Writing Examples
Hannibal: A Tactician Ahead of His Time
This example was written as the final paper for a Roman history course at Alma College. It follows the infamous Hannibal Barca and his military campaigns, providing an in-depth look at the strategies and tactics he used to become feared throughout the ancient world.
Hannibal: A Tactician Ahead of His Time
by Kacie Schaeffer
Since the dawn of our earliest civilization, human history has been shaped by innumerable struggles, heated battles, and dramatic last stands. The tides of war are fickle by nature, however, and have brought about the creation of vast empires and booming economies as well as the utter destruction of great cities and entire races. Those who practiced the art of war understood the duplicity of this beast; the few souls who mastered this art earned immortality through their conquests. Of the handful of military leaders who our recorded history remembers, one man stands out as an exceptionally brilliant tactician: Hannibal Barca of Carthage. In a time when the Romans had established themselves as the dominant military power in the ancient world, Hannibal waged a personal war against them in their own lands and to great effect. Through his courage, charisma, and brilliant military strategies, Hannibal confounded the Romans at every turn and single-handedly shaped the way battles were fought and militaries were organized in the ancient world.
Hannibal's thirst for Roman blood was encouraged from a young age. His father, Hamilcar, was one of Carthage's top generals and had fought the Romans during the First Punic War. After Carthage surrendered to Rome, the fighting subsided but deep feelings of hatred between the conquerors and the conquered did not. Hamilcar busied himself fighting in Spain and Africa but passed his hatred of the Romans on to his son, along with his military skills. At nine years of age, Hannibal begged his father to accompany him on one of his campaigns in Spain. Though Hamilcar could not oblige this request, he brought his young son to one of the altars where warriors made ceremonial sacrifices to gain their gods' favor before departing for battle. Here, he made his son lay his hand on the sacrificial animal and swear to renew the war against Rome as soon as he was able to. Though this event was likely meant to entertain young Hannibal more than anything, the warrior remembered the oath that he swore before his father and the other officers of the Carthaginian army and determined to remain true to his word. The stage for one of the greatest military conquests in history was thus set.
Hannibal might not have grown to threaten Rome as he did had he been denied a position in the army or demoralized his troops while serving in it. As it was, however, Hannibal became a high officer in the Carthaginian army when he was about twenty-one years old. His father drowned unexpectedly while in Spain, leaving his lieutenant, Hasdrubal, in charge. Hasdrubal had married Hamilcar's daughter and saw it fit to appoint Hannibal to the army upon the general's untimely passing. When Hannibal arrived in Spain, he quickly garnered the respect of his peers. He was a young man who did not flaunt his royal heritage but chose to eat and drink in moderation, consuming "only as much as he needed to sustain his strength" and sleeping "only when he had completed his work" (Prevas, p. 48). According to writer and historian Jacob Abbott,
...he entered at once into the duties of his position with a degree of energy, patience, and self-denial which attracted universal attention, and made him a universal favorite. He dressed plainly; he assumed no airs; he sought for no pleasures or indulgences, nor demanded any exemption from the dangers and privations which the common soldiers had to endure (Abbott, p. 37).
It is of little wonder, then, that when a palace slave assassinated Hasdrubal some time later, the troops hailed Hannibal as their new commander. The Carthaginian government agreed and the young leader was thrust into a position of prime opportunity from which to make his war upon the Romans.
Even before his aggressions brought about the opening of the Second Punic War Hannibal was a military success—his troops were extremely loyal to him, so charismatic a leader was he, and his understanding of terrain elements and their uses during battle was flawless. The young commander's military genius first surfaced when he attacked the nations surrounding the city of Saguntum, hoping to draw the ire of the Romans through violating the peace treaty formed at the close of the First Punic War. In retaliation, an army of one hundred thousand men was sent to put an end to his antagonistic practices. Hannibal learned of the force he was to contend with as he was approaching the Tagus River; he hid a large number of his cavalry by the riverbank and then proceeded to ford the waters with his infantry, giving the enemy the impression that the troops were retreating. The enemy hastened into the deep waters, and when they were sufficiently bogged down, Hannibal stood his ground with his foot soldiers and ordered his cavalry to charge the hapless unit. When the enemy troops were all but decimated in the river, Hannibal crossed the river again and met his opposition on their own side, routing them completely. This strategy was only the first of many that led the Carthaginian general to several decisive victories.
