Great Names in History

The Carthaginians were right: it took time to train sailors and oarsmen and Rome didn’t have time. But that wasn’t the first problem Rome ever had. Rome had been having problems for five hundred years. They believed problems could all be solved with a little thought and a little trial and error. This one was chickenfeed. “While the ships are being built, take the men out on that field and teach them rowing,” ordered the general.

“On the ground, sir?”

“Sure.”

“But we don’t have any oars, sir.”

The general didn’t like that kind of objection—one with such an obvious solution. “What is an oar? An oar is a long pole. Get a bunch of long poles—what’s the difference?”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the fields were full of men sitting in rows of five, pushing and pulling on long poles. A pacer pounded on a drum to give them the rhythm.

As soon as the ships were in the water—in only sixty days, if you can believe Polybius—, the oarsmen went aboard, hopped onto their benches, and started rowing with real oars. There was no time to lose. They rowed right out to meet the Carthaginian ships.

What about tactics? The Romans had never thought about what sailors did out there on the sea when enemy ships met. They didn’t know or care about fleet tactics and ramming. Their objective, once they came up to an enemy, was to jump on his ship and kill him. There was nothing like the good old sword and shield.

Most oarsmen on those Carthaginian ships weren’t used to hand-to-hand combat. They thought their job was done once their ship had rammed the enemy ship. A few troops on the deck above them took care of the surrender and reduced any of the enemy sailors that resisted.

The oarsmen on the new Roman quinqueremes were all experienced soldiers. They saw themselves not as sailors but as soldiers doing the temporary but necessary duty of marching over the sea to meet the enemy—marching in a strange way: marching by sitting still and rowing: but marching.

“I’ve been wondering how we’re going to board their ships when we get out there?” one of the more imaginative Roman oarsmen asked the others on their way out to meet the enemy.

It’s true: try to jump from one ship to another, even on a calm sea, even without the confusion of battle and arrows and stones flying through the air. The two ships, even with their gunwales side-by-side, don’t go up and down on the waves at the same time; and when you try to jump, the harder you push with your feet to lift yourself off, the farther down you go into your own boat. And the ships don’t stay together for long either.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” somebody said. And they did. It wasn’t a bridge but a gangplank.

Now came the kind of practical solution to a problem the Romans were famous for. It wasn’t really an invention. The Romans never invented much. It wasn’t some genius’s brainstorm. And it didn’t occur out of the blue. It came to several men at once probably, because their experience in combat brought them all to the same conclusion. “What we need is some kind of gangplank to carry on our ships,” said the generals. “One we can throw across their deck as soon as we bang up against them. Then our men can run right onto their ship.” A portable gangway was nothing novel. A lot of ships must have carried them and still do. But how do you heave such a heavy thing onto the enemy’s deck from your side, without help? The answer was the “Crow”.

Reader: Thank God.

The Romans built a nice long gangplank, four feet by thirty-six, with wooden guardrails. They cut a slot in it at one end and stuck a long pole through the slot. The pole they stood up on deck and fixed solidly like a mast. At the top of the pole they attached a pulley and ran a rope through it down to the other end of the gangplank. By means of that rope they could raise and lower the gangplank. It swiveled around easily because of the loose slot at the base of the pole or mast.

“That is fine as a way of getting our men across,” said the general after he was shown one of these experimental gangplanks. “The hitch I see is that the enemy isn’t going to let the thing lie there on their deck. They’re going to keep pushing it off. We need a way of keeping it in place and also of locking those two boats together. Why don’t you put a big spike on the end of the gangway? When we lower it, the weight will drive the spike right through their deck.”

Soon all the Roman ships were equipped with one of these gangplanks. They were stood up more or less vertically until they were needed. The enemy saw them and at first didn’t know what they were for. Nor did they care. They knew that the Romans were lousy sailors and all you had to do was ram their ships or drive them aground. Even to the Romans the gangways looked odd. They looked like a big bird—the spike was its beak. They started calling them “crows”. “Get the old crow [corvus in Latin] ready,” the captain would shout as they headed for an enemy quinquereme .

