The Ancients - The Rise of Hannibal

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

He was one of the greatest enemies the Romans ever faced. An excellent general and a larger-than-life figure, he led an army across the alps and dealt a series of crushing defeats upon the Romans on Italian soil. His achievements have become a thing of legend and his name has become immortalised. He was Hannibal Barca. Hannibal rests amongst antiquity's greatest generals, but how did he rise to become such a stellar commander, leading his men to incredible victories against the then dominant powerhouse in the Mediterranean? In this episode, Dr Louis Rawlings, Dr Adrian Goldsworthy and Dr Eve MacDonald explore the impressive ascent of the Carthaginian general to the status of one of the most famous military leaders in antiquity.The Rise of Hannibal can be found at https://access.historyhit.com/what-s-new/videos/rise-of-hannibal

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients 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. 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're doing something slightly different. This is quite new turf for The Ancients, because recently on History Hit TV, access.historyhit.com, we released a new documentary called The Rise of Hannibal, all about the rise of Hannibal Barker from his beginnings, from his background in North Africa to his immortalised crossing of the Alps. In that documentary, we have three stellar contributors, three stellar historians in Dr. Eve MacDonald, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy and Dr. Louis Rawlings, all three of whom have also previously been on the Ancients podcast. And speaking of the Ancients, in today's episode, we have adapted that documentary into an Ancients podcast with

even more detail. Those bits which were cut out, we've added back in. Eve, Louis and Adrian are fantastic. We put a lot of work into editing this podcast, into getting it ready. Kudos in particular to Sophie, our editor, who has been putting in a lot of hours to get this podcast ready. So without further ado, here's Eve, here's Adrian, here's Louis, and a bit from myself to tell the story of the rise of Hannibal. Hannibal was born in the mid-third century BC, roughly 70 years after the death of Alexander the Great. BC, roughly 70 years after the death of Alexander the Great. It's still the early stages of the Hellenistic period, but it's a time when turmoil had seized the Western Mediterranean. Dr Louis Rawlings, a walking encyclopedia on all things Hannibal and the ancient Carthaginian military, explains the unstable world that Hannibal was born into. Hannibal was born into a world war

essentially. The western Mediterranean was aflame. The Romans and the Carthaginians were in the middle of a very long war, the First Punic War, which started in 264 BC. Hannibal is born towards the end of that war, probably around 247 a'i fater yn y gweinidog fawr yn y theatr ar-leinig Carthogin, yn erbyn y rhomans yn Cicil. Felly, roedd Hannibal yn dechrau i'r byd lle mae'r rhomans a'r Carthoginwyr wedi bod yn mynd ati am mwy na ddeged a chwe, ac maen nhw'n dal i gael ambell amser i fynd hefyd. Mae Carthoginwyr hefyd yn gorfodageaniaid hefyd yn cael ei ddelio â pwysau empiriaidd eraill. Felly, yn Numidia, mae gennym ni ddwywion rhestr. Yn 255, roedd y Rhomwyr wedi

ddiffygodd Cymru ac roedd y Numidiaid wedi ymuno â nhw neu wedi'u datrys yn unigol ac felly roedd y Carthageaniaid yn dal i fwysio yno a'u hyfforddii yn Affrica. Felly, byddai bywyd Hannibal ar gyfer ei gyfnod cyntaf o flynyddoedd yn un sy'n cael ei gynnal dros war, hyd yn oed ar ddiwedd y Gwar Pwnc cyntaf, sy'n diwedd yn 242 yn y DU. Mae hyn wedi'i ddilyn yn unigol gan gyflawni o farn o'r armei Hannibal, farn o'i fater yn Affrica, ac yn cyflawni yn ymlaen â'r Cattledginion, sydd yn gallu cael eu cyllid, ac mae hefyd rhywfaint o'r poblogaeth Libiaidd. Felly mae yna war dros blwch, war dros dri mlynedd a chwe mis,

a'r rhan fwyaf o'r rhan, mae hanifl'r bap yn cynnal, hamilcar, ffynion yn ymlaen â'r mercenariadau a'r dynion sydd wedi cael eu hymdrech yn y Pwnc I. Felly, ar gyfer ei gyfnod o 8 neu 9 mlynedd, yr hyn a'i gwybod yw'r cynllun yma o'r war. Ac mae'n fawr ei bod yn gwybod y cyfranogwyr yn y war. Ac mae'n ffermio'n eithaf brudol. Ac mae'r Carthagean wedi'u pwysio'n dda iawn yn y Rhyflawniwr. Yn ogystal, maen nhw hefyd wedi colli'r Pwnc I yn y war. Felly, mae Hannibal wedi'i ddod i mewn i'r byd yma lle mae llawer o wleidyddion yn cyfranogi. Mae'r Romain yn ymwneud â'u cynyddu yn yr Idyliau ac wedi symud i'r Ciciliau, ond maen nhw hefyd yn dechrau The Romans are not only expanding in Italy and moved on to Sicily, but they also are beginning to flex their muscles elsewhere as well.

So we know quite a lot about the First Punic War. But frustratingly, annoyingly, as Adrian Goldsworthy, the ancient's veteran, points out, the same can't be said about Hannibal's family and indeed about Carthaginian elite society in general. We know a lot less about Hannibal's family, the Barca dynasty, than we'd like. That's the big problem with Carthaginian history. We don't know much about it and we never get their side of the story. Now really it emerges with Hannibal's father, Hamilcar. He's important. He's a leading

general in the First Punic War and goes on to be a leading commander subsequently. That suggests the family is one of these aristocratic, wealthy houses within the Carthaginian Republic that has a dominant role in politics, in public life, whether it's particularly military or not, who knows in his case. Yes, but other than that, we don't know very much. And on the one hand, we look at the Carthaginians and we see them as remarkably stingy with their citizenship. You know, they don't, not just like the Romans, but like anybody else, they don't really spread Carthaginian citizenship much beyond the descendants of the initial settlers. So you have, you know, the whole status of the Libby Phoenicians, these people who are sort of part Carthaginian, part Libyan, but

not quite as good as the proper Carthaginians, that survive centuries. You know, this is there a long time. However, we also look, and Hamilcar will marry Hannibal's sister to a Numidian prince, and there are sources that Hannibal will later marry an Iberian princess. So there might actually be a lot more cultural interaction and intermarriage in these aristocratic houses than we know about. So although in legal and cultural terms these might be sort of ultra-Carthaginian, ultra-traditional in their view, ethnically they might be quite different. But as with everything else, we don't know. And we don't know. We can look and say, if you're a Greek aristocrat, this is probably what you're going to do at various stages of your life. If you're a Roman aristocrat, certainly later on, we know about your education, we know about how you'd learn to read, how you'd

learn to ride, how you do all of these things. When it comes to the Carthaginians, that's not there, that sort of general idea of how things were done. So we're left really with the sense that Hannibal's father appears as this great figure on the world stage, and then Hannibal will go on to do all his things, and his brothers will be important as well, and they will lead armies. But we don't really know how they got there. What's the basis of their wealth? What's the basis of their prestige? And how do they think of themselves? Mystery still abounds surrounding Hannibal and his family's background. But this has not stopped people putting forward various theories about how the family, the Barkids, ended up at Carthage.