Hannibal used a similar tactic much to the same effect as he attempted to cross the Rhone in his march on Italy. After he had "bought up from the natives all their boats and canoes..." (Wilkinson, p. 12), a group of Gauls loyal to Rome formed to oppose Hannibal's force as they attempted to cross the river. To overcome this obstacle, Hannibal busied his troops with the building of rafts and boats that would bear his men, horses, and elephants across the water while in sight of the enemy. Secretly, however, he dispatched a large unit under the command of an officer named Hanno and charged them with finding a ford away from the hostile Gauls. They left in the middle of the night and, using the thick forests as cover, found a crossing about twenty-five miles upstream from their current location. Hanno's army rested for a day, moved back downstream and proceeded to build a fire with which to signal Hannibal to commence his attack. The Gauls rushed to meet the Carthaginian troops as they forded the Rhone and were taken completely by surprise as Hanno's detachment attacked suddenly and swiftly from the rear. Unable to wage a battle at both the front and the back of their ranks, the Gauls fled. The outcome of this skirmish might have been quite different had Hannibal simply attempted to crush the enemy with the size of his army. However, the commander's superior tactics gave him a clear advantage and opened for him a route into Italy.
Tactically, perhaps Hannibal's most glorious achievement was his crossing of the Alps with thirty-eight thousand infantry, six thousand cavalry (Prevas, p. 151), and thirty-seven elephants in tow (Morris, p.97). When Hannibal chose this route, a Roman army under the leadership of the consul Cornelius Scipio was in hot pursuit of his unit. Not wanting to waste his time and energy in an engagement with Scipio's army, Hannibal led his troops towards the Alps, eager to penetrate Italy as soon as possible. He led them up the Rhone in a circuitous route as an extra precautionary measure, fearing that Scipio would intercept him if he took a more direct path to the mountains. This tactic flustered Scipio, who decided to abandon his pursuit of the Carthaginian army and leave them to contend with the frozen peaks, deadly chasms, and beguiling snows. Hannibal was left largely to his own devices through his decision to avoid a confrontation with Scipio, a choice that eventually led him to emerge as a great conqueror in Italy.
Furthermore, Hannibal's military genius proved valuable in the Alps when his troops encountered some hostile natives blocking a crucial mountain pass. These mountain men guarded this critical point from a series of protrusions in the rock, but abandoned their watches during the evening when the temperature grew dangerously cold. When Hannibal realized this, he ordered his men to pitch tents and build campfires and even moved a large force to a fortified position near the pass. These actions gave the enemy the impression that he was bedding down for the night and making preparations to force his way through the pass at the first light of dawn. The mountain men descended from their posts as evening fell and returned to find that Hannibal had sent several troops to claim their positions as they slept. In fury, the mountaineers attacked the Carthaginian train as it wound its way through the pass but were eventually driven to retreat as Hannibal's forces "...poured such a storm of missiles on the enemies below that...the barbarians were compelled to abandon the prey that seemed in their grasp" (Morris, p. 113). With the defeat of the mountain men, Hannibal was free to complete his treacherous journey through the Alps and descend upon Rome.
Once in Italy, Hannibal continued with his scheming. The fifteen days spent crossing the Alps had cost him dearly, and the chronicler Polybius states that less than thirty thousand of his original unit survived the journey (Law, p. 274). He began to overtake the settlements beyond the Alps that resisted his power and ally himself with the others. Hannibal began to move southward towards the Po River until he met up with Scipio and his army at the River Ticinus and confronted him at last. Using the strategy that had worked so well for him in the past, Hannibal sent a detachment of his army to attack the Romans from the rear. The Romans were soon in total disarray, and they began to flee when they learned that Scipio himself had been wounded in the confusion. After this battle, many of the nations of northern Italy became loyal to Hannibal. A large group of Gauls who had fought with Scipio in the Battle of Ticinus even revolted the night that the fighting subsided, killing several Romans and defecting to the Carthaginian camp. Clearly, the strategies that led to Hannibal's decisive victory over Scipio gained him a great deal of attention and much of the support he needed in order to continue his campaign against the Romans.
The greatest of Hannibal's triumphs over the Roman armies were yet to come. After the disaster at Ticinus, Scipio's fellow consul, Sempronius Longus, came to Italy to try his hand against the threat from Carthage. According to Abbott, Sempronius was "...a man of a very prompt and impetuous character, with great confidence in his own powers, and very ready for action" (Abbott, p. 147). Hannibal learned of the consul's brash nature through his spy network and began devising a way to draw him into an extremely one-sided battle. While both armies were encamped near the River Trebia, Hannibal discovered that tall brush surrounded the water—in many cases, the grasses were thick enough to conceal even cavalry.
