Hannibal, p.1
Hannibal, page 1
FOR
SOPHIA
oἰ μὲν ἰππήων τρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων, οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, ἔγω δὲ κῆν’ ὄτ-τω τις ἔραται
– Sappho
CONTENTS
Prologue
I Carthage
II Mercenaries
III Spain
IV Command
V War
VI March
VII Italy
VIII Delay
IX Defeat
X Death
Epilogue
Nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto …
Litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas
Imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque.
Neither love nor treaty shall there be between the nations … Let your shores oppose their shores, your waves their waves, your arms their arms. This is my prayer: let them fight, they and their sons’ sons, forever.
Dido, Queen of Carthage’s curse upon the Romans.
Virgil, Aeneid IV, 624 ff.
Bellum maxime omnium memorabile quae unquam gesta sunt … Hannibale duce Carthaginienses cum populo Romano gessere.
The war fought by the Carthaginians under Hannibal against the Romans was the most memorable of all wars ever waged.
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, XXI. 1
PROLOGUE
I am old now, and the time of my people is past. No more will the lineage of Barca fight the Romans whom we hate. The Paradise of Mithra holds all those that I have loved, souls whom the River of Ordeal could not scald. Soon I shall join them.
The ravens and the vultures gather over Carthage. I see its doom. Our ships have long been sunk or captured. Their oars of the oaks of Bashan and the Ashurites are broken, sound no more. My army is dispersed. I am far away.
I sit now naked from the heat in a borrowed room in a foreign land alone. They sent for me. I would not go. Soon they will come. They have thought it too hard, too hazardous a task to wait for the death of an old man.
My body stiffens. My wounds throb. I am as an old and wizened oak tree in a field, against which cattle have rubbed too long. Yet shall I tell my story, and be done. I see my body and its many, many scars. All are in front. The Romans shall not have me.
I
CARTHAGE
Children’s memories are deep and strange. Grown men must struggle through the past to reach and to know them. It is best done while one lives, but if postponed will surely come with or after death. I have often seen it so, for I have known too many deaths. My friend Maharbal took three weeks to die after a sword thrust caught him in the stomach. We were deep in Campania, high in the hills when a Roman patrol surprised us. Only I was with him at the end. No-one else could bear the stench of his putrescence. In his death-fever he returned to our childhood in Spain, calling out to me as we raced our ponies hard along the strand of Gadez. Through that last night he turned over such many things. Then, at dawn, he gave up his spirit, but in peace.
Tanit-pene-Baal, the god of dreams and death, would have it thus. We must first cross the River of Ordeal, then the River of Forgetfulness, Ashroket in our Punic tongue, and remember all our lives before our spirits can be free. If we do not, we linger for eternities with the undead by Ashroket’s banks. There stands a great and giant elm tree, its branches spreading like arms, full of years. The undead make their home there, clinging everywhere beneath its leaves, as many as the leaves of the forest which fall with autumn’s chill, and stretch out their hands in longing for the farther bank.
Let me now prepare to cross. I, who have always been fighting, now give the god his due. Time for me, time for the thousands who died for me and need me now to account for their memories so they too may pass in peace. There is so much blood.
Blood. And hate. I must have been three, turning four. I was playing with marbles in the courtyard of our home in Carthage, my brother Mago with me. A breeze stirred the palm trees all around. Suddenly the wail of the corynx, the Carthaginian war-trumpet, filled the air. My mother, heavy with child, ran to us. “Come quickly, boys. Your father is home. He has sent for you. Come.”
We followed her to my father’s hall, rising from its massive foundations to a terraced storey. Onto its walls of bronze were set diamonds, beryls, the three kinds of ruby, four kinds of sapphire, twelve of emeralds, topazes from Mount Zabacra, opals from Bactria, glossopetri fallen from the moon. Never before had I passed through its scarlet doors quartered with a black cross, beyond its grilles of beaten gold which kept out scorpions.
It was silent inside, despite the press of people. As well as Carthaginians, there were Ligurians there, Balearics, Negroes, Numidians, Lusitanians, Cantabrians, Cappadocians, Lydians, Celtiberians, Dorians, men from every corner of the earth, for this has always been the way with us. They parted to let us pass. Standing on a dais at the far end of the hall was Hamilcar, my father, tired and dirty from journeying, his sweat making lines through the grey dust on his forehead.
Before my father stood a man, strange of dress and skin. “I ask you, Marcus Atilius Regulus, what mercy you should have of us. Answer me!” In the stillness, the man’s reply was clear: “I answer you, Hamilcar Barca, as will many greater than you could ever be: Summa sedes non capit duos. Do with me as you must.”
Of course I did not have enough Latin then to understand. Only later did my tutor, Silenus of Caleacte, explain: “Supreme power cannot be shared,” words which form the more so now, I fear, the policy of Rome. I smile as I remember how I returned the words of Regulus in kind, the cry of fear, “Hannibalis ad portas, Hannibal is at the gates,” filling the thoughts of Romans for the many years in which I made them dance.
What I did understand was the roar of anger that rose to meet the man’s reply. My father stood still. He held up his hands for quiet. “Carthaginians, allies, friends, you have heard what this man has said. You know him, Regulus, the Roman consul we defeated and captured when he invaded our own Africa ten years ago. We should perhaps have crucified him. Yet we sent him to Rome to treat for peace on condition he would return. For what have we ever sought of the Romans, we who knew the bounds of the world before they were even a people, than that they should leave us in peace? When have we ever sought out war, unless when these vipers, these conquerors and colonisers of greed tamper with our trade and seize our lands? Three times has Carthage made solemn treaties of peace with Rome. Three times have the Romans broken their word. As we must, we resist them.”