Dr Eve MacDonald is a lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University alongside Louis. She is also one of Hannibal's 21st century biographers. There are some really interesting theories about Hannibal's family, but we don't necessarily have any proof. So we know that he is either from a very, very old family that came with the original colonists from Tyre, so that's something that a later Roman author tells us or sort of constructs for us,

or we know that, or we think that perhaps the surname of the Barkids can tell us a little bit about where they were from, and that they may have been a relatively new family to Carthage. So perhaps only three generations in the Carthaginian political and military system. And that's really something quite interesting for us because it gives us all sorts of insight into things like social mobility. And the theory is that the name Barkid is actually connected to a place that's in Libya today that was part of the area of Cyrenaica, so eastern Libya, not far from Benghazi, and it's called Barke or Barse.

And that the name that the Barkid family comes from that, it's a Barcae or Barcae. And that the name that the Barcae family comes from that, it's a geographical toponym, that it is connected to Hannibal's family as mercenary soldiers three generations before in the end of the 4th century BC. And that they fight against Carthage, they're abandoned by their general Agathocles, who goes back to Syracuse,

and this army is encompassed into the Carthaginian world. And it shows us that the Carthaginians, first of all, are bringing soldiers into their community, into their society, and that we think they are given land and they are sort of brought through into Carthaginian citizenship that way. So that's a really interesting theory. It's a new theory.

But what's not that new, it's sort of come from the 19th century and then been picked up again. Some people have thought this through, but to me, it seems like a fairly sensible idea. And it has a lot to do with where we think the family's landed estates are, and also the fact that they might be part of a sort of military hierarchy. So almost you're born into a military family, and that's what happens. So your father's a general, your great-grandfather's a general, and you inherit that position. And so what do we know about Hannibal's earliest years? Well, the short answer is not much.

So Hannibal's got older sisters. He's actually the oldest brother. So as he begins to grow up, he has two other brothers who come into the world. He probably had a relatively typical Carthaginian elite upbringing. So he would have been educated in various languages, obviously Punic, but probably Greek as well, which was the sort of lingua franca of the Mediterranean. And he may well have also learned other languages, Numidian languages, Libyan dialects as well, o'r Cymru ac efallai y byddai hefyd wedi dysgu llangfyrdau eraill, llangfyrdau New Medin, Llybiau, a ddialegau Llybiau hefyd.

Felly, fel aelod o'r elit Carthagin, roedd yn gallu cyfathrebu â rhaglen o grwpiau a nationaliti o ran aelod o'r clas arferol Carthagin. Mae'n bosibl ei fod wedi'i adnabod yn Carhymru ond roedd ei teulu hefyd wedi cael ei ddoddau ar Hadramentum i'r ddwyll y ddynion ar gyfer cymaint o amser ac felly mae'n bosibl bod Hannibal wedi gweld ei ddoddau ar y ddynion ond ar y ddynion lle byddai'n profi bywydau cymdeithasol hefyd. Mae'n fater yn gyfarwyddwr ac mae'n gyfarwyddwr argymell yng Nghymru felly mae'n it's probable that Hannibal sees his father very rarely if he stays with his mother and his family, but it's likely that he would have seen his father and talked to him

and been educated in some way by Hamilcar. Hamilcar would have only spent a limited amount of time with Hannibal during the latter's earliest years, and it therefore begs the question, what motivated the young Hannibal to decide to follow in his father's footsteps and become a general? We can think about the motivations for Hannibal becoming a general from two perspectives. One is a family perspective and one is the general Carthaginian

perspective. So the Carthaginians were people that ruled a wide empire. They had lots of military concerns and in fact in bywyd Hannibal, roedd Carthage yn fwy neu lai yn gweithredu o 264 i 202 yn y blwyddyn. Mae Carthaginwyr yn barod i'w hymddechrau mewn rhywle. Felly mae yna ystod y 60 mlynedd o gyfansoddiad a chyngor a gwirionedd. Ac mae'n aros iawn bod llawer o Carthaginwyr wedi gweithio

yn yr Armei, neu wedi gweithio fel clases swyddogion, violence. And it's highly likely that many, many Carthaginians served in the army or served as the officer classes or in the navy as ship captains and that sort of thing. The motivations for these individuals were the same sorts of motivations that you might find in any Greek city or indeed among the Romans, which is that you would get glory. You would earn prestige from any y byddwch yn cael gofal. Byddwch yn gweithio ar gyfer unrhyw fath o llwyddiant arweinyddol, bod eich gallu i gael arian drwy Bwti wedi'i gynyddu drwy fod yn General llwyddiannus. Rydych chi wedi ddweud eich bod yn ddynol, rydych chi wedi ddweud yn ffordd y byddech chi'n ddyn ddwy a chymdeithasol gan fod yn aelod o'r elit a chael rôl o'r Cyfnodwr. Mae llawer o swyddogion a chyfnodwyr wedi'u enw yn y cyfrifion o'r Dr Ddynesau Punid II o'r Rhaedeg. Felly, rydym yn gwybod nad yw'r dyniaeth yn llwyr llyfn,

ac nid yw'n cael ei gynaliadu gan rai teuluoedd, ond mae'n debyg bod llawer o Carthaginwyr wedi'u cynnwys. Felly, yn ystod ei gilydd, byddai Hannibal wedi cael ei syniad wedi'i fframio gan y datganiad o swydd ar gyfer yr aristopwriaeth Carthaginwyr. O safbwynt ei hun a'i safbwynt teuluoedd, roedd Hannibal hefyd o'r canolfan o gwasanaeth bydol yng nghyd-destun yr Aristopraeth. O'i safon bersonol ei hun a'i safon teulu, roedd Hannibal hefyd yn ddyn y General ffamio, y General ffamio, y General gwych y mae'r Cartheginwyr wedi'i gael o'r oes. Felly, mewn ffordd, byddai'n ddewis i'w ddilyn y llwybr.

Mae'n ddyn iawn, mae'n dangos ei ddyniaeth yn gynharach path. And he's very keen, he shows his keenness quite early on when asked by his father when he's aged nine whether he would like to accompany him to Spain on campaign. Hannibal says yes, very much so. Hannibal was keen to travel with his father to Spain. And the story goes that Hamilcar was only too happy to oblige, but on condition that Hannibal take a famous oath that has since come to epitomise Hannibal and his family's animosity towards all things Roman. So the oath is the first thing we know about Hannibal and it's also one of the few things we know that may actually have come from the mouth of Hannibal himself. He may actually have told this story, and that's what makes it so interesting, because he tells the story when he's much older, and he's living in exile in

Ephesus, and he is really working for the Hellenistic king Antiochus III, Antiochus the Great, and Antiochus sort of suspects Hannibal of being maybe not completely faithful to his cause. And Hannibal tells him the story. He's like, look Antiochus, when I was nine years old, my father made me swear an oath that I would never be a friend of the Romans. And that word friend is really important here, amicitia. It really means I would never ally myself with the Romans, that I have taken a sworn oath never to become an ally of the Romans. I will never betray you for Rome, is basically what he tells this story of. So it gives us this idea just before this big departure to Spain,

Hamilcar is sacrificing to the gods and he brings his young nine-year-old son up to the altar where the sacrificial remains are. And he makes Hannibal put his hand on the altar and swear this oath, never ever, to become a friend of the Romans. Now the Romans spin this to say that Hannibal hated the Romans and the Barcads hated the Romans. But I think it's really important to understand that that's really very much

a different concept than what we get in the ancient sources. It's much more about I'll always be with whoever's fighting the Romans. I'll never ally with them. And so Hannibal headed to Spain with his father and his brothers, where he continued to learn more from his father and received a military education. There's not much that's told about Hannibal's relationship with Hamilcar in Spain. However, we get a couple of clues. So we know that from a very late source that Hamilcar was very concerned with educating his boys for war. This is part of the mythos o'r

anamnwch anamnwch i'r Roedd, ei bod yn ei hoffi gwneud yw cael ddyfyniad ar y Roedd. Ac wrth gwrs, mae Hamilcar yn meddwl y gall ei blant ei fod yn y ffyrdd ar gyfer hynny. Felly mae stori yw ei fod yn codi'i blant fel gwartheg, fel y byddai'n ei enwi nhw, i fod yn ymdrin â'r Roedd. Felly byddai of the Romans. And so the education that Hannibal would have had would have been both theoretical and practical. Theoretical in the sense that he learned military tactics, probably from books.

