The Ancients - Hannibal's Winter War

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

It’s fair to say that winter battles weren’t commonplace in the ancient Mediterranean world. There is, however, one striking exception. A clash that occurred in mid/late December 218 BC, in northern Italy very close to the Po River. This clash was the Battle of the River Trebia, fought between the Roman consular army of Sempronius Longus and the conglomerate Carthaginian force under the leadership of the legendary Hannibal Barca. In this special podcast, Dr Eve MacDonald, Dr Louis Rawlings and Dr Adrian Goldsworthy talk you through the run up to this decisive winter clash, before delving into the details of the battle itself. From Hannibal and his weary, worn down force emerging from the Alps to Roman soldiers wading through the icy waters of the Trebia, sit back and enjoy as Eve, Louis and Adrian talk you through the story of Hannibal’s first great victory against the Roman Republic.Part 1: The Rise of HannibalWhile you're here, why not leave us a rating and review! We'd love to know what you think.For more ancient content, why not subscribe to our Ancient History Thursday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Music:Epidemic & POND5Battle of The Nile - Grant Newman

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, we've been keeping the military history away from you for long enough. We're back talking about ancient battles, ancient commanders,

and the huge figure that is Hannibal. Now, you might remember a few months back, we had a great podcast episode with Dr. Eve MacDonald, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, and Dr. Louis Rawlings, all about the rise of Hannibal. We traced Hannibal from his beginnings in North Africa and his possible links to Cyrenaica and the city of Barca, all the way through to his campaigns in Spain and ultimately to his famous march to Italy culminating in his

crossing of the Alps. Now his crossing of the Alps is perhaps the most famous thing we remember about Hannibal but we must also remember that this was just the beginning. He was marching to Italy to fight the Romans. Getting over the Alps was just the start. The real war was about to begin and in this second part of our Hannibal episodes with Eve, Louis and Adrian, we cover what followed Hannibal crossing the Alps. We're going to be talking about the first great battle between Hannibal and the Romans, the Battle of the River Trebia. Now enjoy as Eve, Adrian and Louis talk you through the campaign, the background to this great clash, the battle itself, and what followed. So without further ado, to talk all about Hannibal and his first great clash with the Romans in the winter in around December 218 BC, here's Eve, here's Louis, here's Adrian, and a bit of voiceover from myself. Enjoy.

It's late 218 BC, and Hannibal Barker has just completed one of the greatest adventures from ancient history, his crossing of the Alps. Dr Eve MacDonald explains why this feat was so extraordinary for the time. Part of the story of Hannibal's greatness is Hannibal's ability to do almost supernatural things. And in the 3rd century BC, people didn't cross those high, high mountains with armies and with elephants. You didn't do that. The only people in legend who did, the only person who did, was Hercules. And Hercules was a divinity. And so there's this idea that these high mountains are places of great remote and sort of supernatural

beings. And so in order to survive the crossing for the people on either side, in order to get down with this amazing army that he has, he had to have had the backing of the gods. He had to have been favored from the gods. And this is really important, of course, for Hannibal and for his own army to believe in him, that they were on a cause maybe, that they were going to survive. And so in that way, it's just one of the most important things about Hannibal. And of course, it's the thing that everybody remembers the most about him. He said he crossed the Alps with elephants. And of course, the elephants being the other idea that he brought these amazing creatures of war with him to Italy.

So it's definitely the most iconic thing he does. But despite the feat's immortalised legacy, Hannibal's march had come at great cost, as Eve, Dr Louis Rawlings and Dr Adrian Goldsworthy highlight. So he arrives in the Po, we think it's near Turin, modern Turin, the area of the Taurisi tribe, and they're a disaster. Hannibal had begun the march from the Rhone with about 38,000 infantry and about 9,000 cavalry.

By the time he gets to Italy, and we know this because Hannibal set up an inscription right at the end of the war in the south in the Temple of Hero and Sinia, he actually says how many men he brought into Italy. He had 20,000 infantry and only 6,000 cavalry. He's probably got his best men left and it's significant more cavalry survived proportionately than infantry and normally you'd expect horses to break down on a journey like that sooner than men, if only because in the last resort, a man can eat a horse, a horse isn't going to eat a man. But also, you know, these are not animals that are shod. They've been through a rough time. They're in quite a poor state. So Hannibal needs to recover.