The crow was set up near the bow of the Roman ship and it could be swung around left, right, or forward, depending on the point of contact. It fell with a heavy slam and stapled the two ships together very firmly. As soon as it was down the Roman sailor-soldiers ran across: the first two holding up their shields to protect the men coming behind them. They took every ship they could board. The result was that soon the Carthaginians got very leery of Roman ships with crows and wouldn’t go near them. Their old ramming tactic was obsolete.

Return to The Crow:or the First Punic War (Part 1)

The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 2)

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It wasn’t the Carthaginians that seized Messana. It was a bunch of silly mercenaries.

Messana is in Sicily. And just down the island is the city of Syracuse, which was an old Greek colony run by a king or what the Greeks called a tyrant.
Not long after the Romans had eliminated their last enemy on the peninsula, a band of mercenaries who had been working for that tyrant of Syracuse got the bright idea to take Messana on their own, for themselves. They massacred a lot of people and set themselves up in the citadel. The tyrant immediately tried to get Messana free and laid siege. The mercenaries, who hadn’t planned too far ahead, now realized they couldn’t hold out and called for help. Some called to Rome and some called to Carthage.

Both Rome and Carthage showed up with forces; Carthage, because it didn’t want Rome in Sicily; and Rome, because it didn’t want Carthage to grab any more of Sicily than it already had, which was about half. Carthage already ruled Africa and the best part of Spain and all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian Seas. If they got hold of Messana they would soon take the rest of the island. And once they had Sicily, they would strangle Rome. They could close the whole Mediterranean to Roman shipping.

At one moment there were three armies parked out in front of Messana. Seeing the trouble that was ahead, the Syracusan tyrant decided to let the giants slug it out and took his troops home. That left Carthage and Rome facing each other. That is how the First Punic War began. The fight was about Sicily.

The First Roman Fleet

The first thing a Roman commander always did was to get his troops off the water as fast as he could. He was helpless against those Carthaginian ships, which came on with great speed and rammed a Roman transport and sank it with all its soldiers. The Romans didn’t have a single warship. They didn’t even know how to build one. They had never paid attention to ships. A ship was just a floating container, wasn’t it?
But now if they were going to fight Carthage they needed warships. “So let’s build a fleet of warships and go out there and get those bastards.”

“This fact illustrates better than any other the extraordinary spirit and audacity of the Romans,” says Polybius, the Greek historian who went to see Rome just after the wars with Carthage. “It was not a question of having adequate resources for the enterprise, for they had in fact none whatsoever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea before this. But once they had conceived the idea they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians, who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.”

How do you make a warship? “See if you can’t get hold of one of those Carthaginian quinqueremes,” the Roman consuls told their engineers, “and discover how the darned things are constructed.”

What is a quinquereme? Warships couldn’t depend on the wind so they had oarsmen to make them go. The bigger the ship and the faster you wanted it to go, the more oarsmen. Carthaginian ships liked to ram an enemy; so they needed a lot of oarsmen to get up speed. And they were outfitted with a brass beak just under water-level to pierce the enemy hulls. Quinqueremes had long rows of oars with five [quinque=five] men to an oar. This gave them the strong motor they needed.

Lucky Rome. One day a Carthaginian quinquereme ran aground while trying to sink a Roman transport and the Roman soldiers captured it and called their engineers to come and study it. Now they had a model. Right away they set about building one hundred quinqueremes on this model.

Next problem: Rome was going to have a fleet of quinqueremes but where would it get all the sailors to row them?
The Carthaginians heard about Rome’s shipbuilding fantasies and scoffed.
“In the first place,” they said, “we’d be awfully surprised if their ships were as good as ours. And even if they were, it isn’t ships that make a fleet, but sailors. We’ve been sailors all our lives and for generations. You don’t become a sailor overnight. And what about oarsmen? Do they think they can learn to row a quinquereme in a month or two? It’s going to be fun to see that fleet of theirs on parade—we can hardly wait.”

