After Cannae

The victory of Cannae had great results, though it did not make Hannibal feel strong enough to strike a blow at Rome. First and foremost among these results was the alliance of Capua, the second city in Italy. The Capuans, indeed, were not all of one mind in the matter. It was the people that favoured Carthage; the nobles were for the most part inclined to Rome. It was a noble, however, and one who was married to a lady of the great Roman house of Claudius, that took the lead in this movement. The people rose against the Senate, stripped it of its power, massacred a number of Roman citizens who were sojourning in the town, and sent envoys to invite Hannibal to their city. He was of course delighted to come; Capua, which had more than thirty thousand soldiers of her own, was almost as great a gain as the victory at Cannae. He was near to being assassinated, indeed, on the night of his entering the city, for the son of his entertainer had resolved to stab him at the dinner-table. The next day he was present at a meeting of the Senate. He was full of promises; he undertook that Capua should thereafter be the capital of Italy. Meanwhile he demanded that a leading citizen who had been specially active on the Roman side should be given up to him. The man was arrested, and was sent by Hannibal to Carthage.

The greater part of Central and Southern Italy followed the example of Capua. All the Samnites, with the exception of a single tribe, revolted from Rome; so did Lucania and Bruttii, and so did many of the Greek cities in the south, the chief among them being Crotona. These cities had passed the height of their prosperity, but they were still populous and powerful towns.

It was only the extraordinary tenacity and courage of Rome that enabled her to hold out. The Senate never lost its courage, and, after the first panic was over, the people were ready to stand by their rulers to the last. When Varro, whose rashness and folly had almost ruined his country, returned to Rome, the Senate went out to meet him, and publicly thanked him that he "had not despaired of the commonwealth." As he was of the opposite party in politics, this was a way of saying that all Romans, whatever their way of thinking, must join together to made the best of everything. Nothing that could be done to raise an army was neglected. Bands of brigands were induced to enlist by promises of pardon for past offences; even slaves were recruited. As many as eight thousand soldiers were gained in this way. But when a proposal came from Hannibal that the prisoners of Cannae should be ransomed, the horsemen at £17, the infantry at £10 each, the offer was refused. By great exertions an army was raised, and put under the command of Marcellus, who was probably the best soldier that Rome possessed at the time.

Hannibal had sent his brother Mago to Carthage from the battle-field of Cannae. Introduced into the Senate, he gave a glowing account of what had been done, of the four victories which had been gained, of the two hundred thousand men that had been slain, the fifty thousand that had been taken prisoners. As a practical proof of the truth of his story, he poured out on the floor of the Senate-house a peck of gold rings which had been taken, he said, from Roman soldiers that had been slain in battle. It was only the horsemen, indeed only the upper class of the horsemen, he explained, that were accustomed to wear them. But the practical conclusion of his speech was a demand for help. "The nearer the prospect," he said, "of finishing the war, the more you are bound to support your general. He is fighting far away from home. Pay is wanted for troops; provisions are hard to obtain. And though he has won great victories, he has not won them without some loss. He asks, therefore, for help in men, money, and stores."

The war-party was delighted. One of them turned to Hanno, leader of the opposite faction, and asked him, "Does Hanno still repent of having made war on Rome?" "Yes," replied Hanno, "I still repent, and shall do so till I see peace made again. Your invincible general makes as great demands upon you as if he had been beaten. And as for his prospects for the future, has any Latin city joined him? Has a single man of the thirty-five tribes of Rome deserted to him?'

To these questions Mago could only answer "No!" Hanno asked again, "Has Rome said a word about peace?" Mago could only answer that it had not. Then said Hanno, "We are as far off from the end of the war as we were when Hannibal crossed into Italy. I vote that no help should be sent to prolong a war which can have no good end."

This protest, of course, was useless. The Senate resolved to send four thousand African troops, forty elephants, and a sum of money. And Mago was to go into Spain and raise 20,000 troops to fill up the gaps in the armies there and in Italy. As a matter of fact little was done; at this crisis the Carthaginian government showed but little energy, and Hannibal was left, for the most part, to help himself.