The attrition rate on this grand army of his is tremendous, and what's left is an exhausted, hungry, scarcely human-looking ragtag group of men. Of his original force that had set out from southern Spain with him some six months earlier, less than half had reached the fertile plains of northern Italy. It's quite staggering. Hannibal had to rest his army. He had to recover, to resupply and to replenish. The first thing he does is pretty brutal. He comes to the nearest Gallic community,

and because they're not friendly enough, storms their main town, sacks it. It might be a letting off steam moment for the men. It's certainly a chance to get food, to get supplies, to get roofs over your head, somewhere where you can sit by warm fires. So there is a recovery. There's that initial action, even though part of his plan, probably from the start,

and certainly by the time he gets to Italy with just 26,000 men, he needs the tribes of northern Italy, the Gauls, the Ligurians, the others who've been resisting Roman expansion for generations, he needs them to join him because he doesn't have enough warm bodies in his army to face up to large Roman armies. It's going to be much, much harder if he is heavily outnumbered in all his battles. So if Hannibal needed to reinforce his army with Roman-hating warriors from northern Italy. You might think that this initial infamous sacking of Taurasia,

the capital of the Gallic Taurini tribe, might have been a bit of a blunder. But the reality was very different. He replenishes his army from the sack of this city. He also shows the Gauls he's not to be messed with. His army is not to be trifled with. Even in the state that it's in, it's capable of defeating them in battle very tidily. So it has a propaganda effect as well as a logistical effect. And it means that the tribes are more disposed to treat him with respect. And many tribes are actually keen.

And so this shows the prowess of this particular force even if it's a bit smaller than they were expecting it when it first arrived massacring one gallic community doesn't mean that the neighboring tribes actually feel any well or worse disposed towards you because they've probably been enemies and rivals for generations anyway these are not united peoples and you have the advantage just as you've had on the other side of the Alps. You've turned up with a very strong force. You're a good friend. You're someone worth having on your side if you're an ambitious local chieftain or leader

or tribe with stronger neighbors. So there is a bit of a rush to ally with Hannibal before someone else does. There's always that dynamic going on. And it's the same thing. Julius Caesar will experience the same thing in Gaul. It's a question of, I don't want my enemy to get these people on my side, so I'd better go and make friends with them first. Hannibal proceeded to recruit more men from the local Gallic tribes.

But he wasn't alone in wanting their support. A Roman army, commanded by Publius Scipio the Elder, was nearby. So the last time we saw Publius Scipio, he was in Marseilles. And he was in Marseilles and he was there with his brother and he had a consular army and he was on his way to Spain. Because we have to remember that the Romans were sending two armies, one to Sicily to invade Africa and one to Spain. And the whole reason Hannibal invades Italy is to stop the

Roman invasion of Africa and the Roman invasion of Spain. And he succeeds, of course, by doing this, by crossing the Alps. Scipio has sent his army on under his brother's command to Spain and returned to northern Italy. There were already a couple of legions in northern Italy because of this ongoing struggle with the tribes of the area. The Romans have been setting up colonies in the Po Valley and in this area. Understandably enough, the people who've lived there for even longer are not too impressed by their farmland being taken and also by the behavior. You know, Roman colonists probably tend to be rather bullish in their attitude, their sense of superiority over the locals.

So there is constant friction and frequent campaigning that will continue. The Romans will keep sending armies to northern Italy, even at the height of the crisis with Hannibal, because this is a vital area for them. So he's come back, he's taken charge of the two legions there. He calls on the Gauls and the Gallic tribes to come and support him. As we've seen with Hamilcar and those warriors that he had enlisted from the defeated, the Gauls were expected to do the same for the Romans. So even though they've been recently defeated in a number of battles in the late 220s, they are providing considerable numbers of troops for this northern Roman expeditionary force. Scipio therefore therefore, takes this force

and tries to find out where Hannibal is. Scipio masses his cavalry and light infantry, the velites, these skirmishers that come, and marches out to sort of basically reconnaissance in force. Go and have a look. Find out, you know, where the Carthaginians are, what they're up to, what sort of strength they are, how they fight.

