MEMORIA HANNIBALIS: CONSTRUCTING MEMORIES OF PUNIC
WAR VIOLENCE FROM THE SECOND CENTURY BCE THROUGH
THE FIFTH CENTURY CE
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
History
_______________
by
Keenan Gregory Baca-Winters
Fall 2010
iii
Copyright © 2010
by
Keenan Gregory Baca-Winters
All Rights Reserved
iv
DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to my father, Gregory J. Winters. You were right all along.
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ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Memoria Hannibalis: Constructing Memories of Punic War
Violence from the Second Century BCE through the
Fifth Century CE
by
Keenan Gregory Baca-Winters
Master of Arts in History
San Diego State University, 2010
While military historians such as Theodore Ayrault Dodge and Ernle Dusgate Shelby
study the tactics and strategies of the Second Punic War, and while Toynbee studied the
effects of Hannibal on Roman politics after the war and Alain Gowing studied Roman
cultural memory of the Republic during the early principate, no study has explored the
effects of the Second Punic War on Roman cultural memory. This thesis uses Paul Ricoeur’s
narrative theory to investigate how Roman authors from the mid-second century BCE to the
early fifth century CE fashioned their descriptions of Hannibalic violence and Rome’s
experience of the Second Punic War in order to construct a cultural memory that addresses
contemporary concerns.
During the mid-second century BCE, in the wake of the Second Punic War, the
writings of Polybius (210–126 BCE) reveal a sense of superiority among the Romans since
they had recovered from the Hannibalic invasion and become masters of the Mediterranean.
By the first century to early second century CE, Livy’s (59 BCE–16 CE), Plutarch’s (46–
126 CE), and Appian’s (90–160 CE) narratives, written in the Pax Romana when the Roman
Empire reached its greatest extent (ca. 120 CE), escalate this sentiment of superiority about
themselves during an era of vast imperial expansion. Indeed, the Romans during this time felt
that since they defeated Hannibal, they deserved to rule over others and no one could dare
dream of harming the empire. By the late second century CE, in an era of imperial instability
and civil war, Dio Cassius (155–235 CE) revealed that the Romans of this time remembered
the Second Punic War as a time when the Romans had an external enemy to fight and not
each other. By the late fourth century CE, Ammianus Marcellinus (330 CE–408 CE) revealed
that barbarian and Parthian incursions made the Romans of this era feel that their era was
worse than during the Second Punic War. Moreover, the “barbarians” who were fighting for
the Romans as auxiliary soldiers also used the memory of the Second Punic War as a way to
become Roman. When the focus of this thesis shifts to the early fifth century CE, rebellions
and further incursions into Roman territory by the barbarians made the Romans of this era
feel that the Roman experience during the Second Punic War was for naught and that their
empire was falling apart. When Stilicho defeated these enemies threatening Rome in 402 CE,
the Roman of this time hailed him as a new Scipio, Fabius, and Marcellus. Thus, the Romans
people supplanted the importance of the memory of the Second Punic War in an era of
survival and toil. Despite Stilicho’s seemingly single-handed victories over the enemies of
the western empire, ordinary people were suffering from invasions, and the memory of the
Second Punic War ceased to be an important aspect of Roman identity. Paul Ricoeur’s
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narrative theory has allowed this thesis to study how each authors’ cultural milieu influenced
how they composed their narratives of the Second Punic War. These narratives are then a
reflection of each author’s contemporary time.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER
1
PRELIMINARIES .........................................................................................................1
2
MEMORY AND HISTORY IN THE WAKE OF THE SECOND PUNIC
WAR ............................................................................................................................11
The Gravity of Rome’s Situation During the Second Punic War ..........................17
How Polybius Composed His Histories ................................................................18
Folly and Disaster at the Start of the Second Punic War .......................................19
Publius Cornelius Scipio: The Man Who Would Defeat Hannibal .......................32
The Battle of Zama ................................................................................................36
The Effects of Polybius and His Audience Crossing the Roman Ethnic
Boundary ................................................................................................................40
3
MEMORY, VIOLENCE, AND ROMAN SUPERIORITY IN THE FIRST
CENTURY CE.............................................................................................................44
The Nadir of the Roman Experience: Cannae .......................................................46
The Apex of the Roman Experience: Zama ...........................................................50
Gaius Terentius Varro: The Commander of the Roman Army at Cannae .............54
Publius Cornelius Scipio: The Commander of the Roman Army at Zama............56
Prodigies and Portents: The Experience of Ordinary People During the
War .........................................................................................................................60
The Battles of Ticinus, the Trebia, and the Siege of Placentia ..............................61
Religious Prodigies and the Battle of Lake Trasimene ..........................................63
Religious Prodigies and the Battle of Cannae........................................................67
The Second Punic War and the Aeneid ..................................................................71
The Second Punic War in Memorable Sayings and Doings ..................................74
The Second Punic War and Juvenal.......................................................................77
The Second Punic War in Livy and Josephus ........................................................80
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Conclusion .............................................................................................................82
4
THE MEMORY OF THE MUTINY OF SCIPIO’S ARMY AND THE
CRISIS OF THE THIRD CENTURY .........................................................................83
Plutarch’s Lives of Fabius and Marcellus ..............................................................84
Appian’s Roman History and the Continuation of Roman Identity from the
First Century CE ....................................................................................................89
Plutarch and Appian’s Roman Empire ..................................................................94
An Introduction to Dio Cassius..............................................................................97
Dio Cassius and the Mutiny of Scipio’s Soldiers ..................................................98
The World of Dio: An Empire in Turmoil ...........................................................101
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................106
5
THE MEMORY OF THE SECOND PUNIC WAR IN A
ROMANO-BARBARIAN WORLD .........................................................................107
6
CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................123
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................125
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To begin, I would like to thank my thesis chair, Dr. Elizabeth Pollard for her patience
and guidance. I am especially thankful for her feedback and suggestions. Because of
Dr. Pollard’s erudition, my thesis has been transformed from a mound of ungodly prose and
transformed into the brilliant study, which you hold in your hands. Additionally, the rest of
my committee, Dr. Mathew Kuelfer and Dr. Joseph Smith has been gracious and kind in their
helpful feedback.
I would also like to thank Dr. Thomas Sizgorich, formerly of the University of New
Mexico and now at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Sizgorich was instrumental in my
development as a scholar, and as a person. Additionally, I would also like to thank
Dr. Andrew Russell of Central New Mexico Community College. Dr. Russell also
auspiciously appeared at a time in my life, which was at a crossroad. Because of
Dr. Russell’s, Dr. Sizgorich’s, and Dr. Pollard’s advice (advice which I still seek to this day)
I am now poised to embark and the ultimate journey of an academic: the doctorate, which I
will obtain at the University of California, Irvine.
In addition, I am thankful for my friends during this journey. My friends back in New
Mexico–Chris and Alicia Chavez, Zack Herrera, and Rachael Miltenberger–have patiently
supported me when I started to waver during my long stay away from home. Additionally,
David Vidal has provided me with many interesting diversions when times became tough;
while Timothy Wheeler and Antonio Melgarejo have also been good friends during my time
in San Diego.
My family has also been instrumental in my success, and without their support from
home, my time at San Diego State University would have been short lived. I would like to
thank my mother, Elizabeth Baca; my grandmother, Marcella Baca; my brother, John
Gonzales; my aunt, Sarah Baca; and my uncles, Edward Baca, Philip Baca, and Gregory
Baca for their support and encouragement through this process. Last, and certainly not least, I
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would like to thank Sophia, Peppita, and Joel for their unwavering belief in me and their
patience while I have been so far from home.
Thank you, all.
1
CHAPTER 1
PRELIMINARIES
In the mid-first century BCE, during a great civil war, Cicero (106–43 BCE)
sardonically asked Mark Antony why he was summoned to the Senate. “What, I ask you, was
the reason why I was forced into the Senate yesterday? Was I alone absent? or have you not
often been in less number? Hannibal, I fancy, was at the gates…”1 Cicero’s use of the
memory of Hannibal, who by this time in Roman history had been dead for nearly two
hundred years, suggests that Hannibal and the threat of Hannibalic violence remained an
important fixture of Roman cultural memory centuries after the Second Punic War.
While Cicero invoked the memory of Hannibal as a metaphor, he wanted to make it
clear to Mark Antony that he was wasting time while a national emergency was occurring. A
contemporary of Cicero, Cornelius Nepos (100–29 BCE), also used the memory of Hannibal
in his narrative. Cornelius Nepos wrote a brief biography of Hannibal in his narrative entitled
Lives of Eminent Commanders. What makes Nepos’s narrative interesting is not that he wrote
briefly about Hannibal, but rather that Nepos portrayed how Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father,
was instrumental in the formation of Hannibal’s hatred of the Roman people. When king
Antiochus asked Hannibal why he hated the Romans, Hannibal offered the following
anecdote:
“My father Hamilcar,” said he, “when I was a very little boy, being not more than
nine years old, offered sacrifices at Carthage, when he was going as commander
into Spain, to Jupiter, the best and greatest of gods; and while this religious
ceremony was being performed, he asked me whether I should like to go with him
to camp. As I willingly expressed my consent, and proceeded to beg him not to
hesitate to take me, he replied ‘I will do so, if you give me the promise which I ask
of you.’ At the same time he led me to the altar at which he began to sacrifice,
and, sending the company away, required me taking hold of the altar, to swear
that I would never be in friendship with the Romans. This oath, thus taken before
1
Cicero Philippic I 1.5.12, trans. Walter C. A. Ker., Philippics (1926; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1969), 31.
2
my father, I have so strictly kept even to this day, that no man ought to doubt but
that I shall be of the same mind for the rest of my life.”2
Hannibal’s oath of hatred for the Romans was an important aspect of Roman cultural
memory of the Second Punic War. It was not enough for the Romans to remember that
Hannibal indeed represented a time of emergency and danger for the Roman Republic. The
Romans felt a strong desire to remember that Hannibal’s father instilled a hatred of the
Romans when he made the young Hannibal swear an oath to “never be in friendship with the
Romans.” This memory of Hannibal’s hatred for the Romans characterized the Roman
memory of the Second Punic War, a war in which Hannibal, when he invaded Italy, fulfilled
the oath he made to his father. This thesis attempts to explore how the Romans, through
different periods of their history, remembered the Second Punic War and how they
remembered Hannibal, the man who hated them until the day he died.
The Second Punic War began in 218 BCE and ended in 202 BCE. This sixteen-year
war dictated the formation of Roman identity centuries after the war had ended. Every
Roman generation after the war was familiar with the events of the Hannibalic invasion. The
Hannibalic invasion, in other words, was not an abstract facet of Roman history that Roman
school children learned about in school. The Second Punic War constantly reminded the
Romans of their mortality due to the Roman Republic’s near collapse under the military
might of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who audaciously crossed the Alps with tens of
thousands of soldiers and war elephants. The Second Punic War was a way for the Romans
who lived after the war to remember that while Hannibal almost captured Rome, he
ultimately did not force the Romans to surrender to him nor did the Carthaginian army
breech the city walls of Rome. This sense of Roman superiority was strong, for it remained
with the Roman people for nearly four hundred years after the war ended.
Indeed, according to Romans who lived after the war, it was not enough that they
defeated a formidable enemy. The Roman people felt the need to remember that Hannibal
inflicted horrible defeat after horrible defeat upon the Romans at the beginning of the war.
The battle of Cannae, in particular, held a special place in the cultural memory of the Roman
people. As this thesis reveals, the Romans not only remembered Cannae as a horrible defeat,
2
Cornelius Nepos, “Lives of Eminent Commanders: Hannibal 23.2,” in Justin, Cornelius Nepos, and
Eutropius, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson (New York: Bohn’s Classical Library, 1853), 418, original emphasis.
3
but they also recalled the manner in which Roman soldiers died at the battle. In every
author’s narrative, the Carthaginian army’s slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Roman
soldiers loomed large. The heaps of dead bodies at Cannae provided Roman authors with a
measuring stick to gauge how Romans of their time constructed their identity. Through this
study in how these Roman authors constructed the memory of Cannae, one can trace the
trajectory of the formation of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War through
time.
In the mid-second century BCE, Polybius (210–126 BCE) related to his audience that
Hannibal surrounded and annihilated the Roman army at Cannae. Polybius’s factual accounts
of the Romans’ defeat at Cannae–and in turn, their eventual defeat of Hannibal at the battle
of Zama–reveal that a sense of Roman superiority was budding. By the early first century
CE, Livy’s (59 BCE–16 CE) account of Cannae is almost the same as that of Polybius, but
with one difference. Where Polybius was concerned with the mechanics of the battle, Livy
was concerned with the drama of the Roman army’s defeat at Cannae. For instance, a reader
of Livy’s narrative cannot help but feel distress and anxiety as Hannibal’s army closed on the
Romans. In another instance of Livy’s focus on the drama of Cannae, he delved into detail
about the aftermath of the battle. Roman soldiers lay in heaps of bodies, while some
remained alive, lying helplessly as the Carthaginians killed any Roman who was able to
emerge from the mounds of the dead. Livy relates that since the Romans were able to
overcome this type of gruesome defeat, thus the Romans deserved to have an empire. Livy
reveals that Roman superiority by the time of Augustus was in full bloom and was strong and
ingrained in Roman culture.
Livy’s sense of Roman superiority remained a part of Roman identity until the
mid-second century CE, around the time that Plutarch (50–120 CE) and Appian (90–160 CE)
composed their narratives. When Dio Cassius (155–235 CE) composed his narrative of the
Second Punic War, his depiction of Cannae had nothing to do with accounts of the Romans
engaging the Carthaginians in battle. Dio wrote that the gods allowed Hannibal to march
upon Italy, thus the Romans deserved to have a defeat like Cannae happen to them. Dio’s
narrative represents the wilting of Roman superiority in an era of endless civil war. After Dio
wrote his narrative of the Second Punic War, the Romans never regained the feeling of
superiority based on enduring the gruesome defeat at Cannae. By the late fourth century CE,
4
Ammianus Marcellinus (330–395 CE), used the memory of the defeat of Cannae–not the
memory of Roman perseverance after Cannae–to relate to his audience the severity of the
Roman defeat at the battle of Adrianople (378 CE). While Ammianus was relating a military
disaster from his era to the nadir of the Roman experience at Cannae, another Roman author
used the memory of Cannae for an entirely different audience. The author Eutropius (320–
381 CE) wrote a brief history of Rome commissioned by the emperor Valens (r. 364–
368 CE). Eutropius’s audience was newly Romanized provincials who had been integrated
into the Roman government. Eutropius and the integrated barbarians striving to be Roman
knew what memory to make part of their consciousnesses in order to be more Roman: the
accounts of Roman losses at Cannae, as related by Eutropius.
The battle of Cannae is not unlike other instances of violence that other ethnic groups
have used to form national identities. All over the world and across time, different ethnicities
use the memory of violence to construct different their ethnic identities. The Chinese people
remember the Rape of Nanking inflicted by the Japanese during the Second World War as
away to foster national identity, and to this day the Chinese harbor anti-Japanese sentiment
due the refusal of the Japanese to apologize for committing the Rape of Nanking.3
Additionally, the Chinese memory of the Rape of Nanking changed over time as the Chinese
used Nanking differently during different parts of their history.4 The Serbs in the early 1990s
used the memory of the Ottoman Invasions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to justify
the mass murder of Muslims in the Balkans.5
The battle of Cannae and the entire Second Punic War are similar to these examples
of other peoples using memories of violence to construct identities, except for the fact that
these uses of memory are recent to our era. With the Roman people, however, scholars have
3
For more information, see Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the
Nanjing Massacre,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 26-7.
4
See Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and
Japan,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffry M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 54-9.
5
For the linking of the memories of alleged Ottoman and Albanian atrocities against Christian Serbs to
justify ethnic cleansing of Serbian Muslims, see Michael Sells, “Religion, History, and Genocide in
Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Religion and the War Over Bosnia, ed. G. Scott Davis (New York: Routledge, 1996),
24-37.
5
the benefit of time to study how the Romans used the memory of the Second Punic War
hundreds of years after the war, as opposed to a few decades after the fact, as in Nanking and
the Balkans. As stated above, the Romans used the memory of Cannae differently throughout
time, and each of these different uses of memory reveal different conclusions about how the
Romans thought of their own contemporary time.
This thesis utilizes the memory theories of Paul Ricoeur’s work Time and Narrative.
Time and Narrative is philosophical work that investigates how narrative, whether it is a
narrative of history or fiction, is a rumination of time and events. According to Ricoeur, and
as will be revealed during the course of this thesis, the cultural milieu of a writer dictates
what he will place in his narrative. Take the author Livy, for instance. Livy wrote in an era of
aggressive pride for the empire.6 The Romans admired and were proud of their empire at the
end of a century of civil war, and because of this admiration, the Romans needed a
justification as to why they even deserved this empire and the peace and power it brought.
In addition to Time and Narrative this thesis uses Jens Brockmeier’s article,
“Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory,” that addresses a culture’s use
of memory, albeit through a psychological lens. Additionally, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick’s
“‘I Saw a Nightmare…’: Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16,
1976)” provides a model for how a culture, at a social historical level, constructs a memory
centered on violence, despite the efforts of the government to create an official narrative.
This article is concerned with anti-Apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and the use of
this article is not to insist that the Roman government had an official account of the war that
differed from ordinary Romans. Rather, this article reveals that ordinary people are
6
It is also important to be aware that in his preface, Livy stated that to the readers of his narrative, “the
earliest origins and the period immediately succeeding them will give little pleasure, for they will be in haste to
reach these modern times, in which the might of a people which has been long very powerful is working its own
undoing.” See Livy Preface 5, trans. B. O. Foster, History of Rome (1919; repr., Cambridge Harvard University
Press, 2001), 5. This statement suggests that Livy was unhappy with his current time; however, Livy’s
sentiment should not be taken as an entire condemnation of Rome’s past achievements that accumulated to the
empire of Livy’s era. Livy, for instance, also wrote later in his preface that “if any people ought to be allowed to
consecrate their origins and refer them to a divine source, so great is the military glory of the Roman People that
when they profess that their Father and the Father of their Father was none other than Mars, the nations of the
earth may well submit to this also with as good a grace as they submit to Rome’s dominion.” Livy’s statement
demonstrates that while he may have had reservations of the state of the empire during his era, the notion of
Rome’s origins was enough to convince Livy that he should still have pride in the vast territorial gains of the
Romans. See Livy Preface 7, in Foster, 5.
6
instrumental in the creation of national identities. Additionally, Eviator Zerubavel’s book,
Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, reveals that ordinary
people do not even need to read a narrative to be part of a cultural memory of an event. The
act of telling and oral tradition is a form of narrative, albeit unwritten. Since families share
stories of ancestor’s deeds and events that affected the family, children grow and tell their
children, and thus the memory of an event is unbound to the written word. Cultural memory
lives on in a section of society that may not be able to read a written narrative.
One issue that is pertinent to this thesis is the issue of the author’s intent and the
exegesis of the audience. Martyn P. Thompson’s “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of
Historical Meaning” studies the relationship between the author’s original intention in
creating the narrative and the ability of the reader to create his or her own interpretation of
the text.7 When juxtaposed with Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, Thompson’s work takes
special importance to this thesis. The author and a reader of a narrative are in a dance
between the author’s use of cultural memory, the reader’s use of memory, and the event
itself.
How have other historians used memory theory to study Roman history? Since the
use of memory theory is still in its nascent form, scholars have only recently published works
utilizing memory to investigate Roman events The first monograph studying a Roman
memory of an event, coincidentally, was Dennis Proctor’s 1971 book Hannibal’s March in
History. Proctor’s approach is to study how Polybius and Livy presented Hannibal’s march
across the Alps. Proctor then hoped to discover what the common knowledge of Polybius and
Livy was of Hannibal’s march across the Alps.8 Roughly, twenty years later, Gary B. Mill’s
published Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome. Mill’s aim was to study how Livy represented
Rome’s early history in his narrative. According to Mill, Livy was not concerned with
revealing the “truth” of Rome’s history, but rather how the Roman people remembered such
things.9 The method of using memory theory in a historical study influenced Alain M.
Gowing to study how the Romans used the memory of the Republic in the early imperial
7
Martyn P. Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and
Theory 32, no. 3 (October, 1993): 248-9.
8
Dennis Proctor, Hannibal’s March in History (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971), 5.
9
Gary B. Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 18-9.
7
era.10 Thomas Sizgorich’s Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in
Christianity and Islam utilizes narrative formation theory to study how Islam and Christianity
formed communal identities using narratives in the later Roman Empire.11 None of these
works focuses, and this thesis does, on Cannae and the Roman memory of Hannibal.
While scholarship on memory in the Roman Empire is in its incipient stages,
scholarship on the Second Punic War is copious. Military historians, the group of scholars
most concerned with the Second Punic War, have studied the military tactics of the Second
Punic War. The first modern student of history to study the Second Punic War was Theodore
Ayrault Dodge, an officer in the American army during the American Civil War, who
published his study of Hannibal’s tactics in his 1891 book, Hannibal. Dodge’s work was a
biography of Hannibal that also studied Hannibal’s tactics during the Second Punic War.
Additionally, Dodge was such an authoritative and monumental historian that every scholar
who came after him was either arguing with Dodge on some minute point of strategy or
contradicting Dodge altogether. One hundred years later, in 1981, Ernle Dusgate Shelby, a
former officer in the British military, published a revision of Dodge’s Hannibal, also entitled
Hannibal.
While Dodge and Shelby focused upon Hannibal’s strategies during the Second Punic
War, another scholar offered a biography Scipio Africanus. In 1927, Captain B. H. Liddell
Hart published his biography of Scipio that doubled as a study of Scipio’s tactics, entitled
Greater Than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus. Dodge, Shelby, and Hart represent the first wave
of scholarship on the Second Punic War: the military officer, himself well-versed in the art of
war, was drawn to the Second Punic War due to the human drama of the conflict. Recently,
however, there have been new scholars who have not witnessed combat who nonetheless
have attempted to capture the experience of the ordinary soldier during the battle of Cannae.
In 2002, Gregory Daly published his Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second
Punic War. Daly was concerned with the tactics of the battle of Cannae (although Daly’s
book features an exhaustive study of Roman and Carthaginian tactics at Cannae), but he also
10
Alain M. Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ix.
11
Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam.
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 5.
8
wanted to portray to a modern audience that might not have experienced combat what it was
like to be present at Cannae. Another author, Adrian Goldsworthy has published two books
studying Cannae for a widespread audience. The first book, Cannae, which Goldsworthy
published in 2002, offered his audience a general overview of the tactics of Cannae. Five
years later, in 2007, Goldsworthy published another book, entitled Cannae: Hannibal’s
Greatest Victory. Goldsworthy’s aim in this book was to conflate Daly’s study of the
experience of battle in the Second Punic War with his own Cannae. Goldsworthy thus
published for a wide audience a book about the tactics and the experience of the battle of
Cannae.
While recent scholars have focused their scholarly inquiries to the experience of the
common soldier during the Second Punic War, another trend in scholarship has shifted focus
to the effects of Hannibal on other areas of Roman life. In 1965, Arnold Toynbee published
Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life. Toynbee’s work focused
on how the Second Punic War altered Roman politics. Toynbee was especially concerned
with the tension between the patrician and the plebeian classes that culminated in the
Gracchian reforms. While military historians produce studies of the Second Punic War,
Toynbee started a new, albeit small wave of historians studying how Hannibal affected other
areas of Roman life. In 1982, James William Ermatinger published Rome After Hannibal:
Changes in Society and Economics 225–133 B.C. Ermatinger focused his study on how
Hannibal’s invasion altered the agricultural and economic practices of the Roman
government. While Ermatinger published his work in the early 1980s, it was not until
2003 that another author published a work focused upon how the Second Punic War altered
the political landscape of the Mediterranean. Dexter Hoyos’s book, Hannibal’s Dynasty:
Power and Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247–183 BC, studied how Hannibal’s
aristocratic Carthaginian family shaped and altered politics in Carthage and in Roman in the
Mediterranean world.
It is this wave of scholarship focused upon the effects of the Second Punic War on
other areas of Roman life which I study in this thesis. By using memory theory, this thesis
attempts to untangle how the Romans in different periods of their history interpreted the
9
Second Punic War.12 Moreover, this thesis attempts to discover what the Romans, or at least
a range of elite historians, were trying to say about their own identity as a people when
reflecting on the Second Punic War in a particular manner.13
This study of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War documents a shift in
how the Romans used their shared memory of the war to fashion a sense of Roman identity
during different times of their history. During the late second century BCE, Polybius’s
narrative suggests that the Roman people began to foster a sense of superiority about
themselves since they recovered from the Hannibalic invasion and became masters of the
Mediterranean. By the first century to early second century CE, as demonstrated in Livy’s
narrative, the Romans ramped up this sentiment of superiority about themselves during an era
of vast imperial expansion. Indeed, the Romans during this time felt that since they defeated
Hannibal, they deserved to rule over others and no one could dare dream of harming the
empire. In the early second century CE, Plutarch’s and Appian’s narratives suggest that the
Romans of this era continued this sense of Roman superiority by negating Hannibal’s
victories during the war. By the early third century CE, in an era of imperial instability and
civil war in which Roman killed Roman in order that their commanders could become
emperor, the Romans of this time remembered the Second Punic War as a time when the
Romans had an external enemy, and not each other, to fight. By the late fourth century CE,
narratives by Ammianus Marcellinus and Eutropius suggest that barbarian and Parthian
incursions made the Romans of this era feel that their contemporaneous era was worse than
during the Second Punic War. Moreover, the barbarians who were fighting for the Romans as
auxiliary soldiers also used the memory of the Second Punic War as a way to become
Roman. In the early fifth century CE, with Claudian, rebellions and further incursions into
Roman territory by the barbarians made the Romans of this era feel that the Roman
experience during the Second Punic War was for naught and that their empire was falling
apart.
12
For the malleability of memory and identity through the history of a people, see John R. Gillis,
“Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity,
ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4, 16.
13
Ibid., 3.
10
When Stilicho defeated these enemies threatening Rome, the Romans of this time
hailed him as a new Scipio, Fabius, and Marcellus, all Punic War heroes. Thus, the Roman
people shifted the importance of the memory of the Second Punic War in an era of survival
and toil. Despite Stilicho’s seemingly single-handed victories over the enemies over of the
western empire, ordinary people were suffering from invasions, and thus the memory of the
Second Punic War ceased to be an important aspect of Roman identity.
I wrote this thesis from a viewpoint not as one who experienced combat (unless one
counts this thesis process as a battle), but as one whose shared cultural memory of violence
shaped their identity. On April 9, 1942, Japanese Imperial troops, after a three-month siege,
finally succeeded in forcing the combined American and Filipino garrison on the Bataan
peninsula to surrender. The 200th Coastal Artillery Regiment of the New Mexico National
Guard were present during the battle of Bataan and the surrender to the Japanese (including
two of my great-great uncles and a distant cousin). What followed for those who surrendered
to the Japanese was the Bataan Death March, a sixty-mile forced march from Bataan to
Capas without any food or water. For those who endured it, the Bataan Death March was
hell. The Japanese shot, beat, stabbed, beheaded, crushed with their vehicles any soldier who
collapsed; or, as were the majority of cases, the Japanese killed random prisoners for the
mere spectacle. This memory of the Bataan Death March permeates New Mexican
communal identity. In New Mexico, there reside numerous dedications, commemorations,
and parks dedicated the memory of those New Mexicans who fell to the Japanese in a most
despicable manner. Families around New Mexico who had relatives in the Bataan Death
March told stories to their children about what their ancestors endured in the march in an
effort to remember the march. This retelling is not unlike families who lived after the Second
Punic War and who told stories to their children about what their ancestors endured at the
battles of Cannae or how their ancestors were certain that Hannibal was about to march upon
Rome. The effect of a memory of violence is a strong cohesive agent that fosters a sense of
pride among a large swath of peoples across the span of time, and this is the context in which
I composed this thesis.
11
CHAPTER 2
MEMORY AND HISTORY IN THE WAKE OF THE
SECOND PUNIC WAR
Is there anyone who can remain unmoved in reading the narrative
of such an encounter?
– Polybius
In order to understand the effects that Hannibal had on the formation of Roman
cultural identity, it is necessary to investigate first the oldest extant source available to
modern scholars who study the Second Punic War, the Greek author Polybius. Polybius was
born in 208 BCE, thus making his narrative the most contemporaneous to the Second Punic
War. The Histories of Polybius is therefore source-zero for this thesis since Polybius wrote
his narrative so close to conclusion of the war. That is not to say, however, that Polybius’s
narrative best represents what happened during the Second Punic War. Polybius, as a Greek
historian writing a history of the Roman people, had his own audience to which he was
catering and his own prejudices that are present in his narrative, despite his intent to write an
account of the history of the Romans unrestrained from any sort of bias.14 The bias that
influenced Polybius when he composed his narrative was that the Roman people used the
memory of the defeat of Hannibal after the Second Punic War as a means to foster an
incipient sense of Roman superiority over other peoples. Polybius’s narrative reveals that as
the Romans became victorious over Hannibal, they began not to fight for survival, but rather
for the right the rule over other people. This assertion is pertinent to Polybius’s use of Roman
memory of the Second Punic War because it reveals that it is important to investigate first the
character of Polybius. The following questions must then be asked before the investigation
14
See Polybius The Histories 1.14.1-9, trans. W. R. Paton, The Histories (1922; repr., Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005), when he compares the two sources available to him when he composed his
narrative–Philinus and Fabius, a Carthaginian and a Roman, respectively–and Polybius’s insistence that it is
necessary to avoid “accusing our friends or praising our enemies.” See also Polybius The Histories
2.56.8-10 and his insistence that his narrative will be free from exaggeration and seek out only the historicity of
Roman history.
12
Polybius’s narrative commences: Who was Polybius? What was his purpose when he
composed his narrative? Who was his audience?
Polybius was a Greek historian who was born in Megalopolis in 208 BCE, during an
era of incipient Roman dominion over the Greece. The father of Polybius, Lycortas, was an
ambassador to Rome in 189 BCE, which proved to be the conduit that formed Polybius’s
identity and political leanings. Lycortas’s view was that the Greeks should accept Roman
dominion over Greece. Moreover, any interaction that Greece had with the Romans was to be
so inoffensive that the Romans would not want to destroy Greece.15 Moreover, in Polybius’s
adulthood, after Rome conquered Greece, he went to Rome as a prisoner of war and became
a client of Aemilius Paulus, a consul during the Third Macedonian War, and soon began to
tutor Aemilius’s two sons in 167 BCE. While in Rome, Polybius had the opportunity to study
the history and institutions of Roman society in an intimate manner. Polybius’s relationship
with Aemilius Paulus proved to be a further boon for Polybius: the younger of Aemilius’s
sons was Publius Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, and Polybius
became an military attaché to Scipio Aemilianus.16 Polybius would eventually accompany
Scipio Aemilianus to Carthage when the Romans engaged the Carthaginians in diplomacy
before the start of the Third Punic War in 149 BCE. Polybius was likely an eyewitness to the
Romans burning Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE at the conclusion of the Third Punic
War.17 This study of Polybius is important because it proves that through these influences,
Polybius, although a Greek, was beginning to form a distinctly Roman lens through which he
viewed the world as revealed by his use of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War
to justify Roman expansion.
The influence of Lycortas’s opinion, Polybius’s freedman-ship to Scipio Aemilius
Paulus, and witnessing the destruction of Carthage all would have affected Polybius
15
Col. H. J. Edwards, introduction to The Histories, by Polybius and trans. W. R. Paton (1922; repr.,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), vii.
16
See Robert Kallet-Marx, Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Imperium in the East
from 148 to 62 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 22-4; F. W. Walbank, A Historical
Commentary on Polybius, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1957), 3.
17
Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius,” History and Theory 21, no. 3 (October 1982):
367; A. M. Eckstein, “Josephus and Polybius: A Reconsideration,” Classical Antiquity 9, no. 2 (October 1990):
175; Edwards, “Introduction,” viii-ix.
13
enormously.18 Out of these influences, it was the last that made an enduring imprint on
Polybius’s mind. Polybius wrote his narrative for a Greek audience so that they could learn
why the Romans were so successful in expanding throughout the Mediterranean world.
Moreover, Polybius wrote his history of the Romans within a context of world history as he
saw it.19 Polybius’s aim was to compare the Roman Republic to other nations that existed
contemporaneously in an effort to explain why the Roman Republic was successful in its
ability to expand over other nations while other nations did not successfully expand.
According to Polybius, for example, the Persians once had a great empire but could
not exert Persian authority and hegemony outside of Asia. The Spartans, although a powerful
people, held dominion over Greece for only twelve years. The Macedonians under Alexander
the Great were able to conquer and expand only into Asia, while they could not expand into
Western Europe. Rome, on the other hand, surpassed these nations because the Romans were
able to subject the Mediterranean under their rule due to the strength of the Roman
constitution and the mild temperament of Roman rule.20 Therein lies the answers to the
questions posed in the last paragraph: Polybius was a Greek author whose father advocated
that the Greeks should accept Roman rule with relish. Polybius eventually became the
freedman of Scipio Aemilianus who destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War. Polybius
then composed a history of Rome for a Greek audience, so that the Greeks could understand
18
In addition to these claims, the destruction of Corinth by the Romans in 146 BCE also had an enormous
impact on how Polybius perceived Roman domination over Greece. In an attempt to convey to his audience the
enormity of the Roman conquest of Greece, Polybius compared the fall of Greece to the destruction of Carthage
in the Third Punic War: “The ruin of Carthage is indeed considered to have been the greatest of calamities, but
when we come to think of it the fate of Greece was no less terrible and in some ways even more so…the
Greeks, continuing to witness their calamities, handed on from father to son the memory of misfortune.” See
Polybius The Histories 38.1.4-7, in Paton 389. This statement demonstrates that Polybius did not embrace
totally the notion of Roman dominion over Greece, but Polybius’s next statement demonstrates that he placed
the blame of Rome conquering Greece on the shortcomings of the Greeks, and not the Romans themselves. In
regards to cities, including Corinth, which fell to the Romans, Polybius wrote that it was Greek commanders
who “showed both faithlessness and cowardice and brought on their heads all this trouble…Therefore the lost
every shred of honour, and for various reasons consented to receive the Roman lictors into their cities, in such
terror were they owing to their own offences.” See Polybius The Histories 38.3.9-12, original lacuna. Polybius’s
statement demonstrates that while the Romans did deserve to conquer Greece (as this chapter reveals through a
study of Polybius’s use of the memory of the Second Punic War), it was the “faithlessness and cowardice” of
the Greeks that caused the Romans to conquer Greece in a violent manner.
