at

367. Hannibal's Invasion of Italy: to Cannae. Rome had intended to take the offensive, and indeed, she dispatched one consul in a leisurely way to Spain, and started the other for Africa by way of Sicily. But Hannibal's audacious rapidity disconcerted all plans. In five months he had crossed the Pyrenees and the Rhone, fighting his way through the Gallic tribes; forced the unknown passes of the Alps, under conditions that made it a feat paralleled only by Alexander's passage of the Hindoo-Kush; and, leaving the bones of three fourths his army between the Ebro and the Po, startled Italy by appearing in Cisalpine Gaul, with twenty-six thousand "heroic shadows," to attack a population of nearly one million fighting men. With these "emaciated scarecrows" the same fall he swiftly destroyed two hastily gathered Roman armies the Ticinus and at the Trebia; and the recently pacified Gallic tribes then rallied turbulently to his support. The following spring he crossed the Apennines, caught a Roman army of forty thousand men, blinded with morning mist, in a narrow defile near Lake Trasimene, and annihilated it there; and then carried fire and sword through Italy. The wary Roman dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, adopted the wise tactics of delay to wear out Hannibal and to gain breathing time for Rome; but popular demagogues murmured that the senate protracted the war to gain glory for the aristocratic generals, and the following summer the new consuls were given ninety thousand men, with orders to crush the daring invader. The result was the battle of Cannae "a carnival of cold steel, a butchery, not a battle." Hannibal lost six thousand men. Rome lost sixty thousand dead and twenty thousand prisoners. A consul, a fourth of the senators, nearly all her officers, and over a fifth of the fighting population of the city, perished; and the camps of her two armies fell into Carthaginian hands. Hannibal sent home a bushel of gold rings from the hands of fallen Roman nobles.

1 From which we get the term " Fabian policy." Fabius was given the nickname "Cunctator" (Laggard) by the Roman populace.

368. Fidelity of the Latins and Italians to Rome. But the victory yielded small fruit. Hannibal's only real chance within Italy had been that brilliant victories might break up the Roman confederacy and bring over to his side the subject allies. Therefore, as after his earlier successes, he now freed his Italian prisoners without ransom, proclaiming that he warred only on Rome and that he came to liberate Italy. The mountain tribes of the south, eager for plunder, did join him, as did one great city, Capua, and, three years later, irritated by a cruel Roman blunder, some of the Greek towns. But the other cities — colonies, Latins, or allies - closed their gates as resolutely as Rome herself, and so gave marvelous testimony to the excellence of Roman rule and to the national Italian spirit it had fostered.

369. Rome's Grandeur in Disaster. Rome's own greatness showed grandly in the hour of terror after Cannae, when any other people would have given up the conflict in despair. A plot among some faint-hearted nobles to abandon Italy was stifled in the camp; and the surviving consul, Varro, set himself promptly and courageously to reorganize the pitiful wreckage of his army. Varro had been elected in a bitter partisan struggle against the unanimous opposition of the aristocracy, and (with undoubted merits in personal character) he had proved utterly lacking in military talent. He now returned to Rome, expecting to face stern judges. At Carthage a general so placed would probably have been nailed to a cross; at Rome, faction and criticism were silenced, and the senate showed its own nobility by publicly giving its thanks to the general "because he had not despaired of the republic." Before the end. of the year, another army under a new consul was cut to pieces, and by losses elsewhere the senate had fallen to less than half its numbers; but with stern temper and splendid tenacity Rome refused even to receive Hannibal's envoys or to consider his moderate proposals for peace; nor would she in this crisis

1

1 One hundred and seventy-seven new members were enrolled the next year.

even ransom prisoners, since they had not chosen to die for the republic. The senate shortened the days of mourning; it enrolled slaves, old men, boys, and the criminals from the prisons, arming them with the trophies from the temples, and managed to put two hundred and fifty thousand more troops into the field not only refusing to recall a man from Spain or Sicily, but sending new forces to those points. Over a third of the adult male population had perished in three years, or were in the camp, withdrawn from industry. Still, taxes were doubled, almost crushing the weakened power of payment; and in addition, the rich gave cheerfully far beyond these demands, while all creditors of the state willingly accepted delay in payment.

370. Neglect of the Sea and Lack of Concerted Action by Carthage and her Allies. Hannibal's other possible chance, that outside Italy, lay in a general Mediterranean war and in strong reënforcements from Carthage. Philip V. of Macedon did ally himself with Hannibal, but acted indecisively and too late; Syracuse, too, joined Carthage, but its new tyrant was incapable, and in 212 B.C. it fell, after a memorable three years' siege.1 Strangely, Carthage made no serious attempt to recover command of the sea; while Rome guarded her coasts with efficient fleets, and transported her armies at will.

