Hannibal Barca

His best-known battles are the Trebia (218 BC), Lake Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae (216 BC), all victories, and Zama (202 BC), the defeat that ended the war. For more than fifteen years he campaigned in Italy, and no Roman army beat him there in a pitched battle.²

Timeline of Hannibal's life

1. c. 247 BCBorn, the eldest son of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca. The year is an estimate: Smith's Dictionary gives 247 BC, Mommsen 249 BC.³
2. Aged nineSwears at an altar never to be a friend of the Romans and goes with his father to Spain.⁴
3. 221 or 220 BCAfter his brother-in-law Hasdrubal is assassinated, the army in Spain makes Hannibal its commander (Smith dates it to 221 BC, Mommsen to 220 BC).⁵
4. 219 BCTakes Saguntum, a Spanish city allied to Rome, after a siege of eight months.⁶
5. 218 BCCrosses the Alps into Italy and defeats the consul Sempronius at the Trebia.⁷
6. 217 BCTraps and destroys the army of the consul Flaminius at Lake Trasimene.⁸
7. 216 BCSurrounds and destroys a much larger Roman army at Cannae.⁹
8. 203 BCRecalled from Italy to defend Carthage against Scipio.¹⁰
9. 202 BCDefeated by Scipio Africanus at Zama.¹¹
10. 195 BCFlees Carthage after his political enemies denounce him to Rome (Nepos dates his flight a year earlier).¹²
11. c. 183 BCTakes poison in Bithynia rather than be handed over to Rome. Ancient writers dated his death between 183 and 181 BC.¹³

Who was Hannibal's father?

Hannibal's father was Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general who fought Rome in Sicily in the First Punic War and then conquered much of Spain. He made his nine-year-old son swear at an altar never to be a friend of the Romans, took him to Spain, and was killed in battle there about nine years later.¹⁴

Polybius reports the oath in Hannibal's own words, as he told it years later to King Antiochus III, and Nepos tells it the same way. After Hamilcar's death his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair, commanded in Spain for eight years, with Hannibal leading his cavalry, until a Celt murdered Hasdrubal at night over a private wrong. The army then chose Hannibal as its commander, and Carthage confirmed the choice. Nepos says he was twenty-five; Mommsen made him twenty-eight.¹⁵

Hannibal had two younger brothers, Hasdrubal and Mago. Hasdrubal crossed the Alps in 207 BC to join him and was killed at the Metaurus; Livy says the consul Nero had his head thrown in front of Hannibal's outposts. In Livy's account Mago died at sea of a wound taken in northern Italy, on his way back to Africa. Nepos has Mago survive the war, a version that Smith's Dictionary thinks confuses him with another Mago.¹⁶

Livy says Hannibal took a wife from Castulo, a powerful Spanish city so closely allied to Carthage that it supplied him with a bride. Smith's Dictionary adds that no children of his are recorded.¹⁷

The Barcid family: Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Mago

Hannibal belonged to the Barcids, the family of Hamilcar Barca, whose surname Mommsen and the Italian encyclopedia Treccani both explain as a Punic word for lightning. Hamilcar took command in Sicily in 247 BC, in the last years of the First Punic War, and in 237 BC crossed to Spain. He spent about nine years there building a new Carthaginian province, until he died fighting in battle, in 229 BC by Treccani's dating. Mommsen adds that Hamilcar called his three sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal and Mago, his lion's brood.¹⁸

Spain remained a family command after his death. His son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair, took over the army, founded New Carthage, modern Cartagena, on the only good harbor of the south coast, and made a treaty with Rome by which the Carthaginians promised not to cross the Ebro in arms, a treaty Treccani dates to 226 or 225 BC. When he was murdered in 221 BC, the army chose Hannibal.¹⁹

Hasdrubal Barca, the second son, born about 245 BC by Treccani's estimate, was left in command in Spain when Hannibal marched for Italy in 218 BC. In 211 BC he and the other Carthaginian generals in Spain destroyed the armies of the two Roman commanders there, the brothers Publius and Gnaeus Scipio. Beaten by the younger Publius Scipio at Baecula in 208 BC, he still got away with his treasury, his elephants and the best of his troops, wintered in Gaul and crossed the Alps into Italy, only to be killed at the Metaurus in 207 BC.²⁰

Mago, the youngest, led the ambush that struck the Roman rear at the Trebia and fought beside Hannibal in the center at Cannae. Sent home with the news, he poured out before the Carthaginian senate the gold rings taken from dead Romans. He then fought in Spain until the defeat at Ilipa, escaped to Gades, and in 205 BC landed at Genoa to raise the Ligurians and Gauls. Wounded in a defeat in the land of the Insubres, he was recalled to Africa and, according to Livy and to Mommsen, died of the wound on the voyage home; other writers have him survive the war.²¹

Why did Hannibal cross the Alps?

