four children – could now counter Hannibal’s cavalry. When his siege of Utica was broken by the Carthaginians, Scipio ambushed their camp, slaughtering 40,000 of their troops, a fiasco from which the city never recovered. Scipio recognized Masinissa as the Berber ruler, setting up his kingdom of Numidia as a Roman ally. Hannibal was recalled, at the age of forty-six: it was twenty-five years since he had last been in Carthage; Mago perished on the journey home. Now in Africa, Hannibal and Scipio faced one another in person. Hannibal mustered 40,000 men and eighty elephants, Scipio had fewer men but more cavalry thanks to King Masinissa.

On 19 October 202, at Zama, Scipio narrowly defeated Hannibal, whose elephants went berserk and charged into the soldiers on their own side. The war had cost the Scipios and Barcas many lives. Hannibal remained in Carthage, where he was elected suffete, organizing the payment of an indemnity and backing democratic reforms, having the Council elected for a year instead of being inducted for life. Masinissa, whose agricultural ingenuity later made his kingdom an essential source of grain for Rome, founded a dynasty that ruled for two centuries.

Now possessing unrivalled auctoritas – sacred authority – Scipio was awarded a triumph,

^* then offered the consulship for life and dictatorship; but, criticized for his luxury and grandeur, he accepted only the victory agnomen Africanus.^*

He then retired.

Anxious lest Carthage recover under Hannibal’s rule, Rome sent envoys to arrest or extradite him. Hannibal fled eastwards to the court of Antiochos III, scion of Seleukos, who was performing astonishing military feats in the east.

DEMETRIOS, KING OF THE INDIANS