Hannibal: One Man Against Rome

It was not a great book, but it was both enjoyable and informative for me. I had a vague knowledge that Hannibal used the wealth of the Spanish (rather, Iberian) silver mines to build up the Carthaginians militarily, cross the Alps, defeat the Romans decisively at Cannae in the single deadliest day of combat in history and then hang around southern Italy for a while before being chased around the Mediterranean by the Romans. Now his story is much clearer to me.

With Rome's growth through the defeat of most of the different cities and tribes of central Italy, and with its vested interests in maintaining client relations with those states it conquered, it was probably inevitable that Rome and Carthage would clash. And it was probably inevitable that Hannibal would eventually lose. But he came as close as he could to making it work. As it was, he hung on for close to 15 years in southern Italy, terrorizing the Romans and hampering their grain supply. But since he could not control the seas--and it had only been fairly recently that Rome became a naval power--he could not land supplies and reinforcements. Had he been able to join forces with his brothers as planned, then perhaps he could have broken the Roman domination of the cities and ports that he needed, especially Tarentum.

But Hannibal was at the mercy, really, of the mercenary army that he built from the various tribes and peoples of Africa and Europe, and he convinced most of them that he offered them freedom from domination from Rome. Roman treatment of these various peoples that they conquered--for example, the Ligurians, the Brutians, the Capuans, the Macedonians, the tribes of Portugal and Span, shows how determined and ruthless the Romans were: 80,000 Macedonians sold into slavery from one city; all the males of Portugal massacred.

And who knows what history would have been like if Hannibal had been able to force Rome into some kind of peace? Lamb certainly takes a sympathetic tone towards Hannibal, maintaining that he was really a freedom fighter against the Roman juggernaut, banding together diverse peoples who would all stand to regain their independence should Rome capitulate in some way. But it seems far fetched that Hannibal wasn't as merciless or as imperialist as the Romans he fought. Lamb maintains that Hannibal's destiny came from the pledge that he took at his father's insistence that he never become a "friend"--an amicus--of Rome. This came at the conclusion of the "first" Punic War when Rome and Carthage clashed over trading rights in Sardinia and Sicily. The Roman response to this clash had been to build a navy from scratch--with scenes of building a fleet based on a captured Carthaginian vessel and then teaching men to row from dry land mockups--and establish dominance in the Mediterranean. It was like, "game over, man" from that point on for Carthage as a sea power.

Author: Lamb, Harold

Date Published: 1958

Length: 11 hr 12 min

Narrator: Griffin, Charlton