It is a symptom of the deplorable state of intellectual life today that readers of this magazine can guess the lineaments of the story told in Hannibal the instant they read early in its pages that classical Carthage, the city on whose behalf the great captain of the title fought against Rome, was “diverse” and “multicultural.”
To whatever degree bigoted contemporary observers regarded Carthage as brutal in its politics and religion, oppressive to its subjects, aggressive to its neighbors, and sly in its relations with foreign powers, a city boasting those two glittering qualities nearly divinized by our educators must have been, instead, kind and scrupulous in its dealings foreign and domestic, and victimized in its innocence by less politically correct nations. The countless newborn babies and small children the Carthaginians sacrificed to their gods—the remains of more than 20,000 have been found in Carthage alone— fade into no more than a single facet of the glorious cultural mosaic that was Carthage. And none of this needs to be proved, or even argued, by the author, who is also free to commit no few errors of fact: for a diverse and multicultural people are the good guys by definition, and a writer who sings their virtues is liberated from the dull grind of historical accuracy by the purity of her ideals.
Ancient Carthage was, probably, roughly as diverse and multicultural as Saudi Arabia is today: A wealthy state with a small population, Carthage employed foreigners to do her nasty jobs and relied on foreign mercenaries rather than citizens to do her fighting. The mercenaries Carthage hired certainly felt no sense of belonging to the Carthaginian nation: When the Carthaginians, after their defeat by the Romans in the First Punic War (264-241 B.C.) proved unable to pay them, the mercenaries launched a war of unparalleled brutality—the so called Truceless War—against their former employers (240-238 B.C.). Ancient authors describe the Carthaginians as harsh overlords and, when offered Roman protection, nearly every polity in Spain and North Africa dominated by the Carthaginians cheerfully abandoned their former masters: Few seem to have participated willingly in the diverse and multicultural Carthaginian Elysium imagined by our author.
In truth, in the Mediterranean world after Alexander the Great, where the countless cities of the Greeks had become more relaxed than they had been earlier about granting citizenship to in-comers, Carthage may have been unusually exclusive, adorned (like all non-Greek states) with a patina of Greek culture but fully incorporating into her citizen body only immigrants from the region that originally sent her forth as a colony, Phoenicia in the Levant.
At the other, positive end of the spectrum of ancient states welcoming to foreigners and their ways was Rome. Having blessed Carthage as diverse and multicultural, Hannibal‘s author unconsciously imagines Carthage’s great opponent to be as monolithic in race, creed, and outlook as a white-shoe law firm in 1950s New York—and therefore (by an inevitable implicit logic) greedy, perfidious, and belligerent. But the real Romans imagined that their city had been founded from a flotsam of the accursed, exiles, and broken men. And loyal to those origins, Rome energetically split her citizenship into rights and ranks, and granted parts of it to her friends, who could eventually aspire to the whole.
By the time Rome came to fight Carthage, not only the broader nation of the Latins, who were similar to Rome in culture, but Sabines, Volscians, Marsians, Etruscans, Umbrians, Samnites, Greeks, and many more, talkers of strange tongues and harborers of strange habits, had been admitted, to a greater or lesser degree, into this generous system.
For anyone attracted, therefore, to the task of rating the powers of the ancient world in terms of their diversity and multiculturalism as one might the freshman class of an American university, third-century B.C., Rome is a far better candidate for that dubious accreditation than third-century B.C.Carthage. But if such a question is of historical interest at all, it has a significance quite opposite to that the author of Hannibal asserts, because rather than sources of strength, during Hannibal’s Second Punic War (218- 201 B.C.) diversity and multiculturalism were weaknesses—if not decisive weaknesses—for both combatants.
So, indeed, our author admits when she points to Hannibal’s remarkable ability to hold together his crazy quilt “multicultural” and “diverse” mercenary army by the force of his charisma, by his identification with Hercules, and by his crescendo of military successes. (Rather like a contemporary college dean, Hannibal’s real genius, our author thinks, lay in—ahem—managing diversity.) But Hannibal’s remarkable ability implies an extraordinary need, a need one suspects the Carthaginian would have been pleased to do without: Despite Hannibal’s heroic personal qualities, his army was plagued by individual and mass desertion.
As for the Romans, Hannibal’s strategy was to defeat them in battle (as he did, handily, in 218, 217, and at bloody Cannae in 216 B.C.) and then to detach from Rome the Italian
allies who contributed so largely to Rome’s military might. And some he did unfasten, especially after Cannae, and especially in the south of Italy. But those who abandoned Rome, almost all Greek or Oscan, were the allies of Rome most alien in culture to the Romans, while a vast swath of Italy, 100 miles north and 75 miles south of Rome (to say nothing of the majority of cities even further south), remained loyal to the Romans despite Hannibal’s victories, blandishments, attempts to encourage betrayal, and, finally, his sieges and coercive ravaging of their lands.
The heart of this steadfast region consisted of peoples who had always been (or who had grown) similar in their ways to the Romans. But most Roman allies further off who were not culturally similar to the Romans also remained faithful, and it was they who often suffered the most for it, being located in areas where their neighbors had, indeed, defected to Hannibal. These friends of Rome, however puzzling they found Roman ways, knew this about the Romans, at least: The Romans, unlike Hannibal, kept their word about bringing succor to isolated allies, rewarded the loyal, and punished with terrible cruelty those who betrayed them.
The continuing fidelity to the Romans both of their Italian kin and most of their other allies, however different their customs, is the decisive fact of Hannibal’s war in Italy. This story is told (along with those of the First and Third Punic Wars) free of voguish political posturing in Dexter Hoyos’s Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War—the author being himself the acknowledged master of this subject in the current generation. The calculus is this: In his victories of 218-216 B.C., Hannibal killed or captured perhaps 15 percent of the entire male population of those parts of Italy loyal to Rome. No major modern state has ever suffered anything approaching such losses. (Even France and Germany in World War I lost less than 9 percent.)
Yet, against the general expectations of those who did not know her well, Rome did not sue for peace, and in the year after Cannae, put 75,000 men into the field. In 212 and 211 B.C., 200,000 served by land or sea, something like a third of all the military-aged men in Italy. Rome’s ability to recruit such numbers from her own men and her allies is the reason she eventually won the war: Hannibal was kept in check in Italy, other Roman possessions were strongly garrisoned, and Carthage’s ally Philip V of Macedon was stymied in Greece, while the Romans still had ample forces to defeat the Carthaginians in Spain, to capture Carthage’s mighty ally Syracuse in Sicily, and eventually to invade North Africa, compelling Carthage to recall Hannibal to defend his homeland.
During the 16 years Hannibal remained in Italy, Carthage made fitful attempts to reinforce him with new-hired mercenaries and shiny new elephants. But the need to do so shows that Hannibal, despite his victories and charisma, simply could not— unlike the Romans—recruit on a large scale for years among the inhabitants of Italy. Over time his forces diminished and dwindled, and the Romans increasingly constrained his movements. In the last years before his recall, Hannibal was essentially a bandit chief confined to barren Bruttium, the toe of the Italian peninsula.
Apparently, Hannibal’s diverse and multicultural army did not exert the same appeal to potential recruits in ancient Italy as it does to the author of Hannibal, comfortable in the intellectually monocultural echo chamber of today’s university.
J.E. Lendon, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity and Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins.
