But their great general, who felt that he now stood victorious on the ramparts of Italy, and that the torrent which rolled before him was carrying its waters to the rich plains of Cisalpine Gaul, endeavored to kindle his soldiers with his own spirit of hope. He called them together; he pointed out the valley beneath, to which the descent seemed the work of a moment. “That valley,” he said, “is Italy; it leads us to the country of our friends, the Gauls, and yonder is our way to Rome.” His eyes were eagerly fixed on that point of the horizon; and as he gazed, the distance between seemed to vanish, till he could almost fancy that he was crossing the Tiber, and assailing the Capitol.
After the two days’ rest the descent began. Hannibal experienced no more open hostility from the barbarians, only some petty attempts here and there to plunder; a fact strange in itself, but doubly so, if he was really descending the valley of the Doria Baltea, through the country of the Salassians, the most untamable robbers of all the Alpine barbarians. It is possible that the influence of the Insubrians may partly have restrained the mountaineers; and partly, also, they may have been deterred by the ill success of all former attacks, and may by this time have regarded the strange army and its monstrous beasts with something of superstitious terror. But the natural difficulties of the ground on the descent were greater than ever. The snow covered the track so that the men often lost it, and fell down the steep below; at last they came to a place where an avalanche had carried it away altogether for about three hundred yards, leaving the mountain side a mere wreck of scattered rocks and snow. To go round was impossible; for the depth of the snow on the heights above rendered it hopeless to scale them; nothing, therefore, was left but to repair the road. A summit of some extent was found, and cleared of the snow; and here the army were obliged to encamp, whilst the work went on. There was no want of hands; and every man was laboring for his life; the road therefore was restored, and supported with solid substructions below; and in a single day it was made practicable for the cavalry and baggage cattle, which were immediately sent forward, and reached the lower valley in safety, where they were turned out to pasture. A harder labor was required to make a passage for the elephants; the way for them must be wide and solid, and the work could not be accomplished in less than three days. The poor animals suffered severely in the interval from hunger; for no forage was to be found in that wilderness of snow, nor any trees whose leaves might supply the place of other herbage. At last they too were able to proceed with safety; Hannibal overtook his cavalry and baggage, and in three days more the whole army had got clear of the Alpine valleys, and entered the country of their friends, the Insubrians, on the wide plain of northern Italy.
Hannibal was arrived in Italy, but with a force so weakened by its losses in men and horses, and by the exhausted state of the survivors, that he might seem to have accomplished his great march in vain. According to his own statement, which there is no reason to doubt, he brought out of the Alpine valleys no more than 12,000 African and 8,000 Spanish infantry, with 6,000 cavalry, so that his march from the Pyrenees to the plains of northern Italy must have cost him 33,000 men; an enormous loss, which proves how severely the army must have suffered from the privations of the march and the severity of the Alpine climate; for not half of these 33,000 men can have fallen in battle.
Once again the subject shall be Hannibal, and Arnold shall be the artist. This time Hannibal suffers his final defeat at the hands of Scipio.
THE BATTLE OF ZAMA.
[201 B.C.]
Hannibal, we are told, landed at Leptis, at what season of the year we know not; and after refreshing his troops for some time at Adrumetum, he took the field, and advanced to the neighborhood of Zama, a town situated, as Polybius describes it, about five days’ journey from Carthage, toward the west. It seems that Scipio was busied in overrunning the country, and in subduing the several towns, when he was interrupted in these operations by the approach of the Carthaginian army. He is said to have detected some spies sent by Hannibal to observe his position; and by causing them to be led carefully round his camp, and then sent back in safety to Hannibal, he so excited the admiration of his antagonist as to make him solicit a personal interview, with the hope of effecting a termination of hostilities. The report of this conference, and of the speeches of the two generals, savors greatly of the style of Roman family memoirs, the most unscrupulous in falsehood of any pretended records of facts that the world has yet seen. However, the meeting ended in nothing, and the next day the two armies were led out into the field for the last decisive struggle. The numbers on each side we have no knowledge of, but probably neither was in this respect much superior. Masinissa, however, with four thousand Numidian cavalry, beside six thousand infantry, had joined Scipio a few days before the battle; while Hannibal, who had so often been indebted to the services of Numidians, had now, on this great occasion, only two thousand horse of that nation to oppose to the numbers and fortune and activity of Masinissa. The account of the disposition of both armies, and of the events of the action, was probably drawn up by Polybius from the information given to him by Lælius, and perhaps from the family records of the house of Scipio. And here we may admit its authority to be excellent. It states that the Roman legions were drawn up in their usual order, except that the maniples of every alternate line did not cover the intervals in the line before them, but were placed one behind another, thus leaving avenues in several places through the whole depth of the army, from front to rear. These avenues were loosely filled by the light-armed troops, who had received orders to meet the charge of the elephants, and to draw them down the passages left between the maniples, till they should be enticed entirely beyond the rear of the whole army. The cavalry, as usual, was stationed on the wings; Masinissa, with his Numidians, on the right, and Lælius, with the Italians, on the left. On the other side, Hannibal stationed his