19
20
Ibid., 5.31.6-7.
Ibid., 1.2.1-8, 6.18.4. For the mild manner in which the Romans treated the Carthaginians after the end
of the Second Punic War, see 15.17.5-7; Cohen, 377.
14
that the strength of the Roman government allowed the Roman Republic to extend its
hegemony over the Mediterranean.
This mini-study of the milieu of Polybius is important for this chapter because it
suggests that Polybius’s treatment of Roman history is not a simple survey of near recent
events that happened before Polybius’s era. Polybius had a strong connection with the
Romans due to his father’s insistence that Greece must accept the dominion of Rome,
Polybius’s post as military attaché to Publius Scipio Aemilianus, and Polybius’s witness of
the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War. There is more, however, to Polybius’s
identity than a Greek writing a history of Rome that presents the Romans in a favorable light.
Polybius, with his connections to Rome, was still a Greek at heart, and his connections to
Greece are apparent in his Histories. It was Polybius’s dual identity as a Greek and one who
had connections to Roman culture that colored his narrative of the Second Punic War; and it
is necessary to be aware that Polybius was not interested in presenting to his Greek audience
the Roman memory of the Second Punic War as Hannibal invading and nearly conquering
the Romans. Polybius’s intention in creating his narrative was to use the Second Punic War
to show his audience that Hannibal indeed almost defeated the Romans. The Romans,
however, eventually overcame the initial defeats in the early of the Second Punic War.
According to Polybius, in other words, despite that the Romans suffered the loss of three
armies at the battles of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae, the Romans were able to
recover from the Second Punic War and conquer other nations such as Carthage itself and
eventually Greece.
In this manner, Polybius’s account of the Second Punic War was not actually
concerned with the brilliance of Hannibal’s leadership or the persona of Hannibal himself.
Polybius was more concerned with educating his audience as to why the Romans were
destined to rule other nations. The Histories, therefore, is a pragmatic text that serves the
purpose of Polybius to explain to his audience why the Romans were able to expand
throughout the Mediterranean.21 Polybius had a specific intention when he composed his
narrative, and that intention was to reveal to his audience why the Romans deserved to rule
over Greece. Polybius used the recently-formed Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic
21
See Thompson, 251-2.
15
War in a didactic manner to explain to his audience why the Romans were not only
successful in expanding, but also why they deserved to expand. According to Polybius’s
Histories, in other words, the Romans defeated their greatest adversary, Hannibal, and the
subsequent recovery of the Roman state permitted the expansions of the Romans over other
nations.22
There is more to this assertion, for Polybius was bound to his Greek audience. This
bond between author and a memory of an event is a strongly linked chain to the past through
the means of cultural memory. The world of Polybius and other Greeks during this time was
one where the Romans had recently conquered Greece. Polybius and his audience shared the
narrative of the Second Punic War that the Romans established through the means of cultural
memory immediately after the War ended since the Greeks and Roman existed in the same
milieu and thus both groups were aware of the history of the war.23 The binding of writer and
audience through an event of which are both are aware–the Roman cultural memory of the
Second Punic War–is the commonality readers shared with Polybius when they read his
narrative. Both Polybius and his audience used the Roman cultural memory as a way to
explain why the Romans were able to expand so successfully across the Mediterranean.
Polybius, as the creator of a narrative trying to explain why the Romans were able to
accomplish the conquest of the Mediterranean, used the memory of the Second Punic War
with which his Greek audience would already be familiar. When Greeks read Polybius’s
work, they had a commonality with the author Polybius: the recent experience of Rome
conquering Greece.
This commonality served as a way for Polybius’s audience to be aware of the success
of the Roman people in defeating Hannibal and eventually ruling over “the entire world.” In
this way, Polybius’s narrative of the Second Punic War is also a pragmatic text in which the
reader reads, interacts, and interprets the text, no matter what the author’s original intention
22
Indeed, as Kallet-Marx has proposed, the mere threat of Roman invincibility was enough to keep Greece
within the confines of the Roman Republic. See Kallet-Marx, 49-56, 95-6.
23
For the binding of a culture through a common cultural memory, see Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering
and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory,” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 15 (2002): 18; Jeffrey K. Olick
and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: ‘From Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of
Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 133.
16
in creating the narrative.24 The pragmatism is important because Polybius’s audience would
also have tapped into the sense of Roman superiority over other peoples because of the defeat
of Hannibal. Polybius’s narrative is a combination of a substantialist text and a pragmatic
text: substantialist in that Polybius wanted to educate his audience why the Romans were
able to expand so successfully by using the extant memory of the Second Punic War;
pragmatic in that the reader of Polybius’s narrative has their own memory of the Second
Punic War. This commonality and the creation of narrative is linked with the reliving of
memories through repetition.25 In the case of a Greek reading Polybius’s narrative, the
memory of Rome conquering Greece is repeated and relived in the readers’ minds when they
read stories of Scipio defeating Mago at New Carthage and killing every living thing in the
city. The difference, however, between the memory of Scipio’s conquering of new Carthage
and Roman domination of Greece was that the Romans at New Carthage punished those who
had harmed Rome during the early years of the Second Punic War. The aim of Polybius’s
narrative is thus: those who accepted Roman domination were spared the fate of New
Carthage, while those who attempted to harm the Romans received their just punishments at
the end of a sword.
Polybius was also not interested in becoming a firebrand to explain why Roman
imperialism was endemically harmful to nations that Rome conquered. Polybius used the
Roman memory of the Hannibalic invasion to explain that the Romans overcame the initial
setbacks they faced early in the Second Punic War and one day would rule “the entire
world.” The Romans were better than the Persians, Spartans, and Alexander the Great. It
would make sense, in Polybius’s mind, that the Romans would defeat their greatest adversary
and continue to spread Roman hegemony to Greece.26 Polybius, in other words, used the
memory of the Second Punic War as a tool for his audience to realize that the Romans
deserved to rule Greece because of the notion that they defeated Hannibal after having nearly
24
Thompson, 252-3.
25
D. Vance Smith, “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (Spring
1997): 164.
26
For the link between author and reader in the formation of a historical narrative, see Paul Ricoeur, Time
and Narrative, trans. and ed. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 30, 46, 55, 58-64.68, 161-68; vol. 2 19, 64; Brockmeier, “Remembering
and Forgetting,” 36.
17
lost the Second Punic War. Therefore, when a Greek reader who was engaged in reading
Polybius’s histories remembered the Roman conquest of Greece, Polybius taught that reader
that the Romans deserved to win for reasons that Polybius revealed to his reader during the
course of Polybius’s narrative of the Second Punic War.
Furthermore, Polybius’s aim was to instruct audience that the Roman people would
inflict suffering upon the nations that made Rome suffer. If the Carthaginians, who nearly
defeated Rome, inflicted terror and fear upon the Roman people, the Romans made the
Carthaginians suffer tenfold when the Romans began to become victorious over Hannibal at
the end of the Second Punic War. In Polybius’s time, people used the memory of the Second
Punic War to educate his audience why it was a good idea to accept Roman dominion over
Greece and why it would be beneficial to the Greeks to cooperate with the Romans. Polybius
used the Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War as a didactic tool to explain
Roman expansion to his audience, and thus revealing how the Romans immediately after the
Second Punic War constructed their identity of superiority over other nations.
THE GRAVITY OF ROME’S SITUATION DURING THE
SECOND PUNIC WAR
When Polybius began to write about the Second Punic War, he immediately declared
the enormity of the Hannibalic invasion of Italy:
First I shall indicate the causes of the above war between Rome and
Carthage…and tell how the Carthaginians invaded Italy, broke up the dominion of
Rome, and cast the Romans into great fear for their own safety and even for their
native soil, while great was their own hope, such as they had never dared to
entertain, of capturing Rome itself. 27
Polybius set the stage for his narrative of the Second Punic War when he informed his
audience what the Hannibalic invasion of Italy meant to the Romans: the near destruction of
the Roman Republic since the Romans would lose their Italian allies, the territories Rome
acquired in the First Punic War, and the loss of Rome itself. Not only did Hannibal almost
destroy Roman hegemony in the initial stages of the war, in other words, he also almost
conquered Italy and seized Rome itself. If Carthage had won the Second Punic War, it would
have emerged as the superpower of the Mediterranean instead of Rome. This notion reveals
27
Polybius The Histories 3.2.1-3, in Paton, 5.
18
that a defeat at the end of the Second Punic War would actually mean that the vanquished
would lose all hopes of being a superpower in the Mediterranean world.
HOW POLYBIUS COMPOSED HIS HISTORIES
This chapter is not concerned about the entire course of the Second Punic War, but
rather how Polybius constructed his narrative about the Hannibalic invasion. This chapter
splits Polybius’s depictions of the Second Punic War into three sections. The first section
represents folly and disaster at the start of the Second Punic War since Hannibal defeated the
Romans in three separate battles at the beginning of the Second Punic War. The second
section discusses the character of Publius Cornelius Scipio and the sack of New Carthage in
Iberia and how, by sheer tenacity the Romans were able to survive the darkest years of the
Second Punic War. More important than a study of Polybius’s depiction of Roman tenacity,
this portion of the chapter investigates how Polybius used Roman cultural memory of what
happened to the enemies of Rome once the Romans were able to harm the Carthaginians at
New Carthage for nearly overthrowing the Roman Republic.28 The third section of this
chapter discusses the battle of Zama when the Romans defeated Hannibal and how Polybius
tried to conflate the Roman defeat of Hannibal with a new era in antiquity in which the
Romans were ready to become master’s of the Mediterranean world.
This chapter does not offer a complete narrative of Polybius’s depiction of the Second
Punic War, but rather it maintains that Hannibal was only able to succeed in nearly subduing
the Romans due to the incompetence of Roman commanders early in the war, and thus
negating the myth of Hannibal as a brilliant general. This assertion is a reflection of Roman
cultural memory of the early stages of the Second Punic War: Hannibal was not a military
genius; he only defeated the Romans when an incompetent consul weakened the resolve of
the Roman army to defeat Hannibal. Polybius in turn used this memory in his narrative to
bolster his assertion quoted above that indeed, Rome was in danger of losing dominion over
Italy.
28
That is not to say, however, that Roman military operations in Iberia during the Second Punic War were
undertaken as revenge against the Carthaginians. The Romans wanted to disrupt Carthaginians supply lines in
Iberia in order to weaken Hannibal’s capacity to make war upon the Romans. The eagerness in which the
Romans slaughtered everything in New Carthage, however, was enacted as an act of revenge against the
Carthaginians.
19
FOLLY AND DISASTER AT THE START OF THE SECOND
PUNIC WAR
The battle of the Trebia (218 BCE) began when Hannibal attacked a band of Celts,
who had previously allied themselves with Hannibal, attempted to enter into a treaty of
friendship with the Romans. The Roman consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus looked for a
pretext to engage Hannibal in open combat and thus sent soldiers to engage the Carthaginians
after the defeat of the Romans at the battle of Ticinus. Longus wanted to defeat Hannibal so
as to force him and his army to return across the Alps, and thus to save the Roman Republic
from Hannibal. Hannibal, however, did not wish for a full engagement of forces, and ordered
the retreat of his army when Tiberius’s army approached the Carthaginians. Tiberius
managed to kill a few Carthaginian soldiers without suffering many deaths in his army, so
Tiberius was “elated and overjoyed by his success” and was eager “to bring on a decisive
battle as soon as possible.”29 Publius Cornelius Scipio Major, Tiberius’s consular colleague,
had the opposite view: he urged Tiberius to train his army further during the upcoming
winter to ensure the friendship of the Celts.30
Tiberius, however, “was quite conscious of the truth and cogency of all these reasons,
but, urged on by his ambition and with an unreasonable confidence in his fortune, he was
eager to deliver the decisive blow himself and did not wish Publius to be able to be present at
the battle.”31 In this passage, Polybius portrayed Tiberius as a man who was eager to fight
and defeat Hannibal to obtain glory only for himself. Hannibal, however, had a plan to
destroy the Roman army at the Trebia River. Hannibal decided to conceal his soldiers in the
thorny plants that lined the banks of the Trebia to surprise the Roman army in an ambush.32
After concealing his cavalry, Hannibal sent his Numidian cavalry out to Tiberius’s camp to
draw the Romans into the ambuscade. Tiberius responded to the Numidian raid and sent his
entire army after the Numidian who shot at his army.33 According to Polybius, it was
Tiberius’s rashness that caused problems for the Romans, and not Hannibal’s military genius.
29
Polybius The Histories 3.70.1, in Paton, 171.
30
Ibid., 3.70.3-5, in Paton, 171-3.
31
Ibid., 3.70.7, in Paton, 173.
32
Ibid., 3.71.1.
33
Ibid., 3.71.10-72.1.
20
Polybius in turn related this assertion from the Roman cultural memory of the battle of the
Trebia. Publius, the co-consul, advocated a strategy that was more reserved since it called for
further training of the Roman army, while Tiberius wanted to rush into battle with Hannibal.
Tiberius took Hannibal’s bait and sent forth his army after the Numidian raiders
before his soldiers could have breakfast.34 Tiberius Sempronius’s army paid for their consul’s
myopic pursuit of the Numidian raiders. When the Numidian cavalry lured the Romans into
the ambuscade, Hannibal’s soldiers poured forth from the thorny plants lining the
watercourse and attacked the Roman center from the rear.35 While some Roman infantry
were able to fend off attacks from the Celts and Africans in Hannibal’s army and were able
to retreat into Publius’s camp at Placentia, the rest “were killed near the river by the
elephants and cavalry.”36 Because of Hannibal’s judicious planning, his army was victorious
at the battle of the Trebia, while Tiberius’s lack of planning caused a massive defeat of the
Roman army early in the Second Punic War.
What information can one glean from reading Polybius’s account of the battle of
Trebia? Polybius has shown his audience that thoughtless action on the account of Tiberius
directly caused the defeat of the Romans at Trebia and not necessarily the superior
generalship of Hannibal.37 If Tiberius had fought Hannibal later after the winter with
better-trained troops, the Romans could have overcome Hannibal’s strategies. Polybius
further illustrated Tiberius’s proclivity to claim glory for himself when the consul sent news
to Rome “that a battle had taken place and that a storm had deprived him of victory.”38 The
Roman people at first believed the news, but eventually, the Romans learnt that the battle of
the Trebia was actually a defeat for the Roman army. After receiving the bad news, the
Roman Senate became surprised at the defeat of the Roman army at the Trebia and thus
34
Ibid., 3.72.3.
35
Ibid., 3.74.1.
36
Ibid., 3.74.2-7, in Paton, 183. See also Walbank, 404-7. Moreover, the existence of elephants in
Polybius’s narrative of the battle of Trebia suggests that the Roman memory of Hannibal was not of one who
effectively used elephants in the battle, but rather the memory of Hannibal was of a foreigner who invaded Italy.
37
James Davidson, “The Gaze in Polybius’ Histories,” Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 12.
38
Polybius The Histories 3.75.1-2, in Paton, 185.
21
dispatched legions to Sicily, Sardinia, and Tarentum to protect Italy from more of Hannibal’s
incursions.39
This passage is important for two reasons. First, as a general who wanted glory only
for himself, Tiberius sent false news to Rome that victory was for certain, but a storm
deprived the Romans of victory. This lie by Tiberius only caused anxiety for the Roman
people since the Senate had to dispatch legions to other parts of Italy in an effort to stymie
Hannibal’s advance. Second, this passage also reveals that in the Roman cultural memory in
the years after the Second Punic War, it was the defection of their allies the Celts to the
Carthaginians that contributed to the anxiety in the Roman psyche, and not necessarily
Hannibal’s victory.40 Tiberius’s ineptitude at the battle of Trebia therefore resulted in the
Romans’ defeat at the battle and it caused panic in the city of Rome since the Celts were now
fighting for Hannibal.
Tiberius’s loss at the battle of Trebia was the first major defeat for the Romans during
the Second Punic War. Polybius, however, had another reason for describing the battle the
way he did. After the Roman Senate dispatched legions to Italy for protection against
Hannibal, the Roman Senate also asked Hiero, the king of Syracuse, for aid–aid that Hiero
duly sent. Hiero sent aid to the Romans because, according to Polybius, “the Romans both in
public and in private are most to be feared when they stand in real danger.”41 The Roman
people, in other words, had the fortitude to retaliate against their foes even when they were in
lassitude after a defeat in battle. Polybius said to his audience that the Romans were a people
that should always be perceived as being ready to strike at any foe, even one that was
ostensibly a threat to them. Polybius here was telling the Greeks that they should be inclined
to accept Roman dominion because of the capacity of the Romans to strike back at any nation
that dared to challenge Rome. In his depiction of the battle of the Trebia, Polybius wanted to
inform his audience that only the most loyal allies of Rome recognized the potential threat
that the Romans posed to their enemies, as Polybius provided in his explicit mention of Hiero
sending aid the Romans.
39
Ibid., 3.75.4.
40
Andrew Erskine, “Hannibal and the Freedom of the Italians,” Hermes 121, no. 1 (1993): 58.
41
Polybius The Histories 3.75.7-8, in Paton, 187.
22
Polybius pulled this sentiment from the Roman cultural memory of the battle of the
Trebia after the Second Punic War. The Roman people remembered the battle of the Trebia
as one of their first defeats to Hannibal, but only their most loyal allies still recognized the
might of the Roman Republic. Moreover, the Roman people also remembered who was loyal
to them at the end of the Second Punic War when they began to become victorious against
the Carthaginians. Polybius, later in his narrative, used an example of New Carthage to show
his audience what could happen to a people who challenged Rome. The battle of the Trebia
was the first example of Rome’s fortitude in a defeat, and Polybius pulled from a cultural
memory of the battle that the Roman people established after the end of the Second Punic
War.
In his account of the battle of Lake Trasimene (217 BCE), Polybius continued his
insistence that even when a Roman victory in the Second Punic War was doubtful, the
Romans still possessed a tenacity and fortitude that allowed them eventually to turn the tide
of war against Hannibal. The battle of Lake Trasimene began when Hannibal took his army
to meet the army of the Roman consul, Gaius Flaminius Nepos, who was encamped before
the city of Arretium. Hannibal camped his forces just beyond the marshes that surrounded the
town to collect intelligence on the Roman army’s position. Polybius then offered this
depiction of the character of Flaminius when he described the actions of Hannibal:
On learning that this country promised a rich booty and that Flaminius was a
thorough demagogue, with no talent for the practical conduct of war and
exceedingly self-confident withal, [Hannibal] calculated that if he passed by the
Roman army and advanced into the country in his front, the Consul on the one
hand never looked on while he laid it waste for fear of being jeered at by his
soldiery; and on the other hand [the Consul] would be ready to follow anywhere,
in his anxiety to gain the coming victory himself without waiting for the arrival
for his colleague. From all this [Hannibal] concluded that Flaminius would give
him plenty of opportunities of attacking him.42
The intention of Polybius in this passage was to inform his audience that Flaminius, like
Tiberius, would not refuse the chance to face Hannibal in battle due to the opportunity to
claim glory for himself. Hannibal was able to exploit his opponent’s weakness since he
capitalized on Flaminius’s not waiting for his colleague. Polybius has therefore reiterated his
42
Ibid., 3.80.3-5, in Paton, 197; Walbank, 410-20.
23
assertion that it was the weaknesses of the Roman consul that led the Romans to defeat, and
not necessarily Hannibal’s superior generalship.
Hannibal knew that Flaminius had “no talent for the practical conduct of war” and
would only chase after the Carthaginian army because Flaminius wanted to claim the victory
for himself and not wait for his colleague. Flaminius was therefore less inclined to show
restraint when Hannibal attacked the Romans due to Flaminius’s desire to rob his co-consul
of a victory against Hannibal. The real cause of alarm for the Romans in this point of
Polybius’s narrative of the Second Punic War was Polybius’s assertion that Flaminius was a
mere demagogue who would not waste an opportunity to obtain glory by attempting to defeat
Hannibal in battle.43 Polybius stated that “for there is no denying that he who thinks that
there is anything more essential to a general than the knowledge of his opponent’s principles
and character, is both ignorant and foolish.”44 According to Polybius, Hannibal was able to
win at Trasimene because he was able to exploit Flaminius’s weaknesses, while Flaminius
was indeed “ignorant and foolish” because he sent his army after Hannibal. Polybius
continued his diatribe against Flaminius when he wrote “rashness…and undue boldness and
blind anger, as well as vain gloriousness and conceit, are easy to be taken advantage of by his
enemy and are most dangerous to his friends.”45 Flaminius, like Tiberius Sempronius
Longus, was a rash general; and at the battle of Lake Trasimene, as at the battle of the Trebia,
the rashness of a Roman general had serious consequences for the Roman people.
According to Polybius, “Hannibal had correctly foreseen and reckoned on the conduct
of Flaminius” when Hannibal ordered his army to ravage Italy.46 Flaminius’s officers
implored the consul to wait for his colleague to arrive with more soldiers so that the Romans
had reinforcements. Flaminius, however, “paid little attention to the advice” and ordered his
army to engage Hannibal in battle “utterly regardless of time or place, but bent on falling in
with the enemy, as if victory were a dead certainty.”47 Hannibal placed his army in between
43
Although this assertion is beyond the scope of this thesis, Polybius could also have been using the Greek
cultural memory of Cleon to convey to his audience how Flaminius was acting like a demagogue.
44
Polybius The Histories 3.81.1-2, in Paton, 197.
45
Ibid., 3.81.9, in Paton, 199.
46
Ibid., 3.81.12, in Paton, 199-201.
47
Ibid., 3.82.7, in Paton, 201.
24
the Romans and Lake Trasimene on a defile overlooking a road that passed through two
hills.48 Hannibal gave the orders to attack when the Romans appeared, and his troops
ambushed the Romans on all sides. Polybius’s depiction of the battle of Lake Trasimene
shows the precariousness of the situation of the Roman army:
The sudden appearance of the enemy took Flaminius completely by surprise, and
as the condition of the atmosphere rendered it very difficult to see, and their foes
were charging down on them in so many places from higher ground, the Roman
Centurions and Tribunes were not only unable to take any effectual measures to
set things right, but could not even understand what was happening. They were
charged at one and the same instant from the front, and from the rear, and from
the flanks, so that most of them were cut to pieces in marching order as they were
quite unable to protect themselves, and, as it were, betrayed by their commander’s
lack of judgment. For while they were still occupied in considering what was best
to do, they were being slaughtered without realizing how. Flaminius himself, who
was in the utmost dismay and dejection, was here attacked by certain Celts. So
there fell in the valley about fifteen thousand of the Romans, unable either to
yield to circumstances, or or to achieve anything, but deeming it, as the had been
brought up to do, their supreme duty not to fly or quit their ranks.49
This passage is imbued with meaning. The Carthaginians were able to attack and
slaughter the Romans from all angles due to the incompetence of Flaminius. Hannibal’s
troops attacked the Romans so swiftly and surprisingly that Roman soldiers died without any
comprehension of what was occurring when Hannibal’s soldiers began their attack.
Flaminius, the man on whom Polybius laid blame for the defeat of the Romans, died when
the Celts, who had recently defected from the Romans to fight alongside the Carthaginians,
killed him.50 That is not all, however, for Polybius also told his audience that the Roman
soldiers stayed and fought back against the Carthaginians because it was “their supreme duty
not to fly or quit their ranks.” The Roman soldiers, in other words, still fought on even when
they were being cut to pieces. This example of Roman soldiers continuing to fight is
important because Polybius related the Roman memory of the battle of Lake Trasimene to his
audience that the Romans established after the end of the Second Punic War. The Romans
therefore did not just remember the violence at the battle, but also the tenacity of the Roman
soldiers who still fought on despite the slaughter occurring around them. The horrors of the
48
Ibid., 3.83.1.
49
Ibid., 3.84.2-7, in Paton, 205.
50
Davidson, 13.
25
battle of Lake Trasimene paled in comparison to how some Roman soldiers died after the
battle:
Those again who had been shut in between the hillside and the lake perished in a
shameful and still more pitiable manner. For when they forced into the lake in a
mass, some of them quite lost their wits and trying to swim in their armour were
drowned, but the greater number, wading into the lake as far as they could, stood
there with only their heads out of the water…were finally dispatched either by the
horsemen or in some cases by begging their comrades to do them this service.51
This passage is important because it reveals that in the years after the cessation of the Second
Punic War, the memory of the pitiable manner in which the Romans soldiers who died in
Lake Trasimene after the battle ingrained itself upon the Roman psyche.
The tragedy of the battle of Lake Trasimene did not end at this point in Polybius’s
narrative. A few remaining Roman soldiers who managed to escape the slaughter of the
battlefield to an Etruscan village surrendered to the Carthaginians. Hannibal then began an
invective against the captured Romans soldiers and set the allied auxiliaries who fought
alongside the Romans free to return to their homes, because Hannibal did not “come to fight
with the Italians, but with the Romans for the freedom of Italy.”52 Hannibal, when he
released the allies of the Romans after the battle, compounded the danger that the battle of
Lake Trasimene held in the early memory of the Second Punic War since it was possible that
more allies of the Romans could betray the Romans when their early defeats made Rome
weak. More importantly, however, the battle of Lake Trasimene represented to the Romans
another instance when the Romans lost a battle and many soldiers due to ineffectual
leadership. Lake Trasimene represented to the Roman people, as James Davidson has rightly
stated, Hannibal’s first real victory over the Romans in the Second Punic War.53
The disaster at Lake Trasimene confirmed what Polybius wrote in his introduction to
the Second Punic War that the Carthaginians indeed almost “broke up the dominion of
Rome, and cast the Romans into great fear for their own safety.”54 This assertion is important
because the aftermath of the battle of Lake Trasimene caused further fear for ordinary
51
Polybius The Histories 3.84.8-11, in Paton, 205-7.
52
Erskine, 59; Polybius The Histories 3.85.5, in Paton, 209.
53
Davidson, 13.
54
Polybius The Histories 3.2.1-2, in Paton, 5.
26
Romans in the city of Rome, and another military disaster augmented the fear permeating in
Rome. The army of Maharbal, one of Hannibal’s cavalry commanders, engaged and
destroyed the army of Flaminius’s colleague, the consul Gnaeus Servilius, whom the Senate
dispatched to aid in the fight against Hannibal.55 Polybius related that “just when throughout
the city the sore…was most violently inflamed, came tidings of the fresh disaster, and now
only not the populace but the Senate too were thrown into consternation.”56 Hannibal then
traversed the Italian countryside, killing scores of people on the roads and taking cities by
force and killing all Roman adult males who resided in those cities, all because of his
“inveterate hatred of the Romans.”57
In the immediate years after the Second Punic War, the Roman people remembered it
as a war in which everyone in Italy experienced some sort of heartache and fear of Hannibal
becoming victorious due to the incompetent leadership of Tiberius and Flaminius. Many
soldiers were slain in the two battles discussed thus far, and many mothers, fathers, wives,
daughters, and sons lost someone at these battles. Then, when Hannibal turned his army
loose onto Italy, civilians began to die as a result the inability of the Roman army to stop
him. This assertion is important because it reveals that Roman cultural memory of the
Second Punic War was comprised of memories of the first years of the war as a time when
the Hannibalic invasion affected many people, both the elite and the non-elite. Polybius drew
from the Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War to illustrate that indeed, the
battles of the Trebia and Lake Trasimene proved to be the instances where Rome almost lost
the entire war. The battles of the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, despite the gravity of these
defeats, however, were not the nadir of the Roman experience of the Second Punic War. It
took another military disaster of a horrific nature to solidify further the dangerous position
that the Roman Republic was in during the Second Punic War.
The battle of Cannae (216 BCE), on which both the Roman people and Polybius
placed special importance, represented the time when everything seemed to point to a Roman
defeat in the Second Punic War. The battle of Cannae, paradoxically, also represented what
55
Ibid., 3.86.1-4.
56
Ibid., 3.86.6, in Paton, 211; Walbank, 420-1.
57
Polybius The Histories 3.86.11, in Paton, 213.
27
made the Roman Republic special in the psyche of Romans who lived after the end of the
Second Punic War. Polybius placed this sentiment in his narrative to explain that since the
Romans were able to recover the battle of Cannae and defeat Hannibal, the Romans deserved
eventually to dominate the Mediterranean.
The battle of Cannae began when Hannibal captured the citadel in the town of
Cannae, which held food and other provisions for the Roman army. The Roman Senate
dispatched the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Gaius Terentius Varro to Cannae to
recapture the citadel, with both consuls having command of the army on opposite days.
When the consuls arrived at Cannae, Aemilius was in command and opted not to engage
Hannibal in battle. The next day, however, was Varro’s turn to command the legions. Varro
had a quick skirmish with the Carthaginians that Varro’s army won.58 The next day, during
Aemilius’s command of the army, the legions encamped on the bank of the river Aufidus.59
The mood in the city of Rome was tense and unbearable for the people who heard that the
Romans and Carthaginians were engaged in battle every other day. According to Polybius,
there was the “utmost excitement and fear in the city, as most people dreaded the result
owing to the previous reverses, and foresaw and anticipated in imagination the consequences
of total defeat.”60 The Romans were sacrificing at every temple to ensure victory for their
army against the Carthaginians.61 The next day, it was Varro’s turn at command, and the
Roman army clashed against the Carthaginians.
When the Roman engaged the Carthaginians in battle, the Carthaginians enveloped
and surrounded the Romans. The Romans lost their battle formation while the Carthaginians
flooded the flanks of the Roman army.62 Here in his narrative, Polybius was not concerned
with the violence of combat, but rather he was concerned with telling his audience a story of
Roman bravery during a massacre of their army. While the Carthaginians pressed on the
Roman flanks, the Romans fought them off “with desperate bravery” and eventually “began
58
Ibid., 3.110.7.
59
Ibid., 3.110.8.
60
Ibid., 3.112.6-8, in Paton, 279.
61
Ibid., 3.112.8.
62
Ibid., 3.115.7.
28
to drive the rest along the river, cutting them down mercilessly.”63 Aemilius threw himself
personally into the thick of the fighting and rode along the line, “exchanged blows with the
enemy but kept cheering on and exhorting his men.”64 Despite Aemilius’s efforts, the
Carthaginians pressed against the Romans. Aemilius fell in battle, “after receiving several
dreadful wounds,” and Polybius said of Aemilius “of him we must say that if there were ever
was a man who did his duty by his country both all through his life and in these times, it was
he.”65 Varro fled the slaughter of the battle and“ disgraced himself by his flight and in his
tenure of office had been most unprofitable to his country, escaped with a few men to
Venusia.”66
The results of the battle of Cannae were thus: six thousand Roman cavalry were slain,
along with seventy thousand infantrymen, and ten thousand became prisoners of war of the
Carthaginians.67 It was not the disaster of Cannae that interested Polybius, it was the tale of
Aemilius bravely throwing himself into battle and other instances of Roman bravado during a
terrible loss. Indeed, the memory of Aemilius throwing himself into a losing battle against
which he had advocated undoubtedly pulled at the heartstrings of the Roman people who
remembered the battle of Cannae in the years after it happened. Polybius tapped into the
Roman memory of Aemilius’s bravery and presented it to his audience to show the
willingness of the Roman people to fight to the end.68
Polybius was not done explaining to his audience the terror of the battle of Cannae.
After the battle, the Carthaginians controlled “the rest of the coast” while the towns of
Tarentum, Argyrippa, and others surrendered to Hannibal, thinking that the city of Rome
itself would soon fall to Hannibal.69 The rest of Polybius’s treatment of the aftermath of
63
Ibid., 3.115.4, in Paton, 283.
64
Ibid., 3.116.3, in Paton, 287.
65
Ibid., 3.116.9, in Paton, 289.
66
Ibid., 3.116.13, in Paton, 289.
67
Ibid., 3.117.1-4.
68
Although Polybius was using the Roman memory of Aemilius’s sacrifice at the battle of Cannae, the
Greek memory of Leonidas at the Spartans at the gates of Thermopylae would more than likely be recalled by
the Greek reader of Polybius’s narrative.
69
Polybius The Histories 3.118.2-3, in Paton, 292.
29
Cannae reveals that while the Romans suffered another defeat in battle and the defection of
their allies, the Romans refused to surrender to Hannibal:
The Romans on their part owing to this defeat at once abandoned all hope of
retaining their supremacy in Italy, and were in the greatest fear about their own
safety and that of Rome, expecting Hannibal every moment to appear. It seemed
as if Fortune were taking part against them in their struggle against
adversity…Yet the Senate neglected no means in its power, but exhorted and
encouraged the populace, strengthened the defences of the city, and deliberated on
the situation with manly coolness. For though the Romans were now
incontestably beaten and their military reputation shattered, yet by the peculiar
virtues of their constitution and by wise counsel they not only recovered their
supremacy in Italy and afterwards defeated the Carthaginians, but in a few years
made themselves masters of the whole world.70
Polybius here acknowledged the precariousness of Rome’s position. Hannibal had
defeated the Romans in many battles, with each defeat being progressively worse. The battles
of the Trebia, and Lake Trasimene were defeats for the Romans, but the defeat at battle of
Cannae was the one defeat that made cities surrender to Hannibal. Cannae was the defeat that
made the Romans believe that their supremacy over Italy had ended. Cannae was the defeat
that made the Romans believe that their city could fall to Hannibal. Polybius transmitted
these sentiments to his audience; however, Polybius has said something more to his readers.
The Romans, after all of these defeats, were able to keep an air of “manly coolness” that
allowed to overcome Hannibal, reassert their dominance over Italy, and one day make
“themselves master of the whole world.” Even Hannibal himself, according to Polybius,
recognized the steadfastness of the Roman people after the battle of Cannae.
