How did Hannibal die?

Twelve years on the run

Zama did not finish Hannibal. As suffete of Carthage he cleaned up the city’s finances and made powerful enemies doing it (who Hannibal was). They told Rome he was plotting with Antiochus III, the Seleucid king. In 195 BC, before Rome could demand him, he slipped away by night, sailed east to Tyre, Carthage’s old mother city, and went on to Antiochus at Ephesus.

Antiochus used him as an admiral and lost his war with Rome anyway. After the king’s defeat at Magnesia, Rome’s peace terms required the king to hand Hannibal over. So he ran again. On Crete, Cornelius Nepos says, he fooled the locals by leaving jars of lead topped with gold in a temple, while his real money traveled hidden inside bronze statues. He ended up in Bithynia, on the Sea of Marmara, with King Prusias I. Pliny even credits him with founding Prusa, today’s Bursa. Fighting for Prusias against Eumenes of Pergamon, Rome’s ally, he won a sea battle by hurling clay pots full of snakes onto the enemy decks.

The last trap

Around 183 BC Titus Quinctius Flamininus, the general who had beaten Philip V of Macedon, came to Prusias as Rome’s envoy. Plutarch says he was there on other business, found Hannibal and would not let it go, although the king pleaded for his guest. Prusias gave in.

Hannibal had always expected this. Plutarch says seven underground passages led out of his room. Nepos says a slave checked every gate of the house and came back with one answer: armed men everywhere. So Hannibal took the poison he had carried for years. In Livy’s account his last words were a sneer: he would now spare the Romans their long anxiety, since waiting for an old man to die had tried their patience. Before Zama, Livy had him warn the young Scipio about fortune.

Rarely does that man consider the uncertainty of events whom fortune hath never deceived. What I was at Trasimenus, and at Cannae, that you are this day.

Poison, a cloak or a sword?

Livy and Nepos both say poison. Plutarch, who knew Livy’s version, adds two others: that Hannibal had a servant strangle him with his own cloak, or that he drank bull’s blood, as Themistocles and Midas were said to have done. Pausanias says he died of a fever three days after cutting his finger on his own drawn sword as he jumped onto his horse. The satirist Juvenal, three centuries later, hides the poison in a ring and mocks that a ring avenged Cannae.

Even the year was disputed. Nepos cites three authors with three different pairs of consuls, which correspond to 183, 182 and 181 BC. He also says Hannibal was in his seventieth year. If he was nine at the oath of 237 BC, he was nearer sixty-four.

Libyssan earth

Plutarch and Pausanias both tell of an oracle: Libyssan, or Libyan, earth would cover Hannibal. He took it to mean Africa and expected to die at home. But Libyssa was also a village on the Bithynian shore, and he was living beside it. It lay on the Gulf of İzmit, in today’s district of Gebze, east of Istanbul. In Pliny’s day only Hannibal’s tomb was left there. The grave has never been securely identified; a memorial ordered by Atatürk has stood near the traditional spot since 1934.

Rome was not proud of the ending. Plutarch says many senators found Flamininus odious and cruel for hunting down an old man, harmless as a bird too old to fly. Scipio Africanus, the rival who had beaten Hannibal, died around the same years, in bitter retirement at Liternum.