Because remember, it's a generation since anyone's fought the Carthaginians are, what they're up to, what sort of strength they are, how they fight. Because remember, it's a generation since anyone's fought the Carthaginians in any meaningful way, and they don't know, is this army the same as the ones we fought in Sicily and Africa in the First Punic War? The Roman army is a temporary force where people volunteer. It doesn't have a sort of institutional memory in any great sense. And so these light infantry, probably numbering a couple of institutional memory in any great sense. And so these light infantry, probably numbering a couple of thousand, maybe as many as 4,000, plus about 3,000 cavalry, go in search of

Hannibal's army just to find out where it is so that the Romans know and can think about how to act with the main field army. Hannibal takes all of his cavalry, which has been boosted and is being boosted by Gallic recruits all the time, and he has around about 10,000 now. So he's acquired about 4,000 or so, and he brings at least 6,000 of those to the Ticinus. And there we see the first military encounter between Hannibal and the Roman force. The river Ticinus, or the river Ticinus, is a tributary of the Po River, and it was near this river, somewhere to the west of modern-day Pavia, that the Roman and Carthaginian scouting parties stumbled into each other. Hannibal threw down the gauntlets to his opposing number. Scipio, keen for glory, picked it up. We sometimes sympathise with Hannibal more because we think of the Romans as the strong people,

the imperialists, the ones who are going to go on to conquer the empire, but they haven't done that yet. This is the time when actually, in this war, there's a good case made the Romans are the victims, and they're the weak side, and they're the ones who've suddenly got this invader turning up on their doorstep. So there is a sense, rather like the Gauls forming up on the other bank of the River Rhône, like the Allobroges in the Alps, that you have to meet the enemy with boldness from the start, show you're not frightened of him, because otherwise he'll gain confidence and you might start to lose it.

With neither side backing down, Hannibal had this small Roman force in his sights. Without delay, he launched a full-blooded attack. Game on. Hannibal sees the screen of light infantry and just charges. So rather than doing what normal cavalry engagements involve, which is a lot of riding backwards and forwards and throwing sticks at each other, even the heavy cavalry do that kind of thing. They're not lancers or medieval knights or anything like that. They're armed with throwing weapons predominantly. Rather than do that, Hannibal's cavalry just charges forward and drives the velites through the Roman ranks, creates a bit of disorder, and then it's a clash

of the heavies on both sides. There's a whirling combat. This is led by Scipio. Hannibal is perhaps involved, but a bit more supervising rather than charging around like a maniac. And Hannibal is perhaps involved but a bit more supervising rather than charging around like a maniac. And Hannibal has more cavalry, and he's got the Numidian-like cavalry, and these start to just envelop the Roman force. The Numidians, though, swarm round and attack from the rear. They fall on the velites and start doing very considerable casualties amongst them, and, of course, the Romans are surrounded, and so they have to fight their way out.

Surrounded and in a state of panic, the Roman force was in trouble, not least Scipio himself. Scipio, the consul, is wounded and only rescued in one tradition by his 19-year-old son, in another by a Ligurian slave of his. And obviously, the family liked the idea of the son doing it, but who knows. Nevertheless he gets away with it and his army has had a bloody nose which is not the start you want to a campaign. Hannibal had gained first blood. An injured Scipio was forced to withdraw, his Carthaginian enemy breathing down the neck of his crippled army. Hannibal has now demonstrated that he can win a victory over Romans in battle, and that means the Gauls are more likely to join him.