He also studied directly with his father. He accompanied him on campaign in various places. So he's trained as a soldier, as a commander, but he's also given training in philosophy, in all the things that a good Greek education would have been given. And he's trained in Greek because that was the way young elite men of the Mediterranean, the language and the culture they were trained in. So he's brought up to be a sort of Carthaginian of the Mediterranean world, so pretty sophisticated, but with a strong emphasis on military, military strategy. brought up to be a sort of Carthaginian of the Mediterranean world,

so pretty sophisticated, but with a strong emphasis on military, military strategy. And we know that in 229, when Hamilcar is finally killed by a Spanish tribe, that his sons were with him on that campaign. And Hamilcar actually led the Spanish pursuers away from his own sons, and he perished, according to one account, trying to elude them in a river. Hamilcar has died very heroically in the rearguard, covering the retreat of the column when they've got into a sticky situation in northern Spain. And Hannibal and his brothers are some of those who escape. So the father dies, you know, in the best possible heroic fashion. Hamilcar's death is this huge seismic moment in the young Hannibal's life. But following this family tragedy, Hannibal and his brothers opted to remain in

Spain, initially seeing service, military service, under their brother-in-law, Hasdrubal. Hasdrubal was married to one of their older sisters, and he takes over as the Carthaginian commander in Spain, and Hannibal is a young, dynamic commander. He's labelled hypostratagos, which is a term which basically means kind of sub-general, and probably right-hand man of Hasdrubal in Spain. So he's sent on most of the dangerous missions, a'r hen ddeall ysbain. Felly, mae wedi'i gyflwyno ar y rhan fwyaf o'r misiynau perthynas. Mae'n dysgu'r

gwaith o'r cyfnod a'r strategaeth yn y ffordd gan arwain y cyfweliad, gan arwain y cyfnodion gwahanol ar y cymheithiau gwahanol. Felly mae Hasdrubel yn gysylltu'n eithaf gyflym â Hannibal, ac pan mae Hasdrubel yn cael ei dd is the natural choice for the army to succeed as commander. He resembles his father, Hamilcar. He inspires the men in the same sort of way. He exhibits all the martial qualities which he's developed, which make him a great soldier as well as a great general to be. As Louis highlighted, Hasdrubal was assassinated in 221 BC. was assassinated in 221 BC. And this paved the way for Hannibal, then in his mid-twenties, to take command of the Carthaginian army in Spain.

What this army consisted of, filled with veterans who had already seen many years of service fighting in Spain, is quite extraordinary. The army that Hasdrubal and Hamilcar had crafted, that Hannibal inherits, is one that is formed really of two major elements. First there's an African contingent, which was the core that was brought over in the initial conquests. This would have been mainly Libyan subjects of Carthage who would have been paid wedi cael ei ddau ar gyfer cyflog. Felly, a oes eu bod yn broffesiynol neu a oes eu bod yn argyfwng, mae'n ddibynol, ond yn unigol, byddai wedi gweithio yn armeiniadau Carthage yn rhan o'r

ddyfodol, ond hefyd yn rhan o'r arian. Yna mae gennym ni Newmedean, sydd wedi ffurfio cafalri, yn arbennig, a sgwyrmwyr, ac maen nhw'n sgwyrmwyr o ddifon cyffredinol ac yn sgwyrmwyr o ddifon cyffredinol. Maen nhw'n arfer bod yn rhywfaint o'r hyn sy'n gyd-ddychrych yn llyfrau modern nawr, sy'n arfer ei alw'n gwartheg cyffredinol ym Mhrydain. Maen nhw'n hynod o ddiffygol, yn ddefnyddiol, ond yn amlwg maen nhw ddim yn gynnal gwarthegau eu hunain. Ac mewn gwirionedd mae cyffredinolfer anifeiliaid anifeiliaid hefyd yn rhaid i'w chwarae yn llawer o'r gyflawniadau hefyd. Ond maen nhw'n dda iawn am gyflawni, am ymarferio'r ennig. Felly o ran y cyfranogion Cymru, yna yw'r rhai mwyaf pwysig. Mae yna hefyd rhai Ffynigion Libi sy'n ymwneud â thoniau yn Ffynig yna a oedd wedi cael eu cyflawni gan Ffynigion, ond yn debyg o fod ganddyn nhw wedi cael ei ddatblygu gan Ffenisïwyr, ond oedd yn debyg o blwyd cymysgedd erbyn hynny, ac roedden nhw hefyd yn

rhoi cymaint o gwartheg a chyfartal hefyd. Ac yna, yn Sbaen, mae Hannibal yn dod ar llawer o grwpiau wario sy'n byw a'u hanfodd yn Sbaen ei hun. Felly, mae amrywiaethau Sbaen wedi rhoi trwbwydau i Hannibal ac roedd yn cael eu cymryd yn gyffredinol o he recruited heavily amongst these Iberians. In terms of when these men first become soldiers of Carthage, or soldiers of Hamilcar Barca, or then soldiers of Hannibal, who leads the units, how they're organized, almost none of that is known. What we can definitely say is that Hamilcar has been campaigning in Spain for quite a long time, and then there are more campaigns under Hasdrubal and then more under Hannibal. So you have within this army a hard core of soldiers

that have served with the family or under the family for quite a long time and do seem to be full-time soldiers, warriors. These are people who, this is what they do. They are not serving like Roman legion Romain ar ran eu cymorth. Felly maen nhw'n broffesiynolion. Mae Armei Hannibal hefyd yn cynnwys caffael enfawr o'r Iberiaid, yn debyg y bydd nifer o Iberiaid Celt, sy'n Gaelig, hanner Gaelig, hanner Iberiaid, a gydol y goll sydd wedi cymryd lle yn Iberiaid hefyd.