Hannibal crossed the Alps to carry the war by land into Italy and to win the Celts of the Po valley as allies, who joined him after his first victories. Leaving New Carthage in 218 BC, he crossed the Pyrenees and the Rhone and spent fifteen days in the Alpine passes. The whole march took five months.²²

Polybius says Hannibal set out with about 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, left garrisons and sent men home on the way, and lost about half of the army that left the Rhone in the mountains to cold, landslides and attacks by Alpine tribes. He came down into the plain of the Po with 12,000 African and 8,000 Spanish infantry and no more than 6,000 cavalry, figures Polybius took from Hannibal's own inscription. Which pass he used is still argued: Polybius does not name it, and Smith's Dictionary and Mommsen both favored the Little St Bernard while noting that others preferred Mont Genèvre or Mont Cenis.²³

He also brought war elephants. Polybius describes them being rafted across the Rhone and guarding the column in the mountains, where the tribesmen would not come near them. After the battle of the Trebia, rain and snow killed all but one. Hannibal rode that last elephant through the flooded marshes of the Arno in 217 BC, where an eye infection cost him the sight of one eye.²⁴

Hannibal's greatest victories

Hannibal's three great victories came in his first three years in Italy. At the Trebia in 218 BC he hid his brother Mago in a streambed and caught the consul Sempronius between two attacks. At Lake Trasimene in 217 BC he trapped the consul Flaminius in morning mist. At Cannae in 216 BC he destroyed a far larger army.²⁵

At the Trebia he sent Numidian horsemen to provoke Sempronius, who was eager for battle, into crossing the icy river before his men had eaten. At Trasimene about 15,000 Romans died, among them Flaminius, and about as many were taken prisoner; Hannibal lost about 1,500 men, most of them Gauls.²⁶

At Cannae, Polybius says, the Romans had about 80,000 infantry and more than 6,000 cavalry against Hannibal's 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. He pushed his Spanish and Gallic infantry forward in a crescent that gave way slowly, while African infantry on both wings turned inward on the advancing legions, and his cavalry, after routing the Roman horse, struck them from behind.²⁷

The Roman losses are disputed. Polybius puts the dead at about 70,000, a figure Mommsen accepted; Livy gives 45,500 infantry and 2,700 cavalry. The consul Aemilius Paullus and about eighty senators were among the dead. Polybius counts Hannibal's own losses at about 5,700 men, most of them Celts.²⁸

Why did Hannibal never take Rome?

After Cannae much of southern Italy went over to Hannibal, including Capua, but the Latin colonies and central Italy stayed loyal to Rome. Rome raised new armies, garrisoned the towns and avoided another great battle, while Carthage sent him few reinforcements. Livy says his cavalry commander Maharbal urged a march on Rome after Cannae, and Hannibal held back.²⁹

In later years he took the city of Tarentum but never its citadel. To draw the Romans away from besieged Capua he marched to the walls of Rome itself; the Romans kept up the siege, and Capua fell. After his brother Hasdrubal's army was destroyed at the Metaurus in 207 BC, Hannibal held only the far south, among the Bruttians.³⁰

The same would later be true of Napoleon, and our Hannibal vs Napoleon comparison weighs the two side by side.

Did Hannibal ever lose a battle?

Yes. In Italy no Roman army beat him in a pitched battle, though he suffered smaller setbacks, such as a repulse at Nola. His decisive defeat came at Zama in 202 BC, after Carthage recalled him from Italy to face Scipio Africanus, who had invaded Africa. Zama decided the Second Punic War in Rome's favor.³¹

At Zama Hannibal put more than 80 elephants in front, then mercenaries, then African and Carthaginian troops, and his veterans from Italy in the rear. Scipio's lines let the elephants through, and the Roman and Numidian cavalry, back from routing Hannibal's horsemen, fell on the rear of his veterans. Polybius gives 20,000 Carthaginian dead and nearly as many prisoners. Livy says Scipio himself praised Hannibal's dispositions; Hannibal escaped to Hadrumetum. Our Hannibal vs Scipio comparison sets the two generals side by side.³²

What did Hannibal do after the war?