elephants, to the number of eighty, in the front of his whole line. Next to these were placed the foreign troops in the service of Carthage, twelve thousand strong, consisting of Ligurians, Gauls, inhabitants of the Balearian islands, and Moors. The second line was composed of those Africans who were the immediate subjects of Carthage, and of the Carthaginians themselves; while Hannibal himself, with his veteran soldiers, who had returned with him from Italy, formed a third line, which was kept in reserve, at a little distance behind the other two. The Numidian cavalry were on the left, opposed to their own countrymen under Masinissa; and the Carthaginian horse on the right, opposed to Lælius and the Italians. After some skirmishing of the Numidians in the two armies, Hannibal’s elephants advanced to the charge, but being startled by the sound of the Roman trumpets, and annoyed by the light-armed troops of the enemy, some broke off to the right and left, and fell in amongst the cavalry of their own army on both the wings, so that Lælius and Masinissa, availing themselves of this disorder, drove the Carthaginian horse speedily from the field. Others advanced against the enemy’s line, and did much mischief, till at length, being frightened and becoming ungovernable, they were enticed by the light-armed troops of the Romans to follow them down the avenues which Scipio had purposely left open, and were thus drawn out of the action altogether. Meantime, the infantry on both sides met, and, after a fierce contest, the foreign troops in Hannibal’s army, not being properly supported by the soldiers of the second line, were forced to give ground; and in resentment for this desertion, they fell upon the Africans and Carthaginians, and cut them down as enemies, so that these troops, at once assaulted by their fellow-soldiers, and by the pursuing enemy, were also, after a brave resistance, defeated and dispersed. Hannibal, with his reserve, kept off the fugitives by presenting spears to them, and obliging them to escape in a different direction; and he then prepared to meet the enemy, trusting that they would be ill able to resist the shock of a fresh body of veterans, after having already been engaged in a long and obstinate struggle. Scipio, after having extricated his troops from the heaps of dead which lay between him and Hannibal, commenced a second, and a far more serious contest. The soldiers on both sides were perfect in courage and in discipline, and as the battle went on, they fell in the ranks where they fought, and their places were supplied by their comrades with unabated zeal. At last Lælius and Masinissa returned from the pursuit of the enemy’s beaten cavalry, and fell, in a critical moment, upon the rear of Hannibal’s army. Then his veterans, surrounded and overpowered, still maintained their high reputation, and most of them were cut down where they stood, resisting to the last. Flight indeed was not easy, for the country was a plain, and the Roman and Numidian horse were active in pursuit; yet Hannibal, when he saw the battle totally lost, with a nobler fortitude than his brother had shown at the Metaurus, escaped from the field to Adrumetum. He knew that his country would now need his assistance more than ever, and as he had been in so great a degree the promoter of the war, it ill became him to shrink from bearing his full share of the weight of its disastrous issue.
On the plains of Zama twenty thousand of the Carthaginian army were slain, and an equal number taken prisoners, but the consequences of the battle far exceeded the greatness of the immediate victory. It was not the mere destruction of an army, but the final conquest of the only power that seemed able to combat Rome on equal terms. In the state of the ancient world, with so few nations really great and powerful, and so little of a common feeling pervading them, there was neither the disposition nor the materials for forming a general confederacy against the power of Rome; and the single efforts of Macedonia, of Syria, and of Carthage herself, after the fatal event of the second Punic war, were of no other use than to provoke their own ruin. The defeat of Hannibal insured the empire of the ancient civilized world.
The only hope of the Carthaginians now rested on the forbearance of Scipio, and they again sent deputies to him, with a full confession of the injustice of their conduct in the first origin of the war, and still more in their recent violation of the truce, and with a renewal of their supplications for peace. The conqueror, telling them that he was moved solely by considerations of the dignity of Rome, and the uncertainty of all human greatness, and in no degree by any pity for misfortunes which were so well deserved, presented the terms on which alone they could hope for mercy. “They were to make amends for the injuries done to the Romans during the truce; to restore all prisoners and deserters; to give up all their ships of war, except ten, and all their elephants; to engage in no war at all out of Africa, nor in Africa without the consent of the Romans; to restore to Masinissa all that had belonged to him or any of his ancestors; to feed the Roman army for three months, and pay it till it should be recalled home; to pay a contribution of ten thousand Euboic talents, at the rate of two hundred talents a year, for fifty years; and to give a hundred hostages, between the ages of fourteen and thirty, to be selected at the pleasure of the Roman general.” At this price the Carthaginians were allowed to hold their former dominion in Africa, and to enjoy their independence, till it should seem convenient to the Romans to complete their destruction. Yet Hannibal strongly urged that the terms should be accepted, and, it is said, rudely interrupted a member of the supreme council at Carthage, who was speaking against them. He probably felt, as his father had done under circumstances nearly similar, that for the present resistance was vain, but that, by purchasing peace at any price, and by a wise management of their internal resources, his countrymen might again find an opportunity to recover their losses. Peace was accordingly signed, the Roman army returned to Italy, and Hannibal, at the age of forty-five, having seen the schemes of his whole life utterly ruined, was now beginning, with equal patience and resolution, to lay the foundation for them again.