Reader: I don’t think I can wait either. I have been waiting too long for the crow and there is no crow. I started to read this post because of your title and now I feel tricked.

Thank you for staying. The crow will appear in Part Three. When you see it you will be glad you held out through the history lesson.

Reader: I wonder.

See: The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 3)

What if you are a great army but your enemy is a great navy?

You know how to march with fine discipline over hill and dale. You pitch a dandy camp, a real fortress with high walls and a ditch, that nobody is fool enough to attack. On the field, man to man, with your spear, your sword and your shield, you can beat any enemy that is brave enough to stand up to you. But your enemy is out there on the sea, floating on big ships, and just laughing at your predicament. You don’t have any warships, only a few barges and ferries. You can’t go out there and get him—you don’t even know how to swim.

That happened to Rome. The enemy out there calling him a landlubber was Carthage; and if anybody was a sailor, it was a Carthaginian. Those fellows had been sailing around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They had even been brave enough to push on past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown ocean, and south down the coast of Africa. They loved the mist and the smell of the salt-sea . At night when they lay down on the rolling deck, they felt as cosy as the Roman soldier in his square camp and pup-tent. They looked up at the same sky, though the Carthaginian liked to imagine the old heroes and figures he saw in the constellations, and the Roman wondered how he could organize that mess of stars a little.

Rome had been fighting its neighbors for five hundred years and chasing them around the peninsula. Rome was busy with the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, and the occasional Greek. She worked her way south on the Boot and finally came to its toe. When the soldiers lifted their heads after the last battle, they saw the sea. No more Italy, no more neighbors to fight—they had conquered them all. They saw the sea and of course those grinning Carthaginian ships.

They knew Carthage controlled the Mediterranean but up till then they didn’t care about the Mediterranean. “You stay out of my hair and I’ll stay out of yours,” the Romans had told the Carthaginians, who signed a treaty or two with them about staying out of waters where Carthage had no intention of going anyway. “When we feel like it, we’ll go anywhere we want to,” the Carthaginians said to themselves, even while they signed the treaties and shook hands with those rude Romans who didn’t seem to understand the world.

The Romans weren’t sailors but they had always done some trade along the coast with the Greek colonies in the sole and the heel of their Boot and with Greece itself. Roman ships were barely sea-worthy—just barges and transport vessels like wooden boxes; but they were good enough to haul the goods as long as they watched for storms and hugged the coast and went slowly. The boats left Ostia, the port nearest Rome, sailed down the west side of the Boot, slipped between the toe and Sicily, which it kicks, and then headed east for the heel, Tarentum, or right on to Greece. And back.

That route, if it can be called a route, was the one Rome had taken for centuries. It was a very low-profile route: no one had ever tried to block it. Rome knew there was one very vulnerable point—just the place somebody COULD cause trouble if he wanted to. That was Messana—or rather, the Straits of Messana—the narrow sea between the tip of the Boot and Sicily. Block that and all trade would stop. No ship would get by. Life in Rome could get hard if the Straits were blocked for long. Every time the Romans looked out to sea and saw those cocky Carthaginian ships jumping up and down, they worried a little. “If we ever get into war with Carthage and Carthage blocks those straits, we’re going to have big trouble,” they warned each other. “What kind of sacrifices do you make to Pluto? Have to check up on those.” They knew what to do to make Mars happy; but, to be honest, they had neglected Pluto, who was the sea-god.

Reader: Where is the crow? I keep waiting for the crow to appear.

The crow will appear in a minute. First you need background. You saw that the Straits of Messana were the Achilles’ Toe of the Boot of Italy, if you will; and that the worst thing that could happen to Rome was a war with Carthage, who controlled the seas. Guess what is going to happen.

See The Crow (Part Two)

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This is the tower of the Castle of Oreja.