Ond mae hefyd elffant. Ac mae ganddo 37 elffant ar gyfer ei gynllunio, as well, but he also has elephants. And he has, for his campaign, 37 elephants, which he will take and march to Italy with. One thing we tend to forget, because again, it's a little bit less glamorous, is that as important as all of this is the command structure. And again, the sources don't really tell us about this, and they certainly don't point it out specifically, but there are very clearly a group of officers around Hannibal that have served under his father, under his brother-in-law, for a considerable time, and that allow him to do things with this army

that you wouldn't be able to unless you can trust that command when you tell him to go and do things to make the right decisions. And Hannibal isn't an Alexander. He doesn't fight spear or sword in hand at the head of the cavalry in most battles. But he will have to be somewhere. These are big armies, but he can trust the command structure to work. He can trust detachments to do what they should do if he sends them off. And he can also trust the organisation of supply to be pretty good. So there's lots. This is a very well-practised team at all levels. And we tend to look at ancient warfare very much in terms of hardware, or if we're a bit more sophisticated in culture, of

the warriors, the soldiers involved. And that's important. But when you get to battles on this scale and campaigns on this scale, the organisation higher up also matters an awful lot. Filled with veteran soldiers and proven commanders, Hannibal inherited an awesome force. And it was not long before it found itself engaged in the clash that would ultimately spark the Second Punic War against Rome. This clash was at the city of Saguntum, modern-day Sagunto. So the story of Saguntum is fundamental to how and why the Second Punic War starts. And one of the frustrating things is we know absolutely nothing about how and why this all blew up around this one city. Saguntum is south of the Ebro River,

which was, through treaty, agreed to be the Carthaginian sphere of influence in the Iberian Peninsula. But it, at some point in the period between 226 and 220, became allied to the Romans or became friendly with the Romans or called out to the Romans to help them. And if you can think about the way that Hannibal is rampaging all over the Iberian Peninsula, especially he's

done a great deal since Hasdrubal. So he's conquered way up into the Celtiberian regions, some think maybe as far as Salamanca, and some of the towns in the area are getting a little bit nervous, obviously, about this Carthaginian expansion. They're like, yeah, okay, so who are you going to call? When you have the Carthaginians on one side, well, you're going to call to the Romans, really. They're the other big power in the state. You might actually go first to somewhere like Marseilles, and so Saguntum somehow is connected to the Romans. And Hannibal involves himself in an internal dispute in the city. So there seems to be two stories going on. One is that the pro-Carthaginians in the city of Saguntum are put to death. And

Hannibal then tries to defend his interests there. But there's something else about the Saguntines and an external city as well. And these are all mixed up in our sources. Our sources are terrible for this. The only answer for our sources being so bad about this is that either they don't know or they're fudging something. So Livy is trying to construct a story in which Hannibal is to blame for everything to do with the war. story in which Hannibal is to blame for everything to do with the war. And either way, we know that in 219 BC, he lays siege to the city of Saguntum. Now, Saguntum's incredibly well fortified. It's an amazing place. It's only ever fallen once, and that was in the Peninsular War when Napoleon was in Spain, and so one other time. So it's an amazing thing that it fell to Hannibal.

in Spain and so one other time. So it's an amazing thing that it fell to Hannibal. And it is difficult to take. Some people think that Hannibal's experiences at Saguntum were so traumatic and that led to why he would never lay siege to big cities again as he went on his way into Italy, but we don't know. And so Saguntum, after a long siege, falls and the story of that siege and the fall of Saguntum and what went on there becomes really epic in the Roman imagination. Now these are the Roman allies. They did nothing to help the Saguntines while Hannibal was laying siege to them but they use this sack of the city of Saguntum as an excuse to declare war on Rome. Now, there's a number of different political and diplomatic endeavors going on at this moment. So you have Romans supposedly going to see Hannibal before this happens and telling him not to do it,

going to Carthage, but we don't know exactly how that plays out. I always like to think of this idea as young, you know, 24-year-old Hannibal meeting all these old Roman senators who've come to tell him not to do what is essentially in his territory to do, and he just dismisses them, and they're offended, and, you know, it never ends well. Hannibal sacks the city. The Romans take this very much as a slight, because again, they've demanded something and someone else who is a former enemy is not behaving as a former defeated enemy ought to. So they send another embassy to Carthage, and this is the famous one where the ambassador says, you know, I've got peace or war inside my toga, which one do you want? And the Carthaginians

tell him we want war. Hannibal had his war with Rome. But what would he do next? How would he counter the Roman juggernaut? It's not clear whether Hannibal improvises a plan when the war breaks out, or whether there had been a long strategy developed by his family to always take this kind of approach that he adopts. What he does know is that the Romans prefer to fight abroad. ymgymryd â'r ymgymryd yr ydyw yn ei ddefnyddio. Beth mae'n ei wybod yw bod y Rhomans yn barhau i ffwrdd yn y tu allan. Maen nhw'n barhau i ffwrdd yn terryfi arwain, yn ddiddorol iawn, ac mae'r strategaeth yn debygol yw bod y Rhomans yn cynnig cynnydd o Africa a'r cynnydd o Sbaen i'w cymryd, ond hefyd i geisio rhoi pwysau i gynnwys Carthage Unes i'w g. And he needs a plan that will forestall this, to try and stop this. And so his plan is essentially to march to Italy and fight the war in Italy,

which the Carthaginians never really managed in the First Punic War, where they fought mostly in Sicily and sometimes in Africa. So this is a new bold move. It is also predicated on angu bod y Carthagean yn gallu cyfrannu aralladau, a chyflenwadau a chyflenwad yn Eitle ei hun. Oherwydd mae'r Romain wedi gwneud y pen diwethaf yn dynnu'r peninsul Italia. Maen nhw wedi llwyddo'r Samnaidd, maen nhw wedi llwyddo'r Lucanwyr, y Apulewyr, y Butewyr, y Trosgwyr, y Umbriwyr, yr holl ddynion, ac yn ddiweddar maen nhw wedi llwcainio'r Lwcaeans, y Apuleans, y Buteans, y Truscans, y Umbrian, pob un o'r ddraid hynny. Ac yn ddiweddar, maent wedi bod yn ymgyrchu yn y nof

i ddynnu'r Gaeaf. Mae'r Gaeaf wedi cymryd y Plain Po, ac o amgylch 225 ymlaen, roedd y Rhomwyr wedi bod yn chwarae war mor anodd ac anadl ar gyfer y Gaeaf, ac maent wedi llwcain y rhan fwyaf o'r ddra most of the Gallic tribes by 218. In 218 the Romans had planted two colonies in the north which had angered the Gallic tribes. These were the colony of Cremona and Placentia or modern day Piacenza and these colonies were already under attack by roedd y coloni hyn wedi bod yn cael eu hynny. Felly mae Hannibal yn ymwybodol o'r ffaith bod y Gaeaf yn aros i ddod â'i os yw'n gallu marw a chyflawni i'r Cymru. Felly mae'n ei blynydd i fynd i'r Cymru, cyflawni rhai arweinwyr o'r triwg Gaelig,

ac yna ddefnyddio'r adnoddau hyn fel ffwrdd o'i gyflawni ar gyfer ei gynhyrchiadau yn yr ardal peninsul. Bydd yn cael ei hymddeimlo â'r Romain yn eu hanes. Bydd yn gwneud yr hyn y bydd y Romain yn ei wneud. Bydd yn eu llwyddo ar eu chyffyrdd yn gyflawni, as a springboard for his campaigns in the rest of the peninsula. He is going to fight the Romans in their heartland. He's going to do what the Romans would do. He's going to bludgeon them over the head repeatedly, where they think they're safe, where they think they're strong, and make them come to the negotiating table, make them give in, because that's how wars end.

This was a new, bold move indeed. But fortunately, Hannibal had a precedent. The actions of another figure, who had recently fought the armies of Rome on Italian soil, a Hellenistic general, a dashing figure who our sources describe as being the general who most closely resembled Alexander the Great in his military ability, a general called Pyrrhus. So Pyrrhus was the king of Epirus and he was the first of the sort of Hellenistic generals to come to the western Mediterranean and to bring a Hellenistic

army to the central Mediterranean zone. And he invades Italy. He invades Italy because the Romans are encroaching on the Greek cities of the southern part of Italy, of the Arch of the Foot, and it's the people of Tarentum who ask Pyrrhus to come over and help out against the Romans. And you can see the story keeps going all around the Mediterranean, and this is how we get involved in these big wars. And Pyrrhus comes over with a big army, a big Hellenistic army. He brings elephants, the whole deal.