At the break of dawn on a cold, rainy morning in December, he gathered two thousand of his best soldiers, hid them in the brush, and sent a detachment of cavalry to cross the Trebia and encroach on the Roman encampment on the opposite bank. Upon seeing the horsemen, the Romans were immediately called to arms, many before they had had a chance to enjoy breakfast. The Carthaginians retreated as the massive Roman army began to march out of the camp; encouraged by their apparent good fortune, the Romans plunged into the icy waters of the Trebia, which was unusually swollen from the continual rains that had fallen during the night. Drenched and numb from the bitter cold, no sooner had they climbed the bank where the Carthaginians were encamped when the whole of Hannibal's force, fresh from their warm tents, appeared before them. Before the shock of this turn of events had even set in, the elite soldiers concealed in the tall river brush descended upon the flanks of the hapless Roman army, and the ambush was complete. After several hours of fighting, the Romans retreated; many of those who survived the combat drowned trying to ford the river again, as the rain that fell during the battle had caused it to flood its banks still more.
Though the design of this strategy was very simple, Hannibal was able to apply it on a massive scale, affecting the whole of the Roman army. Some forty thousand men on each side engaged each other in the Battle of Trebia (Goldsworthy, p. 33); by the end of the day, the Carthaginians were the clear victors. Once again, Hannibal's superior tactics earned him a decisive victory and the support of native Gauls.
Another victory was earned through Hannibal's cunning against the consul Flaminius at Lake Trasimene. Like Sempronius, Flaminius was "...ardent, self-confident, and vain. He despised the power of Hannibal, and thought that his success hitherto had been owing to the inefficiency or indecision of his predecessors" (Abbott, p. 164). Flaminius was more than eager to engage Hannibal, so sure was he of an easy victory. He marched his troops through a bottleneck, with the vast lake on one side and a wall of mountain granite on the other. However, before the Romans could arrive at the camp that lay beyond, they were ambushed by several strong Carthaginian detachments that Hannibal had hidden in the mountains above the narrow pass. Hannibal attacked the front of the column while his troops sealed off the retreat from behind; when the long and bloody conflict at last ended, Flaminius was dead and his army utterly destroyed. This second great victory in Italy is again attributable to Roman fallacy and Hannibal's employment of natural barriers to give his unit the upper hand in combat.
Before Hannibal's last great victory in Italy at Cannae, he proved that he could use his cunning defensively as well as offensively. After the disaster at Lake Trasimene, the Roman senate elected a man named Fabius to the role of dictator. Fabius was very wise and adopted a policy of wearing out Hannibal's army rather than engaging it. Thus, he always kept his men entrenched on advantageous ground near the Carthaginian force, but never rose to Hannibal's bait or allowed himself to be lured into a battle with the commander. At one point, Hannibal himself was drawn into a trap. Surrounded by mountains teeming with the dictator's men, Hannibal found that the only passage from the area was heavily fortified as well. In order to protect his men, Hannibal gathered a herd of oxen and tied fagots filled with pitch to the horns of the creatures. He drove the herd up the hill under the Romans' watch and ignited the fagots. The oxen stampeded in terror and confusion, lighting much of the dense forest foliage on fire in the process. The Roman guards believed the Carthaginians were launching a desperate attack against them and abandoned their posts to meet the phantom menace. In the ensuing chaos, Hannibal led his troops safely and silently through the pass, free once again to ravage the Roman countryside due to his keen wit and knack for improvisation.
Thus endangered by Fabius, Hannibal schemed to remove the threat of a local intelligence comparable to his own. The dictator's defensive policies, while effective, soon drew the scorn of his master of horse, Minucius. As the second-in-command, Minucius was "as ardent, prompt, and impetuous, as Fabius was cool, prudent, and calculating" (Abbott, p. 173). He wanted desperately to see Fabius engage and erase the Carthaginians from Italy and rallied the troops to his cause. He even wrote to Rome, complaining of Fabius' inability to conduct the army efficiently. Hannibal's spies informed him of this discontent, and the leader further discovered through some Roman deserters that Fabius owned a farm in the country. He sent a small portion of his army to raze and plunder the area surrounding this homestead, but with strict orders to leave the dictator's property untouched. Word of the marauders' actions spread to Rome, where the people assumed that Fabius' hesitance to fight the Carthaginians was due to a corrupt bargain he had struck with Hannibal to retain his status as dictator. Needless to say, Fabius was recalled to Rome, Minucius was made his equal in power, and his forces were split in half. The utilization of the Roman political system and general mistrust of those in power was pure genius on Hannibal's part—this tact led to the near annihilation of Minucius and his army later on when the hot-blooded co-dictator foolishly stepped into one of Hannibal's ambushes. As Rome sank deeper into despair, Hannibal was left unchecked and still free to terrorize the Italian peninsula.