It can’t have long. Already in the eighteenth century a traveller wrote in his journal: “… any day now it will collapse.” The cracks in the walls are big enough to put your arm in. And after a good rain whole shoulders of the great gypsum cliffs come crashing down. One that fell some years ago shaved away the very ground in front of the tower, so that just left of the main door—watch your step as you look inside the tower!—there is a drop of two hundred feet.

Oreja is nothing special. There are more than a thousand ruined castles and fortresses in Spain. Many like Oreja are now out in the middle of nowhere because the roads they guarded are no longer used.
Oreja watches over a ford of the Tagus River. She has been guarding the ford for well over 2000 years. The Romans called her Aurelia. There must have been at least a watchtower on the cliffs in ancient times.

The present tower that is ready to fall is all that is left of a huge complex of defense works built by both Moors and Christians. There were fierce battles here and at the foot of the cliff, in the river valley. The Moors took the castle away from the Christians in 1113; and the Christians didn’t get it back until 1139. King Alfonso VII sieged Oreja with a huge army but still it took him more than nine months to force the Moorish defenders to surrender the castle. Afterwards he handed it over to the Knights of Santiago (St. James) to defend for him.

That’s one of the famous battles Oreja saw, and that one is fact. But there is another one that would make Oreja more famous if anyone could be sure it happened here. Both Livy and Polybius mention it. Somewhere on the Tagus about where Oreja is Hannibal defeated a big army of native Iberians—Olcades and Carpetani—before he started off with his troops and his elephants for Rome. He made the enemy army cross the river to come after him and then cut them down with his cavalry while they were swimming. “It was certainly here at the foot of the castle,” said a nineteenth century writer. “For years farmers have been finding in the fields and on the banks of the river old battle detritus, spearheads, clay sling pellets, even a Carthaginian helmet and an old sword.”

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1. Take the initiative, keep the initiative. This gave Hannibal a tremendous advantage. His enemy had constantly to try to guess his intention and defend himself against several alternative attacks. The enemy Roman consul was forever on the defensive, waiting, wondering, guessing, bracing himself for the blow.
When the consul Longus, bent on making Hannibal stand and fight him, lined up his army for the battle, Hannibal ordered his men to go back to camp. He refused to fight. At that time he was not prepared for a general battle, says Polybius, “and made it a principle never to be drawn into a decisive engagement unless by deliberate choice, and certainly not on a casual impulse.”

2. Be quick. Surprise. Hannibal decamped by night from Capua and got to Rome before the Romans in Capua ever realized he was gone. He crossed Etruria through a swamp because that was the way everyone assumed he wouldn’t go.

3. Be crafty, lay a trap. Hannibal’s plans were always ways of fooling his enemy, misleading him, enticing him into combat, surprising him with hidden forces, seeming to be somewhere else. Everyone remembered the way he got out of the difficult pass in Campania, with Fabius’s army all around him. Along a path that paralleled the only road out, which was heavily guarded by Roman troops, he stampeded a herd of cattle at night with lighted torches on their horns. The guards, thinking the cattle were Hannibal’s soldiers, rushed to confront them, abandoning their positions on the mountain. While they were dealing with the bulls, Hannibal quickly sent his amy through the pass. That was his most ingenious trick. But all his tactics were ploys and ruses and feints, even when not outright traps.

4. Be flexible. Have a plan but be able to alter it or even drop it as circumstances change. Bad generals believe they will one day meet the enemy squarely on the field and have a nice pitched battle. Those generals toy in their minds with troop dispositions—where to put their cavalry, where to stand their light-armed soldiers, how deep to build their phalanx, and so on. “That will be the decisive day,” they tell themselves, and hope for good luck.
For Hannibal every day was that decisive day. The great battle was now, it was always going on. He didn’t merely march until he came to a perfect situation for battle. He created the situation or took advantage of one. He was stubborn only about his objective, not about his means.
He was at every moment aware of his advantages and disadvantages. And of the enemy’s.