After Zama Hannibal turned to politics. Elected one of the two chief magistrates Carthage chose each year, the suffetes, he broke the power of the order of judges, who sat for life, by carrying a law that made them elected yearly, with no one allowed two years in a row. He then traced the revenues and exposed embezzlement.³³

Livy and Mommsen say the recovered money let Carthage pay its yearly indemnity to Rome without a new tax on citizens; Nepos says new taxes were raised and left a surplus. Hannibal's opponents told Rome he was plotting with King Antiochus III of Syria. When Roman envoys arrived, Hannibal slipped away by night to the coast and sailed, in Livy's account, by way of Cercina and Tyre to Antiochus. Carthage confiscated his property, razed his house and declared him an outlaw.³⁴

Antiochus never gave him the army he asked for to invade Italy. In the war with Rome Hannibal commanded part of a fleet that the Rhodians defeated off the coast of Pamphylia, near Side in Livy's account. When Antiochus made peace, Rome demanded Hannibal's surrender, and he fled to Crete and then to King Prusias of Bithynia. Nepos tells how, in Prusias's war with Eumenes of Pergamon, Hannibal won a sea battle by hurling pots full of snakes onto the enemy ships; Smith's Dictionary called the story absurd.³⁵

How did Hannibal die?

Hannibal took poison in Bithynia, probably in 183 BC, after a Roman embassy that included Flamininus pressed King Prusias to give him up. When soldiers surrounded his house and watched every exit, he took the poison he had long kept ready rather than fall into Roman hands. He was buried at Libyssa, on the coast of Bithynia.³⁶

Even the year was disputed in antiquity. Nepos reports that Atticus dated his death to 183 BC, Polybius to 182 BC and Sulpicius to 181 BC; Smith's Dictionary and Mommsen both thought 183 BC the most likely. Nepos also says he died in his seventieth year, which would put his birth a few years before 247 BC.³⁷

Rome's own historians ranked him among the greatest generals. Livy calls Hannibal and Scipio, at their meeting before Zama, the greatest commanders not only of their own age but of all recorded history before it, and Nepos writes that Hannibal surpassed other commanders in ability as much as the Romans surpassed other peoples in valor.³⁸

Whether he was a finer battlefield tactician than Alexander the Great is a debate we weigh in Hannibal vs Alexander. The wider struggle is told in our account of the rivalry between Rome and Carthage. See the others he is measured against in the greatest military commanders in history, or read his defining day in full at the Battle of Cannae.

What was Hannibal famous for?

Hannibal is famous for marching an army with elephants over the Alps in 218 BC and for Cannae, where in 216 BC he surrounded and destroyed a Roman army far larger than his own. He also held an army of Africans, Spaniards, Gauls and Numidians together in enemy country for more than fifteen years without a mutiny.³⁹

• Do the unexpected. By crossing the Alps in 218 BC he reached Italy overland, from a direction Rome had not expected.⁴⁰
• The double envelopment. At Cannae his center gave ground on purpose, drew the legions in, and his African infantry and cavalry closed around them.⁴¹
• Use the ground. At Lake Trasimene he hid his army on the hills above a lakeside road and attacked a whole Roman army on the march in the mist.⁴²
• Read the enemy. At the Trebia he used Numidian horsemen to lure the impatient consul Sempronius across an icy river before his men had eaten.⁴³
• Hold an army together. His army of many nations stayed with him for more than fifteen years in Italy and never mutinied, as Smith's Dictionary and Mommsen both stress.⁴⁴
• The limit he could not pass. Without loyal Latin allies to win over or strong reinforcements from home, his victories could not bring down Rome itself.⁴⁵

Which general matches your instincts? Try our Which Commander Are You quiz, then put the Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae to the test in the ancient battles quiz.

More head-to-head comparisons: Caesar vs Hannibal and Genghis Khan vs Hannibal.