Hannibal released to Rome ten Roman prisoners with their promise to return to
Hannibal so that they could ask the Roman government to pay a ransom for the release of all
the other Roman prisoners of war. The Roman Senate denied the Hannibal’s request for
ransom, but only nine prisoners returned to Hannibal. The tenth prisoner attempted to remain
in Rome, but the Romans arrested this absconder and sent him back to Hannibal in chains.71
When Hannibal realized that nine of the ten prisoners returned to him in fulfillment of their
oath, and the Romans returned the tenth prisoner in chains, “Hannibal’s joy at his victory in
70
Ibid., 3.118.7-9, in Paton, 293.
71
Ibid., 6.58.12.
30
the battle was not so great as dejection, when he saw with amazement how steadfast and
high-spirited were the Romans in their deliberations.”72 The Romans, according to Polybius,
were able to maintain their dignity and tenacity even after they suffered defeats in three
major battles.
This dignity and tenacity of the Romans is what composed the Roman cultural
memory of the battle of Cannae, from which Polybius drew and placed in his narrative: the
Roman people faced defeat at the battle of Cannae and the defection of their allies with an
“air of manly coolness” and refused to panic and surrender to Hannibal. Another important
component of this cultural memory of the battle of Cannae was the memory of the ten Roman
prisoners that Hannibal sent to Rome. Nine prisoners returned to Hannibal of their own
volition, while the Romans arrested the tenth, who attempted to abscond, and returned him to
Hannibal. This tenacity of not surrendering to Hannibal and returning a prisoner to Hannibal
because it was the honorable thing to do was an important piece of Roman cultural memory
of the Second Punic War that Polybius transmitted to his audience.
There is another instance of Roman tenacity ingrained in Roman cultural memory.
Hannibal eventually marched upon the city of Rome and caused “universal panic and
consternation among the inhabitants…as Hannibal had never been so close to the city.” At
the same time the proconsul Appius Claudius was besieging Capua (211 BCE).73 Hannibal’s
ultimate aim in marching upon Rome was to alleviate his garrison at Capua by diverting
Claudius’s attention away from besieging Capua to come to Rome’s aid. Polybius continued:
“The men…occupied the walls and the most advantageous positions outside the town, while
the women made to round of the temples and implored the help of the gods, sweeping the
pavements of the holy places with their hair.”74 The Roman government, however, only sent
forth a number of soldiers from inside Rome in order to keep watch on the actions of the
Carthaginians. Appius Claudius eventually captured Capua and refused to dispatch any men
to aid Rome, contrary to Hannibal’s plan.75 Hannibal retreated with his army when he
72
Ibid., 6.58.13, in Paton, 409.
73
Ibid., 9.6.1-2, in Paton, 13.
74
Ibid., 9.6.3, in Paton, 13-5.
75
Ibid., 9.7.7.
31
realized that the Romans would not attack him at Rome and that Capua was now lost to
him.76
Here, Polybius has made it clear to his audience that the Romans were now so
dedicated to defeating Hannibal that they refused to recall Appius from besieging Capua to
protect the city of Rome, despite the fact that the denizens of Rome were terrified that
Hannibal had come so close to the city. Also according to Roman cultural memory of the
Second Punic War, the Romans themselves remembered that they had learned their lesson:
the Romans could not rush to engage Hannibal in battle, and their refusal to fight Hannibal
outside the gates of Rome represented the beginning of the end of the Second Punic War. Not
only did the Romans ignore their fear when Hannibal approached the city, but the Romans
also deprived Hannibal of the opportunity to destroy another Roman army.
This assertion of Polybius was congruent with his aims in writing The Histories.
Polybius educated his audience on how the Romans suffered through the first years of the
Second Punic War, but were still able to maintain their bravery after enduring defeat on
account of the incompetent leaders who rushed into battle against Hannibal. Each result of
the early encounters with Hannibal was the same: death for the soldiers who fought the
battles and defeat for the Roman Republic. The strategy of harassing the Carthaginians, and
not engaging Hannibal in open battle, proved to be the best way to keep Hannibal from
killing so many Romans and destroying towns. The next portion of Polybius’s narrative
reveals how the Romans in the early second century BCE remembered the time in which the
Romans were able to start defeating Hannibal.
The manner in which Romans remembered the revenge that they took against
Hannibal and those allies of Rome that surrendered to Hannibal was also important to
Polybius and his audience. Polybius and his audience, in other words, wanted to learn what
would happen to a people when they did not cooperate with the Romans. The focus of this
investigation shifts now to Polybius’s depiction of Publius Scipio the Younger and the battle
of Zama, at the end of the Second Punic War. This is important because Publius Scipio the
younger, the son of the consul Publius Scipio who faced Hannibal at the battle of Ticinus,
was the one Roman who was able to cast fear into hearts and minds of the Carthaginians.
76
Ibid., 9.7.10.
32
Scipio accomplished this by invading Carthage itself, thus forcing the Carthaginian Senate to
recall Hannibal from Italy to defend Carthage from destruction.
PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO: THE MAN WHO WOULD
DEFEAT HANNIBAL
Polybius stressed that Scipio saved his father Publius during the battle of Ticinus, the
first battle between the Roman army and the Carthaginians, after Publius was wounded
during the battle.77 The memory of the young Scipio saving his father’s life, in turn, was
important to Romans living immediately after the Second Punic War. Polybius then
continued with his depiction of Scipio, who was ‘beneficent and magnanimous, but…[who]
was shrewd and discreet with a mind always concentrated on the object he had in view.”78
The Romans who lived immediately after the Second Punic War, in other words,
remembered Scipio as being tenacious enough to obtain any goal that he desired.79
Polybius’s example of Scipio’s tenacity was present in his account of how Scipio
became aedile in 212 BCE when Scipio was too young to hold the office. Polybius’s
depiction of Scipio shows one who was indeed “shrewd and discreet” when the opportunity
to become aedile presented itself to him. Initially, Scipio’s brother Lucius was supposed to
become aedile; Lucius, however, was not as popular with the people in Rome to get enough
votes to win the aedileship.80 Scipio then concocted a scheme to become aedile. Scipio had a
dream where he and his brother were both aedile. When Scipio told his mother that he had a
prescient dream that he became aedile although he was too young to hold the office, he
begged her to dress him in a white toga, which was the customary dress of an aedile.81 Scipio
then appeared in the Forum, dressed as an aedile, and the crowd that had gathered in the
Forum enthusiastically received Scipio due to popularity he had obtained when he saved his
77
Ibid., 10.3.3.
78
Ibid., 10.3.1, in Paton, 107.
79
Moreover, Polybius was aware of how a Roman man’s father was a huge influence on his son’s
motivations, as is evidenced by Polybius’s description of how a Roman youth while reiterate his each of his
ancestor’s achievements. Polybius, if his description of Scipio’s dream and his description of Roman funerary
practices are any indication, wanted to show his audience how the Romans desired to emulate the achievements
of their ancestors. For Polybius’s depiction of Roman funerary practices, see Polybius The Histories 6.53.2-3.
80
Ibid., 10.4.3.
81
Ibid., 10.4.9.
33
father at the battle of Ticinus.82 Scipio and Lucius then both won the election to become
aediles.
Polybius remarked that this vignette into Scipio’s obtainment of the aedileship shows
that those who heard of Scipio’s dream
believed that Publius [Scipio] communed with the gods not only in his sleep, but
still more in reality and by day. Now it was not a matter of a dream at all, but as
he was kind and munificent and agreeable in his address he reckoned on his
popularity with the people, and so by cleverly adapting his action to the actual
sentiment of the people and of his mother he not only obtained his object but was
believed to have acted under a sort of divine inspiration. For those who incapable
of taking an accurate view of opportunities, causes, and dispositions, either from
lack of natural ability or from inexperience and indolence, attribute to the gods
and to fortune the causes of what is accomplished by shrewdness and with
calculation and foresight.83
Here, Polybius has made the claim that Scipio was clever enough to bend people’s perception
of him so as to suggest that he could communicate with the divine. Thus, Scipio was able to
become aedile before the proper age. Scipio recognized that he was popular with people
because he saved his father Publius at the battle of Ticinus. Scipio, therefore, might not have
communicated with the gods, but that notion in and of itself does not matter. What mattered
to Polybius was that Scipio was able to discern popular feelings about him and was able to
turn that sentiment into something tangible: the aedileship. This assertion is important
because it reveals that Romans who lived immediately after the Second Punic War
remembered that the tenacity and the intelligence of the young Scipio in obtaining the
aedileship also allowed him to defeat Hannibal at the end of the Second Punic War.
Polybius’s praise of Scipio did not end with Polybius’s presentation of Scipio’s
sensitivity to public perception of his own popularity. Polybius was also keen on presenting
Scipio as uncompromisingly harsh to the Carthaginian residents of New Carthage in Spain.
Polybius, however, also wanted to present Scipio as kind to the Iberians who were bystanders
during the fight between the Roman army and Mago, one of Hannibal’s commanders. For
instance, after the Roman army stormed the walls of New Carthage, Scipio ordered his
soldiers “to kill all they encountered, sparing none, and not to start pillaging until the signal
82
Ibid., 10.5.1.
83
Ibid., 10.5.7-8, in Paton, 111-13.
34
was given.”84 Polybius then digressed on why the Roman army killed every resident: the
Romans killed everyone “to inspire terror.” Anyone who entered a town after the Romans
sacked it would see “not only the corpses of human beings, but dogs cut in half, and the
dismembered limbs of other animals, and on this scene were very many owing to the
numbers of this place.”85 This passage is important because it highlights how Polybius
wanted to portray the Romans: as bloodthirsty against their enemies when the Romans were
in a position to deal vengeance upon those who afflicted the Roman people with defeats and
fear earlier in the Second Punic War.
This sentiment is congruent with Polybius’s aim of explaining to his Greek audience
why the Romans were so successful in spreading Roman hegemony across the
Mediterranean. If the Romans could do this violence to the Carthaginians–a people who
almost destroyed Rome due to the Hannibalic invasion–then what could the Romans do to
other enemies who resisted Roman dominion over their countries? Polybius here has shown
his audience that the Romans were able to overcome the defection of their allies who fought
alongside Hannibal and that the Romans were able to weather the leadership of Tiberius
Sempronius and Gaius Terentius Varro eventually to sack New Carthage and kill every living
thing in the city. Moreover, Polybius also pulled this instance of Roman brutality from a
larger Roman cultural narrative of the Second Punic War. The memory of Roman sacking of
New Carthage was important to Romans immediately after the Second Punic War because it
represented the retribution that the Roman people gave the Carthaginians for the earlier
defeats that the Romans suffered at the battles of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae.
Scipio was also capable of kindness, for he treated his Iberian prisoners leniently who
resided near New Carthage and witnessed the sacking of the city, but did not fight against the
Romans. Scipio made his soldiers set the citizens apart from the working men–the lower
classes of New Carthage–and “after exhorting the citizens to be well disposed to the Romans
and to be mindful of their kindness shown to them, he dismissed them all to their houses.”86
Scipio then made the workingmen into public slaves of the city of Rome, “but if they showed
84
Ibid., 10.15.4-5, in Paton, 137.
85
Ibid., 10.15.5, in Paton, 137. See also 14.4.9 when the Roman army set Utica, a city in North Africa,
aflame and everyone in the town burned to death.
86
Ibid., 10.17.7-8, in Paton, 143.
35
goodwill and industry,” Scipio promised the workingmen to free them after the war with
Carthage was finished.87 Scipio chose the prisoners “who were the strongest, finest looking,
and in the prime of youth” and made them sailors in his naval fleet.88 At New Carthage, there
were also three hundred members of the Carthaginian aristocracy. Scipio had his hostages
write to their families at Carthage stating that the Romans had treated them well, and that
Scipio would release them if their relatives renounced Hannibal and became allies of Rome.89
Scipio even vowed to the women who were among the hostages that “he would look after
them as if they were his own sisters and children and would…appoint trustworthy men to
attend them.”90
Polybius here reinforced his early depiction of Scipio as a man who was able to use
his shrewd thinking to get he wanted. Scipio had already retaliated against the Carthaginians
for the battles of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae when he allowed his army to kill
anything that moved within the walls of New Carthage, including every animal. There was
more to Scipio in the extant Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War than a general
who sacked an enemy city. Polybius portrayed Scipio as one who was able to turn the allies
of Carthage against Carthage, which was something that the Carthaginians were not able to
do with the majority of Rome’s allies even after the battle of Cannae. It is here in Polybius’s
narrative that Polybius has shown his audience that rational thinking was the key to the
Romans’ eventually victory in the Second Punic War and even Rome’s dominion over the
Mediterranean.
Polybius used the Roman memory of Scipio’s kind treatment of the Iberians and the
Carthaginian aristocracy as a way to tell his audience that while the Roman people were
capable of extreme cruelty when they sacked an enemy city, the Romans were also capable
of leniency. Polybius wanted to tell his audience that it would benefit the Greeks to accept
Roman dominion over Greece because of the potential of the Roman people to commit acts
of violence against their enemies, such as Polybius described at the sack of New Carthage. If
87
Ibid., 10.17.9, in Paton, 143.
88
Ibid., 10.17.12, in Paton, 143.
89
Ibid., 10.18.5.
90
Ibid., 10.18.15, in Paton, 147.
36
the Greeks cooperated with the Romans, then the Romans could treat the Greeks with
benevolence as Polybius depicted Scipio treating the Iberians and Carthaginian aristocracy.
Polybius, however, was not done using the extent of Roman cultural memory of the Second
Punic War.
Polybius tapped further into Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War to
educate his audience as to why the Romans deserved to expand outside of Italy and dominate
Greece and other parts of the Mediterranean world. The focus of this investigation now shifts
to how Polybius used the Roman cultural memory of the battle of Zama as a didactic tool to
instruct his audience how the Romans overcame Hannibal and what this meant for Greeks
who lived under Roman dominion. This investigation is important because through studying
Polybius’s depiction of the battle of Zama, one can learn how Romans living in the
mid-second century BCE remembered their victory over Hannibal, and what this meant for
Roman identity during this time.
THE BATTLE OF ZAMA
The battle of Zama (202 BCE) served as a way for Polybius to solidify further his
point that Rome deserved to eventually rule the Mediterranean. Polybius used a speech that
Scipio gave his soldiers before they left Sicily for Africa. Scipio told his troops that the
upcoming battle would make them “unquestioned masters of Africa, but you will gain for
yourselves and your country the undisputed command and sovereignty of the rest of the
world.”91 This passage reveals what the memory of the battle of Zama represented to the
Roman people immediately after the Second Punic War, when the Romans could indeed
claim themselves to be masters of the Mediterranean. Polybius related this Roman memory
of the battle of Zama as the time when the Romans were able to overcome their defeats at the
battle of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae. Indeed, the battle of Zama represented to
both the Romans and to Polybius the point when the Romans received “the undisputed
command and sovereignty of the rest of the world” since the Romans defeated Hannibal.
Moreover, these soldiers were about to fight “to confirm their reputation for invincibility.”92
91
Ibid., 15.10.2-3, in Paton, 487.
92
Ibid., 15.11.12, in Paton, 491.
37
The soldiers who fought at Zama confirmed to Polybius, his audience, and Romans
who lived after the Second Punic War Roman superiority. The Roman cultural memory of
the battle of Zama involved an invincible Roman army that was able to recover from the
losses that the Romans incurred earlier in the war to fight a battle that dictated who would
become the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Roman cultural memory in the years after
the Second Punic War remembered the soldiers that fought at the battle of Zama as
confirming universal invincibility of the Roman people who might at one point have lost the
Second Punic War. Eventually, however, these Romans would then come to dominate the
Mediterranean.
Indeed, as the battle wore on, the Roman army found it difficult to press forward
against the Carthaginian line due to the bloody corpses that lined the ground and made it
impossible to walk without slipping.93 The results of the battle of Zama are thus: fifteen
hundred Roman soldiers died while twenty thousand Carthaginians lost their lives and the
same number became prisoners of the Romans.94
Polybius did more than use the extant Roman cultural memory of the battle of Zama
in his narrative; he transmitted what could happen to the enemies of Rome when the Romans
were in a position of power. The Carthaginians, who fourteen years earlier had slaughtered
thousands of Roman soldiers, had recalled Hannibal from Italy and were now desperately
trying to defend Carthage against an invading Roman army after the battle of Zama. Polybius
taught his Greek audience an important lesson: the Romans defeated the Carthaginians, their
greatest enemy, and made Hannibal’s soldiers pay for their invasion of Italy with their blood.
In an effort to underscore the importance of the results of the battle of Zama Polybius asked
his audience: “Is there anyone who can remain unmoved in reading the narrative of such an
encounter?”95
Polybius’s question is important because Polybius was imploring his audience to be
aware of the enormity and gravity of the battle of Zama. Polybius, in his narrative, wanted
the Roman memory of the battle of Zama to move his Greek audience as if they themselves
93
Ibid., 15.14.2.
94
Ibid., 15.14.9.
95
Ibid., 15.9.3-4, in Paton, 485.
38
were Romans. This reveals another aim of Polybius when he composed his narrative and
when someone read it: they wanted to know why the Romans felt justified in their expansion
outside of Italy and eventually conquer Greece. When Polybius and his audience experienced
the Roman victory over Hannibal at the battle of Zama, they stepped out of the cultural
boundary that made them Greek and they stepped into the Roman cultural boundary the
Romans erected around themselves after the Second Punic War, and in turn experienced the
joys of the victory over Hannibal.96 When a Greek reader tapped into this feeling of joy, they
were striving to become Roman.
There is more to this assertion. This is why, according to Roman mentalité and
Polybius, the Romans were able to overcome the Carthaginians during the Second Punic
War. The Romans withstood the staggering losses during the early years of the war and under
the generalship of Scipio; they had the ability to inflict brutal violence on the Carthaginians
at the siege of New Carthage and at the battle of Zama. Yet the Romans were able to treat
others with leniency, such as Scipio did to the Iberians and Carthaginian aristocracy at New
Carthage, so that other peoples began to realize that the Romans also were able to show
benevolence to peoples that became subject to the Roman Republic. This lesson, in other
words, was that no matter how much violence Hannibal brought upon the people of Rome,
96
For the manner in which one ethnicity can appropriate the values of another ethnicity in order to align
themselves with that other group, see Fredrik Barth, “Boundaries and Connections,” in Signifying Identities:
Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values, edited by Anthony P. Cohen (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 22. Barth uses the metaphor of acquiring land by imposing a boundary around for one’s use:
“But to be able to appropriate land to yourself as property, you need to separate a piece of it, detach it as a
physical object and thus as an object that you can appropriate and claim as against the world. It is this that
requires boundaries: by imposing the conceptual construct of a boundary line around the land you disengage it
from its surroundings, and can appropriate it yourself [original emphasis].” We must add to Barth’s assertion.
The Romans established an incipient boundary around their experiences during the Second Punic War by which
they formed their identity in the immediate years after the war, and the Greeks sought to acquire this identity
when they acquired the narrative of the Roman experience of the Second Punic War through the act of reading
Polybius. Moreover, the fact that Polybius tapped into the sentiment of the Romans becoming masters of Africa
suggests that the Greeks wanted to become a part of this Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War. See
Barth, “Boundaries and Connections,” 27: “More generally, where people are locked into a social organization
of vested interests and mutual controls, there will be positive encouragement for cognitive assent and agreement
with the others who share those interests, and sanctions will be brought to bear against its breach.” The Greeks,
in other words, were cognizant of the importance that the Roman people placed upon being able to identity with
experiencing the Second Punic War. The Greeks benefited from this identifying of the Roman-perceived sense
of deserving to expand outside of Italy since the Greeks believed that the Romans could spare the Greeks the
same fate that they gave the denizens of New Carthage.
39
the Romans could inflict as much terror and violence against their enemies as their enemies
inflicted upon the Romans.
Polybius depicted even Hannibal, after losing the battle of Zama, as recognizing that
the Roman Republic had won the Second Punic War, and now the Romans could now
commit the same acts of violence at the city of Carthage as they did at the siege of New
Carthage. In a speech to the Carthaginian Senate, Hannibal begged the senators to pray that
the Romans ratified the peace treaty:
If you had been asked but a few days ago what you expected your country to
suffer in the event of the victory of the Romans, you would not have given
utterances to your fears…So now I beg you not even to discuss the matter…but to
agree to sacrifice to the gods, and to pray all of you that the Roman people may
ratify the treaty.97
After the Second Punic War the Romans remembered that Hannibal himself had recognized
the potential of the Roman people to pay retribution to their enemies. More importantly, this
passage, when juxtaposed with Polybius’s depictions of the Roman army fighting at the
battle of Zama “to confirm their invincibility,” reveals that Roman identity after the Second
Punic War began to show signs of self-perceived Roman superiority over other peoples.
Polybius used this sentiment of Roman superiority to instruct his audience why the
Romans were able to expand so successfully. Polybius and his audience tapped into the
Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War to align themselves with the sense of
Roman identity and additionally, the Roman memory of the defeat of Hannibal. The act of
Polybius and his audience tapping into Roman cultural memory was a conduit of identifying
with the Roman people. This identifying of the Greeks with Roman culture reflected the
successful marriage of two cultures, despite the fact that the Romans would violently conquer
the Greeks. The focus of this investigation now turns to how the Greek people became
absorbed into the extant Roman identity that allowed the Greeks to accept Roman
domination over Greece.
97
Polybius The Histories 15.19.6-8, in Paton, 507.
40
THE EFFECTS OF POLYBIUS AND HIS AUDIENCE
CROSSING THE ROMAN ETHNIC BOUNDARY
One of the immediate consequences of Greek understandings that the Romans
thought themselves to be invincible since they defeated Hannibal was that the Greeks began
to use the Roman Senate as a mechanism to solve international disputes to the advantage of
the Greeks.98 This Greek use of the Roman government suggests that the Romans had an
uncanny ability to impose their legal systems upon those nations that the Romans had
conquered. Moreover, what is uncanny about how the Romans imposed their legal systems
upon their conquered subjects is that these subjects readily adhered themselves these new
legal systems. Indeed, when one studies how many nations used the Roman legal system to
their advantage, it becomes clear there is an important result that occurred from the concept
of Roman superiority. Many people used Roman legal systems to settle disputes long after
Polybius used Roman cultural memory of Hannibal’s defeat at the end of the Second Punic
War. Clifford Ando, for instance, has presented the example of a group of men who came
from the village of Beth Phouraia to the city of Antioch in 245 CE (nearly four-hundred years
after the end of the Second Punic War) to present the Roman governor with a petition to
solve a dispute in their village.99 This linking of Polybius’s aim of writing his narrative with
the example of the people of Beth Phouraia using the Roman governmental system to settle a
dispute suggests that in the years after their conquest of Greece, the Romans were successful
in convincing people that the mere notion of Roman superiority was enough to keep many
provinces from rebelling. Clifford Ando was correct to state that
although we cannot determine why residents of the empire complied in their
subjugation, the scarcity of revolts among those residents provides the best
measure of that compliance. Furthermore, even if we concede the possibility that
every subject acted purely from a rational calculation of utility, we can
nevertheless see in surviving documentary texts the profound impression left by
the government’s claim to rationality: residents demonstrated their faith in the
system when they played by its rules and especially when they attempted to
exploit them.100
98
See Kallet-Marx, 161-83.
99
Clifford Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2000), 73-80.
100
Ibid., 374.
41
The reasons why the subjects of the Roman governmental system, in other words,
complied with the Roman system varied and were complex. That subjects of the Roman
Republic and Empire, such as the Greeks, believed in the Roman system enough to use it
even for their own gain instead of rebelling against the Romans is an important point in and
of itself. One, however, can modify Clifford Ando’s assertion. The Greeks willingly
identified themselves with the Romans using the Roman cultural memory of the Second
Punic War. The Greeks accepted Roman domination of Greece because they wanted the
Romans to spare Greece the same fate as the denizens of New Carthage, and in turn, to spare
the rest of Greece the fate of Corinth. The question that the Greeks asked themselves was
thus: “If the Romans could withstand the early defeats of the Second Punic War and
eventually sack and burn New Carthage, invade Carthage itself, and force Hannibal himself
to declare the war lost to the Romans, what chance would the Greeks have if we do not
accept Roman dominion of Greece?” The answer lies in the possibility that Polybius through
the fashioning of Roman cultural memory of the defeat of Hannibal was successful in
relating the Roman sense of superiority that the Romans formed about themselves.
The aim of Polybius in relating to his audience that the Romans deserved to expand
outside of Italy because the Romans defeated Hannibal was not lost upon other Roman
historians. The sixth-century CE Roman historian Zosimus said the following about
Polybius’s narrative:
When Polybius of Megalopolis decided to record noteworthy events of his own
time, he thought it would be a good idea to show how…the Romans waged wars
with their neighbors…They subjugated part of Italy, but lost this after Hannibal’s
invasion and their defeat at Cannae, when they saw the enemy attacking their
walls. They then became so successful that in less than fifty-three years they
gained possession not only of Italy but also of the whole of Africa and had
already subdued Spain in the west. In pursuit of more power they crossed the
Ionian sea and conquered the Greeks…Now no-one will attribute all this to mere
human strength. It must have been the necessity of Fate…or the will off the gods
which favours our actions if they are just.101
Certainly, the Roman Empire of Zosimus in the sixth century CE was not the same Roman
Republic of Polybius in the second century BCE. Zosimus himself wrote that his Roman
101
Zosimus New History 1.1.1-6, ed. and trans. by Ronald T. Ridley, New History (Canberra, Sydney:
Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1982), 1.
42
empire was in a state of decline: “For whereas Polybius tells how the Romans won their
empire in a short time, I intend to show how they lost it in an equally short time by their own
crimes.”102
This passage suggests that the worlds of Polybius and Zosimus were disparate
because each author was aware of the state of affairs that influenced their respective
narratives. Polybius wrote in a world of an expanding Roman state; Zosimus wrote in a world
where the Roman Empire was shrinking. Despite these differences in the milieu that
influenced Zosimus’s and Polybius’s narrative, Zosimus’s cognizance of Polybius tapping
into Roman cultural memory of the defeat of Hannibal shows that, indeed, Polybius was
successful in transmitting Roman memory to his audience. In the centuries after Polybius
related the Roman cultural memory of the defeat of Hannibal, Romans were aware that the
Romans withstood their initial defeats to overcome Hannibal. When Zosimus wrote his
narrative, however, his Roman Empire was declining, so he used the Roman memory of the
Second Punic War as a reminder to his audience that indeed, the Roman state was once
great.103
The sentiments of Lycortas, Polybius’s father, that the Greeks should cooperate with
the Romans left an impression on Polybius when he composed his narrative of explaining
why the Romans deserved to expand outside of Italy. Polybius’s clientship with Publius
Scipio Aemilianus and Polybius’s relationship with Roman institutions while he stayed in
Rome with Scipio Aemilianus also influenced Polybius to portray Roman expansion in a
positive light. Both of these influences on Polybius, however, pale when one considers that
Polybius did compose a narrative when he pulled from Roman cultural memory of the
Second Punic War and related it to his Greek audience. Polybius used the extant Roman
cultural memory of the Second Punic War and the sentiments of Roman superiority that
accompanied this memory in his narrative. That this sentiment survived until at least the sixth
century CE shows that indeed, this incipient sense of Roman superiority was apparent to
Romans who lived long after the Second Punic War. Thus was the power of Roman cultural
memory of the Second Punic War.
102
Ibid., 1.57.2, in Ridley, 18.
103
A point to which I shall return in the fourth chapter.
43
There is one more aspect to Polybius’s use of Roman cultural memory of the Second
Punic War to explain to his audience why the Romans deserved to expand. Polybius, despite
his identifying with Roman ethnic identity in his narrative, was still a Greek writing for an
audience that had just experienced Roman conquest. Just before the Roman sack of New
Carthage, the Roman consul Gaius Marcellus recaptured Syracuse from the Carthaginians in
211 BCE. Polybius wrote that when the Romans sacked the city, they captured all the silver
and gold from the homes of the denizens of Syracuse. What was most egregious to Polybius
was the Roman theft of works of art from the denizens’ homes:
There were indeed perhaps good reasons for appropriating all the gold and silver:
for it was impossible for them to aim at a world empire without weakening the
resources of other peoples…But it was possible for them to leave everything
which did not contribute to such strength, together with the envy attached to its
possession, in its original place, and to add to the glory of their native city by
adorning it not with paintings and reliefs but with dignity and magnanimity. At
any rate these remarks will serve to teach all those who succeed to empire, that
they should not strip cities under the idea that the misfortunes of others are an
ornament to their own country. The Romans…after transferring all these objects
to Rome, used such as came from private homes to embellish their own homes,
and those that were state property for their public buildings.104
This passage suggests that while the Greeks may have accepted the Roman conquest
of Greece, the Greeks also had a sense of ambivalence about the Roman appropriation of
newly conquered cultural art, and indeed, the entire notion of the Roman conquest of Greece.
Where the Romans furthered erred, according to Polybius, was that they took the art of the
denizens of Syracuse and placed it in the private homes of people in Rome. Furthermore, this
existence of this passage shows that while the Greeks generally accepted Roman rule, this
acceptance was initially uneasy due to this Greek memory of Roman conquest. Such was the
messy world of Greek identity in the first century BCE in an era of Roman expansion.
104
Polybius The Histories 9.10.11, in Paton, 27-9.
44
CHAPTER 3
MEMORY, VIOLENCE, AND ROMAN
SUPERIORITY IN THE FIRST CENTURY CE
Who is better at enduring toil?
– Livy
Cultural memory, when placed within a context of the production and consuming of a
narrative, only works when the author and the reader of a narrative are familiar with the
shared histories from which the author has drawn to compose their narrative that the author
composed. The story of Hannibal was already well known to Livy’s audience when they read
his narrative.105 It is important to realize that when an author is blaming a Roman general of
the defeat at Cannae, the author is showing his audience that the kind of general who lost to
Hannibal possessed qualities that were undesirable to any good Roman. A general who
defeated Hannibal, on the other hand, possessed qualities that an ideal Roman should try to
emulate.
This chapter will feature the following organization. The first section of this chapter
will discuss two of the most important battles that occurred during the Second Punic War: the
battle of Cannae (216 BCE) and the battle of Zama (202 BCE), and how Livy (59 BCE–
17 CE) portrayed these battles. A presentation follows of Roman generals who fought
Hannibal at the battles of Cannae and Zama. When Livy presented a general who lost to
Hannibal or defeated Hannibal in a certain manner, that author tapped into a set of Roman
values and presented them to his audience.
This chapter then studies the religious aspects of the memory of the Second Punic
War. During the early days of the War, when Hannibal almost captured the city of Rome,
105
Ricoeur Time and Narrative, vol.1, 44-51, 54-7. See also vol. 2, 19, 61-65. For the intentions of an
author in the construction of the narrative and the role of the reader of the narrative, see Thompson, 251-2, 255,
264-5. See especially 270 for the insistence of Thompson that “when a historian decides to ‘interrogate’ a text,
whatever ‘dialogue’ might ensue can only be internal, it can only be a dialogue in the historian’s own mind.”
Thompson suggests that a historian assigns meaning to a text; which is an assertion that this author politely
suggests is improbable, for it does not take into account the fact that a historical episode such as the Second
Punic War was so well known to many people.
45
every member of Roman society was terrified of the prospect that Hannibal might sack and
burn Rome. In turn, there were portents and prodigies that represented the precariousness of
Rome’s situation.106 When the Second Punic War might have been a defeat for the Roman
people, ordinary citizens began to sacrifice scores of animals and even humans in order to
propitiate the Roman gods. Human sacrifice was not a Roman custom, and Romans in the
first century CE remembered that their predecessors sacrificed humans so that the war would
end. This memory of human sacrifice suggests that, indeed, the memory of the terror that the
people of Rome experienced during the Second Punic War was still palpable to those
Romans living in the first century CE. Accordingly, this chapter includes a social historical
study of the Second Punic War and how Romans of the first century CE remembered the
suffering of ordinary Romans during the Second Punic War.
The third and final part of this chapter will study how Livy and other authors around
the first century CE reacted to certain memories of the Second Punic War. Virgil (70 BCE–
19 CE) presented the Carthaginians in a way that emasculated them; and thus this was a way
for the Roman people to have their revenge against Hannibal in the first century CE. Valerius
Maximus (ca. 16 CE–37 CE) presented the fortitude of the Roman people who faced
Hannibal during the Second Punic War. The satirist Juvenal (55 CE–138 CE) used the
memory of the Second Punic War to make his point that Romans during his era were
profligate and pusillanimous when compared to the Romans who fought against Hannibal.
The sentiments of these authors culminate with the following conclusion: The Roman
people during the first century CE thought of themselves as superior and unique since they
were able to defeat Hannibal eventually. The Romans in the first century CE thus thought of
themselves as masters of the world, something that a study of Livy’s Alexander digression
and the sentiments of the Jewish general Josephus regarding the state of Roman power will
reveal. The focus of this section of this chapter suggests how differently the Romans of the
first century CE constructed their superiority.
106
Prodigies mean bizarre apparitions having religious undertones appeared to the Romans, and not are
necessarily meant to mean as prophecies.
46
THE NADIR OF THE ROMAN EXPERIENCE: CANNAE
The battle of Cannae held a special place in the minds of the Roman people: it was
the third defeat in a row that Hannibal inflicted upon the Romans. The aftermath of the battle
of Cannae also held a special place in the Roman psyche, since the Carthaginians marched
upon the city of Rome when it was the most vulnerable. The battle of Cannae began when the
Carthaginians captured the town of Cannae, the citadel of which stored provisions for the
Roman army. The Roman Senate dispatched the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Gaius
Terentius Varro to recapture the town from Hannibal. Each consul had command of the army
on alternate days. On Varro’s turn at command, Hannibal created a carefully designed ruse.
Hannibal left his camp open and full of riches and ordered his army to leave everything but
their weapons in their tents and to retreat over a ridge outside of Cannae to wait for the
Roman army to swarm the town.107 The ultimate goal of Hannibal was to ambush the
Romans when the Romans would be busy plundering the camp. The Roman army was restive
due to the lack of activity in the Carthaginian camp and desired to plunder the camp since
they believed the Carthaginians had deserted it. Varro then sent forth a mission to reconnoiter
the situation.108 The reconnaissance team reported to the consuls Paulus and Varro that
Hannibal had set a trap to ambush the Romans.109
Immediately after the receiving this news, the consuls Paulus and Varro both had
different opinions on the proper course of action. Varro wanted to dispatch the army to
plunder the Carthaginian camp because he did not believe that Hannibal was actually
deceiving the Romans. Paulus wanted to delay any attack on the town since the sacred fowls
refused to eat their feed.110 Varro acquiesced with Paulus’s point of view when two Roman
slaves who escaped from the Carthaginians reported that the Carthaginian army awaited on
the other side of the ridge. Hannibal, after he discovered that his attempt to deceive the
107
Livy History of Rome 22.41.7 trans. B. O. Foster, History of Rome (1929; repr., Cambridge Harvard
University Press, 2001).