Scipio has seen how many Gauls are going to him, even at this point, and he decides that this is now really hostile, potentially dangerous territory to be campaigning, and so he goes back towards Placentia, and Hannibal follows. This pursuit ultimately led Hannibal to the River Trebia. The River Trebia is very small, not much more than a stream really, but it's near the Roman colony of Placentia, modern-day Piacenza, in northern Italy. And it's a tributary, it flows into the Po,

so there are major features the armies have to be careful about. The Romans have been basing themselves around the colony, it's a good place to get supplies, so the Romans are making the most of the fact this is their country. With Scipio's Roman armies settled nearby, Hannibal positioned his force a few miles west of the Trebia, where he continued to garner more support. Some recruits, however, proved more infamous, shall we say, than others. At some point, Hannibal receives around about 2,000 Gallic deserters from Scipio's camp. These men had waited till after dark, had broken out of camp

by beheading the guards that they could and bringing the heads to Hannibal to show, look what we've done. And Hannibal goes, thank you very much. Obviously, these Gauls have festering resentments towards the Romans anyway, but now they can see that the Romans can be beaten and that Hannibal is the hope, then they're emboldened to do this and to actually escape from a Roman camp is no mean feat. So they join Hannibal and Hannibal doesn't use them in his army. They're a little bit untrustworthy. You don't know whether this is going to be a trick. The Romans are sending these as faux deserters. But he nevertheless decides to say thank you very much and sends them home to spread the news, to gather more recruits and to say that Hannibal is

going to win this war and he's going to defeat the Romans for them and drive them out of the north. Hannibal's forces continue to swell. but his run of good fortune seemingly turned when he received reports from the Roman camp that another Roman consular army had arrived, commanded by Sempronius Longus. So Sempronius Longus had been sent to Sicily. He was the consul who was going to invade Africa and win the war gloriously by defeating the Carthaginians in their own turf.

Of course, unfortunately, Hannibal had arrived in Italy. All of a sudden, the Romans realized that, oops, Hannibal's not going to allow them to fight the war they want to fight. He's going to change the paradigm of the war and fight it in Italy. fight it in Italy. And so Longinus has to go from Sicily with his army all the way up the whole of Italy and meet up with Scipio in the Po Valley. And it's kind of an amazing story. We don't really know how he does it, whether he disperses his army and says, okay, everybody meet in Rimini, or if they go by sea, there's stories of him passing through Rome, so we're not really sure, but the army reconvenes in the Po Valley, and he then, after Ticinus,

joins up with the other consul at Trebia. Now, Scipio thinks, we've got two armies here, they don't know each other, they haven't campaigned together, they'll be difficult to control in a battle, we should wait a bit of time. And he's also got this wound, and he doesn't really want Sempronius to get all of the glory from an immediate victory. whether they'll be difficult to control in a battle, we should wait a bit of time. And he's also got this wound, and he doesn't really want Sempronius to get all of the glory from an immediate victory. He'd like to be there himself, but he can't.

So Sempronius tries to take advantage of that. He's a man in a hurry. So one of the things about the Roman system that makes it so important for military victory to happen during their time in command of armies is that the next year there's a new commander. And so Roman glory is won through military command. Consuls go out, they're given a sphere of influence, a province as it's called, and they go and they conquer. And all the success and the wealth and the loot that comes with that is part of their career. It's how they build their own family and their own family's reputation. Sempronius's time in command was running out. He needed a military victory.

He's been deprived of his glorious campaign in Africa and he knows that it's now December and it's likely that the new consuls will be taking office fairly soon and he will be replaced. If we wait and make the armies combine more cohesively, drill them together, skirmish with the Carthaginians indecisively, that kind of thing, to gel these armies, time will be up and he won't be in command. And he's quite confident of his own command abilities, most Roman commanders are, and decides that he is going to win this battle against Hannibal.

It wasn't long before Sempronius spotted an opportunity to do just that. Hannibal is gathering supplies and is raiding and intimidating a particular Gallic tribe on the far side of the Trebia, or the near side for Hannibal, of the river Trebia, which is a tributary of the river Po. It flows north into the river Po. And while his men are, he's got about 3,000 foragers who are out looting and killing and raping and doing all the kind of thing foragers get up to, the Gauls turn up in the camp of Sopronius and say, help us, we're being attacked.

And he sends out his cavalry to intercept and some velites to intercept. And they do, and they actually inflict heavy casualties on these dispersed foragers. And Hannibal's forces flees back towards Hannibal's camp. Sopronius sends out more troops because he's trying to press his advantage and he thinks perhaps that the Carthaginians might be drawn into a proper battle.