5. Fight for tomorrow as well as today. Think two steps ahead, not just one.

6. Understand your enemy; learn his weaknesses. Hannibal always sent out spies to learn the enemy’s plans. He interviewed prisoners and guides to get information. As soon as new Roman consuls were given command, he sent informers to find out who they were. Was the new general a hothead? Had he ever led troops in battle? What was the result? Was he cocky or impatient, did he like to tip the bottle?

After Hannibal had beaten his first consuls, along came another one called Flaminius with his army. Hannibal learned from his informers that this Flaminius was “on fire with ambition” and that he believed in his own good luck. “Here’s a man after my own heart,” thought Hannibal and arranged a trap for Flaminius’s army. He knew the man would attack with his whole force at the first opportunity, good or not, so Hannibal lured him along a narrow road between a mountain (where his own army lay hidden) and a lake. Flaminius was fool enough to believe that HE had the advantage and sent his whole army into Hannibal’s trap, where it was annihilated.

7. Be daring. Come down with your army across the Alps with elephants and attack Rome on Roman ground, far from your own country and without logistic support except what you can steal.

8. Keep your mouth shut. Hannibal never told anyone what he was doing.

9. Be all of the above except when you are faced with an enemy who is all of the above. In that case, be like Fabius, the Roman general. Cautious, prudent, unrisking, defensive, back-holding. No war manual ever told anyone to be like Fabius. But under the circumstances his was the winning strategy.

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This is a relief sculpture from an old Roman sarcophagus. It shows Roman soldiers fighting naked Gauls.

Did the artist sculpt the Gauls naked only to show pretty male anatomy?

No. According to Polybius, in at least one important battle (226 BC), the proud barbarians really did stand up to the Roman legions with nothing on but their jewelry.

“The Insubres and the Boii wore their trousers and light cloaks but the Gaesatae had been moved by their thirst for glory and their defiant spirit to throw away these garments, and so they took up their positions in front of the whole army naked…. They believed they would be better equipped for action in this state, as the ground was in places overgrown with brambles and these might catch in their clothes and hamper them in the use of their weapons……

“The aspect and the movements of the naked warriors in the front ranks made a terrifying spectacle. They were all men of splendid physique and in the prime of life, and those in the leading companies were richly adorned with gold necklaces and bracelets. The mere sight of them was enough to arouse fear among the Romans, but at the same time the prospect of gaining so much plunder made them twice as eager to fight.

“….when the Roman javelin-throwers, following their regular tactics in Roman warfare, advanced in front of the legions and began to hurl their weapons thick and fast, the cloaks and trousers of the [Gauls] in the rear ranks gave some effective protection, but for the naked warriors in front the situation was very different….The shield used by the Gauls does not cover the whole body, and so the tall stature of these naked troops made the missles all the more likely to find their mark….. After a while, their nerve broke under the unbearable ordeal….”  ( Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, pp. 139-141 in the Penguin Classics edition.)

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Cervantes had a useless left hand—a war wound. Nowadays we would call him a disabled veteran.

The man who had the cheek to write a second part of Don Quijote called Cervantes an “old one-armed guy.” That really burned him. “If my wounds don’t shine so brightly in the eyes of one [Avellaneda] who sees them, at least they are esteemed in the eyes of those who know where they came from.”

They came from the Battle of Lepanto. He was hit twice in the chest and once in the left hand by arquebus bullets.

Compared to many, he got off easy. Forty of the soldiers packed into his little skiff died, including the captain, and a hundred were wounded. Cervantes fought heroically. And he had insisted on going into battle though he had a high fever and had been vomiting all night and might have retired honorably behind the lines.

There are many accounts of that famous battle by soldiers who took part, writers many of them. They had all marched to war with romantic visions of glory.
The Battle of Lepanto was no parade. You wonder how any of the soldier-sailors survived at all—on either side. Nearly 600 ships and 180,000 men clashed in a hellish confusion of cannon-fire and desperate no-quarter fighting. Cannon, arquebus, and musket fire came from all sides, the boats had no room to manuever, there was constant ramming and hand-to-hand combats after boarding. Everywhere ships were on fire. In the middle of the battle the Turks’ slave-oarsmen revolted (understandably). There was no way to stop the slaughter. No one could hear above the cannons and the shouting or breathe in the gunsmoke. The sea was full of dead and dying men, and red with their blood. Thousands drowned or were scorched by the flames.

