Tom Holland

Now, Hannibal, as we heard in our last episode, ends up this hunted fugitive, this defeated fugitive, kills himself in 183 BC.

But it's the measure of the shock he had given Rome.

And of the terror that he had inspired in Roman hearts that still more than a century and a half after his death in the age of Augustus, you know, when the Roman Empire stands splendid and without a conceivable rival on the face of the planet.

Hannibal continues to haunt the memory of the Romans.

And so I think it's not hard to imagine what a bogeyman he must have seemed to Romans who had lived through his invasion of Italy and who were born in the generation or two after the great war that he had prosecuted against the Romans.

Completely.

Completely.

Listeners may remember that in our previous series, we talked about Hannibal's preparations for the invasion of Italy in 218.

And he has a dream.

And in that dream, he sees a giant serpent that is following in his wake as he invades Italy.

And this serpent, quote, causing massive destruction to trees and bushes, a deafening thunderstorm following in its wake.

And a god then explains to him what this serpent is.

This serpent is Hannibal himself.

And so the dream is portending what the Romans called the Vastatio Italiae, the destruction of Italy.

And that is exactly what Hannibal had inflicted on Italy.

So monstrous casualty figures, hundreds of thousands of people dead, fields, vineyards, orchards going up in flames year after year after year.

And nothing like it had remotely been experienced by the Romans or the peoples of Italy.

You know, for two or three generations, there hadn't been anything like this.

And today there is considerable debate among historians about how bad the damage inflicted by Hannibal on Italy actually was.

So opinions range from completely apocalyptic to merely, you know, pretty devastating.