But Hannibal, showing great restraint, had other ideas. He realises that this is not the time for the pitch battle that he wants. He's not prepared for it, he's not ready for it. He's got other ideas about how he wants it to go. And so he forms his forces on his camp, which is always a very, very difficult thing to assault, that kind of a thing. He forms his forces, receives the routed foragers, and then stands and does not engage the Romans. Hannibal thinks that the casualties that his men have received are only spurs to Sempronius's rashness, and he's going to use that to exploit Sempronius's overconfidence

in the coming battle at Trebia. Over the next few days, Hannibal surveys the plain west of the river Trebia, studying the ground of his intended battlefield, planning the battle he wanted to fight. So one of the things that is really interesting about Hannibal and about his style of command is about this kind of Hellenistic leadership, is that he's very concerned about his army. He takes a huge amount of care about them. about his army. He takes a huge amount of care about them. And we also know that he's well-schooled in very, very up-to-date strategies and techniques. So we know that he's incredibly well-prepared, for example, with spies, with scouts. He's always two steps ahead of the Romans. He always seems to know for those first years he's in Italy what the Romans are going to do next. And so what he does leading up to the Battle of Trebia is that he sets a whole plan, basically,

for the Romans, a whole plan for them to fall right into exactly what he wants them to do. Hannibal chooses a position. He probably camps on higher ground, but looks at the plain beyond the river, and it's good it's open this is good country for his cavalry but he also sees as Hannibal will often see something else because he discovers a dried up water course a gully that is behind where he wants the Romans to be and where he's going to lure the Roman army to deploy. He can hide a number of troops in this gully because planes undulate, but basically a death file in a plane is invisible. and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11, we reveal new perspectives

on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. At the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and

well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate, light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion-dollar wars, or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. The evening before the battle, he gets his youngest brother, Mago,

who's with him on campaign, to pick 100 infantry and 100 cavalry, the bravest men that he knows in the army, and to bring them to him outside his tent. He says to these men, you are the bravest men I know and you're going to win this battle for me tomorrow. Each pick 10 men that you can trust and rely on and you will follow Mago into an ambush and wait there until the moment is absolutely right and then you're going to win this battle. And so these 100 men pick 10 extra cool dudes of

some sort, you know, whether they're their mates or whether they're people with serious reputations for being hard, they pick the best quality warriors. And this 1,000 cavalry and 1,000 infantry lie in this defile, in this sort of river gully amongst the brambles and the weeds until the battle starts. Hannibal's trap was set. And at dawn the next day, sometime around the 21st of December, he put his plan into action. It's cold. It's like, we think, early December by this point. And they're about to fight a battle in winter conditions, which is very rare, and we don't get very much of that in the ancient world. So this is quite an extraordinary circumstance.

And our Greek source, Polybius, talks about the fact that he gives them breakfast, and we don't get breakfast mentioned very often in the ancient world, much less in terms of battle. And then he sends his cavalry to kind of lure the Romans out of their camp. He sends out his Numidians to attack Longus's camp. They skirmish out the front, they throw javelins at the pickets, they trade insults, and there's even one source talking about some of the Numidians falling off their horses comedically to mock the Roman cavalry and to climb back into

their saddles. And this kind of gets Sempronius's expectations up, let's put it that way. He gets fired up by these Numidians. And so he sends out his cavalry and he sends out his velites to engage them as quickly as possible. And these Numidians then withdraw across the river. Seeing the Numidians withdrawing, Sempronius and his army took the bait. They come charging out of their camp early in the morning, and of course it's late in the season, it's dark in the morning, there's barely light, it's foggy and cold. I don't know if you've been to the Po Valley, but in the winter it can be quite something. Sempronius marches his full army out across the river. Now there are a couple of problems with this.

