Why did Hannibal fail to convert his victory at Cannae into a comprehensive

defeat of the Romans in Italy in subsequent years?

Soon after the Battle of Cannae, one Maharbal, a cavalry commander, was said to have

questioned Hannibal as to why he did not march on Rome.1 Hannibal might well have

answered that it was neither possible, nor preferable, to arrange the destruction of the city. If

Rome would not enter into negotiations, and the dictator M. Iunius Pera assured Hannibal

they would not, then the war must be fought in Italy, rather than at the Colline Gate. Whether

or not Hannibal apprehended such a rejection, and prepared the Italian counter-strategy in

advance, or was entirely surprised, and forced to adapt his strategy, the fact remains that his

victory thereafter depended very much upon a tactic of last resort. Unable now to fight the

kind of war he had budgeted for, a war which convention told him he should already have

won, he was, after Cannae, subject to new military parameters, which did not suit so well.

Hannibal may still have won, if all had gone well, if the allied communities proved both

amenable and competent, if consuls could be goaded into yet more disastrous battles, if food

could be found and reinforcements gathered, and if Punic lieutenants could uniformly prosper

in Spain and Sicily. The precariousness of this compromised endeavour is self-evident, and it

seems clear that after Cannae, Hannibal’s prospects for victory, far from improving, were

diminished. Thus, the substance of this essay will represent a forensic analysis of how and

why Hannibal failed to conquer Italy. Though, some attention will be paid to the more

complex idea of whether a comprehensive defeat of Roman Italy was ultimately required for

Hannibal to achieve his original end of forcing Rome to the negotiating table.

Assuming Hannibal had envisioned a quick war, a small but expert force, acting under the

supervision of a talented general, may have sufficed. Indeed, the evidence confirms the

assumption. In the aftermath of Cannae, as Livy records, Hannibal dispatched an envoy,

1 Liv. 22.51

1

Carthalo, to Rome to discuss terms of surrender.2 At the same time, the Carthaginian was

undertaking to define a treaty with Philip of Macedon, wherein the future international

condition of an already seemingly defeated Rome was to be arranged.3 These are not the

labours of a general anticipating the continuation of a war. Faced with the prospect, after his

rejection by the Senate, of refitting his army for a war of attrition, Hannibal must have been

confronted with the problem of manpower. Polybius recalls that Hannibal commanded, at

Cannae, 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.4 Allied recruits notwithstanding, the number is

low, especially when one considers that Rome was prepared, in the years 214-211, to field,

according to Brunt, over 75,000 legionaries, and multiple consular and pro-praetorian armies.5

Polybius’ recollection that Rome could, only nine years prior, choose from a potential

manpower reserve of over 800,000 is problematic, yet Livy’s recitation of a healthy census

figure of 270,713 may be more credible.6 The Senate was also of a mind to resort to a number

of emergency measures to ensure the replenishment of their forces. Once a situation of

tumultus was declared, magistrates could speed up recruitment by irregularly absorbing

available citizens into their army. Slaves could be confiscated from propertied citizens by the

state, and turned into marines or legionaries, as could freed prisoners, 17 year-olds, and a

mass of proletarii, who could be conveniently reinvented as assidui after a 27% reduction in

the property qualification.7 Overall, a picture emerges of a Roman reserve durable enough to

recover from several of Diodorus’ ‘Pyrrhic victories’, and persist in the face of a mercenary

enemy whose seasoned troops were a perpetually imperiled commodity.8 If it was Hannibal’s

plan to deprive Rome of its reserve by detaching allies, it was a poorly conceived plan, for, as

2 Liv. 22.583 Pol. 7.94 Pol. 3.1145 Brunt in Erdkamp 2011: 676 Pol. 2.24; Liv. Per 207 Liv. 22.57 & 23.148 Diod. 22.6.2

2

Fronda makes plain, nothing short of ‘massive allied defections’ would have sufficed, and

massive defections were unlikely, considering the enforced hold Rome had on Etruria and

Latium.9 A comprehensive defeat at this time was as unrealistic as a comprehensive

appropriation of the allied force.

