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Chapter 1: What were Hannibal's key strategies during the Punic Wars?
It is impossible to withhold our admiration for Hannibal's leadership, his courage, and his ability in the field, when we consider the duration of his campaigns, and take note of the major and minor battles, the sieges, the defections of cities from one side to the other, the difficulties he encountered at various times, and in short, the whole scope of his design and its execution.
For sixteen years he waged ceaseless war against the Romans in Italy, and the whole while, like a good pilot, he kept the love and loyalty of his forces. He had with him Africans, Iberians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Italians and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither in their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect.
Nonetheless, the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will, even upon men of such totally diverse origins. If only he'd subdued other parts of the world first and finished with the Romans, not one of his projects would have eluded him.
But as it was, since he turned his attention first to those whom he should have dealt with last, his career began and ended with them. So that was the Greek historian Polybius. It's one of those passages that seems written precisely to torment 16-year-old schoolboys and schoolgirls in British schools in the 1940s or something, sort of slogging their way through his torturous prose.
Polybius, like him or loathe him, he's our best source for the Punic Wars. And here in this thrilling passage, he is singing the praises of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal.
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Chapter 2: How did Scipio's leadership influence the Roman invasion of Africa?
Now in today's episode, we are coming to the great showdown of the Punic Wars, one of the most titanic clashes in all history. This is the showdown between the Romans and the Carthaginians at the Battle of Zama. And we'll come to this in a little while. But first, let's have a little chat about Polybius himself, because Tom, he knew Rome well and he knew the subject very well.
He'd interviewed leading figures in the war against Hannibal, hadn't he? He admired the Roman system of government. And actually, he was quite a fan of the Roman imperium more broadly.
Yes, even though he was a Greek. And slightly disappointed that you didn't follow up your brilliant impression of Livy in our last episode by doing a Greek accent for Polybius.
I did think about it, but I didn't do it.
Chapter 3: What were the circumstances leading to the Battle of Zama?
But you ducked it. Yeah, so Polybius, for reasons that we will come to, He knows Rome very, very well indeed. And he's particularly close to the family of the Scipios. And they are the family that, as we heard in the previous episode, they played the kind of the leading role in the great Rome's great death struggle with Hannibal.
So when it comes to the Punic Wars, Polybius is pretty clearly team Rome. But even so, as we heard in that opening passage, he can't help but admire Hannibal. And the reasons are self-evident. Hannibal is the man who has led a great army over the Alps into Italy. He's killed 100,000 Romans, perhaps, in three terrible and tactically brilliant battles.
Chapter 4: How did Polybius contribute to our understanding of the Punic Wars?
And who, as Polybius noted in that passage, had kept a force made up of many disparate peoples in the field for a decade and more. in a foreign land separated by the seas from Carthage, his native city. So an unbelievable achievement. Now, the Romans, unlike Polybius, were not generally in the habit of praising Hannibal. And the reason for that is that they feared and hated him too much.
But I think with the Romans, if you have their hatred and their fear, they are paying you a kind of compliment.
Of course, yeah.
They know the man they are facing. I mean, they know that they are facing one of the greatest generals of all time. Now, that said, by 204 BC, Hannibal's fortunes, this guy who at one point had seemed on the verge of destroying Roman power for good, his fortunes are much, much diminished.
Chapter 5: What role did Massinissa play in Scipio's campaign?
So, by 204 BC... He's been in Italy for 14 years. And that is four times the length of the First World War. So that gives you some sense of what an ordeal this has been. It's been a marathon, not a sprint. It really has. And the problem for Hannibal is that
As we heard in the previous episode, the Romans have conquered Spain, which was essentially the place where he was relying on for reinforcements and for supplies and for money and all kinds of things. So that's terrible. His allies in Italy have fallen away, and he is now essentially cornered in Brutium, which is the heel of Italy.
Chapter 6: What was the significance of Sophonisba in the conflict?
But even now, the Romans... are incredibly reluctant to engage him in battle. They just think, if we go and fight him, he will defeat us. That is the kind of hoodoo that he has over them. And so their plan now is to just bypass him altogether. And they're going to do this by invading Africa.
And this strategy had been articulated the year before by the man who has been mandated by the Roman Republic to execute it. So to quote him, I shall draw Hannibal after me. I shall force him to fight on his native soil, and the prize of victory will be not some run-down forts in Brutium, Carthage itself.
Chapter 7: How did the Battle of Zama change the course of history?
And the man who is speaking these words, he's only 30, but he has already established himself as the greatest military hero in Rome's history. And this is the young, long-haired, smoothly shaved Publius Cornelius Scipio.
So in the last episode, we heard how over the previous four years, Scipio had destroyed Carthage's power base in Spain. So by doing that, he had eliminated the manpower and the mineral wealth that had sustained Hannibal's war effort and on which Hannibal had been relying for reinforcements to finish his own war effort in Italy. Scipio had gone back to Rome, hadn't he?
We discussed this at the end of the last episode. He'd gone back to Rome as the great hero of the hour, the hero of the Roman people, the darling of the masses. He had won the consulship, he had been appointed to the command in Sicily, and he had explicitly been given license to invade North Africa. quote, if he judged it to be in the interests of the Republic.
Chapter 8: What were the long-term impacts of the Roman victory over Carthage?
And Tom, you entered the last episode by saying, we will discover if he does. Obviously, the implication is that he will. And he does. He does think it's in the interests of the Republic, even though there are people in the Senate who are a little bit more cautious, aren't they?
Yes. And regular listeners to this series will not be surprised that the guy who takes the lead in opposing this strategy is... Fabius Maximus Conctator, the delayer, the guy who back in the wake of late Trasimene had been appointed dictator, so put in supreme control of the Roman state for six months.
And he had adopted this strategy of shadowing Hannibal, of never engaging him in battle, which then provided the template for Roman strategy in the wake of Cannae, and which is still being adopted. in 204 BC. He's now, I mean, unbelievably old. He's about 130. And he is a figure of enormous status. So he has the official title, Princeps Sinatus. He's the chief senator.
Fabius had directly accused Scipio in the debate about whether he should be given permission to invade Africa. He accused Scipio of endangering Rome's security by leading an expedition to Africa while Hannibal was still current and present in Italy with his own army. Fabius had directly accused Scipio essentially of glory hunting.
Your glory matters less to me, he told Scipio, than the welfare of our city. If you really want to destroy Hannibal, then go to Brutium and fight him there, which is, I mean, a very stinging rebuke. And I think it's clearly animated by a kind of personal animus, as well as anxiety about strategy. And I think it portrays
What right from the beginning of Scipio's career has been an anxiety on the part of conservative elements in the Senate about his character.
Yeah, part of this is his youth, right? And his glamour and his eye for sort of, as it were, a Roman photo opportunity. It's about his hair and his shiny cheeks. His claims to have been born from a serpent, all of that stuff. Right. His general sense of un-Roman-ness, of Greek-ness even.
And of course, we mentioned in the previous episode that while he had been in Spain, some of the Iberian warlords had hailed him as a king, a word that for the Romans, you know, is the most sort of shocking and and toxic label that there could possibly be. Everything about him just seems wrong, doesn't it? It just seems un-Roman.
It's not just that he's been held king, but that he is incredibly popular, both with his troops and with the mass of the Roman people. So in Spain, in the wake of his great victories... His soldiers had taken to hailing him as Imperator, which is a word that means general, but which in the long run will become the title that Augustus claims and which gives us our title of emperor.
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