Second Punic War

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This war is covered at length in The Book of the Ancient Romans by Dorothy Mills on pages 140-172. I would encourage you to read it, however, I have provided a summary below.

Also, if you like the YouTube Channel Extra History, they have done a very good treatment of this whole war in four episodes. They are each about ten minutes long and are pretty entertaining. Warning: They can be a bit crude at times.

• The First Punic War
• The Second Punic War Begins
• The Second Punic War Rages On
• The Conclusion of the Second Punic War

Mercenary Uprising

In the last lesson, we saw Rome beat Carthage on Sicily and send Hamilcar Barca running back to Africa. Hamilcar was not done, he was filled with rage towards Rome.

This defeat left the government of Carthage holding a bill for a sizeable debt that would have to be paid to Rome, but they had a more pressing concern. That mercenary army that they had used for the First Punic War was now holding their hand out looking for payment for their services. When Carthage said that it couldn’t pay them, they decided to declare war and take their payment by force.

The government was forced to turn to Hamilcar and his army to settle this uprising and he did over the course of several years, with payment up-front for his army of course.

Hamilcar and Hannibal to Spain

After this had been settled, Hamilcar went to Spain. His plan was to increase Carthaginian power and wealth, all while raising up an army that would be ready and able to defeat Rome. He took his young son, Hannibal, with him and made him swear that he would never hold friendship with the Romans.

As Hannibal grew, he became a brilliant general and he did what his father had set out to do. For around 20 years, he grew the Carthaginian empire in Spain and took over most of the Iberian peninsula. However, there was a Greek colony named Saguntum that Hannibal sought to besiege.

Remember that Greece and Rome were allies and ambassadors from Rome were sent in 218 BC to Carthage to ask that Hannibal be delivered over to them. Rome felt that if he was not, they would take it as a declaration of war. This was exactly what Hannibal was looking for. He continued the siege of Saguntum and within eight months it had fallen and that meant that Rome and Carthage were now back at war.

Hannibal Invades Italy

Hannibal believed that if he put pressure on Italy’s homeland that he could keep Carthage from being invaded, so he set out with around ninety-thousand foot-soliders, nine-thousand horsemen, and a large number of war-elephants. He went through Gaul (southern France) and pretty easily put down the Gallic people then set out to cross the Rhone river and then the Alps before entering Italy from the north.

This was not an easy journey. It had been 5 months since they left Spain, and they spent 15 days crossing the Alps. The army suffered enormous losses, possibly half of the men, and large numbers of the animals, as well as much of their supplies, had been lost, but they made it. They were now in the Po Valley region of Italy and believed that no great barriers lay between their army and Rome itself.

However, when Rome had heard of the declaration of war, they sent an army under Consul Scipio to Spain to meet the Carthaginians there head-on. Upon arriving, they found that Hannibal’s army had gone north towards Italy. They were shocked! They set out to return to Italy to meet the army in the Po Valley.

Rome is no match for Hannibal

Scipio led his army into battle and was utterly defeated by Hannibal’s forces, and Scipio himself was badly injured, and was saved by his then eighteen-year-old son who will come to be known as Scipio Africanus (We’ll see him later.) After this defeat, the remainder of the Roman army retreated and waited for the other Roman Consul, Sempronius, to join them with fresh reserves of men.

This new group of Romans now faced Hannibal’s army and was again defeated. As winter was approaching, neither army engaged in battle. Hannibal’s men were able to rest. They had earned that winter rest in the lush Po Valley. But they were not going to rest for long.

In the early Spring of 217 BC, Hannibal roused his men and had them cross the Apennine mountains in order to get behind the Roman forces which were now led by a new Consul Flaminius. He lured the Romans into an ambush at Lake Trasimene. There, Hannibal’s men swept down on both sides of the Roman army and cut them to pieces forcing thousands of men into the lake where they drowned.