Pyrrhus was cut from the same cloth as Alexander the Great. He was actually a relative of Alexander the Great. And when he came to Italy, southern Italy, he demonstrated several things about the Romans. A, they could be beaten in battle by a proper Hellenistic army with elephants. And secondly, with elephants, and secondly, that having won battles, it is likely that recently subdued and resentful allies will join. Hannibal is inspired by the fact that Pyrrhus detaches quite a number of Samnite tribes and other tribes in the south from the Roman alliance, and that sustains Pyrrhus' campaign and indeed Pyrrhus' allies when Pyrrhus moves to Sicily. Now, of course, that engages him in Carthaginian territory, and the Syracusans invite him over to defend their interests against the Carthaginians, and he pushes the Carthaginians

way back to the very western point of Sicily. And then he has to leave, and the Carthaginians spring back, and the Romans surge south into Italy, and then they has to leave, and the Carthaginians spring back, and the Romans surge south into Italy, and then they face each other. Up until Pyrrhus, Rome and Carthage have been allies. They've been allied with each other against Pyrrhus up until that point, and as soon as Pyrrhus leaves, having brought all this Hellenistic military engagement to Italy, then Rome and Carthage go to war. So Pyrrhus is really important because he's the first contact in a kind of military way with Rome and with Carthage, but also he's very important because he studied how to fight the Romans, and he studied how to defeat the Romans in some ways, and he seems to have written this down,

and Hannibal seems to have studied his works or what Pyrrhus said. So we're told, of course, via our sources, that Pyrrhus' advice to anyone who wanted to fight the Romans was that you had to fight them in Italy, you couldn't fight them anywhere else, and you had to take their allies away from them. And the only way to defeat the Romans in Italy was to remove them from their allies. And that's why Pyrrhus is so important in this story and to Hannibal's strategy perhaps in what his plans are

when he realises that he needs to invade Italy. Following in the footsteps of Pyrrhus, Hannibal planned to fight the Romans on Italian soil. The next issue was getting there, something much easier said than done for Hannibal and his army. Hannibal's route to Italy is not easy. It involves crossing two major mountain ranges, the Pyrenees and the Alps. Why is it that he marches across these mountain ranges rather than sailing there? And the simple answer is that the Carthaginian navy, after the First Punic War, is not the navy that it had been. The balance of power has changed significantly after the First Punic War that restricts the options Hannibal has opened to him. Up until the First Punic War, the Carthaginians had maintained a presence in Sicily for centuries, and they'd controlled particularly the western part of the

island. That meant they had ports. Ancient fleets have a very short range because your warships are jam-packed with rowers, don't have a lot of space for supplies of food and water that rowing in the hot Mediterranean summer you really, really need, especially the water. So they've got a range of a couple of days out before they need to land somewhere safe, ideally at a port. Carthage has lost the ports that give it the reach to get to Italy. So the naval option of forming a big army in modern-day Tunisia and crossing that apparently short distance, the direct route to the toe of Italy, just isn't practical. Mae cael yr armen mawr yn Tunisiau a'r tro ar y rhan gyffredinol, y rhan gyffredinol i'r Tŵr o'r Ely, ddim yn ymddygiadol.

Y peth arall yw ei fod yn gael elffant ac mae ganddo lawer o gyrff. Mae ei cyfnod o gafael i'r gweithred yn llawer hwyach na phawr o'r armen. Ac mae'r gyrffau'n anodd i'w trafod ar gyfer sipiau. Y peth arall, wrth gwrs, yw bod pŵr Hannibal yn seiliedig o gwmpas Sbaen. Ac mae hynny'n lle mae ei gynnal yr armen, ac mae'n lle y gallai ei ddod o ffyrdd. Mae'n lle mae'n The other thing, of course, is that Hannibal's power is based around Spain. And that's where his army's been formed. That's where he can draw resources. That's where he clearly has a lot more freedom than you suspect he would have in his homeland. So it's much more sensible for Hannibal to march from Spain to Italy,

even though the journey will be difficult. So Hannibal is almost thinking and acting like a Roman when he takes his army from Spain and says, OK, Italy's your heartland, Rome's your capital, that's where I'm going. I can't get there by sea, so I'm going to walk there. His preparations complete, his plan established. In the late spring of 218 BC, Hannibal and his army set off from southern Spain. To guard Spain in his absence, Hannibal and his army set off from southern Spain. To guard Spain in his absence,

Hannibal left his brother, confusingly also called Hastrebel, with a sizeable force. And with that, Hannibal headed north, towards the River Ebro and the edge of Carthaginian territory. territory. So Hadwell leaves New Carthage with an army of 90,000, we're told, 10,000 cavalry and 37 elephants. We know that he marches to the edge of Carthaginian territory, which is the Ebro River, and he crosses the river and he gets into this zone that's between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. Now this is unconquered territories. There's Greek colonial foundations on the coast. There's Celtiberian towns inland. And we aren't given a great deal of detail in the sources,

but we are told there's fairly fierce fighting here, that it takes some time to conquer the region, and that once he does conquer the region, he actually leaves one of his commanders and a big chunk of his army there, 10,000 of his soldiers there, in order to hold the region. So he's obviously faced some serious difficulty, and he does not want to have to deal with that in the rear. And so he really takes some time to be very careful. We're also told then that he sends 10,000 soldiers home.

And we don't know if that's because they've rebelled and he's trying to make a good story of it. Or if he does that in order to help reinforce his brother who he's left in command in New Carthage in Spain, and perhaps he realizes that his brother's going to need more troops in order to hold Spain than he's left. So we don't really know exactly, but we know that there was fierce fighting going on there, and that it was a big step to cross that river. In his own story of the conquest that we can get echoes of in the myths that are told. We were told about a famous dream that Hannibal had as he crossed the river Ebro and that a figure who he believed was a deity was guiding him across to, you know, greater conquests and things like that. So

there's something in that story, the echoes of it that are left for us, that's really important time. something in that story, the echoes of it that are left for us, that's really important time. And also he experiences some early desertions. So when some of the Spanish tribesmen realize that he's not just campaigning in Spain, but he's actually going to cross the Pyrenees and then some other mountains somewhere off in the far distance and then go to Italy, wherever the heck that is, they get a little bit discouraged and start to desert. So Hannibal lets them go. He a mynd i'r Eglwys, lle byddai hynny'n dda, byddant yn cael ychydig o ddysgwriaeth ac yn dechrau gwneud amser. Felly mae Hannibal yn ei gadael, nid yw eisiau pobl fel hyn yn ei farn. Mae hefyd yn anfon unrhyw un arall a'i meddwl yn mynd i fod yn

heb y math o ymrwymiad neu'n rhywbeth heb ymddygiad. Ac mae'n gwneud hynny'n amlwg er mwyn ffostro llawr ar gyfer y triwion. Felly mae'n dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, fyddaf yn dweud, goodwill amongst the tribes. So he said, go, no, you go and I'll call on you at some later point, or my brother will. And this is another example of his man management, his ability to kind of sense the mood amongst his troops and to react and to cut what could be a disadvantageous

situation into an advantage. So he converts these potential disaffected groups into potentially willing recruits in the future, but he won't take them with him. Hannibal had successfully crossed the River Ebro. He had dealt with these troubles north of the river. His next challenge was the Pyrenees. We don't know very much. We know that he did it in three columns. We're not sure why. We don't know very much about the actual Pyrenees themselves, and we know that he went inland to do it, so he would have had to deal with some fairly significant mountain terrain there. Maybe he did it as training, if you think about it that way, because, I mean, realistically, he would have been well aware of what he was facing with this idea of crossing the Alps with an army,

and it may very well be that he spent some time, you know, crossing the Pyrenees, but he had to move inland because of the Allied troops, the Allied cities, the Greek Allied and Roman Allied cities on the coast. So he didn't have any choice, he couldn't stick to the coastal road. So that's what we do know. Hannibal proceeded to march through southern Gaul, meeting relatively little resistance. That was, however, until he reached the River Rhone. So I always think the crossing of the Rhone is one of the most spectacular things Hannibal did, and it often takes second place after the Alps, but in some ways it's amazing. If you see the Rhone River today, it's a hugely managed river. It's much narrower than it was in antiquity.

