Winning All the Battles

In 264 B.C. Carthage, the most economically dynamic polity in the Mediterranean basin, blundered into war with Rome, the region's most relentlessly militaristic power. It was a terrible mistake. For unlike in our own time when power is a complex equation of economic, cultural, and coercive factors, military strength then inevitably trumped wealth, and after a succession of three Punic wars, lasting over a century, Carthage would be utterly obliterated, virtually expunged from the face of history. Had the city quit after the first war, essentially a naval extravaganza lasting twenty-three years, Rome might well have acquiesced to Carthage's continued existence. But it was the fate of the city, which had previously been dominated by merchants and agro-businessmen, to suffer an unexpected outcropping of military talent, and this sealed its doom.

They were the Barcids, a clan of generals in a town of admirals, a family whose abilities, aggressiveness, and, above all, hatred of Rome allowed them to dominate Punic politics and keep the suicidal grudge match going. The first prominent member, Hamilcar, had been the best Carthaginian general in the initial conflict with Rome. But, unhappy with the peace terms, he abandoned his mercenary army, which then revolted against Carthage, leading to a terrible civil war that ended only after their original commander annihilated the rebels. Likely now a controversial figure in Carthage, Hamilcar received permission to march his new army across North Africa to Spain, where he would establish a family enclave based on local gold and silver mines. Accompanying him was his nine-year-old son Hannibal, from whom he extracted an oath of eternal enmity against Rome—a curse that would chart the boy's future.

For it was this Hannibal in 218 B.C. who led the army he inherited from his father across one of the highest passes in the Alps and invaded Italy. Staging the assault from his family's base in Spain, now an empire within an empire, he dragged Carthage into an entirely problematic war with Rome, one that would have been destined for a quick and disastrous end had it not been for one factor: Hannibal himself.

Almost immediately he gathered his bedraggled, freeze-dried near-wreck of an army and led them to two sharp victories over the Romans, the last one at the River Trebia wiping out most of a major consular army. He followed that up the next spring by luring another consular army into a trap set along the shores of Lake Trasimene, staging the most lethal single ambush in Western military history.

By now he had Rome's full attention. The hyperwarlike city on the Tiber, destined soon to rule the Mediterranean world, responded by fielding a crusher of a field force, basically four consular armies welded haphazardly together, and invited Hannibal to fight that. With breathtaking guile on August 2, 216 B.C., he surrounded it on a plain near the abandoned town of Cannae, and then over the course of an afternoon chopped it to bits, killing that day more men than the United States lost in combat during the entire Vietnam conflict.

From William O'Connor Morris, Hannibal (London, 1897).

For the first and only time he had a chance to win the war. Maharbal, his audacious cavalry commander, urged him to march on Rome immediately, arriving before the shock from Cannae could subside, but the boss hedged and the moment was lost. Instead, Hannibal assumed that the authorities on the Tiber would be ready to talk terms and sent a delegation, only to have them thrown back in his face.

Rome was just getting started. The battlescarred veterans who ran the Senate had faith in their alliances and understood Rome's central advantage. In the words of Fabius Maximus, the city's shrewdest military leader: "We are carrying on war in Italy, in our own country … Hannibal, on the other hand, is in a foreign and hostile land.… Do you doubt that we shall get the better of a man who is growing weaker by the day?"

So Rome kept...