108
Ibid., 22.42.4.
109
Ibid., 22.42.5.
110
Ibid., 22.42.8. When a Roman consul went on a military campaign, he brought with him sacred
chickens. Before a battle commenced, the keeper of the sacred chickens would feed them; if the chickens ate the
food with alacrity, then the Romans considered that the battle would go in the Romans’ favor. If the chicken
refused their food, that was considered a bad omen and was prescient of a Roman defeat, as in this case before
the battle of Cannae.
47
Romans to march into an ambush had failed, immediately set the same deception into play.
Hannibal ordered his soldiers to build a camp where they waited on the other side of the
ridge and abandoned the new camp in the same manner as the one as before. Then again, the
Roman reconnoiters reported that Hannibal had abandoned camp. This time, Varro and the
rest of the soldiery’s point of view won out, “and they set forward, under the urge of destiny,
to make Cannae famous for the calamity which befell the Romans.”111 The Roman army then
marched into the Carthaginian camp. It was, according to Roman sentiment in the first
century CE, the eagerness of Varro and the Roman army to plunder the Carthaginian camp
that caused the Roman defeat at Cannae.
The ensuing battle was a massacre for the Romans. The Carthaginian cavalry
defeated the Roman cavalry on either side of the Roman infantry, enclosing on the Roman
infantry like a closing pincer.112 The Carthaginians then began “assailing the Romans from
behind and striking at their backs and hamstrings, effected a great slaughter and confusion”
that resulted in “forty-five thousand five hundred thousand” Roman dead.113 The consul
Aemilius Paulus died along with both the quaestors and eighty members of the Roman
Senate.114 The sheer number of Roman deaths at Cannae represented to Romans in the first
century CE the precarious state of the Roman Republic. Indeed, Livy stated that “never, save
when the city had been captured, was there such terror and confusion within the walls of
Rome,” and that the decemviri allowed rite of Ceres to lapse since there was not “a single
matron who was not bereaved” who remained to perform the rite.115
111
Ibid., 22.43.8-10, in Foster, 345.
112
Ibid., 22.47.8.
113
Ibid., 22.48.4-5, 49.15, in Foster, 363.
114
Ibid., 22.49.13.
115
Ibid., 22.54.7, in Foster, 377; 46.4-5 in Foster, 383. Livy here was referring the Gallic Sack of Rome in
386 BCE; for more information see Ibid., 5.35-55; Veit Rosenberger, “The Gallic Disaster,” The Classical
World 96, no. 4 (Summer, 2003): 365-373, especially 365-6; Arnold Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy: The
Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1965) 25, 123, and
372-7 for the loss of clout in Italy the Romans suffered after the Gallic sack. This conflation of the loss at
Cannae with the Gallic Sack of Rome reveals that both disasters were equated in the Roman psyche, and indeed,
both Cannae was a reminder for the Romans of a time in their early history when the city fell to barbarian
hordes. One disaster, in other words, brought upon the Romans by an outsider was a reminder of another
disaster that was similar in nature.
48
Despite the fear of ordinary Romans after the battle of Cannae, a more urgent
problem for the Roman people was that their allies, who until this point of the war remained
loyal to Rome, began to surrender themselves to the Carthaginians. Livy, however,
maintained that despite the horrible defeat at Cannae, the Roman Senate refused to entertain
the thought of peace with the Carthaginians.116 The battle of Cannae was a horrible defeat for
the Romans, but the Romans who experienced the terror of discovering the news that
Hannibal destroyed an entire army were not so terrified of Hannibal that they thought of
surrendering. Livy's presentation of the aftermath of Cannae suggests how the Roman people
in the first century CE used the memory the battle of Cannae as a reminder of the horrors of
the Second Punic War, and of the resolve of the Roman people when they did not surrender
to Hannibal despite their fear of his marching upon Rome.
The morning after the battle of Cannae was Livy’s opportunity to reinforce the
memory the violence of Cannae in the minds of his audience, in its tragedy and carnage:
There lay those thousands upon thousands of Romans, foot and horse
indiscriminately mingled…Here and there amidst the slain there started up a gory
figure whose wounds had begun to throb with the chill of dawn, and was cut
down by his enemies; some lay there still alive, with thighs and tendons slashed,
baring their necks and throats and bidding their conquerors drain the remnant of
their blood. Others were found with their heads buried in holes dug in the ground.
They had apparently made these pits for themselves, and heaping the dirt over
their faces shut off their breath.117
This passage shows that the Roman soldiers who died at Cannae did not perish in a battle;
they died in a massacre at the hand of the Carthaginians. Livy showed his audience that
indeed, Hannibal was nearly successful in subduing the Roman Republic at the battle of
Cannae in a particularly gruesome manner. Livy has reinforced that the battle of Cannae was
a disaster on a personal level because many ordinary persons’ loved ones died in such a way
that they remained alive the following morning, lying helplessly with their hamstrings cut.
Livy also made certain that his audience was aware of the pitiful state of the Roman Republic
when Roman soldiers had to ask the Carthaginians to kill them to ease their suffering.
116
Livy History of Rome 22.56.13. See also 24.6.5 trans. F.G. Moore for Hieronymus explicitly rejecting
Roman ambassadors due to the Roman defeat at Cannae. See also Erskine, 60.
117
Ibid., 22.51.5-9, in Foster, 369.
49
To the Romans in the first century CE, the memory of Cannae was not only of a
Roman defeat, but also of the heaps of bodies and helpless soldiers dying at the hands of the
Carthaginians. The violence of the battle of Cannae was a fixture of Roman cultural memory
of the event due to the vivid description of the manner in which the Roman soldiers died at
Cannae. The violent aftermath of the battle of Cannae served a much larger purpose in
Roman cultural memory; it reminded later Romans that indeed, a "true" Roman was one who
could tap into this memory of violence and the subsequent fear that the Roman people
experienced after the battle of Cannae.118 The memory of violence was also one of outrage.
In the minds of Romans in the first century CE, how could anyone dare to inflict such a
defeat of the Romans? There is more, however, to this passage than Livy presenting his
audience with a graphic picture of carnage at the battle of Cannae.
Livy continued his depiction of Cannae: “what most drew the attention of all
beholders was a Numidian who was dragged out alive from under a dead Roman, but with
mutilated nose and ear; for the Roman, unable to hold a weapon in his hands, had expired in
a frenzy of rage, while rending the other with his teeth.”119 Much like the memory of the
people of Rome who were so terrified that Hannibal might capture the city but refused to sue
Hannibal for peace, Roman soldiers still fought valiantly while the Carthaginians began to
slaughter the Roman army at Cannae. This particular soldier, after losing his weapons, used
his teeth to chew off the face of an enemy soldier. Livy related to his audience that the
Roman people who fought against Hannibal, despite their fear of Hannibal marching upon
Rome, and the Senate that refused to consider suing Hannibal for peace was much like the
soldier at Cannae who gnawed the face of a Numidian. Romans in the first century CE
remembered Cannae for the violence Hannibal inflicted upon the Romans. These Romans of
the first century CE, however, also remembered the tenacity of the soldier who bit off the
face of the enemy soldier despite the slaughter at Cannae. The memory of Cannae, as
simultaneously gruesome and triumphant as it was to the Romans in the first century CE, was
118
For the persisting existence of violence in cultural memory, see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol.1,
44-5.
119
Livy History of Rome 22.51.9, in Foster, 369-71. The Numidians were a people from North Africa that
were allied with the Carthaginians. The Numidians made excellent cavalry and they were the horsemen who
destroyed the Roman cavalry at the battle of Cannae.
50
not the only Roman memory of the Second Punic War. The battle of Zama was also
important component of Roman memory of the Second Punic War.
THE APEX OF THE ROMAN EXPERIENCE: ZAMA
After the battle of Cannae, as we saw in the last chapter with Polybius’s narrative, the
Roman army began to use delaying tactics against Hannibal in Italy while aggressively
fighting Mago, the other Carthaginian commander, in Iberia. After Publius Cornelius Scipio
sacked and burned New Carthage in Iberia, Scipio found himself becoming popular with the
Roman people since he was victorious against the Carthaginians when the Romans were
containing Hannibal in Italy. Soon the people elected Scipio as consul and Scipio then
devised a plan to invade North Africa and besiege Carthage itself. Scipio’s aim was to force
the Carthaginian Senate to recall Hannibal from Italy to defend Carthage in order to relieve
Italy from Hannibal’s army.
The gravity of Scipio’s invasion of North Africa was not lost upon the people of
Rome. When Scipio and his army left Sicily for Carthage, “it was decreed that there should
be a season of prayer that his crossing over to Africa as his province might be beneficial to
the Roman people.”120 The stakes of the invasion of North Africa were immense, and every
citizen in Rome who experienced the previous disasters in the Second Punic War was
praying for Scipio’s success. The way that Livy depicted the fervency with which the people
in Rome prayed for a victory reveals how a Roman living during the first century CE
remembered that truly, ordinary people were eager for Scipio and his army to invade
Carthage and relieve them from the pressures of the Second Punic War.121
An important factor of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War is revealed
in a speech Scipio gave to the Roman Senate on the eve of his departure to North Africa.
Scipio explicitly linked the invasion of Carthage to requite the Carthaginians for unleashing
Hannibal on the Roman Republic:
120
Livy History of Rome 30.1.10-11, trans. Frank Gardner Moore History of Rome (1949; repr.,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 369.
121
Although this notion is beyond the scope of this thesis, the notion of ordinary Romans praying for
Scipio’s victory might have also served as a reminder to first-century CE Romans of the pleas made to the gods
to end the civil war between Octavian and Marc Antony.
51
Let Italy, so long harried, at length have rest; let Africa in turn be burned over and
laid waste. Let Roman camps threaten the gates of Carthage; better so than we
should see the enemy’s earthworks form our walls for the second time. Let Africa
be the theatre of the remainder of the war. In that direction may terror and flight
be diverted, the devastation also of farms, the desertion of allies, and the other
calamities of war which for fourteen years have assailed us.122
The battle of Zama represented to first-century CE Romans the payback the Roman army
gave the Carthaginians for burning Italy for fourteen years. After Scipio invaded Carthage,
the Carthaginians were going to suffer the terror that they inflicted upon the Roman people;
their homes and farms would burn; their allies would desert them and–most importantly–the
Romans would no longer suffer from Carthaginian harassment. This speech also represents
what a Roman person living in the first century thought of the battle of Zama.
When the Carthaginians and Romans clashed at Zama, Livy made explicit references
to how the discipline of the Roman army translated into a victory over Hannibal. When the
battle began, Hannibal sent forth his armed elephants against the Romans, but due to Scipio’s
reorganization of the Roman army from three battle lines to an open battle formation, the
elephants passed through the Roman army while Roman spearmen killed them.123 When the
infantry of the two armies engaged each other in battle, Livy wrote, “the men of the front
line…pursuing the enemy wherever they could over heaps of bodies and arms and through
pools of blood.”124 Livy, despite his fixation on the violence at Zama, was not concerned
with merely presenting his audience with a bloody confrontation with the Carthaginians.
Immediately before Livy’s remark about the heaps bodies and pools of blood that
Roman soldiers had to overcome to engage the Carthaginians, Livy wrote that the
homogenous composition of the Roman army resulted in a more efficient fighting machine
than the Carthaginian army. “[T]here were what seem small things to mention, but at the
same time were highly important in the battle: a harmony in the shouting of the Romans,
which consequently was greater in volume and more terrifying; on the other side discordant
voices.”125 Livy’s aim here was to highlight that the misfortunes of the early course of the
122
Ibid., 28.44.14-5, in Moore, 187.
123
Ibid., 30.33.16.
124
Ibid., 30.34.10, in Moore, 497.
125
Ibid., 30.34.1-2, in Moore, 493.
52
Second Punic War were now reversed. The Romans, who had suffered through the invasion
of Hannibal into Italy and the subsequent defeat at the battle of Cannae, were now the
invading army that brought suffering upon the Carthaginians. At the battle of Zama, only a
disciplined force such as the Roman army under Scipio’s command could bring the fight to
the Carthaginians, who now lacked the discipline to fight. Indeed, this disciplined Roman
force defeated the Carthaginians and forced Hannibal to do something he would never have
considered doing: sue the Romans for peace.
After his passage about heaps of bodies and pools of blood on the battlefield, Livy
then stressed that Hannibal fled the battle to Carthage. Then, at Hannibal’s insistence, the
Carthaginian Senate sued the Romans for peace because “there was no hope of safety” if the
Carthaginians continued the war.126 The memory of Hannibal wanting to sue for peace
suggests the irony that the man who so long ago harassed Italy was defeated in a single battle
and insisted that the Carthaginians end the war, and this irony would not have been lost upon
a Roman in the first century CE. Livy has related to his audience that the tenacity of the
Roman people allowed them to endure defeats like the one at Cannae and eventually, the
Romans managed to invade Carthage and invoke a sense of terror in the Carthaginians–the
same terror that the Carthaginians inspired in the Roman people for fourteen years.
There is more to the memory of the battle of Zama than the Roman army defeating
the Carthaginians. The battle of Zama represented to first-century CE Romans that the
Second Punic War was finally over and the joy that the Roman people experienced when
Scipio returned to Italy. Livy wrote that the people of Italy were “exulting in peace no less
than in victory, while cities not only poured out to do him honour, but crowds of rustics also
were blocking the roads” and that Scipio “reached Rome and rode into the city in the most
distinguished of all triumphs.”127 This passage suggests that while later Romans formed their
cultural memory from the memory of violence that they endured at the loss at Cannae, the
Romans’ cultural memory also was composed of the relief that the threat of Hannibal no
longer existed, as the phrase “exulting in peace no less than victory” suggests.
126
Ibid., 30.35.11, in Moore, 501.
127
Ibid., 30.45.2, in Moore, 537.
53
Scipio's victory at Zama freed Italy from the violence and the terror of the Second
Punic War. The Roman army invaded Carthage and by doing so, Hannibal no longer
threatened the people of Italy; Hannibal, after the battle, asked the Carthaginian Senate to sue
the Romans for peace. Romans in the first century CE, according to Livy, remembered the
battle of Zama when Scipio made Hannibal flee the battlefield and made the Carthaginian
Senate sue the Romans for peace, which was something that Hannibal could not do at Cannae
to the Romans. The Romans of the first century CE then remembered the subsequent peace
after the battle of Zama because Hannibal could no longer inflict violence upon the Roman
people. Thus, the memory of the relief and joy felt by Romans during the Second Punic War
was important to first-century CE Romans.
The relationship between violence a people endured and the construction of cultural
memory is an intimate one.128 This relationship is stronger than the memory of violence that
a nation inflicts upon another people. Take, for example, the differences in the memories of
Cannae when compared to Zama. Livy’s descriptive language of the mounds of dead bodies
after the battle of Cannae suggests that Romans who lived centuries after the Second Punic
War remembered the violence of the battle of Cannae coupled with the memory of the fear
Romans felt when they believed that Hannibal would march upon Rome. Additionally, Livy
conflated the memory of the Roman soldier who bit off the nose of the Numidian horseman
with the Roman Senate refusing to sue Hannibal for peace after the battle of Cannae. The
combination of these memories was a lesson that the Romans never quit even during a
difficult time. This one act of violence and terror that Hannibal inflicted upon the Roman
Republic was a major component in the formation of Roman cultural memory.129
The first-century CE memory of the battle of Zama is of Scipio bringing the terror of
the Second Punic War to the Carthaginians. More importantly, the memory of the battle of
Zama was one where the Romans of the first century CE remembered that Scipio forced
Hannibal to flee the battle and urged the Carthaginian Senate to sue the Romans for peace.
128
See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 74-5: “The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance
and calls for narrative.”
129
Moreover, ordinary Romans would not have access to monuments depicting Roman losses such as
Cannae, simply because the Roman government (like any government) would only want to commemorate its
military victories. Livy’s depiction of the Roman loss at Cannae is a way to remember the Roman dead at the
battle, since a military defeat might not be monumentalized by a government.
54
Despite Livy writing a narrative of the triumphs and traumas of the Second Punic War, he
had another reason to write about the battles of Cannae and Zama. Livy and his audience
tapped into a lesson on what was considered properly Roman when they considered the
character of a commander who would lose or defeat Hannibal, which the next section of this
chapter discusses.
GAIUS TERENTIUS VARRO: THE COMMANDER OF THE
ROMAN ARMY AT CANNAE
Recall the battle of Cannae and its two commanders: Lucius Aemilius Paulus and
Gaius Terentius Varro. The disparity between Livy’s depictions of each consul reveals two
things about Roman cultural memory of the battle of Cannae. Since Varro commanded the
legions on the day Hannibal launched his attack, Livy portrayed him in an unflattering
manner. There is more to Livy’s depiction of Varro than later Romans being angry towards
the consul who lost to Hannibal: Varro encompassed everything it meant to be a failed
Roman, while Scipio encompassed everything that a Roman would find admirable. Within
the matrix of memory in the first century CE, a Roman who remembered the consul who lost
to Hannibal at the battle of Cannae and the consul who defeated Hannibal at the battle of
Zama, was a Roman in the process of reinforcing what it meant to be Roman. When Livy
wrote about Varro and Scipio, he reinforced the stereotype of an ideal Roman and the
non-ideal Roman.
In addition, the memory of the character of Romans who fought against Hannibal was
an ethnic boundary that the Romans used in the first century CE to decided who was Roman
and who was not. A Roman who lived in the first century CE, in other words, had the
memory of the ideal Roman already established within the framework of Livy’s narrative of
the Second Punic War. These later Romans wanted to emulate that perfect Roman.
Conversely, later Romans should not want to emulate the character of someone who lost to
Hannibal, since that Roman severely lacked something that the ideal Roman possessed.
Livy’s introduction of Varro occurs within a context of another disastrous loss for the
Romans that happened before the battle of Cannae. After the Roman defeat at the battle of
Lake Trasimene in 217 BCE, the Roman Senate elected Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator
with Marcus Minucius Rufus as his master of the horse. The Roman government became
impatient with Fabius’s strategy of harassing the Carthaginians instead of crushing Hannibal
55
in one decisive battle as Minucius advocated. The Roman Senate elevated Minucius to the
office dictator when Fabius returned to Rome to attend to religious matters. Hannibal
attacked Minucius’s army and nearly annihilated the Romans at the battle of Geronium
(217 BCE). Fabius rescued Minucius and his army by arriving and parrying Hannibal in
battle at the last moment. Livy blamed Varro for leading the Roman people against Fabius
and his dilatory tactics against Hannibal. In his account of Varro’s support of Minucius, Livy
stressed Varro’s milieu:
One man alone was found to urge the passage of the bill [elevating Minucius to
the office of dictator]. This was Gaius Terentius Varro…whose antecedents were
not merely base but even sordid. It is said that his father had been a butcher, who
peddled his wares himself, and that he had employed this very son about the
menial tasks associated with that calling.130
Livy continued to write that Varro was so eager to enter public life that he declaimed on
“behalf of ignoble men and causes against…the reputation of persons better sort achieved
first notoriety and then office.”131 Varro, according to Livy, wanted the consulship in such a
way that he was willing to defame anyone to gain the consulship.
Varro’s strategy worked. After the dictatorship of Fabius expired, Varro became
consul. On the eve of Varro’s election to the consulship, Livy expanded on the character of
Varro when he explained “Varro had endeared himself to the plebeians–the class to which he
belonged–by invectives against the leading men…The blow he had struck at the…dictatorial
authority of Fabius brought him the glory which is won by defaming others.”132 A Roman of
the first century CE would have remembered Varro as a member of the plebeian class who
also had base origins and was the one who offered the motion to make Minucius consul, and
as a result, Hannibal almost destroyed another Roman army at the battle of Geronium.
Moreover, Livy stressed that Varro’s father was a butcher who peddled his wares and
employed his son to aid him in this most distasteful practice according to Roman mores.133
130
Livy History of Rome 22.25.18-9, in Foster, 289.
131
Ibid., 22.26.2, in Foster, 289.
132
Ibid., 22.34.2, in Foster, 313.
133
Although it is certainly possible that Livy was transmitting slander spoken against Varro since he was a
plebeian running for consul, Livy criticized Varro for defaming others and becoming consul because of the loss
at Cannae. If Hannibal did not defeat the Romans so horrendously at Cannae, Varro’s consulship would just
have been banal.
56
Livy continued his invective against Varro when he wrote about Varro ascending to
the office of consul by endearing himself to the plebeians and attacking Fabius. Thus Varro
was only able to become consul “by defaming others” instead of winning the consulship by
his own merits. The Roman memory of Varro reveals that the Roman people blame Varro’s
plebeian background and his eagerness to attack Fabius as Varro’s only method of obtaining
the consulship. It was Varro, a man who did not come from a proper background, who made
the Roman army suffer a violent defeat at the battle of Cannae. Varro’s behavior after the
battle was also a source of consternation to the Roman mentalité. After the flanks of the
Carthaginians closed around the Roman army, Varro fled the battle with fifty horsemen while
his colleague Paulus died after imploring Gnaeus Lentulus, a tribune of the soldiers, to fly to
Rome and warn the Senate of the calamity that befell the Roman army at Cannae.134 Such
was the disparate characters of the commanders of Cannae.
This characterization of Varro as being a plebeian who obtained the consulship only
because he attacked the dictator Fabius explains why Livy depicted Varro as being the
advocate of rushing into the fake Carthaginian camp to plunder it. This equation of an
unqualified consul with the disastrous defeat at Cannae, by first-century CE Romans, is
axiomatic since the Roman people would forever link a defeat with an incompetent
commander. There is more, however, to Livy portraying Varro as incompetent because of the
Roman loss at Cannae. Varro served as a lesson to Romans who looked back upon their past
in order to find the ideal Roman. Varro, due to his eagerness to obtain the consulship through
sordid means and his eagerness to raid Hannibal’s camp for plunder, represented what it
meant to be non-Roman. What then, is the ideal Roman according to Livy? To answer this
question, the focus of this chapter shifts to a study of the character of Scipio.
PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO: THE COMMANDER OF THE
ROMAN ARMY AT ZAMA
Scipio was the son of the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio who fought the first battle
against Hannibal at the battle of Ticinus, immediately after Hannibal crossed the Alps into
Italy in 218 BCE. The Carthaginians wounded Publius, and while the Carthaginians began to
route the Roman army, Scipio saved his father, and thus saved the morale of the Roman
134
Ibid., 22.49.10.
57
army. The Romans were then able to escape the chase of the Carthaginians.135 The
first-century CE Roman memory of the young Scipio was of a man who rescued his father
and allowed the Roman army to escape certain slaughter at the hands of the Carthaginian
army. In this regard, the memory of Scipio that was a part of the first-century CE Roman
consciousness was of one who was dedicated to his father in as fervent a manner as every
Roman should be dedicated to the republic.
Scipio indeed embodied this ideal in Roman the mentalité, which is an continuation
of how Romans of Polybius’s time felt about Scipio. After the battle of Cannae, several
senators proposed to abandon Italy in case Hannibal decided to lay siege to Rome itself,
Scipio said to his patrician colleagues that “they must be bold and act, not deliberate, in the
face of this great evil; let them take arms and go with him at once.”136 Scipio then drew his
sword and made the following vow:
I solemnly swear…that even as I myself shall not desert the republic of the
Roman people, so likewise shall I suffer no other Roman citizen to do so; if I
wittingly speak false, may Jupiter Optimus Maximus utterly destroy me, my
house, my family, and my estate. Marcus Caecilius, I call on you and the others
who are present to swear after these terms, and if any refuse to swear, let him
know that against him this sword is drawn.
Scipio’s colleagues then trembled in the presence of Scipio “as though they beheld the
victorious Hannibal.”137
What is the importance of Livy’s depiction of Scipio? When the Roman people
became terrified that their city was about to fall after the defeat at Cannae, Scipio vowed to
the gods that they should not desert Rome, even during a time of great panic, and anyone
who did abandon the city would be put to the sword as no different than Hannibal. Livy
linked this depiction of Scipio swearing that he would not desert Rome with the same Roman
who died while biting off the nose and ears of the Numidian cavalryman since both men were
an exemplum of Roman tenacity during a tumultuous time in Roman cultural memory.
Livy’s message in his passage is clear: Scipio and other good Romans were not so terrified
after the defeat at Cannae that they should want to surrender to Hannibal and abandon the
135
Ibid., 21.46.7-8.
136
Ibid., 22.53.7-9, in Foster, 375.
137
Ibid., 22.53.10-3, in Foster, 375.
58
Republic. If any Roman did so, then the gods themselves should smite that deserter. Scipio
fulfilled his oath, and he took up arms against Hannibal when waged war against the
Carthaginians in Iberia.
Scipio was successful in conquering Iberia from the Carthaginians, and Livy used
descriptive language to outline the manner by which the Roman army under the command of
Scipio razed the town of Iliturgi, a city in Iberia, which allied itself to the Carthaginians.
After Scipio led an assault over the walls of the city by himself, Livy wrote that no one in
Scipio’s army “thought of taking men alive, no one thought of booty, although every place
was open for plunder. They slaughtered the unarmed and the armed alike, women as well as
men; cruel anger went so far as to slay infants.”138
The disparity between Livy’s depictions of Varro and Scipio is immense. Varro, on
the one hand, was a man who had base origins and was only able to ascend to the consulship
by attacking Fabius’s use of dilatory tactics against Hannibal. Varro was able to capitalize on
these anti-Fabius sentiments and thus was able to be elected consul. The disaster at Cannae
was therefore the product of Varro’s leadership and his base origins since he sent his army
after two decoy Carthaginian camps in hopes of obtaining booty. Varro just wanted more
wealth than he deserved in the minds of first-century CE Romans. Scipio, on the other hand,
was able to fulfill a sense of obedience that all Romans should have for their fathers (as Livy
portrayed Scipio when he saved his father at the battle of Ticinus). Scipio also fulfilled this
sense of obedience to the state when he vowed that no one should abandon the Republic after
Cannae and when he led the assault on Iliturgi and the subsequent destruction of the city.
Scipio also proved to embody the tenacity that was apparent in the Roman people after the
defeat at Cannae. The Senate refused to sue Hannibal for peace and when people became so
afraid of Hannibal storming Rome that they wanted to abandon the city, Scipio declared that
he would never abandon Rome and anyone who did was an enemy of the Roman people and
was angering the gods.139 Scipio was a Roman who was obedient to the Roman state in every
manner.
138
139
Ibid., 28.20.6-7, in Moore, 85.
For the use of a hero as a rectifier of problems in cultural memory, see Bernhard Giesen, Triumph and
Trauma (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 15-22, 80-4.
59
The conclusions are clear: a man of profligate character such as Varro only led the
Romans to a disaster such as Cannae. A man of virtuous character such as Scipio was able to
lead the Romans to victory in so violent a manner that the Roman army slew men, women
and children at Iliturgi, and was able to bring the terror of the Second Punic War to the
Carthaginians with the invasion of Africa. Scipio was such an exemplary Roman that he was
able to force the Carthaginian Senate to make Hannibal sue the Romans for peace, which was
something that Hannibal was unable to do to the Romans after the battle of Cannae. Livy
tapped into a cultural memory of Romanitas with his presentation of two disparate
commanders during the Second Punic War. Livy’s audience also reinforced what it meant to
be an ideal Roman by their reading of the text. The lesson for the audience of this narrative is
clear: a bad Roman will only bring disaster to Rome when they engaged an enemy of Rome
in battle, while a good Roman will only bring Rome glory by defeating its enemies.
What is the process of utilizing cultural memory of the Second Punic War to
construct a matrix of the ideal Roman? The anthropologist Fredrik Barth states that when an
ethnic group constructs a boundary to distinguish itself from another ethnic group, that
culture uses exempla that are necessarily stereotyped in order to make it easier for a the
members of that ethnicity to attempt to identify with that epitome.140 Livy provided his
audience with Scipio, the exemplary Roman, whom every Roman should admire and Varro,
the non-exemplary Roman, whom Romans should avoid emulating.141 The characters of
140
Fredrick Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. Fredrick Barth (Boston, MA:
Waveland Press, 1969), 18-9.
141
For the manner in which a stereotyped exemplum will exist to fulfill certain status roles within in an
ethnic group, see Barth, “Introduction,” 27-8. According to Barth, even those who do not fulfill this role, as
with the case of Varro, are still members of that community: “You remain a father even if you fail to feed your
child.” For more information on the author of a narrative tapping into a cultural memory, see Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative, vol. 1, 54-7; for the use of cultural values in a narrative, see 57-9. Moreover, the memory of Scipio is
also more nuanced than it is presented this paragraph. Before Scipio and his army sailed to Africa, Scipio
trained his army in Locri on the island of Syracuse. The commander of the Roman forces who recaptured Locri
from the Carthaginians, the Roman commander Quintus Pleminius, mistreated the Locrians, a scandal erupted,
and the Roman senate censured Scipio and opened an investigation into his Roman-ness. Pleminius accused
Scipio of wearing Greek footwear and having a proclivity for strolling about while reading philosophy. Livy
explicitly stated that while Quintus Metellus, the chief-investigator, cleared Scipio of being unmanly due to his
actions in Iberia, “some of these taunts were true.” It his here that Livy blurred the character of Scipio by raising
the possibility that indeed Scipio was fond of un-Roman things such as wearing Greek sandals and reciting
philosophy. Livy, however, did rectify this ambiguity by reiterating the fact that Scipio drove out the
Carthaginians from Iberia. See Livy History of Rome 29.19.11-13; 20.1, in Moore, 285. For another Roman
author who revealed Rome’s apprehension of Greek culture, see also Juvenal Satires of Juvenal 3.60-1, 66-9,
ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Juvenal and Persius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
60
Varro and Scipio represent both the best and worst of Roman character in Roman
mentalité.142
Since Varro led the Roman army to defeat at Cannae and Scipio was able to defeat
Hannibal at Zama, these two men offer a special lesson for anyone who consumes Livy’s
narrative. Those people who do not embody Roman ideals are at risk of leading Rome to ruin
much like Varro, while those who do emulate the ideal Roman can only bring glory to the
state, like Scipio. This assertion works well within a context of a literate audience of Livy’s
work; however, another group of people forged their own narrative of the Second Punic War.
These ordinary people experienced bizarre religious prodigies during the course of the
Second Punic War. Indeed, it was ordinary people who provided the foundation of the
memory of the Roman experience during the Second Punic War since ordinary people are the
bedrock of any culture.
PRODIGIES AND PORTENTS: THE EXPERIENCE OF
ORDINARY PEOPLE DURING THE WAR
As discussed earlier, the city of Rome was afraid that Hannibal might besiege Rome
after the battle of Cannae, and there was so much mourning within Rome after Cannae that
the decemviri allowed the rites of Ceres to lapse. When Scipio and his army crossed the
Mediterranean to invade Africa, there was an entire month of prayer for his success. Other
events occurred during the Second Punic War that affected ordinary Roman people in other
manners during the course of the war. These other experiences of the Second Punic War were
the religious prodigies that occurred in Rome and that revealed to ordinary Romans that the
Second Punic War was not going in Rome’s favor. These religious prodigies, when coupled
with Cannae and other acts of violence that the Roman people endured during the Hannibalic
invasion, also left an impression on Roman cultural memory.
2004), 171: “I cannot stand a Greekified Rome,” said Juvenal when he launched an invective against Romans
who wore Greek shoes, perfume, and jewelry. See also 11.100 for Juvenal’s lament that in the early days of
Roman history, a soldier “was simple man with no appreciation of Greek art.” Livy’s mention of the probable
veracity of Scipio’s predilection for Greek culture shows that even a national hero can stray beyond the
boundary that separates the Romans from other groups, but that hero can always return to be a paragon member
of that group when that group remembers their deeds that saved the country.
142
See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 64 for the reflection of cultural norms in a narrative. See also
Smith, 168-9 for the use of repetition to solidify cultural norms and mores.
61
These experiences of ordinary Romans during the Second Punic War were probably
more of a determining factor than narratives like Livy in the formation of Roman cultural
identity. It was the experiences of ordinary people during the Second Punic War, in other
words, that established the foundation of Roman cultural memory of this event and allowed
authors like Livy to write their narratives down for their audience. This study will now focus
upon the religious prodigies that ordinary Romans experienced simultaneously with acts of
violence such as Cannae during the Hannibalic invasion and how this memory was
transmitted through time to the first century CE.
THE BATTLES OF TICINUS, THE TREBIA, AND THE SIEGE
OF PLACENTIA
Immediately after Hannibal crossed the Alps, he defeated the consul Publius
Cornelius Scipio the Elder at the battle of Ticinus and then the consul Tiberius Sempronius
Longus at the battle of the Trebia in the winter of 218 BCE. Livy writes that after news of
these defeats reached the city of Rome, “the news of this disaster brought such consternation
that people looked for the immediate appearance of the hostile army before their very city,
and knew not which way to turn for any hope of help in defending their gates and walls
against the onset.”143 In Roman cultural memory, the threat of Hannibal was immediate and
apparent, since after Hannibal and his army crossed the Alps, the first two battles when the
Roman army met the Carthaginians in battle proved to be defeats for the Romans. The next
event that Livy portrayed was Hannibal’s siege of Placentia, which surrendered to Hannibal
after the Roman defeats at Ticinus and the Trebia. After the Roman garrison of the town
surrendered their weapons to the Carthaginians, “a signal was suddenly given to the victors
to sack the town, as if they had taken it by storm. Nor was any cruelty omitted…every
species of lust and outrage and inhuman insolence was visited upon the wretched
inhabitants.”144
143
Livy History of Rome 21.57.1, in Foster, 169. For the battle of Ticinus, see 21.45-6. For the battle of
the Trebia, see 21.53. Livy’s accounts of these two battles are devoid of the graphic detail violence, which are
present in his account of the battle of Cannae. The battles of Ticinus and the Trebia, therefore, are important in
the Roman psyche because of the facts that were the first two Roman defeats to Hannibal. Cannae was
preserved in Roman cultural memory as a violent event because it was such a traumatic event for the Roman
people. This is why this chapter does not explain Ticinus and Trebia in such detail as it did with Cannae.