Cervantes’ chest wounds were serious and he was taken back to a hospital in Italy. His younger brother, who had also fought at Lepanto, probably helped care for him until he was out of danger. His hand never did become normal. Yet the disability was not serious enough for him to give up soldiering. He took part in another expedition and stayed in the army for another year before calling it quits. He finally decided to go home and become a writer.

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In old Republican Rome, you didn’t want to miss the funeral of a great man. It was a real show.

His body was carried in a procession to the Forum, the main square of the city, and laid on the central platform, called the Rostra—laid there or even stood up in his coffin, for all to see. His son or some other close relative delivered a moving funeral address, recalling the best he had done in his life. “Friends, Romans, and countrymen….” Of course now we think of Mark Anthony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Caesar himself delivered a memorable address at his aunt’s funeral.

A great relative was venerated, like a saint. The families made a mask of him or her, an exact likeness, and kept it at home in a wooden shrine. When public sacrifices were offered, they took out the masks and decorated them for display. And when a new member of the family died, relatives who looked something like the deceased man put on those masks and dressed up as that dead relative. They put on his clothes—those that corresponded with his rank: if he was a consul or a praetor it was a white robe with purple piping; if he had been a censor, a completely purple robe; and if he had celebrated a triumph or performed some similar exploit, the robe was embroidered with gold.

Thus masked and with their robes waving, they mounted chariots and solemnly rode to the Forum. In front of them walked men with fasces and axes and other insignia, according to the dignity of the public offices the men had held. When the procession reached the Forum, these doubles of the deceased relatives took their seats on chairs of ivory. “Who could be unmoved at the sight of the images of all these men who had won fame in their time, now gathered together as if alive and breathing? What spectacle could be more glorious than this?” That is what the Greek historian Polybius wrote about the Roman funerals he had witnessed around 135 BC.

The funeral address was about the virtues and the achievements of the dead man lying on the Rostra but it also included an account of the deeds of all the great relatives who were represented there. Each masked man would step forward when it was his turn to be singled out. “This is Gnaeus or Publius or Julius,” the speaker would say. “Let me tell you how he served the nation.” Or: “Like this he gained immortal fame.”

Polybius, who was in love with Roman ways, was always looking for the clue to their greatness. In these funerals he saw the correct education of Roman youth. “They are a wonderful way of inspiring young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that awaits upon the brave. Every one of their boys dreams of becoming a hero. In their daydreams they are Curtius or Horatius at the bridge.”

Who was Horatius?

Horatius at the bridge was only a legend—it wasn’t history. It was the kind of story children were told at bedtime. Horatius was a Roman way back in its early days. He was trying to keep the enemy out of his city, fighting two of them at once on the bridge that leads to the western entrance to Rome. He was doing fine, standing his ground, dodging spears, catching arrows with his shield. Then he happened to see more of the enemy coming and realized that by himself he would never be able to stop them all from crossing the bridge and entering the city. So he shouted back to his comrades to start destroying the bridge as fast as they could. They did what he said. They smashed the big timbers and set fire to the bridge. All the while—and it was a long while—Horatius held back the enemy at the other end of the bridge, snarling and lashing out like a wounded boar. He knew he would not survive this combat. But he also knew that what he was doing would win him lasting glory, which was better than life. When he was sure the bridge was about to fall, he jumped into the river, armor and all; and went down to the bottom. The bridge fell almost at the same time. The enemy suddenly had the wide Tiber between them and Rome. Horatius had saved the city.

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Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father, went to check in with the priests at the temple just before setting out for Spain. His army was waiting for him in their ships at the port of Carthage.

The priests told him the omens were good, so he went ahead and performed the usual ceremonies, which included the sacrifice of a sheep.  His nine-year-old son Hannibal stood with him at the altar and watched his dad make the sacrifice and go through the prayers.