So it's a massive river to cross with an army of, say, now we're at 50,000 all in maybe, maybe 60, and elephants as well. And so he gets to the Rhone. Now he's north of the coast because of the Roman Allied city of Marseille on the coast he needs to avoid. And I'm not sure if he was aware of how big a river the Rhone was or not, but he takes some time when he gets there and he buys up every bit of craft on the river. And the Rhone is a lively river today and really was in antiquity, so boats and anything, dugout canoes, anything he can find to move his army across. But what made crossing this river that much harder was what was lying in wait for Hannibal on the opposite bank.

Now, the Gauls are groups of independent tribes. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the struggle between Carthage and Rome. They are simply in the way. But as with most ancient peoples, you know, when this dirty great army turns up on your doorstep, you're faced with a choice. What do you do? Because you don't know their intentions. And again, there are quite interesting parallels with Alexander's campaigns, but also those of Philip of Macedon. they often take their army far beyond anywhere that anyone from Hellenistic culture has been before and confront peoples with whom they have no prior disagreement or dispute. And it's simply a question of how do you react.

If you submit, then fine, you can become an ally. But more often than not, even though we with hindsight know this is an elite army led by a Hannibal or an Alexander, and it's really not a good idea to argue with them, the local tribes will muster their forces, often behind an obstacle like the River Rhone. It's a good demarcation point. It's defensive. And you sort of think, well, okay, we'll stand there. We'll show them we're brave. We'll frighten them. And either they'll talk and negotiate, or better still, they'll just go away. They'll find another route because we're too scary. And this is what happens. The local tribes gather on the far bank of the River Rhone.

And it's a broad river. It's a big obstacle. It's going to be quite hard getting things like the elephants across anyway. You don't particularly want to do this as an opposed crossing, because again, Hannibal has to think, well, I need to get to Italy. I'd like to have as many of my best men still with me as I possibly can because the real war is going to start then. This is just a prelude. This is a sideshow. Sideshow or not, Hannibal had to get his army across the river and he quickly devised a plan. So Hannibal does again the similarities with a lot of Alexander's manoeuvres of striking. He sends out scouts, they go and look,

they find a place to cross much higher up the river and he sneaks several thousand men across. They then, which is quite unusual, they spend more than a day, they rest up and only then do they move around to get to be in a position behind the Gallic army, and the Gauls haven't noticed, because they're not a professional army, and there is also a tendency, if you're the local people, you tend to think of a mountain range or a river, it's a big obstacle, that's going to stop anybody, isn't it? No one but a fool

is going to attack across that, and people don't, as a rule, attack directly across rivers, that and people don't as a rule attack directly across rivers until Hannibal does. He crosses we're told that he crosses at the very front of all the boats and with lots of noise and you have the other side of the river you have the Celtic tribes yelling and everybody's going for it and then there's an ambush from behind and his surprise attack completely throws the enemy troops into confusion and they take the east bank of the Rhone and then it's all done. The Gauls collapse because it's not what they expected, it's not what they wanted. You know their attitude throughout has been quite reasonable. These people want to walk through our lands, our farms, what are they going to do, what are they

going to steal, what damage are they going to take over, are they going to stay? It's perfectly reasonable for them to defend their homelands but they're not really prepared for warfare in this big league. And they are simply outwitted. But it's a mark of Hannibal doing what his opponents don't expect, but doing it with great skill. You know, this is good intelligence gathering, good and hard and fast marching and keeping concealed. then just surprisingly the enemy shocking them and taking full advantage of that. So it's a foretaste really and it shows just how practiced this army already is before it gets anywhere near a Roman. With the Gallic army destroyed and in flight Hannibal secured the crossing and turned his attention to getting the rest of his army

across the Rhône, including the elephants. I don't think actually we should underestimate how well the Carthaginians understood their elephants, how they used their elephants, and also, of course, the fact that it was autumn by this point, the river is at its lowest point, and elephants can swim. So although our ancient sources construct some amazing stories about pontoons being built out onto the river and then covered in dirt so the elephants don't know they're getting

onto a raft and then being detached and chaos breaking out and everybody falling into the river, it could be that they did it that way. But the Carthaginians must have known that the elephants can swim, so they may have also done it that way as well. Hannibal turned his attention to the next natural obstacle in his army's path, the second great mountain range, the Alps. There was probably no way Hannibal was ever going to go any way into Italy rather than over the Alps. But there is certainly an easier way into Italy than he took. And in order to take the easier way into Italy, he would have had to follow the Geronts River. And that in history was known traditionally as the way of Heracles or Hercules. And it was this sort of mythical road through the Alps

that supposedly in myth Hercules took when he was driving the cattle of Geryon back from the far reaches of the western Mediterranean. So Hannibal probably was intending to go that way. But if this was Hannibal's plan to take this path and to follow in the footsteps of Hercules, then his plan was quickly thrown into disarray. In the interim, Hannibal's Numidian scouts, about 500 of them, have been sent south to see what's going on and have encountered Romans.

Roman cavalry under Publius Scipio the Elder have been progressing from Italy to Spain and have stopped at Marseilles. And so the army of Scipio, a consular army, two legions plus allies, considerable military force, has got to Marseilles. They've heard that Hannibal's in the vicinity from their local Greek allies and so they've reconnoitered up the river. The two forces clash, and the Numidians come off the worst, and the Romans pursue them more or less to their camp. So Hannibal realizes that there's a Roman army right there. Now Hannibal obviously in one sense was given an opportunity once the Romans arrive. Hey look, there's an army, I can defeat it here. But if he defeats it here, well first of all he's got to be confident that he can maneuver it into a position where he chooses to fight,

and then destroy it. He's probably got a big numerical advantage, but it's a battle fought in southern Gaul. That's not going to impress the Romans if they're defeated as much as one in Italy. If he delays and spends weeks maneuvering, maybe longer, before he can secure that victory, the year is coming towards an end, the weather for going across the Alps is going to be that much worse. The Romans had thrown down the gauntlet to Hannibal and his army. But Hannibal was having none of it. Hannibal has no interest in doing battle in Gaul. He has learned from his experiences, and he also knows

from what Pyrrhus told everybody, you need to fight the Romans in Italy in order to defeat them. And so he doesn't want to waste his energy fighting the Romans in terrain he doesn't know in Gaul when he needs to get to Italy to really start to work out his strategy. And his strategy is very, very clear, that he wants to detach the Romans from their allies and defeat them in Italy. So although he doesn't get to take the way that he would have liked to, which is the easiest crossing of the Alps, he has to go north and he has to go into the more difficult and more treacherous terrain of the crossing of the Alps. So again, he does the unexpected. No sane person is going to think, oh yeah, we've bumped into these people, they're our enemy.