Firstly, they haven't had breakfast. Hannibal's army have, and they've got time to prepare and to get assembled in their battle line. Sempronius's army marches out with empty stomachs and also crosses this freezing cold river. Chest height on the infantry, so we're told. And consequently, before the battle has even started, these Romans are freezing cold river, chest height on the infantry, so we're told. And consequently, before the battle has even started, these Romans are freezing cold. They've not had any nourishment. They've got empty, grumbly stomachs. And they're going to have to fight a pitch battle against the Carthaginians with these conditions, and also possibly sleet blowing in their eyes at this point as well. The Romans are rather naive. They're inexperienced by comparison, but also it

seems like a good idea. They know that they've got the best confidence in their legionaries. The heavy infantry will form the center of the army. It's an open plain. We're really good at fighting in places like that. And again, it's the same instinct. This man's invaded our country. We need to stand up to him, coupled with the fact that you've not got more than a few weeks left of your term as consul. So if you're going to get the glory for this, it's got to be really soon. As the Roman and Carthaginian forces lined up, it was a tale of two armies. One warm and well-rested, the other cold and about to fight on an empty stomach. Battle was close at hand.

Hannibal deploys in fairly conventional way, cavalry on the flanks, infantry in the centre, the Romans are doing the same. Hannibal has his elephants that end up on the flanks next to the cavalry. The Carthaginians then send out these Balearic slingers. And the great thing about slings is that, unlike bows and javelins, which are affected by the wind and the rain and the sleet, slingstones fly true through this stuff. So if you sling something, it will hit its target, irrespective more or less of the wind and the conditions.

So these Balearic slingers and the other Carthaginian skirmishers, who are now fighting what are partially exhausted Velites, who have used up most of their ammunition chasing the Numidians about the field, are now able to drive back the Roman light infantry. The Romans then engage centrally with their main infantry forces and beat the Carthaginians, who have deployed their Africans and their Iberians in the centre, and also their Gauls, their new Gallic allies, in large blocks, because at this point the Gauls aren't integrated. By the time we get to the Battle of Cannae, the Carthaginian commander

is able to divide his Gauls and Iberians up into small blocks, into units of a few hundred, and intersperse them. But at this point, the Gauls are better left together. They speak this funny language. They're not really used to operating with the Carthaginians, so he's put them in the centre, actually put them in the centre and have the Africans and Iberians on the flanks of the main line. And the Romans engage with that, and there's a very bitter fight across the entire centre. On the flanks, the Roman cavalry, 2,000 on each flank, is completely outmatched by the 10,000 Carthaginian cavalry, 5,000 on each flank, heavily outmatched, and also elephants as well.

The thing about elephants is that if horses are not accustomed to them, they panic. They don't like the sound, they don't like the smell, they don't like the squealing, all that kind of stuff. It just panics them, and so it's a great disordering effect. Plus they're really difficult to kill as well. It's worth reminding ourselves this is really the only major battle, certainly of Hannibal's great victories, where elephants play any role at all.

And he probably would have won without them. So all the incredible effort that he's taken to get them all this way, you have to wonder, you know, is it an obsession with the big and the powerful? It's making a small number of Tiger tanks rather than lots of really flexible, cheaper assault guns and other medium tanks because the damn things break down anyway. But boy, do they look good. Boy, do they capture the imagination. So the elephants attack what's remaining of the velites,

maybe suffer some casualties. We're not so sure whether there are any fatalities, but are remaining of the velites, maybe suffer some casualties, we're not so sure whether there are any fatalities, but are directed against the Roman cavalry and the Roman cavalry just scatters and driven off the battlefield. So the Roman infantry in the centre are fully engaged and the flanks have been stripped. So this double envelopment that appeared to see this is being replayed again, but with infantry this time. It was then, at this critical moment when Hannibal had started to envelop his foe, that the Carthaginian commander sprung his trap.

Up pops Mago and his strike force of 2,000. Like a substitute in a football match, with fresh legs, they come running onto the battlefield and attack the Romans from the rear, and this is just too much for the Romans. They've had enough. When his hidden men appear behind the Roman line, the Roman army starts to collapse. His numerically superior and probably qualitatively superior cavalry overwhelm the Roman horsemen on the wings. However, the thing probably he doesn't expect is that in the centre of his army, a big hole is punched by the Roman legionaries, who then march through. Now, Hannibal hasn't got that many spare men. He's formed his army without any significant reserve.