2

371. Changed Character of the War, after Cannae. — Rome now strained every nerve for success abroad, where her great enemy could not act in person. Step by step the Roman Scipio brothers forced back the Carthaginian frontier in Spain, cut Hannibal's lines of land communication, and for many years ruined all his hopes of reënforcement from that quarter. After the defeat and death of the two Scipios, Rome promptly hurried in fresh forces under the younger and greater Publius

1 A siege notable for the scientific inventions of Archimedes (§ 259) used in the defense. The philosopher was killed in the indiscriminate massacre that followed the capture.

2 Read Mahan, Influence of Sea Power in History, 14-21, and also Introduction, iv.-vii.

Cornelius Scipio, who in masterly fashion continued the work of his father and uncle. In Italy itself, the policy of Fabius was again adopted, varied by the telling blows of the vigorous soldier Marcellus (the "Sword," as Fabius was the "Shield," of Rome).

Hannibal's hopes had been blasted in the moment of victory. Rome had fallen back upon an iron constancy and steadfast caution; her Italian subjects had shown a steady fidelity even more ominous to the invader; while Carthage proved supine, and her allies lukewarm. Against such conditions all the great African's genius in war and in diplomacy wore itself out in vain. For thirteen years more he maintained himself in Italy without reënforcement in men or money, always winning a battle when he could engage the enemy in the field in person, and directing operations and policy as best he might in Spain, Sicily, Macedonia, and Africa; but it was a war waged by one supreme genius against the most powerful and resolute nation in the world. And so the struggle now entered upon its last, long, wasting stage. It became a record of sieges and marches and countermarches, in which Hannibal's genius was no doubt as marvelous as ever, earning him from modern military critics the title, "Father of Strategy," but in which there are no more of the dazzling results that mark the first campaigns. Hannibal's Spanish veterans died off, too, to be replaced as best they might by local recruits in Italy, and gradually the Romans learned the art of war from their great enemy.

"With the battle of Cannae the breathless interest in the war ceases; its surging mass, broken on the walls of the Roman fortresses, . . . foams away in ruin and devastation through south Italy, -ever victorious, ever receding. Rome, assailed on all sides by open foe and forsworn friend, driven to her last man and last coin, 'ever great and greater grows' in the strength of her strong will and loyal people, widening the circle round her with rapid blows in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Macedon, while she slowly loosens the grip fastened on her throat at home, till in the end. . . the final fight on African sands at the same moment closes the struggle for life and seats her mistress of the world."- How AND LEIGH, 199.

One more dramatic scene

372. "Hannibal at the Gates." marked Hannibal's career in Italy. The Romans had besieged Capua. In a daring attempt to relieve his ally, Hannibal marched to the very walls of Rome, ravaging the fields about the city. The Romans, however, were not to be enticed out to a rash engagement, nor would the army around Capua be drawn from its prey. The only result of this desperate stroke was a fruitless fright-such that for generations Roman mothers stilled their children by the terror-bearing phrase, "Hannibal at the Gates!" Roman stories relate, however, that citizens were found, even in that hour of fear, to show a defiant confidence by buying eagerly at a public sale the land where the invader lay encamped.

373. The Second Carthaginian Invasion. Meantime, in Spain, Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, had been contending against the crushing force of the Scipios, with the skill and devotion of his house. Finally, in 207 B.C., by able maneuvers, he eluded the Roman generals, and started with a veteran army to reënforce Hannibal. Rome's peril was never greater than when this second Barcide crossed the Alps successfully with fifty-six thousand men and fifteen elephants.

The republic put forth its supreme effort. One hundred and fifty thousand men were thrown between the two Carthaginian armies, which together numbered some eighty thousand. An intercepted messenger from Hasdrubal gave the Romans an accidental but decisive advantage. The consul, Claudius Nero, with audacity learned of Hannibal himself, left part of his force to deceive that leader, and, hurrying northward with the speed of life and death, fell upon Hasdrubal with crushing numbers at the Metaurus. The ghastly head of his long-expected brother, flung with brutal contempt into his camp,' was the first notice to Hannibal of the ruin of his family and his

cause.

1 A strange contrast to the chivalrous treatment that Hannibal accorded the bodies of Marcellus and of the Roman generals at Cannae and elsewhere.