They're actually going to march away from us and take what seems to be the hardest route possible away. So it does mean the Romans really don't have a clue what's happening. I mean, Scipio, the Roman commander, will go back to Italy, but send his army on, because he's not really sure. Legally, there's big question marks over whether or not he should do this, but he's going back to northern Italy in case that's where Hannibal turns up, so he can be the man to stop him. And partly it's responsibility and patriotism. Yes, you know, the state needs the best general there, but it's also the very Roman, and I'm the best general, and I want the credit for it. So it's one of those things. Hannibal probably isn't in a position to stay anywhere very long at this stage. His supplies will have been running out. You're coming to the end of the summer,

the harvest there, but you can only eat it once. And the more time you spent gathering, the more problems it causes, the more likely you... His army has already suffered an appalling rate of attrition, even getting this far. It's about half the size it was when he set out. And some of those are deliberate detachments sent home. The others we just don't know about, and we're not sure whether people have simply deserted, whether a lot of raw recruits can't take the pace

and can't march that far and have just broken down, or whether he's deliberately decided there are some of these Allied communities that either I don't want anymore, there are too many, you know, they're not effective enough to be worth my while feeding them, or the deal was they go this far and not any further. We don't know the details, but the drop in numbers is very significant. Hannibal and what remained of his much withered army headed north, up the eastern bank of the River Rhone and edging ever closer towards the Alps. Things start quite well for Hannibal as he comes toward the Alps. And again, you see one

of these very familiar situations in the ancient world, and you can look at it when you're looking at expansion by the Macedonians or the Romans later on. There's a tribe where two brothers are fighting for power. So one of them sees Hannibal and this great army coming along and says, whoopee, right, I'm going to be your friend. I'll do nice things for me. Can you get rid of my brother for me? Which Hannibal promptly does, intervenes, puts this man in power, who then responds by giving him winter clothing, supplies, things that are very useful. And information. Because again, you know, this is a world without, you can't go and pluck the most recent ordnance survey map. know it's we forget how comparatively recent a well-mapped world is

so finding your way you know broadly the route and knowing that the route well that's the route the traders take might not necessarily be the best route for an army to take so getting information from locals is always very useful. But which route did Hannibal take? The routes that Hannibal might have taken across the Alps, that's been debated since antiquity, since Livy, who said, oh, they must have used this pass or they must have used that pass. And he comes up with his own solution. The truth is we don't really know which pass Hannibal used.

I would say, generally speaking, the experts have distilled it down into two different passes. One is the Col de la Traversette and one is the Col de Clapier. Those are the two main contenders. The other big passes are a little bit too far away, given the timings that we have for the crossings. So we know that those are the two passes. the crossings. So we know that those are the two passes. We don't know which he took for certain, but some recent evidence, of course, has told us that there is certainly some interesting evidence in the ground that he took the Col de la Traversette. And that is excavations that have

been done by a professor of geology, actually, who's fascinated by Hannibal, and he went up into the Alps and up to the pass of the Cal de Traverset with his Polybius in hand, and he tried to see what the descriptions of the Alps crossing are and what pass fit it best, and in his mind, it was the Cal de Traverset, and so he then tested his theory and did a bit of excavation on both the French and the Italian sides of the Alps. And he got some very interesting evidence that certainly is dated to the right times, and certainly a layer of the excavation that was evidence of a great deal of churned up, a lot of people passing through. It could very well be an army.

And he found horse dung and DNA in the bacteria of horses. And so there's some good evidence from this that there was an army going through there at around the same time. So it's tempting to say that we have conclusive evidence, but that's not yet available. We'd have to do a little bit more work, I think, on some of the same time. So it's tempting to say that we have conclusive evidence, but that's not yet available. We'd have to do a little bit more work, I think, on some of the other passes. But both passes are over 2,000 metres,

and both passes would be a significant challenge for an army that he's carrying with him and for the elephants and the pack animals and all the material that they're carrying. Everything would have been quite extraordinary. And so it was in 218 BC that Hannibal commenced his immortalised crossing of the Alps. His first aim was to reach the summit of the pass.

Hannibal will begin the ascent of the Alps and he's still got an army as part of 50,000 at this point, between 40 and 50,000. It's a big, big force. However, again, you're coming to the same situation. The locals, people live there, you know, and they know nothing about this struggle between Carthage and Rome and can't see any reason why they should care about it, even if they do. And suddenly, this Carthaginian army has turned up and wants to march through their lands. And you have groups like the Alabrogues, the tribes there, who traditionally, to pass through the passes of their land,

you either pay them some money or expect to be robbed, or possibly both. They're like the Patans of the northwest frontier. You live in this tough environment, but you make the most of it because anyone coming through is going to make sure that they show suitable respect and pay you. And they want the same from the army, but this is not something Hannibal is willing to do

or probably able to do in terms of the sheer scale. If they start charging per head of person or cattle or whatever he wants to go through, they begin to think as well, oh, look at this, nice baggage train. Look at all the shiny and interesting objects. Many things that would be comparatively mundane are very valuable as loot because they have

prestige you've taken it from the enemy but also this is the sort of economy where you can't manufacture lots of things and where you know quite basic weapons have a great value comparison if you look at some of the third century AD archaeological finds of wagon loads of spoil dropped into the Rhine accidentally by Germanic raiders. It's full of junk, basically. It's metal things, it's shiny things, it's a Jackdaw's collection. But we forget again, it's useful to have an extra pot when these things have to be handmade at home or traded with for valuable things. And of course, it's more prestigious. You've taken it from someone, you've shown you're strong. So he's soon attacked, and Hannibal again

does the same sort of thing he's done before. He tries to use fast-moving columns, moving at night, getting behind the enemy. Again, a lot of similarities with the mountain warfare of Philip and Alexander. The locals tend to think they're the only ones who know the routes, and that if they block this pass, they're safe. And then they discover that actually, no, you can get around. And it's a shock. You know, they often underestimate. Hannibal makes some mistakes. There are some quite serious losses, and there are problems that, in some positions in the Alps, you can get above the enemy, but you're too far away, actually, to harm them. So, at one point, he gets to the crest, but then has to charge down to drive off men that have ignored him and are ambushing the main

column. And an army this size, with the baggage, with the elephants that are, you know, 37 of these things, that are cumbersome, need lots of food, aren't really designed for this sort of thing, and that you're bringing because you think this is a real prestige weapon that will give you a great advantage. So you want to cosset them, but they're awkward, they're difficult. So there are lots of places in an army straggling along through valleys and overpasses that it's vulnerable. So they have hard fighting for most of the ascent of the Alps. And, you know, there are quite a lot of casualties. That's the impression in the sources. So the main problem has been these tribes.

After that, the tribes kind of give up. He's getting very high up into the pass now. The second problem is, of course, is weather, that the weather is getting colder and colder, and the snow is starting to form. And because of these difficulties, Y problem ail yw'r amser. Mae'r amser yn dod yn fwy a fwy a'r llwyth yn dechrau ei ffurfio. Oherwydd y anoddau hyn, mae'n dod yn anodd i gael y dynion gwasg yn gydag y dynion. Ymgyrchion diweddar, sy'n cynnwys roi'r bwydau yn ôl ar yr Arglwydd Cymru, wedi llifio rhai o'r gwasg, llifio rhai o'r dynion gwasg hefyd, a chanolbwyntio llawer o amgylcheddau.