The winter of 216—5 he and his army spent in Capua. Ever since he had started from New Carthage, more than two years before, his men had lived in tents, satisfied with the hard discipline and scanty fare of the camp. Doubtless, they had lost something of their vigour by the time that they took the field again; but there were other and weightier reasons why Hannibal's great plans should end in failure than that his army was spoilt by the luxury of a winter in Capua.

In the next year little was done. Hannibal gained some small successes, and met with some small losses. His chief venture had been the siege of Nola, which, after Capua, was the chief city of Campania. In this he failed, owing chiefly to the skill and energy of Marcellus. To have let a year pass without making a decided advance was in fact to fall back. Still his prospects in some directions had improved. At Syracuse the wise old King Hiero, who had continued to be loyal to Rome, without making an enemy of Carthage, was dead. Hieronymus, his grandson and successor, was a foolish youth, who thought he could do better for himself by joining what seemed to be the winning side. He offered his help to Carthage, asking as the price the supremacy over the whole of Sicily. Philip, King of Macedon, again, seemed ready to join an alliance against Rome. Little advantage, however, was gained in this way. Of what happened to Hieronymus I shall soon have to speak. Philip's action was delayed, first by the accident of his envoys falling into the hands of the Romans as they were on their way back from Hannibal's camp, and afterwards by causes which we have no means of explaining. Anyhow, at the time when his help would have been most valuable to Hannibal and most damaging to Rome, he did nothing.

On the other hand, Carthage suffered a great loss in the complete conquest by their enemies' of the island of Sardinia, which had again fallen into their hands. On the whole, at the end of 215 Hannibal, though he had received no serious check in the field, was in a much worse position than he had been in at the beginning.

The next year also (214) had much the same result. Hannibal made an attempt to seize Tarentum, but failed. There were in this town, as elsewhere, a Carthaginian and a Roman party. The latter got to know what their opponents were planning, and took such precautions, that when Hannibal appeared before the walls of the city he found it prepared for defense; and after vainly lingering in the neighbourhood for a few days, was obliged to depart. In another part of Southern Italy he suffered a serious loss. Hanno, one of his lieutenants, had raised a force of twenty thousand Lucanians. This was defeated at Beneventum by the Roman general Gracchus, who was in command of an army of slaves. Hanno's Lucanian infantry either perished on the field of battle, or dispersed to their own homes; but he escaped himself with about a thousand African cavalry.

The next great event of the war—its exact date is uncertain—was a great gain to Hannibal. The friends of Carthage in Tarentum, though overpowered for the moment, had never given up their plans; and now they found an opportunity for carrying them out. The city had sent hostages to Rome. These had attempted to escape, had been captured, and executed. This act of cruelty roused their fellow-citizens to fury; communications were at once opened with Hannibal, and the ringleaders of the plot were not, as might have been supposed, popular leaders, but nobles—relatives, it is probable, of the unfortunate hostages. Hannibal marched towards the town with a picked force of ten thousand men, and halted a few miles off, while his friends within the city completed their preparations. One party was told off to deal with the governor, a Roman of the house of Livius. He had been giving a banquet to some of the citizens; the conspirators paid him a visit after it was over, laughed and joked with him, and finally left him in such a state that they had nothing to fear from his watchfulness. Another party had arranged to admit Hannibal himself by a gate which opened out of the quarter of the tombs, which in Tarentum—we might almost say alone among Greek cities—were within the walls. A fire signal was given by Hannibal and answered by the conspirators. The latter fell upon the guards of the gate, and Hannibal was at hand outside to support them. A third party was busy at another of the gates. They had been accustomed for several days to go out on what seemed to be hunting parties, to return late at night, to talk over their sport with the guard, and to give them some of the game. On this occasion they brought back with them a particularly fine wild boar. While the animal was actually in the passage of the gate, and the sentry was busy admiring it, thirty African soldiers, who had been stealthily approaching, rushed up, cut the man down, and, securing the gate, let in a large body of their comrades. The city of Tarentum was taken, but the citadel was hastily secured by the Roman garrison. The Tarentines were not harmed. It was sufficient if any citizen wrote over his door, "This is a Tarentine's house." But all the dwellings in which Romans had been quartered were given up to plunder.