Nor were the Italians who Hannibal did succeed in recruiting of especial value. Those

seduced by Hannibalic treaties of alliance more often than not capitalized on Hannibal’s

rather naïve promise of freedom and autonomy by offering to take him at his word. Indeed,

Hannibal’s Campanian treaty of 216 includes, as Livy relates it, a clause guaranteeing that ‘no

Campanian citizen should have to fight or discharge any duty against his will’.10 Allies who

would not fight for Hannibal, but who still demanded his protection, were not only militarily

useless, but were, in fact, nothing short of a millstone round his neck. Nor were those who did

agree to fight helpful to the war effort. For example, the Bruttian force led by Hanno to the

siege of Locri, upon being denied their due booty after Locri was admitted to the Carthaginian

alliance without a fight, were quite content to abandon their commander, and embark upon a

siege of Croton, from whom they yet hoped to extract a profit, a profit not to be shared with

Hannibal.11 Fronda makes the point that ‘age-old intra-regional competition helped to

undermine the effectiveness of the Hannibalic strategy’, and the Bruttian example certainly

appears to support this idea.12 In effect, once cut loose from Rome, and Roman repression, the

south proved no prize at all for Hannibal. In fact, the situation in the south, post-Cannae,

could be seen as instructive of why Hannibal failed to solicit the massive defections he

needed. Arguably, Hannibal was probably correct in his assumption that the assorted Italian

allies did not love Rome, but incorrect in his belief that they would rebel, precisely because,

as the Bruttian example suggests, they were well aware that, given adequate license, and

9 Fronda 2010: 4210 Liv. 23.711 Liv. 24.212 Fronda 2010: 52

3

absent the control of Rome, their own neighbours were a far more incorrigible force. This

appears a more likely explanation than the alternative, that the socii were ‘existentially and

ideologically’ bound to Rome,13 for certainly Fabius had little confidence in such notions.14

For as long as Hannibal was forced to rely upon an unruly and demanding south, no

comprehensive defeat of an organized Roman interior was likely to materialise, and the fact

remained that Hannibal had made an investment in the south, and increasingly lacked the

capital to try elsewhere.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Hannibal, recalling his extraordinary victories at

Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae, and the losses he inflicted on multiple great armies, may have

considered battle itself as a way of neutralizing the Roman manpower advantage. Hannibal

had already proved that vast numbers did not guarantee victory, for, as Fronda points out, ‘the

Romans did enjoy a significant advantage in manpower relative to the forces under

Hannibal’s command at the outbreak of the war’.15 It had availed them nothing in the past, so

one can perhaps understand why Hannibal was yet confident. However, the Roman

introduction of the ‘Fabian strategy’ proved fatal to Hannibal’s aspirations. By reverting to an

evasive posture, denying battle and striking at Hannibal’s allies, rather than at Hannibal

himself, Rome could at last make their manpower work for them. Both Livy and Polybius

demonstrate that even Hannibal’s feigned march on Rome in 211 did not draw out the Roman

army.16 Polybius, too, remarks that, thanks to the Fabian strategy, the Romans remained

‘secure in the knowledge that these same [Carthaginian] horsemen who had defeated them in

pitched battles could not touch them’.17 He also refers to the Roman tendency to ‘dog the

enemy’s movements’.18 Lazenby brings into question the notion that the Fabian strategy was

13 Zimmerman 2011: 28714 Liv. 23.2215 Fronda 2010: 3716 Liv. 26.7-12; Pol. 9.3-717 Pol. 9.418 Pol. 9.3

4

actually successful, by pointing out that the Romans still lost decisively at Herdonea in 210,

and twice at Canusium in 209, but to this author’s mind the very fact that Hannibal was

allowed but three such engagements in a decade of total war confirms the value of the

strategy.19 By the end of the Battle of Cannae, Rome had lost some 82,000 men to pitched

battles; the need for a new tactic was self-evident.20 That Hannibal failed to anticipate this

need, and continued to predicate his war on the assumption that the Romans could not adapt,

reveals a profound capacity for miscalculation on his part, of the sort that precluded

comprehensive victory.