Felly mae'n colli llawer o drwpwyr trwy'r cymryd cyffredinol hwnnw. Mae'r triwion Gaelig wedi'u lleihau arno. Ac mae'r hyn sy'n digwydd yn fwy cyflym, ac mae'n anodd i chi he's lost a lot of troops through this constant attrition the Gallic tribes have placed on him and the passes are becoming more precipitous and it's difficult to keep your footing and some people are falling off and falling to their deaths. The ascent of this pass proved extremely difficult for Hannibal and his army but finally nine days after starting the crossing they reached the summit of the pass. Ahead of Hannibal lay the Lombard plain. He and his men, they could see the fertile lands of northern Italy. But reaching them would be far from easy. If going up was hard, coming down is actually harder because by the time he gets to

the summit, the weather has changed for the worse. The snow has fallen. And not only is it snow, Mae'r amser wedi newid i'r peiriau. Mae'r sŵn wedi cael ei ddod. Ac nid yw'n sŵn ond mae'n sŵn ar sŵn. Mae'n sŵn yn y flwyddyn diwethaf. Felly mae sŵn ffres, sy'n cael ei roi'r llyfrau'r bywydau yn eu llwyr ac yna maen nhw'n breidio i mewn i'r gwaelod sydd y tu hwnt. Yn fawr, mae llawr o ddynion a chyfran a'r elffant sy'n marchio drwy'r sŵn ffres yn cael eu llwyr yn y tu hwnt. Ac mae hyn yn dod yn ddwylo iawn ac yn ddwylo iawn. Ac mae pobl yn dechrau llynnu'n llaw, yn y llaw, yn y canol ac yn wir, hyd yn oed ar eich rhan a'ch gân ac yn neud, mae'n gwaethaf yn ymwybodol, yn ôl at y sŵn, rydych chi'n slydu'n fwy gyflym. Felly mae hyn yn

anodd iawn i Hannibal. Ac hefyd, wrth i'w dechrau ei ddysgu, mae rhan o'r pas wedi cael ei llwyddo neu'i nodi'n ffordd byd. Felly mae'n ymlaen 250 i 500 o ddwylo o ddwylo. Mae'n rhaid i'w gael yn glir ac yn cael ei adeiladu pan mae'r sŵn yn cael ei ddwylo ac mae pawb yn cael ysgrifennu iawn, yn enwedig y dynion pach. Felly, yn ystod hynny, mae'n ddifrifol iawn i ddysgu. Mae stori o'r ffaith bod yr Armeryd wedi gorfod lloi'r ddwylo o'r cynnyrch, y bwldr mawr sydd wedi bod yn ei ffwrdd, ac yna ddynu gwynig ar y ddynion roedd yn rhaid i'r armen ddynu'r roc o'u cynnwys, y bwldrau mawr oedd yn ei ffordd, ac yna ddynu ffinegwr ar y rociau dynu er mwyn eu llwyddo. Mae hyn yn stori fawr, ond mewn gwirionedd, pan fyddwch chi'n meddwl am dynion gwaelod, mae'n aml yn

cymryd fwyn oed, ffinegwr, oherwydd roedd yn dda i'r coedau'r gwartheg. Roedd yn cadw ffyngeirio, sy'n fath o sgwrfi anifeiliaid, ar y a kind of animal scurvy, at bay. Also, vinegar can be drunk by men as well to kind of lessen thirst. So it's not implausible that Hannibal does actually have vinegar with him on the march. So it's possible that this is something that he did in order to break through. Three days after clearing the landslide, Hannibal and his army emerged onto the plains of northern Italy. They had done it. Overall, it had taken Hannibal and his army 15 days to cross the Alps. But this march, the climax to an epic venture, came at a great cost. Hannibal had begun the march from

the Rhone with about 38,000 infantry and about 9ion a tua 9,000 o gyfraith. Ar y pryd mae'n dod i'r Ely, ac rydym yn gwybod hyn oherwydd bod Hannibal wedi sefydlu annwyl yn y diwedd y war yn y Ddyn a'r Tembl o Hyrwyr y Lysynnau. Mae'n dweud faint o dynion a gafodd i'r Ely. Cawdodd 20,000 o dynion a chafaelu 6,000. Mae hyn yn ddiddorol. 20,000 infantry and only 6,000 cavalry. This is terrific attrition. In Spain, he'd actually started the expedition with 59,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. So he's lost an awful lot.

Now, some of those were sent home and were deserted and left as garrisons. But 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. Nevertheless, despite its heavy toll, the feat's legacy has endured for more than two millennia. There is such a drama about Hannibal's march to Italy,

most of all in the Alps, but even, you know, crossing the Rhône and getting elephants onto barges and all of these things. It is a terrific story And when you write about it or when people make documentaries or dramas about it, you are drawn. You know, it is very hard to resist the lure of this epic, because it does seem to be up there with Troy and all these, you know, it's just a great, great story. So it's part of Hannibal's myth management. 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 had, 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 is that 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.

And for 250 years, people have been trying to recreate the crossing of the Alps with elephants. And Napoleon talks about it. When he crossed the Alps with his army, that he was following in the footsteps of Hannibal. So it's definitely the most iconic thing he does. And that memory, that continual interest, I think, is something that we see in the sort of early modern period developing from our understanding

and interest in ancient stories. But it also was really important in the ancient world as well. And you can imagine the way that people who lived in the mountains and on either side of the mountains would have told that story over and over again to their kids, their grandkids, generations of the Hannibal crossing the Alps story. So it is really the greatest echo of this miraculous feat is the memory of it and the Alps themselves. Hannibal's crossing of the Alps is the memory of it and the Alps themselves. Hannibal's crossing of the Alps is the thing that we remember the most about this ancient leader. But for Hannibal, we must remember that this venture was only the beginning. The danger is that we obsess with this and we forget why Hannibal was doing it.

He is doing this great epic not for the sake of it, not to show off, not to do wonderful things, not to overcome nature, but to begin his main war against Rome. And the whole point is to get to Italy, to fight the Romans on their home soil. So it's a little bit like obsessing about, say, the preparations to Pearl Harbor, even the attack itself, and forgetting what's going on in the wide war and why the Japanese are doing that.

With Hannibal, the real war is about to begin. And before it's begun, he's lost a huge number of soldiers. And the ones he's got are worn out, tired. The animals in particular are in a poor state. So, you know, he could easily have lost the war before it had even begun if he hadn't been able to cross the Rhine, if he'd done even worse in the Alps. So he's done great things and it is incredible and it is dramatic, but it's, this isn't actually the big story. The big story is what happens next and what will happen in the years to come and whether all of what's gone on is actually worthwhile, because it was only about getting him to the point where he can go to Rome and humiliate them on their home turf. I hope you've enjoyed this slightly different ancients episode today, all about the rise of Hannibal,

featuring not one, not two, but three contributors in the awesome Dr. Reeve MacDonald, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy and Dr Louis Rawlings. All three of them starred in a recent documentary released on History Hit TV titled The Rise of Hannibal. And stay tuned for a sequel documentary coming out in due course. If you want to watch that doc and many others that we've got on History Hit TV, head over to History Hit at access.historyhit.com. In the meantime, see you in the next episode. Thank you.