144
Ibid., 21.52.13-4, in Foster, 171-3.
62
This passage suggests that while people in the city of Rome were indeed terrified at
the prospect of Hannibal marching upon the city walls of Rome after he defeated two consuls
in two separate battles, people who did not live in Rome also suffered from the effects of
Hannibal’s invasion. The people of Placentia had only been part of the Roman Republic for a
short period of time when they surrendered their city over to Hannibal. After the Roman
garrison handed over their weapons to the Carthaginians, Hannibal’s soldiers sacked the
town and began to commit atrocities upon the denizens of Placentia. A study of the sack of
Placentia demonstrates that the memory of the Hannibalic invasion did not just gestate in a
Roman psyche. The Hannibalic invasion was an event that was simultaneously engraved
upon the minds of the Roman people who lived in Rome and people who lived on the Italian
peninsula who were not Roman. The memory of the Second Punic War, in other words, was
not something that only one who lived in the city of Rome could experience; it affected
everyone who lived in Italy during this time. This assertion is important because it is
imperative to see that everyone in Italy had experiences of the Hannibalic invasion, which is
the foundation of Roman cultural memory for a variety of people whose ancestors did not
live in Rome during the time of the Second Punic War.
After Hannibal defeated Publius Scipio at the battle of Ticinus, and Tiberius
Sempronius at the battle of the Trebia, and after he sacked Placentia and committed atrocities
against the denizens of that city, he then began to march across Italy. It was at this time that
the people witnessed the first in a series of religious prodigies that occurred in Italy. In the
provision market in Rome, a six-month-old freeborn infant yelled “triumph!”; an ox climbed
on top of a three-story house and threw itself off when bystanders attempted to bring it down;
witnesses reported phantom ships in the sky; lighting struck the temple of Hope in the
provision market; and in Lanuvium, the body of a murder victim began to stir.145 The Senate
then commanded the decemviri to consult the Sibylline books to see if the people could
propitiate the gods with sacrifices. The Romans began to purify the city by sacrificing scores
of animals to the gods.146 The importance of Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans at the battle of
145
Ibid., 21.62.1-5, in Foster, 185.
146
Ibid., 21.62.6.
63
Ticinus and the Trebia, and his sack of Placentia, shows that when Hannibal threatened the
inhabitants of the Italy, people everywhere began to become afraid.
The appearance of religious prodigies at this time served as a reminder to the Roman
people that, indeed, since Hannibal was successful in defeating the Romans in battle, the
world was out of balance, and Hannibal was poised to take the city of Rome at any
moment.147 When the world was out of balance (in other words, when Hannibal defeated the
Roman army and threatened Rome’s very existence) the Romans of the first century CE
would remember the religious prodigies as a reminder that the danger that Hannibal
represented to the Roman Republic was a preternatural threat. The gods themselves, in other
words, seemed to sanction the Hannibalic invasion. The memory of these prodigies was
proof to Romans living in the first century CE that the invasion of Hannibal did indeed
threaten the existence of the Roman Republic.
RELIGIOUS PRODIGIES AND THE BATTLE OF LAKE
TRASIMENE
As winter began to wane and spring began in 217 BCE, the Roman army suffered yet
another defeat at the hand of Hannibal at the battle of Lake Trasimene. Religious events
preceded the battle that foretold the defeat of the Romans. The Roman people had elected
Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius as consuls for that year and when they began their
consulship, reports of religious prodigies began to pour into Rome. These prodigies were the
following: in Sicily, the javelins of soldiers spontaneously combusted; in Sardinia, fires
erupted upon the shores, two shields sweated blood, and the disk of the sun had become
contracted; in Praenestae, glowing stones had fallen from the sky; in Capena, two moons rose
in the daytime; blood mixed with the waters of Caere; in Antium, farmers reaped bloody ears
of corn; and in Rome, on the Appian Way, the statues of Mars and wolves sweated.
According to Livy, the one prodigy that gave the previous prodigies credence was “that a hen
had changed into a cock, and a cock into a hen.”148 The Senate commanded the decemviri to
147
For more information on the sentiment of the Roman people on religious prodigies during the Second
Punic War, see Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy, vol. 2, 378-9. Toynbee’s study suggests that since Livy dwelt on
prodigies during his account of the Second Punic War, there was a link between the appearance of these
prodigies and the terror felt by people during the war.
148
Livy History of Rome 22.1.13, in Foster, 203.
64
consult the Sibylline books, and the Senate and Gnaeus Servilius offered sacrifices to Jupiter
Optimus Maximus and Juno at the temple of Saturn in Rome.149 These religious prodigies
revealed to those who witnessed them that something bad was coming their way.
While the consul Gnaeus Servilius remained in Rome to propitiate the gods with
sacrifices because of the appearance of the prodigies, his colleague Flaminius departed from
Rome to Arretium to engage Hannibal in battle. While in camp in Arretium, Flaminius’s war
council advised him to wait for Gnaeus Servilius and his army so that they might engage the
Carthaginians in battle together with a greater force. Flaminius rejected their advice and gave
the orders for his army to march while exclaiming: “Let Hannibal slip through our fingers
and ravage Italy, and, laying waste and burning everything, march clear to Rome.”150
Flaminius was aware that Hannibal had begun to torment the people of Italy, and this is
apparent in his eagerness to engage Hannibal in battle without waiting for his colleague and
his army.
What happened next was another religious prodigy that foretold the disaster of the
Roman defeat at the battle of Lake Trasimene. Flaminius ordered the standard-bearer to pick
up the standards and begin the march. Flaminius then jumped upon his horse. The horse,
however, stumbled and flung Flaminius over his head, while the standard bearer could not lift
the standard from the ground despite pulling with all his might. These double prodigies did
not perturb Flaminius, and he ordered his army to march out despite the warnings from the
gods that the following battle would be a disaster.
Hannibal, after he laid waste to the city of Cortona in order to tempt Flaminius into
battle, hid his troops behind a defile in between Lake Trasimene and the mountains of
Cortona, which featured a narrow road that passed in front of the defile.151 Flaminius and his
army reached Lake Trasimene at sunset, and they proceeded to pass through the defile.
Suddenly, Hannibal ordered his troops to attack the Romans, and the mountains pinned the
Romans on one side while Lake Trasimene prevented their escape on the other side.
Flaminius rallied his soldiers to fight the Carthaginians by aiding in the fight wherever he
149
Ibid., 22.1.17-18.
150
Ibid., 22.3.10, in Foster, 211.
151
Ibid., 22.4.1-3.
65
was needed, and indeed, the only hope for the Roman army to escape slaughter was to open a
way through the Carthaginians by the use of arms.152 Such was the precariousness of the
Roman army’s situation. The battle raged on until an Insubrian horseman killed Flaminius
with a spear. Roman soldiers then began to flee into Lake Trasimene. Then many became
exhausted and drowned in the lake while others tried to swim back to the shoals and met
Carthaginian horsemen who slew the Romans while they were still in the water.153 About six
thousand Roman soldiers managed to flee the battle, but Maharbal–one of Hannibal’s
commanders–captured them with a promise that if the Roman soldiers surrendered, he would
provide them with food and set them free. Hannibal, however, disregarded Maharbal’s
promise made the Romans into prisoners.154
The effects of the battle of Lake Trasimene were as traumatic to the people in the city
of Rome as were the effects of the battle of Cannae. Fifteen thousand Romans soldiers died
at Lake Trasimene, while the people in the city of Rome became frightened when the news of
the battle reached the city. Matrons wandered the streets, demanding news of the battle from
anyone who had any information available, and a crowd gathered in front of the
Senate-house to receive news of the battle.155 No one, however, could get any information
about how many Roman soldiers died at Lake Trasimene.
Livy’s account of the emotional state of Rome after the battle of Lake Trasimene
must be quoted at length because it reveals the fear that the people of Rome felt as they
waited for news of how their loved ones fared during the battle:
152
Ibid., 22.5.7.
153
Ibid., 22.6.6-7.
154
Ibid., 22.6.12. The narrative of Hannibal’s putting Roman prisoners of war in chains would
undoubtedly remind a Roman audience of the Caudine Peace, where a Roman army in 321 BCE surrendered to
the Samnites at the Caudine Forks. The Samnite commander made the Romans strip to their undergarments and
put the Romans under the yoke to symbolize that the Samnites made the Romans into slaves; but the Samnites
did not kill all their Roman prisoners and eventually set them free. The Romans, however, remembered that the
Samnites mocked and humiliated their soldiers as they passed under the yoke. The Roman Senate allowed the
Romans who were put to the yoke to retaliate against the Samnites for this offense to Romanitas, and the
Roman army invaded Samnium and slaughtered every living thing that they could find. For more information,
see Ibid., 9.5.6-9.6.3; Rhiannon Ash, “Waving the White Flag: Surrender Scenes at Livy 9.5-6 and Tacitus,
‘Histories’ 3.31 and 4.62,” Greece & Rome, Second Series 45, no. 1 (April 1998): 27-31; E. T. Salmon, “The
Resumption of Hostilities after the Caudine Forks,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological
Association 87 (1956): 98-108.
155
Livy History of Rome 22.7.6-9.
66
They were ignorant of how those dear to each of them were faring, nor did anyone
really know what to hope or fear. On the next and on several succeeding days the
City gates were thronged with a crowd in which the women outnumbered the
men, waiting for some kinsmen or news of him. Surrounding anybody who came
along, they plied him with questions, nor could they tear themselves away–
especially from those they were acquainted with–until they enquired into every
detail. Very different were the expressions you would have noted in their
countenances, according as the tidings they received were glad or sorrowful,
when they moved away from their informants and returned to their homes,
surrounded by friends, congratulating or consoling them. The women especially
exhibited extremes of joy and grief; one, on suddenly meeting her son safe and
sound at the very gate, expired, they say, in his embrace; another, whose son had
been falsely reported dead, sat sorrowing at home, and no sooner beheld him
entering the house, then she died of excessive joy.156
Hannibal then continued his march across Italy and pillaged several farms, and the Senate
elected Quintus Fabius as dictator for the second time.157 When Fabius reported to the Senate
after his election to the dictatorship, “he convinced the Fathers that the consul Flaminius had
erred more through his neglect of the ceremonies and the auspices than through his
recklessness and ignorance; and asserting that they ought to enquire of the gods…how
the…displeasure of the gods might be appeased.”158
The lesson that a first-century CE Roman audience would have taken from the battle
of Lake Trasimene is clear: there were several religious prodigies before the battle that
warned the Roman people that Hannibal was successfully marching across Roman territory.
The strange prodigies that erupted across Italy served as a warning to the Roman people. As
Hannibal marched closer to Rome, the consul Flaminius itched to meet Hannibal in battle to
block his advance, while his colleague Gnaeus Servilius remained in Rome to try to
propitiate the gods. Gnaeus Servilius, however, was not able to appease the gods with his
sacrifices to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Flaminius, while he sat upon his horse and marched
out to meet the Carthaginians in battle, received another portent of the upcoming disaster
when his horse flung the consul over its head and when the standard-bearer could not lift the
standard from the ground. Fabius was correct to state that when Flaminius ignored the
prodigies, he led his army to a disastrous defeat, despite Flaminius conducting himself
156
Ibid., 22.7.10-14, in Foster, 225.
157
Ibid., 22.9.1, 7.
158
Ibid., 22.9.8, in Foster, 231.
67
bravely during the battle while the slaughter of his soldiers occurred around him. This
first-century CE Roman assertion is important because Fabius was fulfilling a role for later
Romans to understand why the battle of Lake Trasimene was a disaster for the Roman army:
Flaminius ignored the religious portents that foretold the disastrous loss for the Roman
people at the battle of Lake Trasimene. Moreover, Flaminius’s ignoring of the portents and
the subsequent Roman defeat at Lake Trasimene caused heartache and fear back in the city of
Rome, which was something that first-century CE Romans did not forget.
RELIGIOUS PRODIGIES AND THE BATTLE OF CANNAE
The memory of religious phenomena during the Second Punic War is also apparent
after the battle of Cannae. Since this defeat was worse than the defeats the Roman army
experienced at Ticinus, then Trebia, and Lake Trasimene, religion played a larger role in the
aftermath of the battle of Cannae than the defeats of these other battles. There were prodigies
that occurred in Rome after the battle of Cannae that compounded the fear of the Roman
people. The decemviri accused two Vestal Virgins, Opimia and Floronia, of unchastity
earlier in the year, before the battle of Cannae. The decemviri buried one of the Vestals alive
while the other killed herself. The decemviri so severely scourged a secretary to the pontiffs,
Lucius Cantilius, who had sex with Floronia, that he died from the punishment.159
Since Livy placed this incident after his depiction of the aftermath of the battle of
Cannae, a Roman audience in the first century CE would have blamed the infraction on the
Vestal Virgins’ breaking their vow of chastity in addition to already blaming the consul
Varro’s lack of restraint for riches for the horrible disaster at the battle of Cannae. In Roman
cultural memory, this violation of the faith of the Roman people provided an additional
reason why Hannibal slaughtered so many Roman soldiers at Cannae. As noted earlier, Varro
only became consul when he attacked the dictator Quintus Fabius, and his desire for plunder
made him order Roman soldiers to their deaths when he sent them to pillage the faux
Carthaginian camps. What made the battle an even worse affliction to the Roman psyche was
that two Vestal Virgins violated their vows, which reveals that in Roman cultural memory,
159
Ibid., 22.57.2-3. The Vestal Virgins kept the sacred flame of Vesta–the goddess of hearth and
household constantly lit in the temple of Vesta in the Forum in Rome. The Vestals were not to have sex in order
to show their devotion to the goddess; if a Vestal Virgin did have sex, she was buried alive while the man with
whom she had had sex was scourged.
68
the gods themselves ordained the Roman defeat at Cannae. The Romans had to do something
to appease the gods.160 What the Roman people did next proved their desperation after the
battle of Cannae. The Romans crossed a cultural boundary and performed a foreign religious
rite in a desperate attempt to propitiate the gods.
The Senate again ordered the decemviri to consult the Sibylline Books so they could
remedy the situation. What the Sibylline Books dictated in a time of national crisis when the
Vestal Virgins offended the gods by having sex was the following remedy:
by the direction of the Books of Fate, some unusual sacrifices were offered;
amongst others a Gaulish man and woman and a Greek man and woman were
buried alive in the Cattle Market, in a place walled with stone, which even before
this time had been defiled with human victims, a sacrifice wholly alien to the
Roman spirit.161
The Roman people who experienced the battle of Cannae and the violation of the vows of the
Vestal Virgins felt that their world was collapsing due to the horrible disaster at the battle of
Cannae and the subsequent fear of Hannibal marching upon Rome. Additionally, since the
Vestal Virgins broke their vow of chastity, it becomes clear why the later Roman memory of
Cannae was composed of a scene of fear that the gods themselves sanctioned the Hannibalic
invasion. Moreover, it becomes clear why the Romans would resort to human sacrifice in an
effort to appease the gods in an effort to stop Hannibal’s march across Roman territory.
The point to Romans committing human sacrifice after the battle of Cannae may have
been to sacrifice a victim in place of themselves so the gods could spare Rome from
Hannibal. The practice of sacrificing in general represents an attempt by the sacrificing
people to place whatever transgression they committed on the victim, then in the act of
killing, the gods forgive the sin and the gods are pleased with the sacrifice.162 During a time
160
Ibid., 22.57.5, in Foster, 385. Livy makes explicit mention that “Since in the midst of so many
misfortunes this pollution was, as happens at such times, converted into a portent, the decemvirs were
commanded to consult the Books…to enquire…with what prayers and supplications they might propitiate the
gods.” Cf no.2 for the linking of the violation of the Vestal’s vows with the disaster of Cannae, and since this
“pollution” happened before the battle of Cannae, the Roman people were terrified of a greater calamity that
could result of the anger of the gods–Hannibal besieging Rome itself. See also Holt N. Parker, “Why Were the
Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and the Safety of the Roman State,” American Journal of Philology
125 (2004): 575-80, 586-90.
161
162
Livy History of Rome 22.57.6, in Foster, 385-7.
See René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael
Metteer (1978; repr., London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 24-7 for the concept of transferring blame onto the
sacrificial victim during sacrificial ritual.
69
of a great crisis–in this instance, the shock that was the defeat at Cannae and the fear that
Hannibal would siege Rome because of the offense of the Vestal Virgins affected everyone,
everywhere–people in Rome sacrificed humans in their desperation to address the crisis. In
the case of the Romans who sacrificed two pairs of Greeks and Gauls, who were not Roman,
the Romans placed the blame of the Vestals breaking their vow of chastity on the outsiders
whom the decemviri sacrificed, and not the Roman people themselves. Only in such a
calamity does a society turn to such extreme measures.163
After the decemviri sacrificed the victims and the Romans believed themselves to be
cleansed of their transgressions against the gods, the Romans could then finally defeat
Hannibal, since “the monster is always expelled in sacrificial rituals.”164 When a Roman in
the first century CE remembered this instance of the Roman people sacrificing humans at the
nadir of the Roman experience during the Second Punic War, the Romans who lived after the
fact tapped into the fear that the Romans who had committed the sacrifices felt during this
time of crisis.165 This assertion is important because when the Romans who lived during the
Second Punic War crossed an ethnic boundary and committed a religious rite that was
anti-Roman, it exposed the immense fear that the Roman people felt towards Hannibal. That
fear of Hannibal and the memory of Romans committing human sacrifice became a mainstay
in the formation of Roman identity during the first century CE.
There is more to this assertion, for the people who experienced the Roman defeats
earlier in the Second Punic War were the foundation from which the memory of Hannibal
was transmitted throughout the centuries. When a people suffer such trauma, the memory of
163
For the role of sacrifice in a time of mimetic crisis and the violations of society’s mores during such a
crisis in an effort to deflect the blame whatever deity that the society offended (e.g. as in the case of the Roman
people adopting the foreign rite of human sacrifice), see Girard, 20, 41-2. For the importance of the sacrificial
victim to come from outside the community, see 78: “The community belongs to the victim, but the victim does
not belong to the community. Even when the victim does not appear in the guise of a stranger, it will be seen as
coming or returning from the outside, especially returning to the outside at the moment when the community
expels it. The fact that sacrificial victims, even when they are human, are chosen from outside the community
suggests that the interpretation that makes the victim exterior to the community…” See also Rosenberger,
368-70 for the Romans using Gauls as sacrificial victims due to the Romans’ vestigial fear of the Gauls due to
the Gallic Sack of Rome in 386 BCE. See also Giesen, 46-8 for the use of the concept of the outsider as
bringing misfortune to the victim.
164
165
Girard, 60.
See Giesen, 8 for the remembrance of cultural memory as a reminder of a society’s morality such as the
case of a first century CE Roman remembering the Hannibalic invasion.
70
the events becomes entrenched in the very essence of their beings. Ordinary people
experienced terror when they heard that Hannibal defeated another Roman army and
witnessed religious prodigies that reminded them that even the gods themselves seemed to
sanction Hannibal’s campaign against the Roman people. These events left a mark on the
cultural psyche of the Romans that they passed on by word of mouth years after these events
happened to the next generation of Romans.166
Additionally, the relief experienced by ordinary people when Scipio defeated
Hannibal also left a mark on the first-century CE Roman psyche. The Roman people
experienced an apogee and nadir of emotions during the Second Punic War that became a
determiner when they constructed their identity, and anyone who could tap into the cultural
memory of the experiences of the Second Punic War could tap into Roman identity. The
transmission of these stories of Hannibal that ordinary people passed to the next generation
was the very reason why Romans who lived in the first century CE were already familiar
with the narrative of the Hannibalic invasion when Livy composed his narrative. When the
history of a people is intimately linked with violence that is a part of that people’s cultural
memory, the only way in which that cultural memory could be recorded for posterity is by
ordinary people actively discussing their experiences and passing these narratives to their
children. Those children will pass the stories on and so forth.167 According to René Girard, in
other words, “mimetism is indeed the contagion which spreads throughout human
relationships, and in principle it spares no one.”168 The Second Punic War affected every
member of Roman society. These people affected by the war were the conduit by which the
memory of the terror that Hannibal inflicted upon the Roman people was passed to next
generation until everyone was familiar with these stories when Livy composed his narrative
in the first century CE.169
166
See Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4-5 for the explanation that “being social presupposes the ability to
experience things that happened to the groups to which we belong long before we even joined them as if they
were part of our own personal past.”
167
See Zerubavel, 7 for the oral transmission of cultural memory.
168
Girard, 299.
169
For the function of cultural memory acting as a thread holding together the identity of a society, see
Zerubavel, 37-54. See Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, “‘I Saw a Nightmare…’: Violence and the Construction of
Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976),” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (December 2000): 23-44 for the way in which
71
THE SECOND PUNIC WAR AND THE AENEID
Although Livy composed what is perhaps the definitive narrative of the Second Punic
War, other writers in the first century CE used the memory of the Second Punic War in their
own narratives as well.170 While the genres of these narratives are non-historical, the
existence of the Second Punic War in other narratives demonstrates that indeed, the memory
of the Hannibalic invasion was a phenomena that was part of the first-century CE Roman
cultural memory. The first writer apart from Livy whom we will study and who incorporated
references of the Hannibalic invasion in his work was the poet Virgil in his epic poem the
Aeneid.
Virgil wrote his Aeneid at the beginning of the first century CE, with the following
plot: after the Greeks breech the walls of Troy during the Trojan War, the protagonist of the
poem, Aeneas, flees burning Troy with his father, son, and loyal companions. The band
eventually makes its way to Carthage and Aeneas falls in love with Queen Dido, but their
love is not meant to be. Aeneas absconds from Carthage and from Dido’s love because he
was destined to found the city of Rome. The Aeneid is a foundation narrative of the city of
Rome.
Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil made several statements about the city of Carthage that
reflect first-century CE Roman cultural sentiments towards the Carthaginians. Immediately
in the first book of the Aeneid, Virgil declared the following about Carthage:
There was an ancient city, the home of Tyrian settlers, Carthage, over against
Italy and the Tiber’s mouth afar, rich in wealth and stern in war’s pursuits. This,
‘tis said, Juno loved above all other lands, holding Samos itself less dear. Here
was her armour, here her chariot; that here should be the capital of the nations,
should the fates perchance allow it, was even then the goddess’s aim and
cherished hope. Yet in truth she had learned that a race was springing from Trojan
blood, to overthrow some day the Tyrian towers; that from it a people, kings of
a people will form their own narratives of a traumatic event even when government manipulates the official
report of a cultural memory of a violent event. That is not to say that the Roman government changed and
manipulated the memory of the Second Punic War, but rather this article is useful for the fact that it highlights
the methods in which a people will remember a traumatic event.
170
This assertion only implies that Livy is the only extant author whose works covers the entire span of the
Second Punic War and not necessarily better than other narratives.
72
broad realms and proud in war, should come forth for Libya’s downfall: so rolled
the wheels of fate.171
According to Virgil, Carthage was Juno’s city and she loved it more than all her other cities
and more importantly, Juno wanted Carthage to one day be “the capital of the nations.” Fate,
according to Virgil, did not allow Carthage to become such a seat of power due because of a
race which sprang from Trojan blood was to overthrow Carthage one day. The “race
springing from Trojan blood” was of course, the Roman people, who ultimately defeated
Hannibal at the battle of Zama.
Another section of the Aeneid offers evidence that the Roman people thought that the
defeat of the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War was direct sanction from the gods for
the Romans to have a vast empire. In a dialogue between Venus (the mother of Aeneas and
daughter of Juno) and Jupiter, Venus is concerned that Juno will stymie Aeneas’s attempts to
found Rome because of Juno’s love of Carthage. Jupiter, however, tells his daughter not to
worry, for “…I set no bounds in space nor time; but have given empire without end. Spiteful
Juno…shall change to better counsels and with me cherish the Romans, lords of the
world…”172 In the course of Virgil’s poem, the Romans are the people that are destined to
have an empire without end because they defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War.
Moreover, Jupiter himself, the king of the gods, sanctions the Romans to be the masters of
the world, not the Carthaginians. This sentiment demonstrates how Romans during the first
century CE felt about the defeat of the Carthaginians: the Roman people did deserve “empire
without end” because they had defeated Hannibal at Zama.
When Aeneas and his men abscond from Carthage, Dido becomes heartbroken. Virgil
used Dido’s anger to foreshadow the future clash between the Romans and the Carthaginians
in the Second Punic War. After Dido realizes that Aeneas has snuck away from Carthage and
before she commits suicide, Dido states the following:
If that accursed wretch must needs reach harbour and come to shore, if Jove’s
ordinances so demand and this is the outcome fixed: yet even so, harassed in war
171
Virgil Aeneid 1.12-22, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and rev. G. P. Goold, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid
(1916; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 263-5. For a comparison of Virgil’s poetry to
that of Homer in Virgil’s description of Juno’s love of Carthage, see R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in
Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987), 63-6. Juno is Jupiter’s wife and queen of the Roman
gods.
172
Virgil Aeneid 1.279-282, in Fairclough and Goold, 281.
73
by the arms of a fearless nation, expelled from his territory and torn from Iulus’
[Aeneas’ son] embrace, let him plead for aid and see his friends cruelly
slaughtered!…This is my prayer; this last utterance I pour out with my blood.
Then you Tyrians, persecute with hate his stock and his race to come, and to dust
offer my tribute! Let no love or treaty unite the nations! Arise from my ashes,
unknown avenger, to harass the Trojan settlers with fire and sword–today,
hereafter, whenever strength be ours…I pray, and sea with sea, arms with arms;
war may they have, themselves and their children’s children!173
This passage is imbued with symbolism. Dido vows that there will never be peace between
Carthage and Rome. Dido’s descendants, the Carthaginians will persecute Aeneas’s
descendants, the Romans, with fire and sword during the Second Punic War. According to
Virgil, the Carthaginians fulfilled Dido’s vow by means of the defeats that Hannibal gave
them in battle after battle.
There is more, however, to Virgil stating that Dido was the one who vowed that there
would never be peace between Rome and Carthage. Recall that in the first book of the
Aeneid, Virgil stated that Carthage was Juno’s beloved city. Then later in the Aeneid, Dido
vowed vengeance upon the Roman people after Aeneas left her to find Rome. What Virgil
has done here is emasculate Carthage by making it Juno’s city, the city of a woman. Virgil
also further emasculated the Carthaginians when he portrayed them as fulfilling a vow made
by Dido, the woman who ruled Carthage, to harass the Roman people. Virgil, for his part,
belittled the Carthaginians and Hannibal by emasculating them and associating them with
female deities and a female ruler. Hannibal did indeed harm the Romans severely at the battle
of Cannae, but the Roman people in later years had their revenge on Hannibal when they
equated his race with a goddess and a queen, thus emasculating the Carthaginians.174
173
Ibid., 4.612-29, in Fairclough and Goold, 463-5. When Dido commits suicide, according to J. William
Hunt, Virgil uses her death as a metaphor for Carthage’s eventual fall in the Third Punic War. Although the
Third Punic War is out of the scope of this chapter, the existence of evidence that Virgil linked back to a
communal memory in Roman history to incite a response in his audience when they read the about the suicide
shows that the entire Carthaginian/Roman interaction forever altered the Roman mentalité in the way that
Roman authors included interactions with the Carthaginians outside of the context of the Second Punic War.
See Virgil Aeneid 4.667-71 and J. William Hunt, Forms of Glory: Structure and Sense in Virgil’s Aeneid
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 86-92.
174
Although Venus pleads to Jupiter on Rome’s behalf (hence making Rome a city of Venus) Jupiter
himself granted that the Romans should have an immense empire, and not the Carthaginians. In Roman
mentalité, it was Jupiter who allowed Rome to have an empire, while Juno and Dido were upset that Carthage
was not allowed to become masters of the Mediterranean.
74
THE SECOND PUNIC WAR IN MEMORABLE SAYINGS AND
DOINGS
The second writer roughly contemporary with Livy to use the Second Punic War in
his work was Valerius Maximus, an author who wrote in the early to mid-first century CE.
Valerius wrote a compendium of memorable events that occurred in Roman history from the
foundation of the city. Valerius used events that occurred during the Second Punic War as a
way to moralize Roman values to his audience. Valerius, in other words, reinforced Livy’s
work since they both sought to elucidate the memory of proper Roman behavior in their
narratives. Valerius, for instance, stressed the importance of a Roman adhering to Roman
religious principles by using the consul Flaminius as an example. According to Valerius, it
was Flaminius who caused the defeat of the Roman army at Lake Trasimene because
Flaminius ignored religious prodigies:
[Flaminius] gave orders that for the standards to be pulled up, his horse slipped
and he was thrown over its head to the ground. Nothing daunted by the prodigy,
he threatened the standard-bearers who told him that the standards could not be
moved from their positions with a flogging unless they dug them up immediately.
But would that he had paid the penalty for his rashness only with his own
misfortune and not with a great calamity of the Roman people! For that in the
battle fifteen thousand Romans were killed, six thousand taken prisoner, twenty
thousand put to flight.175
Valerius’s passage linked Flaminius’s ignoring of the religious prodigies before the
disastrous Roman defeat at the battle of Lake Trasimene. As stated earlier in this chapter,
Livy noted Flaminius’s horse flinging him over its head and the immobile standards. Valerius
and Livy reinforced a common cultural memory to stress that a Roman should follow the
proper rites and heed religious portents.
Valerius did not aim to convey a mere moral lesson to his audience. Like Livy,
Valerius also mentioned the battle of Cannae in his narrative within a context of
exemplifying Roman tenacity and steadfastness in the aftermath of the battle. Unlike Livy,
however, Valerius was not concerned with reiterating that Cannae was a disaster for the
Roman people. Valerius’s audience would already be familiar with the narrative of the battle
of Cannae from their exposure to Livy’s narrative. Thus, this assertion suggests that ordinary
175
Valerius Maximus Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.6.6, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey,
Memorable Doings and Sayings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 69.
75
people passed down the story of the Cannae from generation to the next. Valerius was
concerned instead with reinforcing the idea that the battle of Cannae did not force the Roman
Senate to sue the Carthaginians for peace:
Of the same period and stripe was a solider at the battle of Cannae, in which
Hannibal battered the Romans’ strength rather than broke their spirit. His
wounded hands were useless for holding arms, so clasping the neck of the
Numidian who was trying to despoil him, he gnawed the man’s nose and ears,
disfiguring his face, and expired vengefully biting. Put aside the iniquitous
outcome of the battle, how much braver was the slain than the slayer! Vulnerable
in victory, the Carthaginian consoled his dying foe, the Roman in the final
moment of his life became his own avenger.176
Much like Livy’s passage that described the same event, the existence of Valerius’s
treatment of the Roman soldier who died gnawing the face of a Numidian horseman
demonstrates that the Roman memory of Cannae transcended the violence that occurred to
the Roman soldier present at the battle. Valerius, like Livy, also remembered Cannae as the
nadir of the Roman experience of the Second Punic War. Valerius also remembered that the
Roman people did not give up the fight against Hannibal after suffering a stinging defeat at
Cannae. Valerius explicitly wrote that “Hannibal battered the Roman’s strength rather than
broke their spirit.” The existence of this passage shows that the Roman mentalité concerning
the battle of Cannae was not fixated upon the disastrous loss that was the battle. What the
Roman people had never done, unlike Hannibal when he later asked the Carthaginian Senate
to surrender to the Romans after the battle of Zama, was to surrender to the Carthaginians.
Valerius’s gleeful passage about the Roman soldier who bit the face of the Numidian shows
that some first-century CE Romans felt had a sense of superiority about themselves because
at the lowest possible point of the Second Punic War, even the soldiers who died at Cannae
fought to the bitter end.
Valerius also suggests that the memory of the fear, terror, and mourning that the
Roman people felt after the news of Cannae reached the city of Rome remained ingrained in
the Roman psyche in the years after Livy wrote his narrative. Valerius, however, wanted to
show again the tenacity of the Roman people after Cannae. Valerius’s presentation of the
aftermath of Cannae is set in a context in which Valerius offered his audience a brief history
176
Ibid., 3.2.11, in Shackleton Bailey, 245.
76
of religion in the Roman Empire from the foundation of the city to the Valerius’s era.
Valerius wrote that
After the battle at Cannae it was decreed that matrons should not extend their
mourning beyond thirty days so that the rites of Ceres could be celebrated by
them; for with the greater part of Rome’s strength lying on dire and accursed soil,
nobody’s home was free of grief. So the mothers and daughters and wives and
sisters of those recently slain were obliged to wipe away their tears, lay aside the
embers of sorrow, don white clothing, and give incense to the altars. By such
resolution in the maintenance or religion the heavenly beings were made much
ashamed to wreak further cruelty upon a nation which could not be scared away
from their worship even by harshness of injuries.177
Much like the passage in which Valerius described the Roman soldier at Cannae who
died while gnawing the face of the Numidian, Valerius here has depicted the Roman people
as not allowing the disaster at Cannae to preclude their duty to the gods. Indeed, the
insistence of the Roman matrons to observe the rites of Ceres after the thirty days of
mourning had finished shamed the gods themselves so much that the gods decided to cease
harassing the Roman people. Thirty years after Livy published his account of the Second
Punic War, Valerius suggested that the Romans began to have a sense of superiority about
themselves when they remembered the battle of Cannae.
The memory of Cannae shifted from the terror to focus on the endurance of the
Roman people in Valerius’s narrative. Hannibal did not force the Romans, in other words, to
surrender after the battle of Cannae. When the Carthaginian army crushed the Roman army, a
Roman soldier dug deep inside himself after he lost his gladius to find the strength to bite the
face of a Numidian horseman. When the news of Cannae terrified the denizens of Rome, the
rites of Ceres lapsed. When the matrons of Rome were grieving the death of their loved ones,
they eventually embraced their duties as women of the Roman Republic and began to resume
the rites of Ceres. Such was the manner in which Valerius presented the memory of the
Second Punic War: the Roman people did not allow Hannibal to conquer them despite
Hannibal inflicting horrible losses in battle after battle upon the Romans.