After this humiliating defeat, Rome decides to appoint a dictator to take control of things since they looked pretty dire. The man they appoint, Fabius, does not attack Hannibal head on, but recognizes that Hannibal is low on supplies and decides to irritate him and his forces by only engaging in minor skirmishes and avoiding Hannibal’s traps. In hindsight, we see this as wise, but the people of Rome hated it and wanted bloody revenge. Fabius gives back control after his 6 months are up and they elect a new consul who promises to gather a giant army and wipe out Hannibal and his army.

Slaughter at Cannae

The newly elected Consuls, Aemilius Paulus and Varro, do what they promised and raise an army of 80,000 men. This was the largest army that Rome had ever sent out at one time. In 216, at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal beat the vastly larger Roman force with cunning and tactical brilliance. He forced the Roman troops into a position where they could be flanked by his stronger troops and cavalry and the slaughter was relentless.

At Cannae, Hannibal wiped out at least 70,000 men including Consul Aemilius Paulus and 80 senators. After the death or imprisonment of 130,000 Roman troops in two years, 40% of Rome’s Italian allies defected to Carthage, giving it control over most of southern Italy. The foreign kingdoms of Macedonia and Syracuse joined the Carthaginian side as well, and the Romans were forced to send troops to those locations as well to keep these foreign forces from joining with Hannibal to take Rome itself.

War Leaves Italy

This was the First Macedonian War in Macedonia, which ran at the same time as the conclusion of the Second Punic War. Also, the name Archimedes is synonymous with buoyancy, science, engineering, and even a death ray, but Archimedes showed his worth during the attack and siege of Syracuse up until the end when they fell to Rome and he lost his life.

From 215–210 the Carthaginian army and navy launched repeated amphibious assaults to capture Roman Sicily and Sardinia but were ultimately pushed back. Finally, the Romans understood Fabius’s tactics and they adopted the Fabian strategies. During this period that others would have surrendered or sought terms with an invading force, the Romans continued to fight, believing the saying, “You are never defeated until you admit defeat.”

Roman armies recaptured all of the great cities that had joined Carthage and defeated a Carthaginian attempt to send Hannibal reinforcements in 207. Southern Italy was devastated by the combatants, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or enslaved.

But in Spain, which served as a major source of silver and manpower for the Carthaginian army, a Roman expeditionary force was seeking to undermine the Carthaginian stronghold, but Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal was in charge there and he was no slacker. He killed the general Scipio that had been wounded in the first battle with Hannibal.

After this victory, Hasdrubal attempted to cross the Alps as well to join forces with Hannibal in Italy and take Rome together to avenge their father. However, Roman forces caught Hasdrubal’s army by surprise and Hasdrubal was killed along with most of the Carthaginian forces. This was a difficult blow to Hannibal and to make things worse, the informed him that his brother had been killed by tossing his head into the camp for Hannibal to find.

Scipio Africanus Defeats Carthage

Back in Spain, Scipio Africanus, the son of the Scipio that was defeated by Hasdrubal, captured Carthage’s capital city in Spain in 209 and pushed the Carthaginians from Spain completely by 206. He was made Consul and declared his plans to invade Carthaginian Africa in 204.

He was able to inflict two severe defeats on Carthage in Africa by making an alliance with the king of Numidia on Carthage’s southern border. Numidia had been the supplier of most of Carthage’s heavy cavalry, including their war elephants. Once those superior forces became Rome’s then the war was nearly over.

The Carthaginian government was forced to send for Hannibal’s army in Italy to come and protect Carthage. The final engagement between Scipio and Hannibal took place at Zama in Africa in 202 and resulted in Hannibal’s defeat and the imposition of harsh peace conditions on Carthage.

Carthage was forced to give up any claim to islands between Africa and Italy. They had to pay an annual tribute of two hundred talents for fifty years. They had to give up all of their war elephants and were to wage no war except with Rome’s consent. Perhaps the worst punishment, they were forced to watch their fleet of ships (commercial and military) around 500 ships dragged out into the sea and burned. They were left a free nation, but one that had been severely scarred.

The Second Punic War overthrew the established balance of power of the ancient world and Rome rose to become the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin for the next 600 years. How would things have been different if Rome had given up after the Battle of Cannae, or if Hannibal had joined forces with his brother and attacked Rome directly? I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.

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