The last great victory tasted by Hannibal was at the Battle of Cannae. In an attempt to regain control of Italy, Rome put together a massive army consisting of eight legions numbering roughly eighty thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry (Goldsworthy, pp. 64-65). Outnumbered by over thirty thousand men under the consuls Aemilius and Varro, Hannibal employed his old tricks to emerge the victor of the conflict. Early in the battle, the Punic commander sent a large number of troops over to the Roman lines as deserters. The soldiers threw their shields and weapons at the Romans' feet, and thus unarmed were admitted to the back of the ranks. They were largely ignored and kept under an extremely light guard; unfortunately for the Romans, the "deserters" each possessed concealed daggers and launched a surprise attack on the consular army from behind when they were already losing ground to the Carthaginians in the front lines. Eventually, the Romans were surrounded and defeated. Aemilius was mortally wounded and the remainder of his troops fled, facing a crushing defeat. In this last great battle, Hannibal cemented his dominance on the battlefield both in terms of his military might and his superior strategies.
Hannibal's unprecedented success in Italy left a long and enduring impression upon the Romans. With every battle that Hannibal won, a great blow was dealt to the citizens of Rome. Fear of invasion and destruction pervaded all of the ranks of society. Morale decreased to the point where the superstitious Romans were observing bad omens in everyday occurrences. Before the Battle of Ticinus, Roman soldiers were upset when a wolf entered their encampment and injured several men before escaping, and later when a swarm of bees landed on a tree just over Scipio's tent. Both were considered warnings of the disaster that was about to befall the ranks. In the city, omens were often reported to the senate itself, and the list of these signs was particularly long when Hannibal was making his way towards Rome:
An ox...got into a house, and...had climbed up into the third story, and, being frightened by the noise and uproar of those who followed him, ran out of a window...A light appeared in the sky in the form of ships. A temple was struck with lightning. A spear in the hand of a statue of Juno...shook, one day, of itself. Apparitions of men in white garments were seen...A wolf came into a camp and snatched the sword of a soldier on guard...The sun one day looked smaller than usual. Two moons were seen together in the sky. Stones fell out of the sky at a place called Picenum (Abbott, p. 167).
The exorbitant list of omens outlines the many deep-rooted fears that plagued the citizens of Rome during Hannibal's reign of terror.
When news of the utter destruction at Cannae hit the city, it was followed by mass hysteria. A member of almost every single family in Rome served in the army during Cannae, and the fear that Hannibal's forces would soon march on the city itself was compounded with grief over losing the men of the family. Perhaps the greatest blow was to Roman self-esteem, however:
It mortified the Roman pride...to find that the greatest armies they could raise, and the ablest generals they could choose and commission, proved wholly unable to cope with the foe. The most sagacious of them, in fact, had felt it necessary to decline the contest with (Hannibal) altogether (Abbott, p. 186).
After Cannae, with the emergence of Scipio the Younger as a general equal in skill to Hannibal, the Romans were able to regain lost ground and eventually defeat the Carthaginians to end the Second Punic War. These battles created in Rome a streamlined military structure, however, which lasted for several centuries and ensured that no other foreign power would threaten the city's safety again.
Clearly, Hannibal possessed a military genius that was ahead of its time. He single-handedly changed the face of the ancient world as well as the way in which wars were waged forever. In straying from the traditional practice of meeting the enemy in open combat until superior numbers and discipline eventually prevailed, a new way of waging battles ensued. The generals that followed Hannibal learned to use the streams, mountains, valleys, and other natural features of the lands they traversed and to choose their battlegrounds wisely if they desired to meet with success. Hannibal's flexibility and cunning transformed war into an art where careful planning and strategy became equally as important as the physical might and endurance of one's troops. It is for these contributions that history remembers his name and has bolstered him into the ranks of the immortal.
Sources
Abbott, J. (1903). Hannibal. pp. 13-205. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.
Goldsworthy, A. (2001). Cannae. pp. 17-180. London: Cassell & Co.
Law, W. J. (1866). The Alps of Hannibal. pp. 253-312. London: Macmillan and Co.
Morris, W. O. (1901). Heroes of the Nations: Hannibal. pp. 75-186. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Prevas, J. (1998). Hannibal Crosses the Alps: The Enigma Re-Examined. pp. 1-219. Rockville Centre: Sarpedon.
Wilkinson, S. (1911). Hannibal's March. pp. 3-36. Oxford: Clarendon Press.