Valerius also offered his own presentation of Scipio that corroborates Livy’ depiction
of Scipio. Scipio, according to Valerius, possessed the self-confidence to fight the
Carthaginians in Iberia when he was only twenty-four years old, and thus he “gave hope of
177
Ibid., 1.1.15, in Shackleton Bailey, 29.
77
salvation and victory to the Roman people.”178 Valerius reiterated that Scipio forced the
Romans who wanted to flee Italy after Cannae to swear not to abandon Rome.179 The
memory of Scipio’s devotion to the Roman Republic existed outside the confines of Livy’s
narrative of the Second Punic War, and Livy’s depiction of Scipio was not something that
Livy inserted into his narrative as a didactic tool to teach his audience about how an ideal
Roman should act. The character of Scipio was ingrained in the fabric of Roman cultural
memory, and the existence of a discussion of Scipio’s character reveals that the memory of
Scipio was an important facet of Roman cultural memory.
Indeed, there are two other authors in this era who shared this sentiment of
approbation of Scipio. The astronomer Manilius wrote about what constituted the Milky Way
Galaxy. According to Manilius, only exemplary Romans occupied the Milky Way’s mass of
stars. Included in the list of Romans who served the state well was Scipio.180 The other
author who used Scipio in a flattering manner his work was Cicero in his De Re Publica.
According to Cicero, Scipio the elder tells his adopted son, Scipio Africanus the Younger, to
look to the stars of the Milky Way. It is here, in the starry heavens, where Scipio resides, that
he tells his son where his destiny lies.181 Manilius and Cicero suggested that, indeed, many
Romans remembered Scipio and his dedication to the Roman Republic.
THE SECOND PUNIC WAR AND JUVENAL
This chapter now shifts to the early second century CE to discover how the memory
of the Second Punic War survived three hundred years after the defeat of Hannibal at the
battle of Zama. The author Juvenal wrote a satire seeking to highlight the shortcomings of
Roman society during his time. Whether Juvenal’s sentiment is true or not is not important
when one considers how Juvenal attempted to prove that Romans during his time were
profligate; he used the common memory of Hannibal to do so. Juvenal, as an author who
used a fictional narrator in his Satires, is connected to the larger Roman cultural memory of
178
Ibid., 3.7.1a, in Shackleton Bailey, 299.
179
Ibid., 5.6.7.
180
Manilius Astronomica 1.792, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold, Astronomica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
181
Cicero, “Scipio’s Dream 16,” in De Re Publica, De Legibus ed. and trans. Clinton Walker Keyes,
(1929; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
78
the Second Punic War since he used the memory of the war to solidify his overall thesis that
his contemporary Roman society was lacking when compared to the Romans who lived early
in their history.
In his second satire, Juvenal complained that the Romans who lived in own his era
were effeminate men who lacked the qualities that earlier Romans possessed. Juvenal, for
instance, wrote that “grim-looking perverts” and men who put makeup on their faces and
drank from phallus-shaped glasses filled the streets of Rome.182 When Juvenal wrote about
these perceived deviations from acceptable Roman behavior, he exclaimed: “the fighting
youth destroyed at Cannae, the dead of all those wars, what would they feel whenever a ghost
like this came down to them from here? They would want to be purified.”183 In Juvenal’s
view, the Roman men who lived during his time were decidedly un-Roman; moreover,
Juvenal invoked the soldiers who died at Cannae to compare his contemporaries to those
Romans who died defending the Roman state against Hannibal. Juvenal’s conclusions are
clear: when an unmanly Roman from his time died and travelled to the underworld, he would
disgust the Romans who died heroically at Cannae. Juvenal has thus recalled a common
Roman cultural memory that would be familiar with his audience.
Juvenal continued with his invective of his contemporary Roman society. Roman
women were also lacking in moral discipline:
In the old days it was their lowly position that kept Latin women pure. What kept
the contamination of vice from their tiny homes was hard work, short sleep, hands
chafed and hardened from Tuscan fleeces, Hannibal close to Rome…These days,
we are suffering a calamity of peace.184
In the early second century CE, Roman women, according to Juvenal, were meeker than
during the Second Punic War. That is not to say that Juvenal’s sentiment towards Roman
women in his time was true. It is, however, important to realize that Juvenal tapped into
Roman cultural memory to show his audience the hardships that the Roman people
experienced due to the Hannibalic invasion as Livy described in his narrative. In Juvenal’s
182
Juvenal Satires of Juvenal 2.8-9, in Braund, 149; 2.93-7.
183
Ibid., 2.155-8, in Braund, 163.
184
Ibid., 6.287-92, in Braund, 259.
79
mind, Hannibal made the Roman people ostensibly tougher than the Romans in the early
second century CE, who were “suffering a calamity of peace.”
Much like Livy and Valerius Maximus in their propositions that the Romans who
defeated Hannibal possessed qualities that made them into exemplary Romans, Juvenal
wanted to discuss what constituted an exemplary Roman. With Juvenal, however, the
fortitude of Romans who faced the threat of Hannibal had possessed, had disappeared from
the Roman people of Juvenal’s time. The rectitude of Juvenal’s assertion is less important a
consideration when one considers that the memory of the battle of Cannae survived three
hundreds years after the fact. Juvenal’s use of Hannibal also shows that Romans who lived
long after the Second Punic War also felt that there was a sense of Roman superiority since
early Romans did overcome Hannibal’s invasion, despite any sort of feelings of Roman
inferiority during Juvenal’s time. Juvenal was lauding the memory of the early Roman
accomplishments while mocking the Romans of his own time.
Juvenal also presented Hannibal in a manner much as Virgil did almost a century
prior. In a section of his Satire that focused upon the nature of rhetoric schools in Rome,
Juvenal stated that when students of rhetoric consider the accomplishments of Hannibal, “a
man too big for Africa,” they should realize that Hannibal did achieve greatness since “Spain
increased his empire and he vault[ed] the Pyrenees. Nature throws the Alps and snow in his
path: he splits the rocks and bursts through the mountain with vinegar.”185 Hannibal,
according to Juvenal, already held Italy when he crossed the Alps, but Hannibal was not
satisfied until he captured the city of Rome itself. Juvenal then depicted Hannibal in a
manner that resembled Virgil’s emasculation of Carthage in the Aeneid, and thus nullifying
Hannibal’s accomplishments all together:
What a sight! And what a cartoon it would’ve made–the one-eyed general riding
on his Gaetulian beast! So how does it end? O glory! This same man is defeated
and he sits, a conspicuous dependent, at the king’s mansion, waiting until his
Bithynian majesty chooses to wake. That life once caused havoc for humanity, but
its end will not come from swords or rocks or missiles. No, it will be that famous
avenger of Cannae, retaliating for all the bloodshed–a little ring. Off you go, you
185
Ibid., 10.147-53, in Braund, 379.
80
maniac, zoom through the hostile Alps–to entertain schoolboys and to be put in
their speeches.186
Juvenal in this passage noted the irony of the end of Hannibal. After the end of the
Second Punic War, Hannibal left Carthage and lived in the court of the king Prusias of
Bithynia. When the Roman army found Hannibal at Bithynia, he committed suicide by
drinking poison from his signet ring to avoid capture by the Romans. This passage from
Juvenal reveals that the Romans in the early second century CE remembered Hannibal as one
who might have invaded Italy and caused destruction at Cannae, but died at his own hand in
a foreign land. The mighty Hannibal was then the subject of speeches in rhetoric school.
Such was the fate of the mighty Carthaginian general Hannibal, according to Juvenal.
Juvenal might have felt that the Romans of his time were lacking when he compared them to
Romans who faced Hannibal, but this passage shows that Juvenal realized that the Roman
people did overcome a great enemy when Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama. Indeed, writers
during the first century to early second century CE used this sentiment of Roman superiority
in their narratives.
THE SECOND PUNIC WAR IN LIVY AND JOSEPHUS
Early in his history of Rome, Livy, when he was discussing the accomplishments of
Alexander the Great, offered his audience a digression concerning who would win in a war
between the Roman Republic and Alexander the Great. According to Livy, the Romans
would have won this hypothetical war. The Roman army, according to Livy, could draw
upon its reserves while Alexander’s army, like Hannibal’s, would wear away as the fighting
continued for an extended period of time while away from home.187 Livy’s digression soon
began to focus itself upon the notion that the Romans would have defeated Alexander the
Great because the Romans defeated Hannibal:
What soldier can match the Roman in entrenching? Who is better at enduring toil?
Alexander would, if beaten in a single battle, have been beaten in the war; but
what battle could have overthrown the Romans, whom Caudium could not
186
Ibid., 10.157-67, in Braund, 378-81.
187
Livy History of Rome 9.19.6.
81
overthrow, nor Cannae?…A thousand battle arrays more formidable than those of
Alexander and the Macedonians have the Romans beaten off.188
According to Livy, the Romans could defeat any enemy–including Alexander the
Great–since Hannibal at Cannae could not force the Romans to surrender. This passage
suggests that the Roman people who lived after the Second Punic War had a sense of
superiority about themselves since they had defeated Hannibal centuries before. The Roman
people, according Livy, defeated Hannibal after suffering from defeat after defeat; thus, they
could defeat any enemy who dared to face them. The Roman people could even defeat
Alexander the Great, who conquered the world from Greece to the Indus River.
This sense of Roman superiority was also present in an outsider’s narrative of Roman
history. The Jewish author Josephus was a general who fought against the Romans during the
Jewish rebellion of the mid-first century CE. Josephus changed sides in the Jewish rebellion
and became a client of the Roman emperor Vespasian. While in Rome, Josephus composed a
history of the Jewish war after the Romans defeated the Jews and sacked the Second Temple
of Jerusalem. Josephus’s narrative suggests that indeed, the Romans had this sense of
superiority about themselves when they faced a foreign enemy in battle. King Herod
Agrippa, a Jewish king who took the name of a general of the emperor Augustus,
admonished his subjects for rebelling against Rome. He used an interesting bit of Roman
historical knowledge to inform his audience that any rebellion against Rome was doomed to
fail.
After King Herod had asked his subjects about the Britons, the Germans, and
Parthians whom Rome had subjugated, he told his audience the following:
Thus, when almost every nation under the sun does homage to the Roman arms,
are you alone willing to defy them, regardless of the fate of the Carthaginians,
who, for all their pride in the great Hannibal and in nobility of their Phoenician
descent, fell beneath the hand of Scipio?189
Within the context of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War, according to
Josephus, the Romans were able to subjugate these other races because they defeated
188
Livy History of Rome 9.19.9, trans. B. O. Foster, History of Rome (1926; repr. Cambridge Harvard
University Press, 2001), 239. See also Ruth Morello, “Livy’s Alexander Digression (9.17-19): Counterfactuals
and Apologetics,” The Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002): 62-85.
189
Josephus The Jewish War 2.380-1, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray and ed. Jeffery Hendersen, The Jewish
War (1927; repr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 473.
82
Hannibal after they suffered from several defeats from Hannibal. No one could question the
supremacy of the Roman Empire since the Romans defeated Hannibal. What separated the
Romans from other races was that they did not defeat Hannibal, as the Romans did. The
Romans, according to Josephus, deserved their imperium sine fine.
CONCLUSION
Roman authors used the memory of the Second Punic War in many ways. The
narratives of several authors used the trauma of the Hannibalic invasion and the eventual
triumph of the battle of Zama to construct a boundary around the Roman people. This
boundary was one of superiority since the Roman people were able to overcome their defeat
at the battle of Cannae by their victory at the battle of Zama. The Roman people also used the
memory of the commanders who fought at Cannae and Zama as a way to construct the
manner in which a proper Roman should act. Most importantly, the memory of the Second
Punic War permeated throughout every stratum of Roman society. Indeed, in order to be a
Roman, one would had to have been connected to the memory of the violence and trauma of
the Second Punic War.
83
CHAPTER 4
THE MEMORY OF THE MUTINY OF SCIPIO’S
ARMY AND THE CRISIS OF THE THIRD
CENTURY
You all deserve to die, yet I, for my part, will not put you all
to death…
– Dio Cassius
Polybius, an author of the second century BCE, began using the memory of the defeat
of Hannibal as a way to justify Roman expansion and rule outside of Italy. Livy, Virgil,
Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Juvenal used the memory of the Second Punic War and the
subsequent defeats of Hannibal to justify Roman superiority over other peoples. This use of
the Second Punic War to explain to the Roman people the state of their empire remained in
the Roman psyche into the second and third centuries CE. This timeframe is the era of a third
cohort of Roman authors who composed narratives about the Hannibalic invasion: Plutarch
(46 CE–126 CE), Appian (90 CE–160 CE), and Dio Cassius (155 CE–235 CE). Moreover,
what is also important about these authors is that Plutarch and Appian’s narratives reveal that
Romans of the early to mid-second century CE still constructed their cultural identity in
reference to Hannibal in the same fashion as the Romans of the first century CE. A study of
Dio demonstrates a significant shift in how the Romans of the early third century CE
remembered the Second Punic War: the Romans who fought against Hannibal were better
than the Romans of Dio’s era because they did not kill each other in civil war as Dio’s
contemporaries were doing. This chapter attempts to discover why this shift in Roman
cultural memory of the Second Punic War occurred.
Plutarch and Appian captured in their narratives of the Hannibalic invasion a
continuation of the Roman cultural memory that Livy presented in his narrative in the first
century CE. The same memory of the violence, fear, and eventual triumph over Hannibal that
was present in Livy’s narrative is also present in the narratives of Plutarch and Appian. An
investigation of Dio’s narrative of the Second Punic War, however, suggests that Dio was
84
more concerned than others had been with how Publius Cornelius Scipio dealt with his
mutinous army in Iberia on the eve of the North African invasion prior to the battle of Zama.
Scipio restored order in his army by punishing only the leaders of the mutiny and not all the
soldiers who had mutinied against him.
Plutarch and Appian’s narratives of the Second Punic War differ from Dio’s narrative
in one important manner. The Roman Empire of Plutarch and Appian was a strong empire
that benefitted from emperors such as Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius who ruled the
empire without implementing a systematic system of terror to prevent usurpations and
rebellions that occurred in the Roman Empire in the early third century CE. The world of
Plutarch and Appian, in other words, was a stable world, and the Roman cultural memory of
the Second Punic War of the early to mid-second century reflects when the Roman State was
secure. The memory of the Second Punic War served as a way to remind the Romans that
they deserved this stable world because the Romans had defeated Hannibal. In Dio’s era,
civil war raged in which Romans killed each other in battle and emperors purged those who
threatened their reign.
This chapter features the following sections. The first two sections investigate how
Plutarch and Appian reflected Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War during the
mid-second century CE and how this cultural memory was a continuation of the same
memory of the Roman people in the first century CE. The third section studies the world of
Plutarch and Appian and how this world influenced the formation of Roman cultural
memory. Then the fourth section studies how Dio portrayed the Second Punic War in his
narrative. The fifth section that follows is an investigation of Dio’s attempts to explain why
the Romans of Dio’s time were fixated upon an era when the Romans did use violence
against each other to ensure the security of the empire.
PLUTARCH’S LIVES OF FABIUS AND MARCELLUS
Plutarch was a Roman citizen of Greek descent who wrote his Parallel Lives in the
early second century CE. Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives around the same time as Juvenal
composed his Satires, which itself was a narrative that revealed that the Romans in the early
second century CE constructed an identity of superiority about themselves centered on their
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defeat of Hannibal.190 This milieu also influenced Plutarch’s narrative of the Second Punic
War.191 Moreover, this sense of Roman superiority based on the defeat of Hannibal survived
until Appian’s era in the mid-second century CE, which suggests the longevity of this
sentiment of superiority.192 Plutarch’s Parallel Lives feature biographies of Fabius Maximus
and Marcus Marcellus, two Roman generals during the Second Punic War.
Quintus Fabius Maximus was the Roman dictator who advocated delaying open battle
against the Carthaginians and only harassing Hannibal to wear down Hannibal’s army in a
war of attrition. There was, however, more to Plutarch’s biography of Fabius than recounting
the deeds of Fabius during the entire Second Punic War. Plutarch also wrote about Fabius’s
devotion to Roman religious rites during times of a national emergency. After the Roman
defeat at the battle of Lake Trasimene, the Roman Senate declared Fabius dictator. After his
election to the dictatorship, Fabius was quick to show the Roman people that the battle of
Lake Trasimene was a result of the Romans not adhering to the proper religious rites, and not
Hannibal’s superior generalship. Plutarch thus negated Hannibal’s victory over the Romans
by maintaining that they could only blame the defeat at Lake Trasimene (217 BCE) on the
Romans not properly observing the religious rites and not Hannibal’s intelligence.
After this, [Fabius] began with the gods…and showed the people that the recent
disaster was due to the neglect and scorn with which their general [Flaminius] had
treated the religious rites, and not to the cowardice of those who fought under
him. He thus induced them, instead of fearing their enemies, to propitiate and
honour the gods. It was not that he filled them with superstition, but rather that he
emboldened their valour with piety, allaying and removing the fear which their
enemies inspired, with hopes of aid from the gods.193
This passage demonstrates that while the Romans of the early second century CE still
remembered their defeat at the battle of Lake Trasimene, Plutarch enlarged the memory of
the Roman hero to include Fabius. Fabius was a hero in the psyche of second century CE
Romans not because of his military prowess, but because Fabius represented an ideal Roman
190
See Chapter 3.
191
For the effects of living in a world under Roman governance, see C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971), 3-12.
192
193
See Jones, Plutarch and Rome, 67-71, 80-7.
Plutarch Fabius Maximus 4.3, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives (1918; repr., Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 129.
86
who recognized that the Carthaginians were not superior to the Romans. Romans of the early
second century CE blamed Flaminius’s ignoring of the portents that allowed Hannibal to be
victorious at the battle of Lake Trasimene, as suggested by Plutarch’s narrative. The Romans
of the early second century discounted any possibility of Hannibal being superior to the
Romans who fought against him. The Romans of this era had no reason to fear an external
enemy if only they adhered to their religious rites.
Plutarch’s narrative of Fabius’s sentiment blamed not that the superiority of the
Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene but the Romans’ lack of adherence to the proper religious
rites for the defeat of the Romans at this battle. Virgil and Plutarch took different approaches
to reflect the Roman cultural memory of their respective eras, but the result was the same:
both authors embodied the memory of the Roman people that despite his victories, Hannibal
was not a threat since the Romans eventually defeated him. Plutarch and Virgil both showed
that the memory of the Roman people in the first to second century CE was that it was
Romans themselves who fell out of favor with the gods and allowed Hannibal to become
victorious (and not the superiority of Hannibal as a general). Thus, the Romans of the early
second century CE asserted the superiority of the Romans when they reduced Hannibal’s
victories to nothing and laid the blame for the Romans’ defeat on Flaminius.
The Romans during Plutarch’s time, however, did not forget the violence of the
Second Punic War in an effort to undermine the Roman memory of Hannibal. The battle of
Cannae (216 BCE) was also an important feature in Plutarch’s Life of Fabius. Plutarch not
only gave his audience another account of the violence of battle of Cannae, but he also
embodied how the Romans of his era negated Hannibal’s accomplishments even in the
Romans’ worst defeat during the Second Punic War. Plutarch’s depiction of Cannae laid the
blame of Hannibal’s victory on one of the consuls who fought at the battle, Terentius Varro,
and not the entire Roman army that fought at Cannae. Plutarch wrote, like Livy and Polybius
before him, that Varro was “a man whose obscure birth and whose life was conspicuous for
servile flattery of the people and for rashness.”194 In addition, consider the following manner
in which Plutarch depicted how Varro’s co-consul, Aemilius Paulus, died at Cannae. While
the battle of Cannae raged around Paulus, a Carthaginian cavalry soldier struck Paulus with a
194
Ibid., 14.1, in Perrin, 159.
87
spear. Paulus then fled the battle and waited by a rock to die. Cornelius Lentulus, a Roman
officer, begged Paulus to flee and save his life. Paulus refused to leave, and ordered Lentulus
to tell Fabius that “Paulus Aemilius was true to his precepts up to the end…but was
vanquished first by Varro, and then by Hannibal.”195
The importance of this statement as follows: in the second century CE, according to
Plutarch, the battle of Cannae was a violent affair, but it was Varro who was ultimately to
blame for the defeat of the Romans. Varro led the Romans to defeat at Cannae because of his
“servile flattery” and not because of Hannibal’s superior generalship at the battle of Cannae.
The Romans of Plutarch’s era nullified Hannibal’s accomplishments when they maintained
that Hannibal was not that brilliant of a general. This use of cultural memory of the Second
Punic War meant to the Romans of the early second century CE that they had no reason to
fear any external enemy just so long as they remembered not to ignore religious portents as
Flaminius had done at the battle of Lake Trasimene.
With Plutarch negating the victories of Hannibal, one must also recognize that the
Romans of the second century CE did not forget the violence that they inflicted upon the
Carthaginians during the Second Punic War. Plutarch used the victories of the Romans to
negate further the memory of Hannibal’s victories against the Romans within the matrix of
Roman identity. While Plutarch was focused upon the life of Fabius and how Fabius
protected Rome when Hannibal ravaged Italy, Plutarch’s narrative also reveals that the
Roman people also remembered another commander who fought against Hannibal: Marcus
Claudius Marcellus. Moreover, Marcellus also represented to Plutarch the redemption of the
Romans’ defeat at the battle of Cannae and the ability of the Romans to inflict damage on the
Carthaginians.
In 216 BCE, at the battle of Nola, Marcellus became the first Roman commander to
defeat Hannibal in the Second Punic War. After the battle of Cannae, the Roman people
elected Marcellus and Fabius as consuls as a way to protect the Italians from Hannibal’s
advancement by using Fabius’s delaying tactics and to aggressively pursue Hannibal by
using the offensive capabilities of Marcellus.196 The Romans so believed in the ability of
195
Ibid., 16.7, in Perrin, 167.
196
Plutarch Marcellus 9.4.
88
these two consuls to protect them that they called Fabius “the shield” because he prevented
Hannibal from attacking Rome, while Marcellus was “the sword” because he was the first
Roman consul to defeat Hannibal in battle.197 According to Plutarch, Hannibal regarded
“Fabius as a tutor, but Marcellus as an adversary; for by the one he was prevented from doing
any harm, while by the other he was harmed.”198
Marcellus proved his military acumen at the battle of Nola, when he defeated
Hannibal who was attempting to storm the city with his army. Plutarch’s narrative of the
battle of Nola is an indication of how Romans of the second century CE remembered how
Marcellus defeated Hannibal. More importantly, however, this battle was important in the
Roman psyche because the manner in which Marcellus defeated Hannibal. When Hannibal
sent forth his army to seize Nola, Marcellus ordered his men to throw open the gates of the
city and immediately afterward Marcellus’s army poured out of Nola to engage Hannibal.
The Romans killed five thousand Carthaginians while only losing five hundred soldiers.199
The Romans of the second century CE, through Plutarch’s narrative, remembered the battle
of Nola as another method to assert Roman superiority. According to this sentiment, if the
Romans could defeat Hannibal after their loss at Cannae, then that victory reveals that the
Romans were superior to other peoples. In the second century CE the Romans linked the
notion of Varro causing the Romans’ defeat at the battle of Cannae with Marcellus’s victory
at the battle of Nola to reveal that Marcellus could redeem the less than ideal Roman by
defeating Hannibal. Marcellus thus saved the notion of the ideal Roman when he corrected
Varro’s error at Cannae.
Despite Plutarch composing a narrative of Marcellus’s accomplishments, Romans in
the second century CE did not supplant the memory of Scipio being the savior of Rome.
Instead, the Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War in the early second century CE
expanded the pantheon of the heroes of Rome to include Marcellus. Indeed, in his
introduction to the Life of Marcellus, Plutarch wrote that
there were the chief Romans of that time, who, in their youth, waged war with the
Carthaginians for Sicily; in their prime, with the Gauls to save Italy itself; and
197
Ibid., 9.4, in Perrin, 459.
198
Ibid., 9.6, in Perrin, 459.
199
Ibid., 11.4.
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when they were now grown old, contended again with Hannibal and the
Carthaginians, and did not have, like most men, that respite from service in the
field which old age brings.200
These passages demonstrate that the Romans of the second century CE used the memory of
other Romans who fought against Hannibal after they defended Rome from the Carthaginians
in the First Punic War and from the Gauls as a way to further foster a sense of Roman
identity. The story of Marcellus, according to Romans of the second century CE, told of a
man who was the first Roman to deal a blow against Hannibal and to come to the defense of
Rome, even in old age. The Romans in the early second CE therefore remembered that
Marcellus defeated Hannibal at the battle of Nola, which allowed Scipio to invade North
Africa and eventually defeat Hannibal.
That Plutarch are no extant works of Plutarch on the life of Scipio does not mean that
the memory of Scipio ceased to exist in the minds of the Romans of the second century CE.
The memory of Scipio still lived in the minds of Romans in this era; it was just that Plutarch
further solidified the memory of the defeat of Hannibal when he included the memory of
other Romans who defeated Hannibal, as in the example of Marcellus, or who exhibited
Roman virtue, like Fabius. Plutarch extended the Roman cultural memory of the Second
Punic War that the Romans of the first century CE established when those Romans
remembered both the violence of the Second Punic War and the eventual triumph over
Hannibal.
APPIAN’S ROMAN HISTORY AND THE CONTINUATION OF
ROMAN IDENTITY FROM THE FIRST CENTURY CE
Appian also reveals that in the late second century CE, the Roman people constructed
a similar identity about themselves based upon an extant Roman cultural memory from the
first century CE. Appian was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and died during the reign of the
emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138 CE–161 CE). Appian’s milieu reveals his familiarity with the
institutions of the Roman Empire. Appian, who “reached the highest place in [his] native
country, and had been, in Rome, a pleader of causes before the emperors, until they deemed
[him] worthy of being made their procurator,” had an intimate knowledge of the composition
200
Ibid., 1.3, in Perrin, 437.
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of the Roman psyche that is evident in his narrative of Roman history.201 Appian’s
background suggests that Appian was an insider of the Roman government, and thus Appian
was already inclined to believe that the Romans deserved to rule over other peoples when he
composed his narrative. Indeed, in the preface to his narrative, Appian wrote: “No empire
down to the present time ever attained to such size and duration,” and “through prudence and
good fortune has the empire of the Romans attained to greatness and duration.”202 This
sentiment is important because it reveals that unequivocally, according to Appian, the
Romans of the mid-second century CE still believed themselves to deserve an empire much
as the Romans of the first century CE had, although no longer through the notion of military
might.203
This sentiment also influenced how the Romans of the mid-second century CE
remembered the Second Punic War, which is similar to Livy’s account of the Second Punic
War in the first century CE. Appian’s narrative of the Second Punic War, however, was not a
mere regurgitation of Polybius’s and Livy’s narratives of the Second Punic War. Like
Plutarch, Appian’s narrative of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War
represented the same Roman mentalité of earlier eras, and Appian’s narrative is a
continuation of the same Roman sense of superiority that was present in Livy’s narrative.
One must also be aware, however, that Appian focused his narrative on slightly different
memories than Polybius, Livy, and even Plutarch. The sentiment present in all of these
narratives, nonetheless, is that the Romans were better than other peoples because they had
defeated Hannibal.
Appian only offered his audience a brief synopsis of the course of the Second Punic
War, and not a recapitulation of the entire war. Appian’s accounts of the first major defeats
for the Romans–the battles of Ticinus, the Trebia, and Lake Trasimene–were brief and only
201
Appian Preface 15, trans. Horace White and ed. G. P. Gould, Roman History (1912; repr., Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25. For the effects Appian’s position in the Roman government had on
his literary talents, see Alain M. Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992), 274-77; for the similarities between Appian and Polybius, see 284-5.
202
Appian Preface 8, in White and Gould, 13; Preface 11, in White and Gould, 17; Gregory S. Bucher,
“The Origins, Program, and Composition of Appian’s Roman History,” Transactions of the American
Philological Association 130 (2000): 430.
203
According to Bucher, Appian believed that it was the emperors who made Rome great, which is a point
to which we will return later in this chapter. See Bucher, “The Origins,” 431.
91
made mention of the loss of life the Romans experienced at these battles.204 It is not until his
narration of the battle of Cannae that Appian offered his audience a detailed depiction of
what occurred at the battle. This narration suggests that the battle of Cannae was still
important in the psyche of the Romans in the mid-second century CE as an example of the
violence that the Romans suffered because of the battle of Cannae.205 Appian’s detailed
depiction of Cannae also reveals that like the Roman cultural memories of the Romans of
Polybius’s and Livy’s era, the significance of the battle of Cannae in Appian’s narrative
shows that Appian offered another continuation of the Roman identity juxtaposed with the
memory of Hannibal established in the first century CE.
Appian’s account of the battle of Cannae was a recapitulation of Polybius’s and
Livy’s account of the battle (i.e. the base origins of Varro, the closing pincer movement of
the Carthaginians around the Romans, and the death of Paulus) with one difference. Appian
discussed how Hannibal himself recognized the superiority of the Romans even after he had
defeated them at Cannae. After the battle ended, Hannibal went to view the dead on the
battlefield. Then Hannibal saw “the bravest of his friends lying among the slain he burst into
tears and said that he did not want another such victory.”206 This passage demonstrates that
the Roman people, according to Appian, remembered not only the violence of the war but
also Hannibal’s victories in such a way that undermined Hannibal himself. In Appian’s
narrative, Hannibal himself, although victorious, recognized that even in the midst of their
worst defeat, the Romans were capable of inflicting huge losses upon the Carthaginians when
he stated that, “he did not want another such victory.” Hannibal himself realized that the
Romans were capable of fighting even when all seemed lost, and the memory of Hannibal
crying at the sight of his slaughtered friends served as a way to negate further Hannibal’s
accomplishments during the Second Punic War by depicting Hannibal as losing his
composure. Such was the manner by which the Romans of Appian’s era simultaneously
recognized the violence of the Hannibalic invasion and the superiority of the Romans who
eventually defeated Hannibal.
204
See Appian The Hannibalic War 2.5.
205
Ibid., 4.20-6.
206
Ibid., 4.26, in White and Gould, 345.
92
In addition, there are signs in Appian’s narrative of the Second Punic War that
suggest that Romans in the mid-second century CE further expanded upon the first century
CE Roman memory of the Second Punic War. After Scipio defeated Hannibal in the battle of
Zama in Carthage in 202 BCE, the Roman senate debated how to make the Carthaginians pay
for starting the war. This debate was a point of concern for Appian and, by extension, for
Romans in the mid-second century CE. The memory of Scipio invading North Africa “to
bring retribution upon the Carthaginians in their own country” was not lost upon the Romans
of the second century CE. The Romans of this time, according to Appian, however, also
expanded the notion of vengeance against the Carthaginians when they recalled why the
Carthaginians should be suppliant to the Romans while at the same time also asserting the
notion of Roman superiority.207
After he defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama, Scipio dictated to the Carthaginians
that in order to surrender, the Carthaginians must give all but one of their warships to the
Romans, hand over all Roman prisoners of war and deserters, pay the Romans 250 talents
every year for fifty years, and not wage war upon other nations.208 In the Roman Senate, two
factions debated two disparate courses of actions against the Carthaginians. A senator, whom
Appian described as only being a friend of Scipio, advocated that while the Carthaginians did
act cruelly towards the Romans during the course of the war, it would be nobler for the
Romans not to destroy Carthage itself and ratify Scipio’s terms for peace.
The deed will be sounded through all the earth, now and hereafter, if we destroy
this famous city, former mistress of the seas, ruler over so many islands, and the
whole expanse of water and more than half of Africa…While they were
combative it was necessary to contend against them; now that they have fallen
they should be spared, just as athletes refrain from striking a fallen antagonist…If
we consider closely what they have done to us, it is in itself the most fearful
example of the fickleness of fortune, that they are now asking us simply to save
them from destruction…209
This passage demonstrates that the Romans of the second century CE recognized that
Carthage was a great nation that the Romans managed to defeat, and that it was the
207
Ibid., 2.1, in White and Gould, 413.
208
Ibid., 8.54.
209
Ibid., 9.57, in White and Gould, 491, and notice the notion of good and bad luck present in Appian’s
narrative instead of the Romans thinking that they deserved their empire based on Jupiter’s sanction.
93
“fickleness of fortune” that allowed the Romans to defeat the once-powerful Carthage. It
would behoove the Romans not to become too arrogant when they dealt with defeated
peoples because the Romans might find themselves in a situation like Carthage. In this way,
Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War in the mid-second century CE allowed the
Roman people to acknowledge that while they had defeated an enemy that had inflicted
violence and trauma upon the Roman people, the Romans should not tempt fate and treat
others harshly. This was why Scipio and his allies advocated offering terms of surrender
instead of the Romans razing Carthage to the ground. Indeed, in his preface Appian wrote
that the Romans were so successful in maintaining such a vast empire because the Romans
exercised “prudence, rather than to extend their sway indefinitely.”210 Those who advocated
terms of surrender for Carthage had a rival faction in the senate.
One of Scipio’s rivals recalled the sufferings of the Roman people and the harsh
nature of the Carthaginians in order to justify the Romans seeking the ultimate vengeance
upon the Carthaginians:
The people of Saguntum, a noble city of Spain, in league with themselves and
friendly to us, they slaughtered to the last man, although they had given no
offence. Those of Nuceria, a town subject to us, surrendered to them under a
sworn agreement…They shut the senators of Nuceria up in a bath-room and
suffocated them with heat. Then they shot the common people with arrows as they
were going away…They put another general of ours, Regulus, to death with
torture after he had gone back to them in accordance with his oath…They cast our
men, whom they had taken prisoners, into ditches, making bridges of their bodies
to pass over.211
Despite the protest of this rival, the senate ratified Scipio’s treaty. This outcome highlights
the fact that even though the Romans could prove themselves stronger than Carthage by not
destroying it, the Romans in the second century CE still remembered the violence that
characterized the Second Punic War. The persistence of the memory of violence of the
Second Punic War in the mid-second century CE shows that the Romans of this era still
210
211
Appian Preface 7, in White and Gould, 11.