So once the Romans have punched through, there's nothing to stop them. But the Romans also can see the rest of their army collapsing all around them. They keep going and then do a wide loop round to go back to Placentia and the camp because they can't do anything to stop. They know this is a route, there's nothing they could do. The Carthaginians hunt down everybody else on the battlefield and they've got fresh legs, they've got a thousand fresh cavalrymen who have not been doing anything other than sitting there waiting for their chance to do this and they hunt down the battlefield. So it's a decisive victory for Hannibal.

By the end of the day, some 20,000 Roman soldiers had perished. Hannibal, meanwhile, had lost several thousand troops, although the exact number of casualties is unclear. One thing, however, is clear. With the Romans in full retreat, Hannibal had won a clear victory. If you go back and look at the First Punic War, the Romans were the aggressors all the time. In terms of strategy, they provoked it really by intervening in an area the Carthaginians thought was their turf. And then they take the offensive. All the strategic offensives are launched by the Romans and they'll invade North Africa and they'll suffer their only really serious battlefield defeat in North Africa, when it is largely decided by elephants, and these cause the problem. But after that, when there's a pitch battle, the Romans tend to win. So the Romans are confident, and the Romans won the war. They've come through with the belief that they are superior.

They think, well, we're just as good. We're just as brave. We won the last war. We're going to win this. So there is a great urge to fight, and then you have a shattering defeat. Trebbia demonstrates Hannibal, battle winner, not just against savages and barbarians and Iberians, he's won battles against those many times, but against a proper Roman army, civilisation, as it were. He's overcome a civilised army in a straight battle, and for the Greek and Roman army, civilization as it were. He's overcome a civilized army in a straight battle. For the Greek and Roman writers this is a very important thing and of course its impact on morale in Italy, its impact on morale in Rome is quite profound. It galvanizes the Romans to really take this war much more seriously.

They mobilized many more forces for the next campaign. So they send out the next two consuls, each with a new army, to join up with the survivors of Sempronius and Scipio's force. But they also send troops to Sardinia, to Sicily, and to southern Italy to garrison it, just in case there are problems. So the Romans really start to gear up for this war because of this. They know now that Hannibal is not going to be a pushover necessarily. The other thing that happens really importantly is it then demonstrates

to the Gauls that Hannibal is a battle winner. And so as soon as he does defeat the Romans at the Battle of Trebia, all huge amounts of the tribes and the peoples of northern Italy come over to his side. And one of the things that he talks about, or we think that he talks about in his plans and strategies, his ideas around this invasion of Italy, is that he sets out to free the Italians from the Romans. I mean, the Romans had just finished conquering this northern part of Italy. They had just spent the previous century conquering the south of Italy. And so there was a lot of room there to approach a lot of unhappy Roman allies who had been fighting in wars against them.

And so Hannibal sets out with this very, very Hellenistic idea of freeing the Italians from the Roman oppression. And that really is important for him then, to beat the Romans in a set battle from the get-go, and really that sets off his whole campaign in Italy. Victory at the Trebbia had kick-started Hannibal's campaign in northern Italy. But there was still plenty of hard fighting ahead. So Hannibal is a young man, and these wars against the Romans are never short.

The first war had lasted 23 years. This war will actually last 16 years. We've only been in Italy for a few weeks and Hannibal's already crushed two Roman forces. He has comprehensively defeated two consular armies in pitch battle and yet he's not even got into Italy proper. He's only in Cisalpine Gaul, which has only recently fallen to the Romans. There are many, many more battles to be fought. There are many more campaigns to be waged. If Hannibal is going to break up the Roman alliance, he's going to have to do it by demonstrating that the Romans are incapable of

defeating him in battle. And that means he needs to fight more battles. And he seeks out battles continuously throughout his campaigning, obviously with the caveat that he can, in fact, choose not to fight on occasion when it doesn't suit him. And there are a number of battles where he pulls away after an indecisive engagement of the first day. At the end of the day, his army melts away, disappears, and the Romans are left to wonder where on earth he's gone. And they are unable to sort of secure their advantage. And it's quite striking that Hannibal has won the first of his great battles, Trebia. He has, in 217, the following year, the Battle of Trasimene to fight and win.