The Fabian strategy, insofar as it altered the dynamic of the war, changing a formerly

rapid-fire conflict into a ponderous war of attrition, also served to compromise Hannibal’s

army on an economic level. The Romans could utilise their own existing infrastructure to

support static front-lines, relying on local supply shipments from depots such as that on

Volturnus River, for example, which was in turn supplied by Etruscan and Sardinian

shipments via Ostia.21 Livy recalls that, in addition to the Volturnus store, Rome could afford

to fortify supply depots at Casilinum and Puteoli, and as such ‘send all grain cargoes

immediately to the camp’.22 In stark contrast, Hannibal was largely restricted to living off the

land, a process which not only made supply unreliable, but also guaranteed that Hannibal

could not maintain the kind of static position that Rome favoured, precisely because

‘Campania was less and less able to sustain his army’.23 Nor could Hannibal prevent the

Romans from scorching the land, in an attempt to further restrict his options. Livy recalls a

Fabian law of 215 instructing allies to burn agrarian land and surplus, and Polybius points out

that whenever armies were forced to forage further afield their operational efficiency was duly

19 Lazenby 1996: 4620 Brunt in Erdkamp 2011: 6721 Liv. 25.2022 Liv. 25.2223 Erdkamp 2011: 73

5

reduced.24 Nor could Hannibal receive shipments from abroad in the same way the Romans

could, for, owing to Roman naval control of both the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts, and the

Sicilian routes, the Hannibalic force was essentially isolated. Ultimately, one need only

consider the miserable fate of the Capuans in 213, driven to the point of starvation, and unable

to feed either themselves or Hannibal’s army, to realise what little opportunity Hannibal had

of breaking free of his southern fetters, and attaining to a more comprehensive defeat of the

Roman peninsula at large.

As can be seen, Hannibal was confronted with innumerable logistical problems upon

relocating to the south of Italy after the Roman rejection of his peace. These require treatment,

but so too does the nature of the Roman rejection itself, and the particulars of the intractable

Roman character. Fronda is content to label any such discussion of the Roman character, as a

factor behind their victory, as ‘nebulous’.25 But one might equally argue that just as no

examination of the Persian Wars would be complete without some analysis of the peculiarities

of the Spartan mindset as a factor effecting resistance, so too no examination of the

Hannibalic War can be satisfactorily concluded without consideration of the psychology of an

unconventional Roman people. According to Livy, ‘no other nation could have suffered such

tremendous disasters and not been defeated’.26 The extreme extent to which the Senate was

unwilling even to consider retreat can perhaps be gauged by examining some few of the

extraordinary tactical and legislative provisions enacted, of which many must have stunk in

the nostrils of the conservative elite, and were yet retained. The Fabian strategy of evasion

and harassment itself ran contrary to the martial mentality of the Romans, and even Fabius’

own magister equitum, Minucius, branded the tactics ‘feeble and dilatory’.27 The arming and

fielding of slave and criminal armies, and the relative enfranchisement of the proletarii also

24 Liv. 23.32; Pol. 1.1725 Fronda 2010: 4826 Liv. 22.5427 Pol. 3.90

6

struck at the heart of the ancestral status quo, or ‘constitution’, that at any other time the

Senate was self-evidently loath to tamper with.28 Likewise, the empowering in 216 of the

triumviri mensarii, with exceptional powers to appropriate the wealth of prominent citizens,

and the passing of the tributum duplex in 215, evidences a controversial willingness to bleed

the otherwise inviolable noble houses.29 Livy’s comment, that ‘honour must give way to

expedience’,30 perhaps encapsulates the anomaly of resorting to un-Roman solutions in order

to effect a distinctly Roman inflexibility, which, as Zimmerman makes plain, was ‘a

precondition of the later victory’,31 and an important factor contributing to Hannibal’s

inability to comprehensively defeat the Romans either at home or in Italy.