Appian The Punic Wars 9.63, in White and Gould, 501-3. For Regulus, see Horace Ode 3.5, trans. Niall
Rudd and ed. Jeffery Hendersen, Odes and Epodes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 161:
“[H]e pushed away his virtuous wife…and his little children…and yet he knew what the barbarous torturer was
preparing for him…”
94
formed an ethnic boundary around the notion of enduring violence.212 Even though the
Romans in the second century CE used the memory of the restraint that the Romans showed
towards the Carthaginians after the Second Punic War, the Romans still considered the war a
violent affair in memories that shifted over time.
Appian’s narrative demonstrates a construction of the Roman identity that justified
the Romans’ possessing an empire based on the superiority of the Romans when they chose
not to destroy Carthage after the Second Punic War, despite suffering immensely during the
war. The Romans who lived in the mid-second century CE, according to Appian, had the
same milieu of Romans who lived in earlier eras–Roman superiority based on a memory of
the Second Punic War–and this identity long justified the existence of their empire. Appian
revealed a notion of Roman superiority based on a memory of the Second Punic War that
lasted nearly three hundred years after the end of the Second Punic War. Plutarch’s and
Appian’s Roman world was stable and benefitted from rulers concerned only with the safety
of the empire. An investigation of the Roman Empire of Plutarch and Appian demonstrates
how this stability influenced these writers.
PLUTARCH AND APPIAN’S ROMAN EMPIRE
While we will see that Dio was unfortunate to live in an era of the Roman Empire
suffering from a series of violent civil wars and rulers who attempted to obviate any
usurpation by purging any potential rivals, Plutarch and Appian did not. Plutarch and
Appian’s environment influenced how the Roman people in their era remembered the Second
Punic War as a time when they defeated a terrible enemy that inflicted immense violence
upon the Roman populace as a way to justify and explain the existence of their stable empire.
The emperors who reigned during the lives of Plutarch and Appian demonstrated
restraint and moral fortitude. After the death of Domitian, who himself instituted a reign of
terror, (r. 81 CE–96 CE) in 96 CE, Nerva (r. 96 CE–98 CE) became emperor.213 Nerva did
not purge those who plotted against him: “In the senate he took an oath that he would not
212
213
For the establishing of communal boundaries, see Barth, “Introduction,” 18-9, 27-8.
According to Dio, after the death of Domitian the senate tore down all of Domitian’s statues and arches
he had built. See Dio Cassius Roman History 68.1.1, trans. Earnest Cary, Roman History (1917, repr.;
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
95
slay any of the senators, and he kept his pledge in spite of plots against himself.”214 The reign
of Nerva was short due to advanced age of the emperor, and Nerva’s adopted son, Trajan
(r. 98 CE–117 CE), next became emperor and heralded in an era of unrivaled peace and
security in the Roman Empire.215 Ancient authors were unanimous in their praise of Trajan’s
reign as emperor. Dio said that Trajan “did not envy nor slay any one but honoured and
exalted all good men without exception. To slanders he paid very little heed and he was no
slave of anger. He refrained…from unjust murders.”216 This passage suggests that during the
late first century CE, Nerva and Trajan did not murder anyone because of conspiracies
against them. Moreover, civil wars in which scores of Roman killed each other over the
emperorship in the early third century CE did not tarnish Trajan’s reign. Trajan instead
focused his army’s strength against Decabalus and the Dacians, a war in which the Romans
were victorious and resulted in the annexation of Dacia for the Roman Empire.217 Indeed,
even Pliny the Younger wrote: “we are receiving hostages, not paying for them; huge losses
and vast sums of money are no longer needed to buy terms of peace which shall name us as
conquerors.”218
The Roman Empire of Trajan, in other words, fought external enemies instead of
fighting against Romans of a rival political faction. The Romans of this era therefore still
believed that their state was strong, and that their defeat of Hannibal entitled them to this
stable empire. Pliny the Younger even compared Trajan to Scipio as a Roman hero and
maintained that bestowing the title of Optimus was the most appropriate appellation for this
beloved emperor.219 Pliny’s comparison of Trajan to Scipio suggests that Pliny could not
think of any other person to whom he could compare Trajan other than the man who defeated
Hannibal. The title of Optimus only reconfirmed that the Romans of Trajan’s era held him in
214
Ibid., 68.2.3, in Cary, 363.
215
Also, during the reign of Trajan, literature flourished in the empire, thus allowing Plutarch and other
authors to compose their works. See Jones, Plutarch and Rome, 28.
216
Dio Cassius Roman History 68.6.4, in Cary, 371. See also Dio Cassius Roman History 68.15.3, in Cary,
389: “He had taken an oath that he would not shed and blood and he made good his promise by his deeds in
spite of plots against him.”
217
For the best extant source of Trajan’s Dacian wars, see Dio Cassius Roman History 68.8-15.
218
Pliny The Panegyricus of Plinius Secundus Delivered to the Emperor Trajan 2.12.2, trans. Betty
Radice, Panegyricus (1969, repr.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 351.
219
Dio Cassius Roman History 68.23.1-3; Pliny Panegyricus 13.6; 2.12.
96
high regard. The Romans continued the sentiment of Roman superiority that Romans of
earlier eras established when they remembered the Second Punic War in this world.
Although Nerva and Trajan were exemplary emperors, not all emperors during this
era showed as much restraint as Nerva or Trajan. Hadrian (r. 117–138 CE), Trajan’s
successor, murdered men who had insulted him before he became emperor.220 Despite this
instance of rashness, Dio recognized that Hadrian generally showed restraint that balanced
his proclivity to murder those who insulted him. Indeed, when the people of Alexandria
revolted, Hadrian sent the Alexandrians a letter rebuking them for rebelling instead of
massacring its inhabitants as a way not to warn other cities not to revolt.221 Moreover, there
was a safeguard that existed that prevented Hadrian from enacting more purges that would
have created an environment of fear that would in turn have led to usurpations earlier in the
empire.
This safeguard was Hadrian’s adopted son and successor, Antoninus (r. 138–161 CE).
The senate gave Antoninus the cognomen Pius when he became emperor because he
“besought the senate to pardon those men whom Hadrian had condemned, saying that
Hadrian himself had been about to do so.”222 Antoninus thus pardoned those whom Hadrian
condemned during his reign in such a way that did not attack his father Hadrian, which only
increased Antoninus’s stature among the Roman people. Furthermore, Dio wrote that the
senate also admired Antoninus and gave him the name Pius because he refused to put anyone
to death based on accusations alone. “When, in the beginning of his reign, accusation was
brought against many men, some of whom were demanded by name for punishment, he
nevertheless punished no one saying: ‘I must not begin my career as your leader with such
deeds.’”223 This passage demonstrates the world in which Appian captured the Roman
cultural memory of the Second Punic War. Antoninus, Nerva, and Trajan refused to kill those
who conspired against them and thus helped to maintain the security of the empire because
220
Dio Cassius Roman History 68.4.1-9.
221
Ibid., 69.8.2. For Appian as an Alexandrian who admired Rome, see Bucher, “The Origins,” 445-6.
222
Antoninus Pius 6.3, trans. David Magie, The Scriptores Historia Augusta (1924, repr.; Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1960), 113.
223
Dio Cassius Roman History 70.2.1, in Cary, 469. See also The Scriptores Historia Augusta: Antoninus
Pius 12.6.
97
these emperors refused to use terror to keep their rule. This milieu undoubtedly influenced
the Romans of this time to remember the Second Punic War as the defeat of Hannibal that
allowed them to possess such an empire.
AN INTRODUCTION TO DIO CASSIUS
This particular permutation of Roman identity, according to Plutarch and Appian, was
not to last long after the mid-second century CE, however. By the early third century CE, the
Romans of this era used the memory of the Second Punic War as a reminder of the time
when the Roman Empire was stable. This memory, as much as the memory of the Second
Punic War used in earlier eras, was a reflection of the contemporary Roman society in which
the author produced his narrative. This time, however, the Roman Empire was suffering from
civil war, political purges, and usurpations. A study of Dio Cassius will thus demonstrate a
shift in Roman recollection of the Second Punic War.
Dio Cassius was born in Bithynia in the mid-second century CE. At the age of thirty,
Dio moved to Rome and became a senator. During the reign of the emperor Commodus
(r. 161–192 CE), Dio became an advocate. Dio was to reach higher levels of Roman
government, for in 220 CE, Dio became governor of Pergamum and Smyrna, consul,
proconsul of Africa, then governor of Dalmatia and then Pannonia, and again consul in
229 CE. Dio was therefore familiar with the institutions of the Roman government much like
Polybius and Appian had been before him. Dio’s intimacy with the Roman government
would undoubtedly influence his composition of his Roman History, since his service to the
emperors made Dio adhere to a Roman identity. Dio, in other words, was insider of the
Roman government; to obtain this position, Dio would have to adhere himself to a sense of
Roman identity. More importantly, however, was that Dio’s access to these institutions also
gave him an eyewitness look at how the Roman Empire of his time operated, which will be
relevant when one studies Dio’s environment.224
Although Dio’s narrative is an important source to demonstrate the early third century
CE Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War, one must keep in mind that there is
224
See the T. D. Barnes, “The Composition of Cassius Dio’s ‘Roman History,’” Phoenix 38,
no. 3 (Autumn, 1984), 242-5; Fergus Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1954), 5-27.
98
only a minimal amount of surviving text that was Dio’s own. John Xiphilinus (in the eleventh
century CE) and Zonaras (in the twelfth century CE) wrote epitomes from Dio’s work, which
have survived, and the majority of what is available in Dio’s narrative comes from these
epitomizers, who wrote almost a millennium after Dio. Nonetheless, Dio’s narrative is not
faulty since it presents the bare essence of what Dio wrote. The little of Dio that survives
closely resembles what the epitomizers used to create their summaries of Dio’s work. The
few extant samples we have of Dio’s narrative, in other words, is verbatim the account that
the epitomizers used in their summaries of Dio such as speeches or descriptions of people
within Dio’s narrative. John Xiphilinus and Zonaras preserved Dio’s account of the early
third century CE Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War. Without these Byzantine
authors, Dio’s narrative would have been lost to history.
DIO CASSIUS AND THE MUTINY OF SCIPIO’S SOLDIERS
Dio’s narrative of the Second Punic War reflects an important aspect of Roman
cultural memory of the Second Punic War in the early third century CE that differs from
earlier authors:
The Romans were at the height of their military power and enjoyed absolute
harmony among themselves…For the greater of their success, the more they were
sobered; against their enemies they displayed that daring which is a part of
bravery, but toward one another they showed forbearance which goes hand in
hand with good order.225
According to Dio, the Second Punic War was a time when the Romans “enjoyed absolute
harmony among themselves” that allowed the Romans to fight against their external enemies.
The threats of external enemies also prevented the Romans during this time to fall out of
harmony and fight one another in civil war. Early third-century CE Romans, according to
Dio, remembered Hannibal as a guarantor of Roman harmony.
Dio continued with an examination of Hannibal’s character. Dio wrote that when the
allies of the Romans allied themselves with the Carthaginians, none of the tribes’ chiefs
could match Hannibal. Hannibal, according to Dio, “could comprehend matters most clearly
and plan out most promptly every project that he conceived…[and] was most resourceful in
225
Dio Cassius Roman History 13.52.1,3, in Cary, 61.
99
the suddenest emergency…”226 Dio’s sentiment suggests that in the early third century CE,
the Romans remembered Hannibal as a formidable foe with admirable qualities who could
comprehend any matter and execute his plans to completion. When juxtaposed alongside the
passage in which Dio described the harmony of the Roman people during the Second Punic
War, this quotation suggests that the Romans of the early third century CE placed emphasis
on a different aspect of the Second Punic War than the Romans of the first and second
centuries CE. There was something else was occurring, in other words, during Dio’s world
that changed how the Romans remembered the Second Punic War.
Dio also went further in his depiction of Hannibal. In his account of the collapse of
negotiations between the Romans and the Carthaginians after the fall of Saguntum, Dio wrote
that Hannibal had a dream in which “wild beasts” followed Hannibal’s army out of Iberia.227
Hannibal also had a vision in which the gods sent for him and bade him to invade Italy. The
gods sent Hannibal a guide to lead him into Italy. When Hannibal looked behind him, he
“saw a great tempest moving along and an immense serpent following in its wake.” Hannibal
then asked his guide about the tempest and the serpent, the guide responded “‘Hannibal,
these are on their way to help you in the sack of Italy.’”228 This passage demonstrates that in
the early third century CE, the Roman people not only remembered that Hannibal had
admirable qualities, but also that the gods themselves gave Hannibal aid and sanction to
ravage Italy. Moreover, this passage suggests that Dio’s era was disparate from Plutarch and
Appian’s era. Romans of Dio’s era thought of their current time as profligate and that they
deserved to suffer from Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. There is also one more aspect that sets
Dio’s narrative apart from Plutarch and Appian’s narratives and that will further explain that
when the Romans of the early third century CE remembered the Second Punic War, they
used this memory as way to discover an era in Roman history when Romans lived in
harmony with each other.
In the early third century CE, the Romans also remembered Scipio in a different
manner than the Romans of earlier eras. Scipio was still a hero to the Romans in the early
226
Ibid., 13.54.2, in Cary, 65.
227
Ibid., 8.22, in Cary, 85.
228
Ibid., 8.22, in Cary, 85.
100
third century CE, albeit in an entirely different manner than for the Romans of Polybius’s and
Livy’s time. After Scipio subjugated Iberia and burnt to the ground a city of the Iliturgitani (a
people allied to Hannibal), Scipio fell ill and his armies rebelled due to a delay in receiving
their salary.229 When Scipio learned about the rebellion, he wrote a letter to his army that
pardoned them for their mutiny and acknowledged their anger in their lack of pay. Scipio
even went so far as to praise the mutineers’ lack of violence.230 When the soldiers received
Scipio’s letter and learned that he was not angry with them, they stopped the mutiny. Scipio
then regained his health and promised the soldiers food if they visited him in New Carthage,
which they did and encamped outside the city walls. The leaders of the mutiny entered New
Carthage to meet Scipio and he ordered his bodyguards to seize them. The next day, Scipio
summoned his army within New Carthage to make an expedition; but instead of his army
leaving, they surrounded the leaders of the mutineers.231 Scipio then told the soldiers camped
outside of New Carthage that “you all deserve to die, yet I, for my part will not put you all to
death, but will execute only a few whom I have already arrested; the others I release.”232
Scipio then ordered his men to bind leaders of the rebellion to stakes and to put them to death
by scourging.
The Romans of the early third century CE did not forget that the Romans during the
Second Punic War had inflicted violence on others in retribution for joining the Carthaginian
cause, as we see with the example that Dio provided of Scipio’s army burning the city of the
Iliturgitani to the ground. There is, however, more to this memory than another example of
the Roman people remembering violence that they had inflicted upon other people during the
Second Punic War. Since the Romans of the early third century CE remembered that Scipio
punished the mutineers by only executing its leaders, this shift in memory suggests that the
environment of Dio’s world was different from the world of Plutarch and Appian. Plutarch
and Appian, as suggested earlier, lived during the reigns of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius,
and Marcus Aurelius, who all ruled modestly. The era of Dio, however, was a time of civil
229
Ibid., 8.25.
230
Ibid., 9.10.
231
Ibid., 9.10.
232
Ibid., 9.10 and 16.57.1, both in Cary, 219.
101
war and political upheaval that weakened the security of the Roman Empire and marked the
beginning of the crisis of the third century.
THE WORLD OF DIO: AN EMPIRE IN TURMOIL
According to Dio, the Roman Empire received its first shock after the death of
Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 CE) when his son Commodus (r. 180–192 CE) ascended to the
emperorship. Dio wrote: “our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron
and rust, as affairs did for the Romans that day” when Commodus became emperor in
180 CE, thus beginning an era of continual instability in the Roman Empire.233 Although Dio
felt that Commodus had soiled the Roman Empire, Commodus began his reign attempting to
emulate his father, Marcus Aurelius; however, Commodus’s paranoia about a senatorial plot
against him colored his reign.234 Indeed, there was some veracity behind Commodus’s fear
that certain members of the senate were trying to kill him.
Lucilla, Commodus’s sister, was offended that Commodus’s wife Crispina was held
in higher honor than her. Lucilla then had Quadratus, with whom Herodian accused Lucilla
of having an affair, attempt to kill Commodus.235 Quadratus enlisted the aid of “a number of
leading senators” in the plot and waited to ambush Commodus when he entered the
amphitheater. When Commodus entered, Quadratus leapt from the shadows and brandished a
sword and declared to Commodus: “See! This is what the senate has sent you.”236
Commodus’s bodyguard then seized Quadratus, who in turn betrayed the entire plot to
Commodus. The reaction of Commodus to the plot was vicious: he ordered the deaths of his
sister and several members of the senate who cooperated in the assassination attempt and
seized all of their property.237 As a result of this assassination attempt on Commodus’s life,
233
Ibid., 72.36.4, in Cary, 69. For the effect this sentiment had on Dio’s narrative–namely he did not
approve of what was happening in the empire–see Barnes, 253-5; Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio, 122-3. For the
Role Dio’s milieu had on the formation of his narrative, see Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives, 290-4.
234
The Scriptores Historia Augusta: Commodus Antoninus 1.7, by Magie, 265 however, said that
Commodus “from his earliest years was base and dishonourable…”
235
Dio Cassius Roman History 73.4.6-7; Herodian History of the Empire 1.8.4-12, trans. C. R. Whittaker,
History of the Empire (1969, repr.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
236
Dio Cassius Roman History 73.4.4, in Cary, 77; Herodian History of the Empire 1.8.5. See also David
S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (London: Routledge, 2004), 87-8.
237
Dio Cassius Roman History 73.5.1, 4; Herodian History of the Empire 1.8.7-11; The Scriptores
Historia Augusta: Commodus 3.9.
102
Commodus began to devote his life to participating in chariot-racing and gladiatorial shows
instead of governing the empire; thus the freedman Cleander, who became head of
Commodus’s bodyguard detail, gained more power and influence in the Roman
government.238
As Cleander gained more influence, his wealth increased until he was able to
purchase the entire grain supply of Rome and withhold it to increase the price of the crop so
he could then sell the grain to the people of Roman at an inflated price.239 A famine occurred
in Rome because of Cleander’s hoarding of the grain supply and the denizens of Rome
became infuriated with Cleander. Ordinary people then marched to Commodus’s palace
outside of Rome and demanded that Commodus put Cleander to death. Commodus, who was
in a secluded part of his palace, was unaware because Cleander prevented the news of the
uprising from reaching him. Cleander then ordered the Roman cavalry to cut down the crowd
of people.240 When news of the massacre reached Rome, people “locked the doors of their
homes and climbed on roofs, from where they pelted the horsemen with stones and tiles.”241
This brief survey of the reign of Commodus suggests that in the late second century CE, the
Roman world began to suffer from an emperor who, after foiling an assassination attempt,
secluded himself from governing and allowed Cleander to ascend to a position of power.
Cleander’s attempts at price speculation caused a famine and caused ordinary Romans to rise
against Cleander; and the imperial cavalry went in and killed Roman citizens, who in turn
began to fight back. This example of the revolt against Cleander is the first instance of the
milieu of Dio that influenced the formation of the cultural memory of the Second Punic War.
The revolt against Cleander did not cause Commodus to cease his inept method of
rule. After he put Cleander to death, Commodus began to put scores of senators to death as
his reign continued to preclude more assassination attempts on himself and uprisings.242 A
238
Dio Cassius Roman History 73.10.3-4; Herodian History of the Empire 1.12.8-9. See also Millar, A
Study of Cassius Dio, 130-1.
239
Herodian History of the Empire 1.12.11, who explicitly mentioned the corn supply; Dio Cassius Roman
History 73.13.4-6, who just made references to the food supply and not any specific foodstuff.
240
Herodian History of the Empire 1.12.15-18.
241
Ibid., 1.12.8, in Whittaker, 81. See also Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London:
Duckworth, 1992), 81-2; Potter, 90-3.
242
Dio Cassius Roman History 73.16.4. For a dramatic example of Commodus threatening the senate
103
study of Commodus demonstrates that the milieu of Dio was indeed violent; but more
importantly, these passages also reveal that the reign of Commodus, as bad as it was, was
only the beginning of a long era of turmoil in the Roman Empire. After Commodus’s
assassination,243 the senate declared Pertinax (r. 193 CE) emperor.244 The reign of Pertinax
was short. The army, which was still loyal to Commodus and hated Pertinax, slew Pertinax in
the imperial palace.245 What happened next caused more instability in the Roman Empire.
The soldiers, who had just slain Pertinax, auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder
while they remained shut behind the walls of their camp.246 Didius Julianus (r. 193 CE), an
ex-consul, won the emperorship when he offered to pay the soldiers a largess.
According to Herodian, the slaying of Pertinax and the soldiers auctioning off the
emperorship “was a prime cause in the development of a shameful state of indiscipline that
had permanent consequences for the future.”247 This “shameful state of indiscipline” was the
following: when an emperor fell out of favor with the army, the army would declare another
man as emperor. The army would then dispose of the current emperor and declare whomever
promised the largest largess to be emperor. Julianus’s reign followed this pattern. After his
ascension to the emperorship, Julianus devoted his time to the pursuit of luxury. As a result,
three men rebelled against Julianus: Septimius Severus in Pannonia, Pescennius Niger in
Syria, and Clodius Albinus in Britain; each of these men’s’ armies declared them
Augustus.248 Severus left Pannonia with his army for Italy while Niger remained with his
while he performed in a gladiatorial game, see Dio Cassius Roman History 73.21.1-4. Commodus decapitated
an ostrich and held the bloody head in front of the senate, including Dio, and threateningly waved a bloody
sword. Dio and the other senators began to laugh at the absurd appearance of Commodus and only prevented
the laughter from becoming too overt by chewing on laurel leaves.
243
For the complete story of Commodus’s assassination, see Dio Cassius Roman History 73.22.1-10;
Herodian History of the Empire 1.17.1-37.
244
See Potter, 93-6 for the tension between the army and the senate in the selection of emperors.
245
For the full story of the assassination of Pertinax at the hands of the army, see Dio Cassius Roman
History 74.9.1-10.3; Herodian History of the Empire 2.5.1-27; The Scriptores Historia Augusta: Pertinax
11.3-12; Potter, 96-100. For Dio’s role in the senate after Commodus’s death, see Millar, A Study of Cassius
Dio, 134-6.
246
Dio Cassius Roman History 74.11.4; Herodian History of the Empire 2.6.6.
247
Herodian History of the Empire 2.6.14, in Whittaker, 181.
248
Dio Cassius Roman History 74.14.2, 8; Herodian History of the Empire 2.7.1-6. According to
Herodian, Julianus fell out of favor with the army due to Julianus breaking his promise of giving the soldiers
largess.
104
army in Syria and Albinus stayed in Britain. Since Severus was the only commander who left
his province with his army, he reached Italy, captured Ravenna, and began to march toward
Rome.249 Julianus’s soldiers then slew him in the same manner in which they slew Pertinax.
This survey of the state of the Roman Empire ca. 200 CE demonstrates that in Dio’s
time, assassinations and rebellions became unremarkable after the reign of Commodus.
Severus’s ascension to the imperial purple, however, did not alleviate the instability that
affected the empire due to the quick succession of Roman emperors. Niger, Severus’s rival
for the emperorship, still wielded power in Syria, and another civil war erupted. Niger left
Syria for Byzantium, which preferred Niger to Severus as emperor and marched to engage
Severus in battle. After a lengthy civil war that resulted in the deaths of many Roman
soldiers that fought for either Niger or Severus, Severus defeated Niger.250 Severus then
began to put to death not only everyone who joined Niger’s faction, but also anyone who
might have sympathized with Niger’s cause or soldiers who Niger forced to fight for him.251
Severus’s purges of the supporters of Niger within the Roman Empire were a shock to the
people who experienced them; here was a Roman emperor who was the killing Roman
citizens who might have supported the opposition to Severus. Thus in the early third century
CE, it was Romans killing Romans instead of an external enemy like Hannibal. According to
Dio, if Scipio experienced such a civil war, Scipio would not have resorted to liquidating his
rival’s soldiers, unlike Severus. Severus’s killing of scores of Niger’s soldiers is why Dio
focused on how Scipio did not punish everyone who rebelled against him. There is more to
this assertion, for Severus was not finished in purging the supporters of Niger from the
Roman State. The acts of violence that Severus undertook to exterminate anyone who
249
Dio wrote that Severus seized Ravenna without bloodshed without mentioning if Severus frightened the
Italians. See Dio Cassius Roman History 74.16.12 while according to Herodian, Severus’s march on Italy
caused much fear in the Italians and thus causing the fall of Ravenna. See Herodian History of the Empire
2.11.13.
250
For the defeat of Niger near Antioch, see Dio Cassius Roman History 75.8.5. For the effects of the civil
war on the Roman Empire, see Herodian History of the Empire 3.4.7-13. Herodian also insisted that as a result
of Severus’s defeat of Niger, many soldiers who fought under Niger absconded after Niger’s defeat because
they feared reprisal from Severus and lived among the barbarians. These former Roman soldiers taught the
barbarians how to fight in close-quarter combat like the Roman army and how to manufacture Roman-like
weapons. See Herodian History of the Empire 3.4.18-21. See also Potter, 128 for the efficient manner in which
two Roman armies killed each other in battle.
251
Dio Cassius Roman History 75.9.7; Herodian History of the Empire 3.4.5.
105
sympathized with Niger apexed at the siege of Byzantium, a city that supported Niger early
in the civil war as we noted earlier. Since Byzantium had an impressive system of defensive
walls that protected the city from a siege, Severus’s assault on the city was taxing upon
people on either side of the conflict.
Severus zealously poured every resource he had at his disposal into the siege of
Byzantium, and the Byzantines did all that they could to repel Severus’s army:
When all the supplies in the city had been consumed and both their fortunes and
the hopes based thereon had been reduced to extreme straits, at first, even though
they were from all outside aid, they nevertheless continued to resist. For their
ships they used timbers taken from their houses and braided ropes made of the
hair of their women; and as often as any of the foe assaulted the wall, they would
hurl down upon them the stones from the theatres and whole bronze horses and
statues of bronze. When their customary food failed them, they proceeded to soak
hides and eat them.252
Much like the revolt against Cleander and the subsequent massacre of Roman citizens at the
hands of the imperial cavalry, the participants in Severus’s siege of Byzantium were all
Roman. The soldiers of Severus suffered when they attempted to scale the walls of
Byzantium, since the Byzantines hurled down stones and bronze statues, and the Byzantines
suffered hunger due to the siege and had to eat hides for sustenance. What is remarkable
about the siege of Byzantium was that a Roman army attacked and starved a Roman city into
submission. This event demonstrates why early third-century CE Romans remembered how
Scipio punished with death only a select few who had rebelled against him. In Dio’s era,
Roman-on-Roman slaughter was commonplace and thus the Second Punic War reminded the
Romans of this time when Romans fought an external enemy and not each other.253 When
there was a rebellion in the Roman army during the Second Punic War, Scipio did not enact a
policy of wholesale slaughter; he punished only those who deserved it and not his entire
army. What made the instance of Severus’s assault on Byzantium abhorrent to Romans of the
third century–and thus influencing their memory of the Second Punic War as a time when
252
Dio Cassius Roman History 75.12.3-5, in Cary, 189. See also Herodian History of the Empire 3.6.9, in
Whittaker, 293: “Later the city was starved and destroyed…”; The Scriptores Historia Augusta: Severus 8.12.
For a study of Dio’s account of the siege of Byzantium, see Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio, 139-40.
253
That is not to say that these emperors here did not initiate any campaigns against external enemies. For
Dio’s depiction of the failed campaigns against the Persians by the emperors under whom he served, see
Barnes, 248-51.
106
Romans did not kill each other and when commanders did not slaughter scores of people–
was that ordinary citizens suffered during the siege. As the siege wore on, the food supply of
Byzantium ran dangerously low, and the Byzantines eventually ran out of hides to consume
and “when they were reduced to the last extremity, they had recourse to themselves and
devoured one another.”254 Hannibal himself had never caused the people of Rome to eat each
other because of starvation; it was Severus, a Roman General who punished an entire city to
the point of cannibalism for supporting his rival, Niger.
These examples of Commodus and Severus killing off any potential assassins or
rivals for power, or the supporters of a rival suggests why the Romans of the third century
CE remembered that Scipio did not punish the entire army for its mutiny. The instability of
the Roman Empire in the late second century and early third century CE made the Romans of
this era yearn for a time when their state was strong and when the Romans had an external
enemy to fight, instead of each other. These Romans remembered one of the greatest events
that happened during the entire span of their history, the Second Punic War, to remind
themselves poignantly of an era not affected by civil war.
CONCLUSION
Gowing has rightly stated that “Appian wrote in the relative stability of the Antonine
principate; Dio, in a period when revolution was virtually an everyday occurrence.”255 This
pithy statement solidifies how each author’s contemporary society’s memory of the Second
Punic War influenced the composition of their narratives. The Romans of Plutarch and
Appian’s era lived in a stable empire that benefitted from rulers who did not enact purges to
prevent usurpations. Thus, the Romans of this time used their cultural memory of the Second
Punic War to explain that they deserved a stable empire. When we study the era of Dio, we
see that the Romans of that time used their cultural memory of the Second Punic War as a
way to remind themselves that at one time, the Roman people did not kill each other in
political purges or civil wars, as was occurring in the Roman Empire of Dio.
254
Dio Cassius Roman History 75.12.6, in Cary, 191.
255
Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives, 5.
107
CHAPTER 5
THE MEMORY OF THE SECOND PUNIC WAR IN
A ROMANO-BARBARIAN WORLD
Thee, Stilicho, our new Scipio, conqueror of a second Hannibal, more
terrible than the first…
– Claudian
When Ammianus Marcellinus (330–395 CE) desired to compare the Roman defeat at
the hands of the Goths at the battle of Adrianople in 378 CE to another Roman disaster with
which his audience would already be familiar, he had only one point of reference: the battle
of Cannae. “The annals record no such massacre of a battle except the one at Cannae,” wrote
Ammianus when he wanted to convey the disastrous consequences of the battle of
Adrianople to his audience.256 The battle of Adrianople was a military disaster that rivaled in
scope the battle of Cannae. The eastern Roman Emperor Valens (r. 364–378 CE) died in the
battle and only a third of the entire eastern field army survived while the Goths attempted to
march upon Constantinople.257
The battle of Adrianople and the Roman use of cultural memory to show how much
of a disaster Adrianople was during the late forth to the early fifth century CE are important
for two reasons. The first reason is that Adrianople shows that the Romans in the fourth
century CE still remembered the battle of Cannae as the nadir of Roman experience.
Moreover, Adrianople also suggests that whenever an enemy soundly defeated the Roman
army in battle, the Romans usually used the memory of Cannae as a way to measure if that
defeat was truly harmful to the Roman Empire. As in the case of Adrianople, this battle was
such a shock to the Romans that Julius, the “commander-in-chief of the troops beyond the
Taurus,” sent a letter to his commanders ordering them to assassinate any Goths whom they
held as hostage as revenge for the Roman defeat at Adrianople. These commanders executed
256
Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 31.13.19, ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe, Res Gestae (1935; repr.,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 483.
257
Ibid., 31.13.12, 18, 31.16.4; John Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London: Duckworth,
1989), 300-1.
108
the plan immediately.258 These Goths were not yet auxiliary soldiers in the Roman military,
rather, the Romans held these Goths as hostages to train them to become auxiliary soldiers.259
Such was the desire for revenge that the Romans had toward the Goths after Adrianople that
the Romans resorted to murdering children, much like Hannibal had murdered Roman
prisoners of war after the battle of Cannae.260
The second reason why the Romans used their cultural memory of the Second Punic
War to comprehend their loss at Adrianople is because it was during this time that enemies
from beyond the frontiers of the empire were threatening Rome. Indeed, it was the Huns
invading and conquering Gothic territory who pushed the Goths into Illyricum in the first
place, and thus set the stage for the battle of Adrianople to occur. It was the uncouth behavior
of the Roman officials in charge of the Goths when they captured Gothic children and lack of
food that caused the Gothic uprising that led to the battle of Adrianople.261 More importantly,
these barbarian incursions into Roman territory triggered the Romans to use the memory of
the Second Punic War as a way to compare their dying empire in the West to another
instance in which the Roman state was fighting for survival. To the Romans in the late fourth
and early fifth centuries, the Second Punic War was not a time when the Romans overcame
great odds to defeat Hannibal. The Second Punic War, according to the Romans of this era,
paled in comparison to their struggle to save the empire from the devastating effects of
multiple invasions. This thesis is important because according to the late antique Roman
mentalité, the Second Punic War, as bad as it was, ended in a Roman victory that guaranteed
that the Romans would become the masters of the Mediterranean. The invasions of the
western Roman Empire in the late fourth century CE, however, only ended in continual
Roman defeats and the withdrawal of Roman forces from the frontier in the west and
territorial losses to the Parthians in the east. Thus to late fourth-century CE Romans, the
258
Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 31.16.8, in Rolfe, 503; Michael P. Speidel, “The Slaughter of
Gothic Hostages after Adrianople,” Hermes 126, no. 4 (1998): 505; A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire
284-602: A Social and Economic Survey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 154.
259
Speidel, 504, 6.
260
A point to which I shall return in the study of Eutropius’s narrative.
261
Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 31.3.8; 31.4.10-1. See also Zosimus A New History 4.20.5-7,
although Zosimus labeled the Goths as Scythians; Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 153; Potter, 530-2; for the
Huns pushing the Goths into the Roman Empire: Potter, 1028.
109
Second Punic War was a time of Roman triumph over Hannibal, instead of Roman defeat and
territorial losses, as was occurring in late Antiquity.
This moment of devastation at Adrianople is also the juncture in which this study of
Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War will conclude. There is a practical
importance for this end-point: after the early fifth century CE, with the fall of the western
empire, the extant sources do not reveal how the Romans of later eras remembered the
Second Punic War.262 Surely, there were other events that occurred in later Roman history
that mirrored events of the Second Punic War (such as Heraclius’s invasion of Sassanid
Persia during the bitter Byzantine/Sassanid War of the seventh century CE that mirrored
Scipio’s invasion of North Africa in the Second Punic War). However, the late fourth century
to early fifth century CE was the last time in Roman history that the Roman people used their
cultural memory of the Second Punic War in some sort of fashion. The reason behind this
disengagement of cultural memory of the Second Punic War might be because when the
Roman people were living in an era of invasion and hardship, people were more concerned
with survival than with the memory of the Hannibalic invasion.
