David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Publius had orchestrated the impossible. He had encircled an army larger than his own, simply by moving his various troops about in unexpected ways. The Libyans in the center were as dead on their feet as all of the Romans trapped shoulder to shoulder at Cannae.

Yet the matter was decided not by men but by four-legged creatures. The elephants—which had been stung again and again by the skirmishers' javelins—spun and careened in toward the center of the army. In pain and fury, the creatures moved heedless of which men they trampled, which they swatted out of the way with tusks and trunks. The drivers atop them smashed them about the head and yanked their ears and roared at them to change course. But it was no good. The elephants turned as if by common agreement and each cut a swath of grisly death toward the Carthaginian heart. With this, the battle collapsed. From then on Publius commanded a rout.

Mago stared and stared at what he saw, so long and intensely that he was saved only when one of his guards jabbed his horse in the rear with a spear. As he hurtled off on his bucking horse he called for a retreat to be sounded. With that the troops gave up all semblance of discipline. They turned and fled, Romans fast behind them. The sky opened above them in a sudden outburst of rain. This slowed the Roman advance. Mago fought to keep the army moving through the night, but the distance they covered in the stumbling dark was not enough. In the morning the Romans followed on their heels, leaving corpses like wayposts marking their path. Despite all Mago's dismay at the fact, eventually he, Hanno, and five thousand mounted soldiers—Massylii and Libyans mostly—dashed before the body of the army in undisguised flight.

For much of the long summer, Imco found himself standing just behind Hannibal's shoulder, watching as Fortune favored one side and then the other. Marcellus became the sharpest thorn in Hannibal's side, single-handedly trying to undo all he had accomplished. Only a fortnight after Hannibal left Casilinum, he had retaken it through siege and treachery. Capuans had garrisoned the city—not the best of troops but, considering its natural defenses, even they should have held it. But they lost their nerve, scared, no doubt, by Marcellus' growing reputation. They struck a deal with the Roman for their surrender, in return for which they would be allowed to return to their city unmolested. But when they strolled through the gates the waiting Romans pounced on them and hacked them beyond recognition, punishment for crimes that they believed predated this betrayal.

Casilinum was not the only setback: Fabius Maximus retook Tarentum, Claudius Nero mauled a band of five hundred Numidians, Livius Salinator surprised a Carthaginian admiral off the coast near Neapolis, frightening the cautious sailor back to Sicily. But more often the Roman foolishness flared so brightly that it left Imco shaking his head in amazement. There was Tiberius Gracchus, for example. Overconfident after his rout of Bomilcar's forces, Gracchus marched too close to Hannibal. His guides, perhaps having mistaken their route in all innocence, abandoned him the moment they spotted Numidian riders. This set the slave army in turmoil, a situation easily exploited. Watching this from the height where his troops stood in reserve, Imco was struck by the thought that battles were won or lost on the basis of a single factor that each and every soldier controlled. Not the hand of any god, not the cunning of any one leader, not superiority in arms or training: none of these mattered as much as the bravery of individual men. Perhaps slaves could be expected to understand that least of all. They panicked, all at the same moment. The matter was decided, and Tiberius Gracchus perished in the ensuing rout.

Soon after Gracchus' death, the Romans fell under the spell of a centurion named Centenius Paenula. Some recalled that on the day of his birth considerable prodigies had occurred. Another scholar connected clues from several of the ancient texts and announced that the young soldier's name was destined to sound in glory throughout the ages. Striking in appearance, tall and fine-featured, he did not have to do much to convince the Senate that he was just the one chosen by the gods to strike a blow at Hannibal. With the remnants of Gracchus' army and a horde of enthusiastic volunteers, he marched into Lucania, met Hannibal, and promptly offered up all eight thousand of his force for sacrifice. They were slaughtered down to the last man. Centenius Paenula, it turned out, was not a name that would ring down through the ages.

Imco was in the very room at Herdonea when Hannibal met with a foolish magistrate who dared to drink his wine and accept his gifts, but begged more time to decide whether he could deliver his people to Hannibal's side. The commander nodded at all of this and spoke graciously. Of course, he said, more time was reasonable. He was, after all, only prosecuting the greatest war the Mediterranean had ever seen. If the magistrate needed to think this over, he could do so, by all means. Hannibal and his entire army would wait on him. The magistrate might or might not have recognized the irony in the commander's voice, but when he stood to leave Hannibal made all clear. The magistrate could have as long as he needed to decide, except that he must do so before the wine he had just drunk escaped his body. The man looked at him in mystification.

“You see,” Hannibal said, “I happily give wine to my friends, but a man who drinks my wine and then rejects my friendship is a thief. I'd like to know which you are before you piss my goodwill onto the ground. Take as long as you want, but before you loose your bladder I must know what you are to me. Perhaps you should sit down again.”

Herdonea was soon his. As was Caulonia. For a time that city's magistrates and officers held out in the citadel with their families, refusing to surrender: They were well provisioned and believed that Nero—with yet another Roman army—would soon come to their aid. Hannibal, however, conceived of a way to stir them from the nest. Some bored Balearics had come across a shallow cave teeming with snakes, hundreds or thousands of them. Hannibal had the creatures gathered up and placed in large urns. In the gray light just before dawn one morning, he had these hurled into the citadel with catapults. Most of the urns smashed against the walls, but several landed atop the structure. They exploded into jagged shards of writhing, slithering life.

The Caulonians, waking to this commotion, cried out that Hannibal's gods had called upon them a plague of serpents. Women took up the shout, and children wailed with fright. Stumbling and running through the half-light inside the cramped citadel, the people panicked. Guards jumped from the top of the tower, thudding dully against the dew-licked turf. One leaped in a different direction than the rest and fell in straight-legged horror, so stiff that his legs anchored him in a mound of dirt thrown up by the diggers. His ankles snapped at the impact, but he sank to the thighs and stood trapped there, howling. The Balearics, arguing that this was all their doing and that therefore to them went the sport, used the man for target games. They slung their tiny pellets at the swaying figure, battering his chest, knocking out his teeth, and bashing in an eye and tearing chunks of flesh from his biceps. The man died shortly after they began betting on who could shoot into his scrotum in a way that left the missiles sitting in the sacs, twins to the balls naturally at home there.

The magistrates, after receiving assurances of fair treatment, gave up the citadel. Reasonable behavior, Imco thought. If Hannibal could make the sky rain vipers, what chance did they have against him?

Not even Marcellus could last forever. He and Crispinus both perished near Venusia in an episode surprising only in its anticlimactic result. The two generals had each encamped on the far side of a growth of knobby hills. Hannibal, on approaching them, noticed the hills and sent Numidians out in the night to secure them. This they managed, while also keeping their presence secret. The Romans, however, soon noticed the same feature. The two generals, believing themselves safe, rode out to inspect the territory personally. The Numidians recognized them at once and sprang a trap that killed Marcellus on the spot. Crispinus died days later from his spear wounds.