These are all salient explanations of Hannibal’s inability to overrun Italy, and yet this line

of analysis presupposes that Hannibal did indeed intend to do so. Arguably, this is to miss the

point entirely, for one might well argue that Hannibal’s original end, to strain Roman and

Italian resolve to the point of negotiated capitulation, could still have been achieved even

while the Carthaginian was confined to the south. In effect, Hannibal only required a foothold

in Italy to ensure that the war was prolonged, and it follows that for every year the war

persisted, the Italian desire to fight would be eroded, and the Roman state weakened.

Essentially, Hannibal’s only strategic obligation was to maintain the war on Italian soil;

comprehensive conquest was not strictly necessary. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest

that by 209 Hannibal’s strategy of death by a thousand cuts was working, for Livy describes

how even in Latium those of the 12 colonies who announced that they could no longer supply

Rome with troops did so in order to try and induce Rome to turn their thoughts towards ‘a

treaty of peace’.32 Lazenby certainly appears convinced that it would be ‘the long drawn out

misery of constant war service and devastated fields’ that would vindicate Hannibal’s plan, 28 Liv. 22.57, 23.1429 Liv. 23.21, 23.31, 26.3630 Liv. 23.1431 Zimmerman 2011: 28732 Liv. 27.9

7

rather than any sort of Italian conquest writ large.33 If this be the case, and the argument does

seem intuitive, one might simply argue that the only reason Hannibal failed to defeat the

Romans in Italy was because his colleagues failed to defeat the Romans in Spain, insofar as

the latter loss necessitated in the final instance Hannibal’s return to Africa.

Ultimately, the sheer volume of complex military, economic, strategic and geographical

variables with which Hannibal had to wrestle while entrenched within Italy rendered the

Carthaginian’s plan supremely ambitious. A clear picture emerges of a Hannibalic force less

and less able to prosecute the war on its own terms, much less seize, or re-seize, the initiative.

Hannibal’s army was merely holding on after Cannae, in the hope of extracting a peace that

was never likely to be provided by a Roman state that did not negotiate while vulnerable.

Though it is not necessary to regard Hannibal’s enterprise as doomed, it does seem quite clear

that a comprehensive victory, an Italy-wide reenactment of Cannae, was not possible.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Appian, Punica

Cicero, Brutus

33 Lazenby 1996: 43

8

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica

Livy, Historiae Ab Urbe Condita

Plutarch, Lives

Polybius, Histories

Secondary Sources

Bernstein, A.H. 1994, ‘The Strategy of a Warrior-State: Rome and the Wars against Carthage, 264-201 BC’, in W. Murray, A. Bernstein & M. Knox (eds.) The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, pp. 56-84. Cambridge.

Briscoe, J. 1989, ‘The Second Punic War’, in A.E. Astin, F.W. Walbank, M.W. Frederiksen & R.M. Ogilvie (eds.) The Cambridge Ancient History 8, Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 BC, 2nd ed, pp. 44-80. Cambridge.

Erdkamp, P. 2011, ‘Manpower and Food Supply in the First and Second Punic Wars’, in D. Hoyos (ed.) A Companion to the Punic Wars, pp. 58-76. Oxford

Fronda, M.P. 2010, Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy During the Second Punic War. Cambridge.

Fronda, M.P. 2011, ‘Hannibal: Tactics, Strategy, and Geostrategy’, in D. Hoyos (ed.) A Companion to the Punic Wars, pp. 242-259. Oxford.

Goldsworthy, A. 2000, The Punic Wars. London.

Lazenby, J. 1996, ‘Was Maharbal Right?’, in T. Cornell, B. Rankov & P. Sakin (eds.) The Second Punic War: a Reappraisal, pp. 39-48. London.

Naco del Hoyo, T. 2011, ‘Roman Economy, Finance, and Politics in the Second Punic War’, in D. Hoyos (ed.) A Companion to the Punic Wars, pp. 376-392. Oxford.

Scullard, H.H. 1980, A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BC. London.

Smith, R. 1883, Rome and Carthage: the Punic Wars. London.

Zimmerman, K. 2011, ‘Roman Strategy and Aims in the Second Punic War’, in D. Hoyos (ed.) A Companion to the Punic Wars, pp. 280-298. Oxford.

9