Incursions into Roman territory weighed heavily upon the minds of authors in the late
fourth century to early fifth century CE, and this concern manifested itself in a begrudging
admiration for barbarians from beyond the frontiers. During the reign of the emperor
Constantius II, Ammianus wrote the following comparisons between the Gauls and the
inhabitants of Italy:
All ages are most fit for military service, and the old man marches out on a
campaign with a courage equal to that of the man in the prime of his life; since his
limbs are toughened by cold and constant toil, and he will make light of many
formidable dangers. Nor does anyone of them, for dread of the service of Mars,
cut off his thumbs as in Italy.263
Indeed, it was these same people from beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire who were
pillaging and burning the provinces of Gaul and Germania during Ammianus’s lifetime.264 In
the world of Ammianus, external enemies were making inroads into the Roman Empire,
262
That is not to say that the Roman Empire completely disintegrated. The eastern Roman Empire
survived for another thousand years after the collapse of the western Empire.
263
Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 15.12.3, in Rolfe, 197.
264
Ibid., 15.4.2; 16.11.4.
110
including the Parthians in the east who crossed the Euphrates River and besieged the Roman
cities of Nisibis and Amida during the reign of Constantius II. When a citizen of the Roman
Empire–whether he resided on either the oriental or the occidental peripheries or in the safety
of the inner core of the empire–stopped and pondered the condition of the empire, he could
not escape the fact that external enemies threatened the very existence of his world.
Despite the multiple invasions that the Romans suffered at the hands of the barbarians
in the west and the Parthians in the east, the Roman Empire was not in danger of collapsing
due these troubles. Julian, whom Constantius II made Caesar in the West, soundly defeated
the Alamanni at the battle of Strasbourg,265 reclaimed and restored forts built by Trajan
across the Rhine,266 and defeated the Franks.267 So great were Julian’s victories that
Ammianus wrote that “this memorable war, which in fact deserves to be compared with
those against the Carthaginians…was achieved with very slight losses to the Roman
commonwealth.”268 This quote demonstrates that when Julian began to push back against the
barbarians, Ammianus compared Julian’s campaigns against the barbarians as more
important and honorable than the defeat of Hannibal because Julian was able to defeat those
who threatened Rome, and thus prevented harm to the empire, unlike the Second Punic War
when Hannibal marched across Italy for fourteen years.269 The Roman military in the east
also stymied the Parthian advance and broke the sieges of Nisibis and Amida.
265
Ibid., 16.12.62; Potter, 501-2; Matthews, 297-300.
266
Ibid., 17.1.11.
267
Ibid., 17.2.1-3; 8.1-4.
268
Ibid., 17.1.14, in Rolfe, 311. For more on Julian’s accomplishments against these groups, see Averil
Cameron, The Later Roman Empire: AD 284-430 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 134.
269
Despite these victories and Ammianus’s praise, Julian was also instrumental in weakening the empire
by his disastrous Persian campaign. He invaded Persia, and after a series of victories, burnt his fleet of ships and
marched his soldiers into the heart of Persia and began to besiege Ctesiphon. A spearman struck Julian and he
died, and the army, stranded in Parthian Persia, declared Jovian emperor. Jovian had no choice but to surrender
Nisibis to Sapor in exchange for the Parthians not molesting the Romans as they straggled out of Persia. The
frontiers of the Roman Empire in the east therefore shrank, and Ammianus Marcellinus and Zosimus blamed
Jovian for it. See Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 25.9.9, and Zosimus New History 3.33.3 for the residents
of Nisibis blaming Jovian for the surrender of the city to the Parthians; Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 138.
For the concept of shrinking frontiers, see Mark W. Graham, New and Frontier Consciousness in the Late
Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1-2, and for Julian’s invasion and the blame
of Jovian, 46-9. For a further explanation of Julian’s ill-fated Persian campaign, see Cameron, The Later Roman
Empire, 92, 99; Potter, 485-6, 519, 527, who linked Julian’s Persian campaign to Valens’ defeat at Adrianople
in how each battle harmed the empire.
111
The case of Amida is most interesting because of who defeated the Parthians: Gallic
auxiliaries of the Roman army. When the Gallic auxiliaries at Amida saw the “throngs of
wretches” suffering under the siege, they demanded from their tribunes the opportunity to
engage the Parthians in battle.270 Ammianus wrote the following about how the Gallic
auxiliaries fought the Persians at the siege of Amida while Roman legionaries stood frozen at
the city gates:
[T]he Gauls faced them, relying on their strength of body and keeping their
courage unshaken as long as they could, cut down their opponents with the sword,
while a part of their own number were slain or wounded by the cloud of arrows
flying from every side …When on the following day the slaughter was revealed,
and among the corpses of the slain there were found grandees and satraps…And
as because of this event a truce of three days was granted by common consent.271
This passage reveals that during a time when barbarians were assaulting the western half of
the empire, barbarian auxiliaries at the other end of the empire were saving a Roman city
from the Parthians while Roman legionaries did little to end the siege. This sentiment
confirms what Ammianus wrote about Italians severing their thumbs to avoid military
service, as noted earlier in Ammianus’s passage. This passage also reveals that during this
era in Roman history, the primary defense of the empire was in the hands of auxiliary forces
instead of legions composed of Roman citizens.272 This assertion is not to imply that the loss
of territory to these invaders was the fault of the barbarian auxiliary soldiers defending the
empire, rather, the example of Gallic soldiers defeating the Parthians at Amida represented a
new paradigm in which the Roman people had to establish an identity and cultural memory.
This new paradigm then threw into disarray the traditional role of barbarians existing only to
harm the Roman Empire.273
270
Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 19.6.3, 497.
271
Ibid., 19.6.9, 13, in Rolfe, 499-503; Potter, 504-5, who downplays the role of the Gallic auxiliaries in
the defense of Amida; and for a chronology of the siege of Amida and an explanation of the origins of the
Gallic soldiers, see Matthews, 58-61, 65-6.
272
This phenomena of the later Roman Empire is a shift from the early era of the Principate. Roman
commanders in the early Empire saw the benefit of using barbarian auxiliaries in conditions that were
detrimental to the regular legions’ style of combat like different terrain the legions were used to fighting on,
such as marshes. For more information, see Catherine M. Guiliver, “Mons Graupius and the Role of Auxiliaries
in Battle,” Greece and Rome 43, no.1 (April 1996): 54-7, 59-60, 67.
273
For the stereotyped barbarian thirsty for Roman blood, see Thomas S. Burns, Rome and the
Barbarians, 100 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 365. We must
also be cognizant of the fact that the eastern emperor Valens permitted the Goths to settle in the empire because
112
In the case of Romans in the late fourth century CE, the ethnic distinctions of
barbarian and Roman were beginning to become blurred because the Romans relied on the
barbarians for their defense instead of Roman-citizen legionary armies. Ammianus, himself a
Roman citizen, expressed admiration of the Gauls who fought the Romans bravely while
chastising the Italians who cut off their thumbs to avoid military service. Ammianus also
reveled in Julian’s victories over the barbarians, while at the same time he acknowledged that
the Gallic auxiliaries were instrumental in the defeat of the Parthians at the siege of Amida,
which thus reveals the complexity of Roman identity in this era. The auxiliary soldiers
themselves were also aware of this new paradigm. The auxiliary soldiers wanted to be more
than auxiliaries of the Roman military; they wanted to become ethnically Roman. In order to
become Roman, these barbarians fighting for Rome saw the best avenue to take to
accomplish this aim: the adoption of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War.
In 370 CE, the eastern emperor Valens commissioned Eutropius (320–381CE) to
write a brief history of the Roman people from the foundation of the city until the reign of
Valens. Eutropius’s Breviarium ab Urbe Condita is unlike any other source have studied in
this investigation; for it is indeed brief. Where Polybius, Livy, Appian, and Dio Cassius were
concerned with conveying detailed accounts of Roman history to their audience, Eutropius
wanted to offer his audience a pithy account of the events of Roman history. Who would then
benefit from Eutropius’s factual presentation of Roman history? People of Germanic or
Gothic descent, whether they were high-ranking auxiliary soldiers or members of upper-class
Roman society, were the primary audience for the Breviarium ab Urbe Condita based on the
simple language that characterizes Eutropius’s work.274 Moreover, the Breviarium ab Urbe
he wanted to use the Goths as soldiers for his campaign against the Parthians, which reveals that it was Valens’
desire for barbarian soldiers that allowed the battle of Adrianople to occur. See Ammianus Res Gestae 31.4.4;
Burns, 328-9; Matthews, 327-8. Although the Romans of the late fourth century CE realized the role that
barbarians played in the defense of the empire, they still did not accept that barbarians were defending the
empire, knowing that the same barbarians who might have defended the empire were still capable of harming it
immensely. For an explanation of this tension, see Matthews, 316-8. Moreover, we see this tension manifesting
itself when the Romans executed their Gothic hostages after Adrianople; see Speidel, 503.
274
For the “barbarian” audience of pithy narratives such as Eutropius’s Breviarium, see Arnaldo
Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in The Conflict Between
Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press,
1963), 87-8. See also H. W. Burns, “Introduction,” in Eutropius, The Breviarium ab Urbe Condita of Eutropius,
The Right Honourable Secretary of State for General Petitions, Dedicated to Lord Valens Gothicus Maximus
and Perpetual Emperor: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by H. W. Bird (Liverpool: Liverpool
113
Condita was a way for barbarians to become Roman by linking themselves to the narrative of
Roman history. If a German or Goth living within the empire could tap into Roman cultural
memory while fighting for the Roman commonwealth, then that barbarian could then
consider himself as Roman as Romulus, Mucius Scaevola, Camillus, or Scipio. Indeed, the
Second Punic War still was important enough for Eutropius that he slightly slowed the pace
of his narrative when he began to discuss the Second Punic War.
Take, for example, Eutropius’s description of the Second Punic War. Notice that
while this passage is brief, Eutropius wanted to convey the violence of the Second Punic War
to his audience:
In the same year, the Second Punic War was begun by Hannibal against the
Romans, the general of the Carthaginians who…proceeded to besiege Saguntum,
a Spanish city allied to Rome…The Romans warned him, through envoys, to
abstain from hostilities. He refused to receive the envoys…The Saguntines,
meanwhile, were overcome by famine, captured by Hannibal and suffered the
ultimate punishment.275
Eutropius’s passage on the start of the Second Punic War is important because it reveals that
the notion of Second-Punic-War violence was still important to Romans living in the late
fourth century CE, and by extension, the “barbarian” audience of Eutropius. Eutropius’s
language reduced the origins of the war and the violence that accompanied it to its essential
elements. After Eutropius’s account of Hannibal besieging Saguntum, Eutropius wrote about
the battles of Ticinus, the Trebia, and Lake Trasimene in a similarly brief fashion.276
The violent aftermath of the battle of Cannae was of special importance to Eutropius.
Eutropius wrote that
in none of the Punic Wars did the Romans suffer more severely, for there the
consul Aemilius Paulus perished and twenty former consuls or praetors, thirty
senators, three hundred noblemen, forty thousand infantry and three thousand five
University Press, 1963), xviii-xix. For the proliferation of barbarian recruits becoming junior officers in the later
Roman army, see Burns, 234-5.
275
Eutropius The Breviarium ab Urbe Condita of Eutropius, The Right Honourable Secretary of State for
General Petitions, Dedicated to Lord Valens Gothicus Maximus and Perpetual Emperor: Translated with an
Introduction and Commentary by H. W. Bird 3.7, ed. and trans. H. W. Bird, The Breviarium ab Urbe Condita of
Eutropius, The Right Honourable Secretary of State for General Petitions, Dedicated to Lord Valens Gothicus
Maximus and Perpetual Emperor: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by H. W. Bird (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1963), 16.
276
Ibid., 3.9.
114
hundred cavalry were captured or killed. During these calamities, however, none
of the Romans deigned to mention peace.277
Eutropius continued to describe the deaths of the Roman prisoners of war at the hands of the
Carthaginians: “[Hannibal] executed all of them in different ways and sent to Carthage three
modii of gold rings.”278 This passage demonstrates that by the late fourth century CE,
Ammianus did not use the battle of Cannae as an abstract example of a historical incident to
convey to his audience that the battle of Adrianople was a resounding defeat for the Romans.
Eutropius’s passage reveals that explicit examples of violence at Cannae were still an
important aspect of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War in the late fourth
century CE. Moreover, this passage also suggests that the memory of the Romans not
surrendering to Hannibal, despite the violence the Romans suffered at Cannae, still resonated
in the Roman psyche seven hundred years after the battle of Cannae occurred. Thus, if
Eutropius’s narrative is any indication, the psyche of late fourth century CE Romans still
valued the violence of Cannae and the fortitude of the Romans as an important aspect of
Roman ethnic identity.
In addition, the existence of the Romans’ sentiment of trauma and triumph at the
battle of Cannae also reveals that the Germans or Goths who wanted to become culturally
Roman knew what memories they needed to utilize to accomplish this feat. When a person
from beyond the Rhine or the Danube wanted to become Roman, he had to tap into this
memory of experiencing the Second Punic War. When a German or Goth accomplished this
feat, he could claim to be Roman, and thus further justify in his mind fighting and dying for
the Roman Empire. There is more, however, to this assertion. Eutropius’s narrative does not
simply include his account of the Second Punic War for his “barbarian” audience to read.
Eutropius, like Ammianus, used Hannibal to compare the severity of military disasters
throughout Roman history.
In the late second century BCE, while Rome was warring with Jugurtha, several
Germanic tribes defeated a Roman army near the river Rhône. Eutropius wrote: “The
consternation of Rome was great, such was scarcely felt in the Punic War against
277
Ibid., 3.10, in Bird, 17.
278
Ibid., 3.11, in Bird, 18.
115
Hannibal.”279 When Spartacus led his fellow slaves in an uprising against the Romans,
Eutropius wrote that the rebels “instigated a war almost as serious as that which Hannibal
had set in motion.”280 It thus becomes apparent that while the Romans of the late fourth
century CE remembered these instances of Roman history as being comparable to the
seriousness of the Second Punic War, the “barbarian” who was attempting to become Roman
had to remember the Second Punic War as an event that permeated and colored every aspect
of Roman identity. Every time an enemy defeated or threatened Rome, the specter of
Hannibal was there, ready to haunt the Roman psyche and remind the Romans of their
mortality; this sentiment was one which the “barbarian” needed to embody if he wanted to
become truly Roman.
Eutropius reveals that the memory of the violent defeats that Hannibal inflicted upon
the Romans during the Second Punic War was still an important aspect of Roman cultural
identity in the late fourth century CE. In this era, however, it was not just Romans using the
memory of the Second Punic War as a way to fashion Roman identity. In the late fourth
century CE, Roman culture was transforming along the ethnic frontier between Roman and
barbarian and becoming Romano-Barbarian, and in the Second Punic War both ethnicities
found a source with which to construct an ethnic identity.281 In the early fifth century CE,
Stilicho, the half-Vandal regent of the boy emperor Honorius (r. 395 CE–423 CE) proved to
be the exemplum of this new Romano-Barbarian identity that tapped into the memory of the
Second Punic War in order to become more fully Roman.282 Before a study of Stilicho
279
Ibid., 5.1, in Bird, 28.
280
Ibid., 6.7, in Bird, 34.
281
For the blending of Roman and barbarian cultures into Romano-Barbarian, see Burns, 350-65.
282
Stilicho rallied the barbarian auxiliaries to fight against Alaric by using the memory of Hannibal’s
victories over the Romans and the fact that Roman Republic did not fall. In addition, the Romans did not falter
even when Philip II of Macedon declared war on Rome during the Second Punic War: “When warlike Hannibal
was spreading destruction throughout the cities of Italy, and Cannae had doubled Trebia’s cruel losses, a vain
hope drove Philip of Macedon to turn his feeble sword against a people which, as he thought, was in
difficulties…The monstrous insult roused the Roman Fathers…and commanded Laevinus, even while he
conducts the war with Carthage, to do battle with the king of Macedonia.” Claudian The Gothic War 26.386-95,
ed. and trans. Maurice Platnauer, Claudian (1922; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1963), 155. Thus
we see Stilicho, himself of half-Vandal ancestry, using the memory of the Second Punic War and the ability of
the Romans to wage two wars simultaneously to rouse the allies of Rome to fight against Alaric, revealing that a
person of barbarian ancestry could commandeer the Roman memory of the Second Punic War to become
ethnically Roman.
116
commences, however, it is imperative to investigate first the milieu of the early fifth century
Roman world and how this milieu influenced the Roman cultural memory of the Second
Punic War. Only then can we understand how the poet Claudian (370 CE–408 CE)
considered Stilicho the new Scipio.
Despite the existence of the memory of the Romans’ triumph over Hannibal in the
late fourth century CE, as evidenced by Eutropius’s narrative, it is apparent that in the early
fifth century CE, Roman memory of the Second Punic War was fixated upon Ammianus’s
sentiment that the current era of Roman history was worse than the Second Punic War.
Indeed, the Romans had a new foe, Alaric, who invaded Italy with his army and threatened
the existence of the western empire. Alaric, unlike Hannibal, did not want to annihilate
Rome; he wanted the Romans to pay him to defend the empire and only invaded Italy after
Stilicho urged the boy emperor Honorius to deny Alaric’s request. Regardless of Alaric’s
aim, however, his subsequent invasion of Italy was a shock to the Romans, and although
Stilicho repulsed Alaric, something was happening that made the Romans of the early fifth
century feel that their era was worse than the Roman experience during the Second Punic
War.
The poet Claudian wrote the following comparing the accomplishments of Scipio to
Stilicho when Stilicho drove Alaric from Italy:
The elder Scipio, who single-handed turned the Punic wars back from Italy’s
coast to their own home, fought not his battles unmindful of the Muse’s art; poets
were ever the hero’s special care. For valour is always fain to seek alliance with
the Muses that they may bear witness to her deeds…Therefore, whether to avenge
his sire’s death the young warrior brought into subjection the Spanish seas or
embarked upon the Libyan wave his dreadful standards, resolved to break with
sure spear the strength of Carthage, Ennius was ever at his side and in all his
campaigns followed the trumpet’s call into midst of the fray. Him after the battle
the soldiers loved to hear sing, and the trooper, still dripping with blood, would
applaud his verses. When Scipio had triumphed over either Carthage–over the one
to avenge his sire, over the other his fatherland–and when at last disasters of a
long war, he drove weeping Libya a captive before his chariot wheel…Thee,
Stilicho, our new Scipio, conqueror of a second Hannibal more terrible than
the first…283
283
Claudian On Stilicho’s Consulship II, 23.1-22, in Platnauer, 39-41. Emphasis mine.
117
In this passage, Claudian recalled for his audience Scipio’s deeds in saving his father at the
battle of Ticinus, the conquest of Spain, and the invasion and defeat of Carthage. The last
line of this passage, however, reveals how the Romans of the fifth century CE truly felt about
the Second Punic War: the new enemy that endangered Rome, Alaric, was worse than
Hannibal and Rome had a new hero to save it, Stilicho. How could Claudian consider a
half-Vandal regent of a child emperor in the west as the new Scipio? An investigation into
the world of the early fifth-century CE Roman Empire will reveal that an environment of
corruption, political intrigue, and rebellion had an immense impact on how the Romans
during this time remembered the Second Punic War.
The story of Rufinus, regent for the eastern emperor Arcadius (r. 395–408 CE)
reveals that apart from Alaric, the western empire had several problems occurring at once.
Rufinus sold positions of high stature,284 confiscated the property of others,285 and put those
whose property he confiscated to death.286 Indeed, Claudian himself was aware that
Rufinus’s actions were damaging to the empire: “An empire won and kept at the expense of
so much bloodshed, born from the countless lesser…one coward traitor overthrew in the
twinkling of an eye.”287 Here Claudian reveals that the Romans of his era were well aware
that their world was declining; more importantly, the Romans of this era were aware that the
toils that their ancestors endured to build the empire had been all for naught due to Rufinus’s
alleged crimes in the eastern empire.
While Rufinus was committing these deeds in the eastern empire, Gildo rebelled
against the western empire at the behest of the eastern consul Eutropius in North Africa and
endangered the grain supply of the western empire.288 This threat, when coupled with
284
Claudian The First Book Against Rufinus 3.179.
285
Ibid., 3.190-3.
286
Ibid., 3.234-6.
287
Claudian The Second Book Against Rufinus 5.50-3, in Platnauer, 63. For the alleged crimes of Rufinus,
see Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,
1970), 61-83. Rufinus’s transgressions must be taken with caution, for Claudian, writing as Stilicho’s
propagandist, only had three pieces of evidence to back up any wrong doings that Rufinus, who before he was
regent to Arcadius, might have committed. For Stilicho and Rufinus’s rivalry, see 61; for Claudian’s evidence,
see 69.
288
Cameron, Claudian, 93. Indeed, Gildo proved to be such a threat that Stilicho broke off his campaign
against Alaric, who was marching across the eastern Empire. See Cameron, Claudian, 88-9, 159-61; Emma
118
Rufinus’s mischief in the east, was too much for the Romans in the west to bear. Claudian
wrote of a personified Rome, whose hair was grey and who was emaciated with hunger, and
who said to Jupiter that
Was it for this that I waged lamentable war with proud Carthage for so many
years?…Is this my reward…for my losses on Cannae’s field?…For naught my
lands been laid waste, so many of my generals slain, the Carthaginian invader
broken his way through the Alps, Hannibal approached my affrighted
capital?…Has thrice-conquered Carthage fallen for Gildo’s benefit? Was this the
object of mourning Italy’s thousand disasters, of centuries spent in war, of Fabius’
and Marcellus’ deeds of daring–that Gildo should heap him up riches?…Alas for
our toil and those many deaths: the two Scipios have laboured, it seems, to further
Bocchus’ native rule: Roman blood has given victory to the Moors.289
The Romans in the early fifth century CE, according to Claudian, remembered the violence
of the Second Punic War, but in an entirely different manner than the Romans of the first
century CE. The Romans of this era, according to Claudian, remembered that the hardships
that the Romans endured during the Second Punic War and the labors of the heroes of Rome
were squandered when Gildo rebelled against the western empire. According to this
mentalité, the thousands of Romans who endured the fear of Hannibal sacking Rome, the
thousands of Roman soldiers who died gruesomely at Cannae, the deeds of Fabius and
Marcellus, and the efforts of the Scipio brothers to expel the Carthaginians from Iberia were
all for naught. The Roman cultural memory that celebrated the superiority of the Romans
from Polybius’s narrative to Appian’s narrative ceased to exist in an era in which the western
empire was slowly losing control over its territory and people faced the possibility of
starvation. Claudian’s narrative reflects that the Romans of his time were aware that rebellion
was chipping away at the western empire, and that the suffering that the Roman people
endured during Hannibal’s invasion of Italy was all for nothing since the empire that their
Roman ancestors paid for in blood was wasting away.
Burrell, “A Re-Examination of Why Stilicho Abandoned His Pursuit of Alaric in 397,” Historia: Zeitschrift für
Alte Greschichte 53, no. 2 (2004): 251-4.
289
Claudian The War Against Gildo, I 15.76-95, in Platnauer, 105; Michael Roberts, “Rome Personified,
Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Early Fifth Century,” American Journal of Philology
122 (2001): 535-6, especially 563: “The poets of the turn of the fourth century and the early fifth century return
repeatedly to the image of Rome, metaphorically imagined as a queen or goddess, and metonymically
represented by a series of historically and culturally charged locations.”
119
The Romans of the early fifth century CE also supplanted Scipio as the hero of the
Roman people.290 The Romans of this era certainly still remembered Scipio as the conqueror
of Hannibal, but Stilicho became a more important and revered figure in the pantheon of
Roman heroes than Scipio did. Indeed, for Claudian revered Stilicho because he defeated
Gildo, and revived the memory of the Second Punic War as a time when the Roman people
defeated a great enemy as we see in the following passage from Claudian. “Who would now
be telling of the Punic wars, of you, ye Scipios…who would sing of cautious Fabius, if,
destroying right, the fierce Moor were trampling on an enslaved Carthage? This victory,
Rome, has revived the heroes of old; Stilicho has restored to thee all thy triumphs.”291
Indeed, according to Claudian, Stilicho was also instrumental in “restoring” Rome to its
former glory by defeating those who threatened her, but there is more to Claudian’s approval
of Stilicho.292 Again, Claudian used a personified Rome, this time more youthful, to
represent that the Roman world of the early fifth century CE was becoming reinvigorated.
“Let…the Scipios, terror of Carthage learn by one man’s help I have been rescued by a
double danger and have recovered both Libya and the faces.”293 This passage is important
because it suggests that in an era in which the Romans thought that all the toil that their
ancestors endured to obtain an empire was for naught, Stilicho restored and thus
re-legitimized the memory of Roman suffering and endurance during the Second Punic War
by restoring Rome to its former glory when he defeated Gildo. Thus, the Romans of this era
considered Stilicho even more of a hero for defeating the enemies of Rome and restoring its
former glory. Thus, the Romans could then resume expanding over other nations as Jupiter
had sanctioned them to do in the Aeneid.294
290
For the absolutist construct of the hero–and the need for a hero within a narrative–see Giesen, 83-4:
“[i]n populist constructions of charisma, there is the insurmountable barrier between the charismatized hero,
who has the word, and the audience that listens to him or her. In contrast to the hero, the audience can only
cheer, confirm, and shout–it cannot argue and suggest, tell stories and command actions.” Stilicho, in other
words, is the hero, and despite his shortcoming, to which we shall return, the audience of Claudian’s narrative
must cheer Stilicho on as he destroys those who threaten Rome.
291
Claudian On Stilicho’s Consulship, I 21.379-85, in Platnauer, 391-3.
292
Cameron, Claudian, 107-8.
293
Claudian On Stilicho’s Consulship, II 22.383-5, in Platnauer, 31.
294
This assertion suggests that there was a link between Vergil and Claudian’s poetry was an extension of
the themes of Romaitas first explored by Virgil in the first century CE. For the concept of imperium sine fine
persisting in a world of a declining western empire, see Graham, 43. We must also be cognizant that Eutropius,
120
Moreover, Stilicho, as noted above, was successful in driving Alaric out from Italy,
and according to Claudian, Stilicho was more successful than the heroes of the Second Punic
War because he defeated Alaric quicker than the Romans defeated Hannibal:
Fabius was the first to stay by his slow struggles Hannibal’s lightning rush; then
Marcellus, meeting him in the open field, taught him defeat, but it was the valour
of Scipio that drove him from the shores of Italy. In the case of our latest foe
Stilicho succeeded in combining in himself the diverse skill of all these three; he
broke their frenzy by delaying, vanquished them in battle and drove the
vanquished host from Italy.295
According to Claudian, Stilicho embodied all three of the characteristics of the heroes of the
Second Punic war when he expelled Alaric from Italy. The Romans of the early fifth century
CE considered Stilicho greater than the heroes of the Second Punic War because Stilicho was
an amalgamation of Fabius, Marcellus, and Scipio, while simultaneously restoring the empire
that each of these men obtained when they faced Hannibal. Additionally, according to
Claudian, while Hannibal was able to march upon Rome briefly during the Second Punic
War, Stilicho prevented Alaric from even gazing upon Rome itself; such was Stilicho’s
brilliant generalship, in Claudian’s mind.296 In the early fifth century CE, even while using
Punic precedent as a reference point, the Roman psyche had finally supplanted the
importance of the Second Punic War as an indicator of Roman greatness in a milieu of a
decaying world. To the Romans in the early fifth century CE, the Romans during the Second
Punic War might have suffered from Hannibal’s invasion, but their contemporary time was
worse since their empire was crumbling while Stilicho was proving himself to be the new
savior of Rome by reversing Rome’s fortunes.297 Moreover, it is also important to be aware
of that Alaric did not invade Italy simply because he wanted to destroy the Western Roman
a consul in the eastern Empire, might have been responsible for the death of Rufinus, and not Stilicho. See
Cameron, Claudian, 90-2.
295
Claudian The Gothic War 26.138-44, in Platnauer, 137; Michael Dewar, “Hannibal and Alaric in the
Later Poems Claudian,” Mnemosyne 47, fasc. 3 (June, 1994): 351, 368-370.
296
297
Dewar, 363-4.
Despite Claudian’s praise for Stilicho’s success in expelling Alaric from Italy, Claudian was not alive
to witness Stilicho’s assassination and Alaric’s re-invasion of Italy and eventual sack of Rome in 410 CE. For
Stilicho’s assassination, see Zosimus New History 5.34.1-5. For Stilicho’s temporary expulsion of Alaric, see
Cameron, Claudian, 180-2, 186. See also Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, 148-9; Bryan Ward-Perkins, The
Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25-7 for an explanation
on the barbarian recruits in the Roman army, whom Stilicho recruited, who defected and fought for Alaric after
Stilicho’s assassination and the Roman government’s pogrom of barbarians living within the western Empire.
121
Empire. Alaric wanted to fight for the Romans like the Gallic soldiers at Amida and the
“barbarian” junior officers in the Roman army who read Eutropius’s narrative of the Second
Punic War. It was not until Alaric lost his title of general from both the western and eastern
governments, that he claimed to be king of the Goths and invaded the western empire.298
It is also important that this memory of the Second Punic War lived on the psyche of
the fifth-century CE Roman upper classes. As noted in the first century CE, the memory of
the Hannibalic invasion permeated every section of Roman society. By the late fourth and
early fifth century CE, only the Roman aristocracy was using the cultural memory of the
Second Punic War as a means of fashioning Roman identity. Ordinary citizens of the empire
were not concerned about how the heroes of the Second Punic War defeated Hannibal or how
barbarians fighting for Rome wanted to use the memory of Hannibal to become Roman
during a time of imperial crisis. External invasion of the western empire was disrupting the
lives of ordinary people, and it is hard to remember the Second Punic War, the heroes of the
Second Punic War, or Hannibal himself when the Persians were besieging one’s city,
rebellion in north Africa disrupted one’s food supply, or barbarians sacked and burned one’s
town.299 In an era of basic survival, ordinary people did not stop to consider how earlier
Romans had a similar experience of enduring toil during the Second Punic War. Thus, the
memory of the Second Punic War eroded away with the disintegration of the western empire
when ordinary people had to worry about survival in a violent world.300 Roman cultural
298
Burns, 367; Potter, 528. For barbarians in general who “entered the empire in hope of enjoying the
fruits of Roman material comfort,” see Ward-Perkins, 23. For specific examples of Stilicho himself attempting
to enlist Alaric’s aid to fight against the usurper Constantine III and Alaric’s offer to do the same, see J. F.
Drinkwater, “The Usurpers Constantine III (407-411) and Jovinus (411-413),” Britannia 29 (1998): 271, 281.
Thus we see that Alaric and Stilicho, who fought each other when Alaric invaded Italy, could have become
allies against a usurper of the western Roman emperor Honorius, thus the political situation becomes much
more messy.
299
Ward-Perkins, 13-4 for the inhabitants of the western Empire suffering from barbarian invasion such as
nuns of Carthage being raped and the denizens of Clermont forced to eat grass during a siege. For the
inhabitants of Rome, when Alaric sacked the city in 410 CE, who suffered from famine and plague and forced
to commit cannibalism, see Zosimus New History 5.39.1-4 and Ward-Perkins, 16-7. Moreover, a decline of the
little things in life that ordinary people enjoy also occurred, such as fine pottery, a decline in the minting of
coinage, and the use of writing. See Ward-Perkins, 87-166. Indeed, Claudian, despite his praise of Stilicho
restoring Rome to her former glory, was also aware of the state of decay on the western Roman Empire: see
Cameron, Claudian, 362-71.
300
That is not to say that the post-Roman world in the west entered into a dark age. After the shock and
aftermath of invasion subsided, there emerged a new, distinct culture in the former Western Roman Empire. For
122
memory of the Second Punic War became no longer viable as an indicator of Roman identity
when most of the population of the western empire could have cared less about Hannibal’s
invasion.
more information, see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity.
A.D. 200-1000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 51-73.
123
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
In this study of Roman cultural memory of the Second Punic War, a shift has
occurred in how the Romans used their shared memory of the war to fashion a sense of
Roman identity during different times of their history. During the late second century BCE,
Polybius’s narrative suggests that the Roman people began to foster a sense of superiority
about themselves since they recovered from the Hannibalic invasion and became masters of
the Mediterranean. Between the first and early second century CE, as demonstrated by Livy’s
narrative, the Romans ramped up this sentiment of superiority about themselves during an era
of vast imperial expansion. Indeed, the Romans during this time felt that since they defeated
Hannibal, they deserved to rule over others and no one could dare dream of harming the
empire. In the early second century CE, Plutarch’s and Appian’s narratives suggest that the
Romans of their era continued this sense of Roman superiority by negating Hannibal’s
victories during the Second Punic War. By the early third second century CE, in an era of
imperial instability and civil war in which Roman killed Roman, Dio Cassius demonstrated
that the Romans of this time remembered the Second Punic War as a time when the Romans
had an external enemy to fight and not each other. By the late fourth century CE, narratives
by Ammianus Marcellinus and Eutropius suggest that barbarian and Parthian incursions
made the Romans of this era feel that their own era was worse than during the Second Punic
War. Moreover, the barbarians who were fighting for the Romans as auxiliary soldiers also
used the memory of the Second Punic War as a way to become Roman. The early fifth
century CE, with the narrative of Claudian, rebellions and further incursions into Roman
territory by the barbarians made the Romans of this era feel that the Roman experience
during the Second Punic War was for naught and that their empire was falling apart. When
Stilicho defeated these enemies threatening Rome, the Romans of this time hailed him as a
new Scipio, Fabius, and Marcellus. Thus, the Roman people supplanted the importance of the
memory of the Second Punic War in an era of survival and toil. Despite Stilicho’s seemingly
single-handed victories over the enemies of the western empire, ordinary people were
124
suffering from invasions, and thus the memory of the Second Punic War ceased to be an
important aspect of Roman identity.
125
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