He has the Battle of Cannae, which is the greatest Roman military commitment up to that point, and in fact becomes Rome's greatest military defeat when they lose something in the region of 50,000 men in a single day. But that only takes us even down to 216. In that time, a third of the Roman Senate will die. Something like 100,000 Romans and allies will die. You know, these are losses on a great war scale with a community that just hasn't experienced anything like this before. And in those first three years of the war, by any normal rules of warfare in the ancient world, Hannibal won. The big problem was that the Romans wouldn't accept that.

They didn't give in. And in the end, it's that stubbornness, this bloody-mindedness that pulls them through. And they learn. You know, the army's Hannibal fights at the start are clumsy, unsophisticated, poorly led. But there is an irony in the sense that the young Scipio Africanus, as he would become, is there at Tichinus, may save his father's life. And this is the man who will drive the Carthaginians out of Spain and then go beat them in North Africa and be the only Roman to defeat Hannibal in a pitched battle, the Battle of Zama at the very end of things. But again, it comes back to this sense in 218. Very strange thing that the march to Italy is already pretty bizarre, unlikely, improbable. And then even more improbable,

unpredictable things are going to happen in this next titanic struggle, because it is fought on an appalling scale. And even after their bad first three years, the Roman losses continue to be dreadful. And this will spread to Spain, to Macedonia, to, says Alpine Gaul, to North Africa. You know, a lot of communities are caught up in this power struggle. And the losses and the devastation and the sack of communities is appalling. But again, we know that they didn't. Although the Romans would ultimately evict Hannibal from Italy and pursue him to his North African homelands and beyond. His legacy endures to this day, stronger than ever. I think that what I find so interesting about Hannibal is that he's a Carthaginian,

and we know so little about Carthage, and we understand so little about the Carthaginian culture and their place in the Mediterranean. So I think, for me personally, that's a really important part of my interest in Hannibal. I also think that Hannibal becomes such an icon because the Romans, of course, become so powerful and the Romans conquer the whole of the Mediterranean world. And Hannibal was the one who challenged the Romans the most. And so, in fact, by challenging Rome and by taking the Romans to the very edge of defeat, in many ways, Hannibal is the greatest of all Roman enemies

and the Romans are the greatest of all empires. There'll be biographies of Hannibal, even though it's pretty much impossible evidence-wise to write one. There'll be certainly more books about his campaigns about his battles about his role and he will appear in studies of military history because he's influenced so many other people but also there is a lot that is staggering about these campaigns the ability to kind of get the psychology right of the man of of the enemy commanders, of his own officers, to put them in the right frame of mind for victory. And to get it all working together, I think it's absolutely tremendous achievements.

I think those are his outstanding qualities. But I also think there's more to it than just that, in that he survives for so long in Italy. He fights the Romans for 16 years. He goes back to Africa. He survives defeat in Africa to become a politician in Carthage. He's then exiled to the eastern Mediterranean. And he does, as his oath said, always hold on to this idea of never allying to the Romans. And he fights the Romans until the very end. He's 65 years old and the Romans have finally beat everybody around him and he eventually has to take his own life. So I think that kind of determinism probably is one of the reasons why people are fascinated by him. I think

that he represents the other side of empire or fighting against empire for certain people as well. And so he was a figure, not just in the Roman imagination, but also I think in the Greek Eastern Mediterranean. People used to visit his tomb or the place of his tomb, which is in Turkey today. For centuries, it was a place of pilgrimage. People would go to the tomb where Hannibal was buried. And people talk about that into the Byzantine period as well. So there's something about that memory of this man who was so much a figure of opposition to Rome that is both important to the Romans but also important to all of those others who fought against the Romans as well. I hope you've enjoyed this part two of our special episodes on Hannibal. It was great to interview Dr. Eve MacDonald, Dr. Louis Rawlings, and Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, all about this fascinating figure.

And you can rest assured that there will be more Hannibal content to come in 2022. If you want more ancients content, and of course you do, then why not subscribe to our Ancients newsletter, the link to which is in the description below. See you in the next episode. Thank you.