When they were finished, Hamilcar asked the priests and other men present to stand back a little from the altar while he spoke to his son.  “Would you like to come along with me to Spain?” he asked the boy. He had been given the mission of subjugating Iberia in preparation for the coming war with Rome.
“Oh yes!”  Hannibal had been told that he would have to wait to go until he was older.  “Please let me go!” he begged. “Please, father!”
“All right,” said Hamilcar.  “I’ll show you how to fight.  And do you know why?  So you will always beat a Roman.”

And then he made the little boy swear.
He led him to the altar and lifted him up to the dead sheep that he had just sacrificed; and he made Hannibal put his little hand on the still-warm body and swear that he would never, ever, become a friend to the Romans.

So deep and so strong was the resentment Hannibal’s father felt after that first lost war with Rome.

A legend?  The story came from Hannibal himself.  That is and isn’t reason to believe it, since he was a most wily old fox and was known to mislead all his life. But that he hated Rome no one ever doubted and so it might as well be true.

He told it years later to a Greek king.  Hannibal had lost his last battle with the Romans and was on the run. In Greece King Antiochus took him in, which was a bit of humanity the Romans didn’t appreciate, of course.  Rome was tired of the way Greece had always intrigued against them. Now Rome spread the rumor that Hannibal had become their secret ally.  This made the king doubt and he asked Hannibal outright if it was true.  That’s when he told the swearing story and added: “Now that you know this, which I’ve never told to anyone, be sure that as long as you are hostile to Rome, you can count on me as your most trustworthy supporter.  But if ever you turn around and become an ally of Rome’s, then watch out for me—you won’t need to call and ask me how I lean.  There is nothing in this world—nothing—that I won’t do to harm Rome.”

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Erika wrote:

Pretty impressive, a great general [Hannibal] was. What puzzles me most is why these extraordinary gentlemen hesitated to take Rome when it was within their reach. Attila had a chance to do it, but stopped short. Was it the name, the fame of Rome? Or what was it?

Hannibal was near Rome twice with his armies and both times decided against going ahead with an attack. Why?

The first time he gave up the idea because taking Rome would have meant a siege and his strength, his safety, was in movement. He couldn’t afford to let himself get stuck anywhere. He had no siege machines and no supply line back to Carthage. His larger strategic plan for Italy was to turn Rome’s allies against her one by one and to form a coalition. So, though he was near Rome and had no Roman army in front of him, he turned and marched away.

The second time, seizing Rome had not been part of his plan and one of his rules was to avoid being forced into doing anything that he was unprepared for. The plan was wonderful enough. He had been stuck sieging the siegers around Capua. What?

When the city of Capua had declared itself an enemy of Rome and friend of Hannibal, the Roman senate sent an army to punish it. Hannibal came to their aid with HIS army and surrounded the besieging Roman force. For a long time both armies stayed camped around the starving city and their squirmishes produced no result. Hannibal realized he would have to do something fast because the city couldn’t hold out much longer and the senate was preparing another army to fight him. So he came up with one of his tricks.

One night, leaving his campfires burning to fool the enemy, he marched his army secretly to Rome, which he thought was not well-defended. He knew that when it became known that his army was just outside the capital, the Roman forces everywhere, including the one at Capua, would drop what they were doing and hurry to defend it. The ruse worked.

But if Rome was so weak, why didn’t Hannibal quickly take it?

As it happened, there WAS a force in Rome. The latest group of conscripts had been told to report to the city for service on that day. Seeing them, Hannibal decided taking Rome would be too risky, and went back to Capua, following his original plan.

My sources are Livy and Polybius.

As you see, erika, there was nothing spooky—the city of Rome had no mysterious power to intimidate—at least over clear-headed leaders like Hannibal and Caesar. I don’t know much about Attila’s reasons. I always heard it was Pope Leo who made him change his mind about taking the city.
Remember there were 650 years between Hannibal’s Rome and Attila’s. In 200BC the town could not have been imposing.

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