Who was Hannibal?

A son of the lightning

Hannibal was born around 247 BC into Carthage’s leading military family, most likely in Carthage itself, near today’s Tunis (where Carthage is today). His name means roughly “Baal is gracious” in Punic, the city’s Phoenician language. His father, Hamilcar, was nicknamed Barca, probably “lightning,” and had never lost a battle to Rome in Sicily during the First Punic War. Historians give the nickname to the whole family. Hannibal had two younger brothers, Hasdrubal and Mago, and all three would spend their lives fighting Rome.

In 237 BC, before Hamilcar sailed to Spain, he offered a sacrifice. His nine-year-old son begged to go with him. Decades later Hannibal himself told what happened next to King Antiochus, to prove his hatred of Rome was real.

On his accepting with delight, and, like a boy, even begging to do it besides, his father took him by the hand, led him up to the altar, and bade him lay his hand on the victim and swear never to be the friend of the Romans.

Raised in the camps of Spain

He grew up in his father’s army, while the Barcas built a new Carthaginian empire in Spain on silver mines and Spanish soldiers. A Spartan named Sosylus taught him Greek, marched with him and wrote a history of his wars. In 221 BC, at about twenty-six, the army acclaimed him general. Livy, who loathed him, still admits that he slept on the ground in a soldier’s cloak among the sentries, first into battle and last out. In the same breath Livy charges him with cruelty and treachery, the standard Roman picture of a Carthaginian.

Fifteen years in Italy

In 219 BC he besieged Saguntum, a Spanish town friendly to Rome, and started the Second Punic War. Then he did the unthinkable and marched 37 elephants and an army from Spain over the Pyrenees and the Alps, a story told in did Hannibal cross the Alps with elephants?

In Italy he won three crushing victories in three years: the Trebia in 218 BC, Lake Trasimene in 217 BC and Cannae in 216 BC, where his center gave way on purpose and his wings and cavalry closed around the Roman army. In the flooded marshes on the way south he lost the sight of one eye, the right one according to Cornelius Nepos. Yet Rome never asked for peace. He stayed in Italy fifteen years, never took Rome, and in 202 BC lost the last battle, at Zama in Africa, to Scipio (why he lost).

Statesman, exile, legend

Peace did not end his career. Elected suffete, one of Carthage’s two chief magistrates, he went after corrupt officials so the city could pay Rome without new taxes. His enemies denounced him to Rome, and in 195 BC he fled east. He advised King Antiochus III against Rome, then served the king of Bithynia, in today’s Turkey, and around 183 BC took poison rather than be handed over (how Hannibal died).

Plutarch tells of a meeting with Scipio at Ephesus. Asked who was the greatest general, Hannibal named Alexander, then Pyrrhus, then himself. And if you had beaten me? asked Scipio. Then, said Hannibal, I would put myself first. No portrait of him survives that scholars can trust. His battle plan at Cannae is still taught in military academies.