sic example of envelopment and the use of numerically
inferior forces to defeat a superior army.
Despite his numerous victories, Hannibal was
unable to defeat Rome itself because, with the Roman
command of the sea, he could not obtain supporting
forces from Carthage. Notwithstanding his incredible
victories, his army was slowly being bled to death with
the constant, slow attrition of his force. By 212 b.c.,
the Romans had retaken several areas lost to Hannibal,
forcing his troops away from Rome. In 207, the death of
his brother Hasdrubal at the Metaurus River (now the
Metauro River) left Hannibal without one of his great
generals. For four years, his army held out in southern
Italy, but he was forced to retreat to Carthage when
Publius Cornelius Scipio (Scipio Africanus) attacked
the city in 203 b.c. On 19 October 202 b.c., Hanni-
bal confronted Scipio in his last major battle at Zama,
also known as Naraggara or Margaron and now Saqi-
yat Sidi Yusuf, Tunisia. Armed with 48,000 troops and
elephants, Hannibal tried to use the same techniques
he had used in the past, but the Romans had learned
his strategy. Although Scipio had only approximately
30,000 troops, he utilized the encirclement movement
to attack Hannibal’s forces. Scipio’s superiority was in
cavalry, supplied by Masinissa, the ruler of the North
African kingdom of Numidia. The Carthaginians were
decisively defeated—some 20,000 were killed in the
clash—and Hannibal fled to Carthage. The battle ended
the Second Punic War, and in exchange for ending the
fighting, Carthage gave up control of Spain to Rome.
In his final years, Hannibal served as a suffete, or
chief magistrate, of his city-state. His chief task was to
raise capital to pay the indemnity Rome had imposed
on Carthage after the loss at Zama. However, in 195
b.c., Rome accused him of once again working to defeat
Roman rule, and to avoid arrest, Hannibal was forced
to flee to what is now Syria. Sheltered by Antiochus III
of Syria, he served the Syrian army in its war against
Rome. When Syria was defeated at Magnesia in 190
b.c., Hannibal once more fled, this time to Bithynia in
Asia Minor, where he was made commander of a fleet
of ships. His last battle was against King Eumenes II of
Pergamun. His victory came, according to legend, when
his forces threw snakes into the enemy ships.
The Bithynians faced defeat when Rome intervened
on the side of Eumenes, and Hannibal, unable to flee,
realized that he would be handed over to the Romans.
Facing torture and execution, he poisoned himself in
the Bithynian village of Libyssa (now near modern day
Gebze in Turkey) in 183 or 182 b.c. His tomb at Gebze
still stands.
Hannibal is considered one of the greatest generals
in the history of warfare. Historian J. F. Lazenby, in his
massive work on the Second Punic War, explains:Apart from what we can glean from his actions,
we really do not know what sort of a person Han-
nibal was. Polybius, the nearest in time of the ex-
tant sources, says that ‘some consider him to have
been cruel to excess, some avaricious.’ But the
Greek historian himself seems to have thought
that any cruelty that Hannibal displayed was the
result of circumstances, and in his main narra-
tive records few atrocities committed by him or
his army. It also emerges that it was among the
Romans that Hannibal had a reputation for cru-
elty.... In the day-to-day conduct of operations
there are few generals to compare with Hanni-
bal: from his use of Hanno’s outflanking force
at the crossing of the Rhône, to his retention
of his third line as a reserve, and, possibly, his
use of cavalry as a decoy, at Zama, he showed a
consistent sureness of touch, an ability to assess
any situation and to arrive at a solution, often
involving a departure from normal methods and
considerable boldness. He was clearly a master
of what amounted to psychological warfare, and
of all of the tricks a general needs to deceive an
enemy: it is easy to admit the planning of the
ambush at Trasimene, but easy to forget how
unique an ambush on such as scale is in the an-
nals of warfare.References: “Hannibal,” in Command: From Alexander
the Great to Zhukov—The Greatest Commanders of World
History, edited by James Lucas (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 1988), 40–41; Baker, George Pierce, Hanni-
bal (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1929); Ross,
Thomas, The Second Punick War between Hannibal, and
the Romanes... (London: Tho. Roycroft, 1672); Brad-
ford, Ernle, Hannibal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981);
Bruce, George, “Cannae” and “Ticinus,” in Collins Dic-
tionary of Wars (Glasgow, Scotland: HarperCollins Pub-
lishers, 1995), 49, 247; “Hannibal,” in The Penguin
Dictionary of Ancient History, edited by Graham Speake
(London: Penguin Books, 1995), 298–299; Lazenby, J. hAnnibAl