David Durham - Pride of Carthage

The attrition of the original army had effects on more than just his melancholy. Each day that he survived, he rose to greater prominence. Bomilcar had not forgotten him after Cannae. It took him a week to find him, but after Imco reported back to his captain the giant sought him out. He came upon him when Imco was huddled over a bowl of beef stew. He had barely touched it, steaming hot as it was, but he knew the broth would be tasteless and the meat stringy, without passion or zest. Food was plentiful for once, but the preparation still painfully primitive. He was still sore, every inch of him, from the fighting. That was why he yelled out so when the general clamped his massive hands down on his shoulders. It felt as if some great eagle had pierced his flesh and was about to carry him aloft. The next moment it felt as if a hyena had clamped down on his genitals—but this was an effect of his own stew, which he had spilled in its entirety onto his lap. He screamed in agony, and for this Bomilcar took to calling him Imco the Howler.

For his bravery at Cannae, the general had Imco's rank raised to captain and put him in charge of a unit of five hundred men. He instructed him to manage their circuitous march south, as Bomilcar was taking his ten thousand to hold the lower reaches of the peninsula. Imco tried to talk his way out of this, but Bomilcar laughed off all his complaints as if they were jokes. It was clear that the man only heard what he wanted to and that for some reason he wanted to make Imco into a fool in the public eye. He was sure this would be obvious to all, but strangely enough when he gave an order the men generally followed it. Despite his doubts, he did know how to imitate authority. When he needed to utter a command, the words came to him. He knew the proper order of march and could measure distance with surprising accuracy.

He got his first taste of battle command against Tiberius Gracchus at Beneventum. The fighting was savage, especially because Gracchus' army was made up of debtors and slaves who had been promised freedom in exchange for victory. They had been instructed to prove themselves by retrieving the heads of the men they killed. This they did, to gruesome effect. Bomilcar conceded defeat and withdrew, quickly, not even pausing to break camp but backing right through it and on. Brave and powerful as he was, the big man was no Hannibal, not even a lesser Barca. To make things worse, Imco was quite sure that the Romans had decided to fight only where Hannibal was not.

Hence he felt a certain amount of relief when late in the summer the commander himself met them outside Tarentum. They desperately wanted the city as an ally, with its marvelous port and protected inner harbor, its Spartan origins and position of leadership among the Greek cities of the south. As a captain Imco now sat at the fringes of councils with the great man, listening to him discourse on the value of a jewel like Tarentum. He spent many hours near enough to study his leader's features and comportment. Hannibal had certainly changed. Aged much faster than the years in passing. Imco still envisioned Hannibal as he had seen him long ago outside Arbocala, in the full bloom of youthful strength, unblemished, confident, with eyes of such glimmering intelligence that he seemed all-knowing, undefeatable. What had the years done to him?

The answer was not obvious. In fact, it was contradictory. To a person who remembered him from years before, Hannibal showed many signs of physical privation. His brows seemed to have lost their grip on his forehead. They slid down and hung like twin black cornices over his eye sockets. His blind orb sucked the vision of others into it. The clouded, scarred tissue seemed to possess a hunger fueled by its inability to look outward anymore. A welt ran from under his breastplate diagonally up his neck, and all manner of nicks, cuts, and lesions peppered his forearms and hands. Occasionally his tunic shifted far enough up his thigh to expose the edge of the ragged spear wound he had received at Saguntum.

If such injuries caught Imco's eye immediately, they also faded in consequence with each following moment. He had heard through some of his lieutenants that portions of the troops—the newest, in fact—grumbled at the slow pace of the summer, suggesting Hannibal had fallen foul of the victorious wind that had earlier propelled him. But these men did not sit so close to him. In truth, the man's single eye glinted with enough energy for two. He sat straight-backed, the muscles of his arms and shoulders taut under his skin. Though he was motionless, it was hard not to stare at him. He looked as if he might snap to his feet at any moment, draw his sword, and slice someone's head off. But this was not to say he seemed angry. He did not. He sat in complete composure. He simply seemed capable of anything, at any moment. No, Imco thought, Hannibal was still formidable. He was battered and worn by the campaign, but the mind behind the man's features had lost none of its sharpness, as he demonstrated in his assault on Tarentum.

He had been sitting outside its gates barely a week when two young men, Philemenus and Nicon, ventured from the city and swore that there was a large contingent intent on switching allegiances. Imco sat with the other officers off to one side, able to hear all that transpired. They said that the Romans had recently treated their countrymen roughly and unfairly. A group of Tarentines had been held in Rome since after Cannae. They were meant to ensure their city's fidelity, but in the previous month some of the group had escaped and made their way home. Whether there was treachery in this was unclear, but the Senate, perhaps showing its nervousness and frustration, accused them of fleeing to the enemy. They ordered the remaining prisoners scourged and then tossed them to their deaths from atop the Tarpeian Rock. The news of this act greatly stirred the Tarentines' anger. The city was still officially a fortress locked against the Carthaginians and guarded by a Roman garrison, but the two men believed that many would like to see this reversed. They wished to gain promises of Carthaginian goodwill toward them and their people. This guaranteed, they would do what they could to open the city.

Hannibal did not answer their proposal directly. He spoke through his translator, although Imco knew he did this primarily for the benefit of the monolinguals among his officers. “Just how did you escape the city, considering that it's the locked fortress that you call it?” he asked.

Philemenus, the shorter of the two and the more talkative, said, “That's easy. The Roman guards know us well. They let us out to hunt boar. Every now and then we bring them a—”

“You say you leave and enter the city often?”

“Of course. At all hours. Sometimes our hunts—”

Hannibal cut off the man's speech with a single raised hand. He let the silence linger a moment while he thought, and then said, “Friends, you were wise to come to me. Ambitious. And you've planted in me the seed of a plan . . .”

For the next two weeks, Philemenus became quite the hunter. He left the city almost daily, often returning late at night laden with deer and the occasional wild swine. As the Romans grew accustomed to this, and to gifts of fresh meat, Hannibal also let the rumor circulate that he was ill with a fever, bed-bound and in fear for his life. He then sent out a select force of ten thousand infantrymen with four days' rations and orders to march at night and hide themselves away in a ravine very near the city. On the chosen evening, Hannibal met the troops and approached one of the side gates. Inside, Nicon dispatched the unwary guards with a dagger and then let Hannibal through. The army streamed in behind him, as quietly as possible.

This much Imco saw with his own eyes, but at the city's far gate Philemenus—shadowed by a thousand Libyans—served as does the smaller of a crab's two pincers. He shouted up to the guards to let him in and quickly, for he was burdened with an enormous boar. They admitted him through the wicket gate, along with three soldiers disguised as herdsmen aiding him with the corpse. The guards had bent to gawk at the beast, and this became the last thing they ever did as living beings. Soon the main gate was opened and the Libyans strolled in.