Book II · The Mediterranean Wars
Epilogue
Rome in the Late Summer of 216
It is the convention of military-historical writing to conclude a volume of campaigns at a moment of strategic completion — a peace, a settlement, a definitive transition of one strategic configuration into another. The present volume violates this convention deliberately. It ends, instead, at a moment of strategic crisis: the late summer of 216 BC, with the Roman state in the immediate aftermath of the worst single-day military catastrophe in its history, with the Italian alliance system partially disintegrated and only beginning to be tested for its capacity to absorb the further shocks the war would deliver across the following decade, with Hannibal's army victorious in the Italian theater and the Carthaginian state's strategic position superior to what it had been at any previous moment of the war. The Hannibalic War was not yet lost by Rome in the late summer of 216, but neither was it yet won; the strategic situation was, in modern military-theoretical vocabulary, open in a way it had not been at any previous moment since the campaign's opening. The decisions about to be taken at Rome in the autumn and winter of 216–215 BC, and the political and strategic posture the Roman state was about to adopt across the long war of attrition that would follow, would determine the war's eventual outcome. None of those decisions was yet made.
What can be said about Rome at this moment, by way of summary, is the following. The state had absorbed three catastrophic military defeats within twenty-four months — Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae — at a cumulative cost of perhaps 100,000 Roman and allied dead. This was an unprecedented loss in ancient Mediterranean military history; the comparable Athenian disaster at Syracuse in 413 BC had cost approximately 40,000 dead and had broken the Athenian state's offensive capacity for the remainder of the Peloponnesian War. The Roman demographic recovery from Cannae was, by contrast, sufficient to enable the raising of new armies within months of the catastrophe. The institutional resilience that had enabled this recovery was a function of the combined Roman-Italian alliance system: the Italian socii, even those who had defected in the south, retained the underlying institutional connection to Rome that made political reintegration possible; the Latin and central Italian core of the alliance system remained committed to Rome through institutional habit, religious and family ties, and the strategic calculation that the Roman state, even in its weakened condition, remained the more reliable long-term protector against potential alternative hegemons (whether Carthaginian, Greek, or Gallic). The strategic depth of the Italian alliance system was, in this sense, the achievement of Book I — the long political-military investment of the fourth and early third centuries BC — being now tested under conditions of maximum stress.
The Roman military instrument had been transformed by the experience of the wars covered in the present volume. The army of 216 BC was no longer the army of 264 BC. It had acquired a navy, learned how to fight on the sea, lost it to storms and rebuilt it, conducted amphibious operations across the western Mediterranean, fought set-piece engagements against Hellenistic-style combined-arms forces under Carthaginian command, and tested itself — three times — against the most formidable individual general in the ancient world. The institutional knowledge of the army was richer than at any previous moment; the strategic experience of the senatorial class was deeper; the technical competence of the Roman officer corps was higher. None of this had been sufficient to defeat Hannibal in the field. What it had achieved — what it was about to achieve, in the long campaigns following Cannae — was the institutional patience to refuse decisive engagement, the demographic depth to absorb continued defeats without strategic dissolution, the alliance-system resilience to maintain the Italian theater as a coherent strategic unit despite Carthaginian operational success, and the eventual capacity to take the offensive in theaters where Hannibal's tactical superiority could be neutralized (Spain, Sicily, eventually Africa itself).
The figures who would dominate the next phase of the war were already present in subordinate positions at Cannae or were beginning to emerge in the army commands of the post-Cannae years. The young Publius Cornelius Scipio — the same who had rescued his wounded father at the Ticinus, nineteen years old at Cannae and one of the few senior officers to escape the field — would in 210 BC, at the age of twenty-five, be entrusted with the Spanish command in succession to his father (killed in Spain in 211); his Spanish campaigns of 210–206 BC would expel Carthage from the Iberian peninsula and would establish him as the man who would eventually confront Hannibal in Africa, win the battle of Zama in 202, and acquire the cognomen Africanus by which the Roman tradition would remember him. Marcus Claudius Marcellus — already a substantial figure as the captor of the spolia opima from the Cisalpine Gallic commander at Clastidium in 222 — would emerge as the principal commander of the post-Cannae years, the man who would retake Syracuse in 212 and would, in 208, finally fall in an ambush by Numidian cavalry, having earned in his Sicilian campaigns the alternative cognomen by which the tradition would remember him: the Sword of Rome. Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator, would continue to exercise the moral and political authority that his dictatorial year had established, serving as consul again in 215 and 214 and as the architect of the strategic doctrine of which Cannae had been the catastrophic vindication. Gaius Claudius Nero, in 207 BC, would conduct the audacious flank-march from southern Italy to the Metaurus river in time to intercept Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal Barca and to destroy the only major reinforcement Carthage was ever to attempt to send Hannibal's Italian army — an action that would, in the verdict of Polybius and of subsequent military historians, effectively decide the war.
But none of this was yet visible in the late summer of 216 BC. What was visible was a smoking battlefield in northern Apulia, a senate house in continuous session at Rome, a magistrate at the gates of the city receiving the surviving consul with restraint, a body of new recruits — boys of seventeen, slaves freed for the occasion, debtors and criminals — being mustered for legions whose officers had been killed two weeks earlier on a single afternoon. The war had been begun by Hannibal's strategic vision and his three years of operational virtuosity in the Italian theater. It would be ended, eventually, by the Roman institutional resilience that those three years had tested and that Cannae had, paradoxically, confirmed by failing to break. The story of how that confirmation became victory belongs to Book III.
For the present volume, let us conclude as we began the Imperium Romanum series — with the recognition that the Roman achievement is best understood not as a sequence of brilliant individuals or decisive battles but as an institutional construction of unusual coherence and unusual capacity for absorbing shock. The years 264 to 216 BC were the years in which that construction was tested by external pressure of unprecedented intensity. It was not yet, in 216, fully proven. It was, however, beginning to be visible, in the very absence of its dissolution under conditions that would have destroyed almost any other Mediterranean state of the period. The Cannae generation of Roman magistrates would, across the following fourteen years, complete the proof.
End of Book II.
Book III — The Long War: From the Recovery After Cannae to the Battle of Zama (216–202 BC) — will treat the post-Cannae Roman recovery, the Sicilian campaigns and the fall of Syracuse, the war in Spain under the elder Scipiones and then under their son, the Metaurus, the African expedition, and the final engagement between Scipio Africanus and Hannibal at Zama.