Book: Hannibal
Quotes of Book: Hannibal
Livy gives conflicting figures as to the number of men who started out and the number lost in the crossing. Some of these are so exaggerated that they were clearly part of later Roman propaganda, designed to inflate the Roman ego as to the size of the army that their forefathers had faced. For instance, one of the Latin sources which he quotes has Hannibal arriving in Italy with 100,000 foot and 20,000 horse-far more than he started out with. Polybius is more trustworthy since, as he tells us, he had seen the inscription at Lacinium in which Hannibal himself had set down the facts and figures of his campaigns. His account reveals Hannibal reaching Italian soil at the foot of the Alps with 12,000 African and 8,000 Iberian foot, and not more than 6,000 horse. Between the Pyrenees and Italy, therefore, he had lost-mostly in the Alps-some 30,000 foot and 3,000 horse. This more or less confirms one statement of Livy's, that a Roman who had been a captive of Hannibal left it on record that Hannibal had told him that 'after crossing the Rhône he lost thirty-six thousand men and a vast number of horses and other animals'. book-quoteHannibal seems to have set out from Cartagena about mid-June in 218 B.C. and to have been five months between Cartagena and the plains of the Po. It was, therefore, mid-October at the earliest when he halted at the watershed above Italy and gazed southward. Undoubtedly he had not intended to cross the Alps so late, having hoped, perhaps, to make a start in May. He had been delayed, as has been suggested, by the late arrival of many of his troops from their winter quarters, and delayed again, as we know, by unexpected heavy fighting throughout northern Spain. It would seem, in fact, that his arrival at this point was even later than October, for the setting of the Pleiades would have been visible in the latitude in which he stood during the first fortnight in November in the year 218 B.C. book-quoteFabius, as defender of the land, had time on his hands and he also had manpower. He took over the two legions of the consul Gnaeus Servilius and added a further two legions to the army that now lay at his disposal. At the same time he gave orders for all the people who lay ahead of Hannibal's line of march to abandon their farms, burn the buildings, and destroy the crops. {Centuries later his basic strategy was to be adopted by the Russian general Kutusov against Napoleon.} The people of Italy should withdraw into their land, leaving as little behind them as possible, and he himself-as commander of the only organised army-should avoid a pitched battle at any costs. Guerrilla tactics, harassing the flanks of the enemy, cutting off his foraging parties and gradually bleeding the invader to death, were the methods that Fabius was to employ against the general whom, very wisely, he was unwilling to meet on normal terms. book-quoteRoman tactics in battle were comparatively simple and, since they had proved so successful in previous wars, were used against the Carthaginians until the latter demonstrated, by a flexibility designed to match each new occasion, that what had triumphed over Latins and Greeks and Gallic tribes needed adaptation. First of all, the Roman front line would open fire with their throwing spears, following this up with a charge with their swords-somewhat akin to the musket volley and bayonet charge of later wars. If this failed to break the enemy front, the second line, passing through the first on their chess-board principle, would repeat the procedure. The veterans held as reserve could then be used if necessary, while all the time the lightly-armed infantry were skirmishing on the flanks of the enemy, aided by the cavalry. These tactics had served the Romans well in the past-and were to do so in the future-but proved inadequate to deal with a general who modified his own tactics to suit each new battlefield, and who used elements of surprise and carefully laid traps, into which the Romans more often than not were prone to blunder. book-quote