A murmur of agreement, of anger, rose and died away, as hiss of pebbles on the shore when wave recedes.
“This Regulus we sent to Rome. And what did he urge on their Senate? Why, not peace but more war. Then war he shall have. As Sufet of Carthage I speak for the Council of Elders and I say: let that which is customary be done.”
It was as all had expected. Two men came forward and seized Regulus by the arms. A third gave to my father a short sharp knife and turned Regulus towards us. In one swift movement my father seized the Roman’s long nose with the thumb and finger of his left hand. With the knife in his right he cut it off. Regulus screamed and sank to the floor. The pool that gathered in the dust beside him was my first sight of Roman blood. I felt nothing. Mago beside me began to sniffle. My mother grabbed him by the hair and made him watch.
Next my father knelt. The Roman was pinned down on his back. I knew as my father began to reach out. I was to cut out tongues myself in years to come. The Roman’s screams were drowned in his own blood. My father rose, said: “Send him again to Rome. Then will he treat for neither peace nor war,” and left.
My mother sent us to our room. Mago cried. I lay on my bed. I did not understand. I understood somehow that I did not need to. The door opened. My father was there, washed, in clean clothes. I sat up, quickly. “Hannibal, Mago,” he said, “you are young. But what you learn today you cannot learn too soon. Come in, Hamilax.”
Hamilax was my father’s High Steward. How long he had served our house, I do not know. But he was old, his face deep-lined. “My sons,” said my father, “there are many things that words cannot capture. What you have seen today is one. Here is another. Hamilax, take off your tunic.”
Standing before us, Hamilax took off his shirt. From the waist up his skin was angry, red and rippled, like the surface of the sea when the wind ruffles it in a dying sun. He turned. His back was the same, but for the welts that crossed it. We looked. “Thank you, Hamilax. You may go,” commanded my father. I saw the Steward wince as he knelt to pick up his tunic. His skin, I saw, was stuck to his ribs.
“The Romans did this to him.” My father sat down on my bed. “He served my father Hasdrubal before me and was captured fighting the Romans at the great sea battle of Mylae. My father offered an exchange: ten of them for Hamilax. They agreed. When the ship bearing him came to Carthage, I was with my father waiting at the docks. But we could not see Hamilax standing on the deck. He was carried ashore on a litter.
“Understand this: yes, the Romans had released him, but first they had flayed him with red-hot sand. It was to be weeks before we knew if he would live or die. This, I learned, is Roman faith. What you saw done to Regulus was right. The gods demand it. Do not forget.” Then he was gone. There was only the creak of the great wheel which carried water through the palace, turning, turning.
As I grew, I felt alone not least because my father was so seldom with us. He was away, fighting the Romans in Sicily. He would come when he could, perhaps three times each year, sometimes for a night and a day, sometimes for more. Even then, he had no time. Strange men would arrive, borne to our palace on rich litters. They and my father would talk and argue late into the night. I heard snatches of discussion about trade, about money, for I slept in a room above that in which they met. One I came to know as Gisco was always loud. “Let the Romans have Sicily, yes, and Sardinia too. All we need from them is freedom to trade as did our fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Let us look south, to Africa.”
“And will the Romans stop,” my father scoffed, “with Sicily? What about Spain and our mines there?”
“They can have all that, if they leave us Africa …”
I slipped into a fitful sleep.
It was during one of these visits – was I four, five? – that my father woke me. It was still dark, but from the garden I heard the calling of the storks that marked each dawn and, through the window, carried on a gentle breeze, the sound of Eschmoun’s horses, safe in their sacred glade, whinnying towards the sun. “Hannibal, get up.” Shivering, I rose, slipped on my tunic, sandals. “Come with me.”
Through the sleeping house I followed my father down. We passed through the great front doors of porphyry, on down the staircase of ebony, the prow of a defeated galley in the corner of each step. On the main path of black sand mixed with powdered coral we went along the avenue. The double rows of cypresses swayed softly in the breeze. In the garden, past the orchards of fig trees and pomegranates, white-tufted cotton shrubs, roses and vines, we walked, on beyond the fish ponds and the great pits where the elephants, smelling us, stirred.
The wall, the great wall of Carthage where I was forbidden to go, rose up from the darkness. It was, I knew already from Silenus, a marvel of the earth. Of dressed stone, forty feet high and thirty feet thick, the wall ran for twenty-two miles round Carthage. Double-storeyed, it held within its bulk the stables for 300 elephants with stores for their caparisons, their tethers and their food. Above were more stables for 4,000 horse, their harness, gear. There were barracks too for 20,000 soldiers and 4,000 cavalry. A city within a city above which soared up towers, each of strong battlements, shrouded in bronze shields. My servants said it was the work of our god Baal, but I knew that man had made it.
Reaching forward in the darkness, my father felt the great smooth stones. He paused and heaved. One swung open, startling me. He stepped forward, into the wall. I followed. He turned and pulled shut the stone behind us. “This is a way, Hannibal, known only to me and to Hamilax. You will tell none of it.” In the dark, I followed him, as I was to follow through much greater darknesses to come.
Pushing up another stone, my father climbed onto the rampart, I behind. No sentries called. We were on a stretch of wall defended by the sea, impregnable. “I have brought you here, Hannibal, to look and to learn. Be silent now, and see.”
In the east, pink light swelled. White foam girdled the peninsula and the sea was still. Dogs barked. Birds called. As the light grew, the water-courses of Megara in the city below unwrapped their white coils, serpents against the greenery of the gardens that they served. Houses grew, taking shape and massing from the darkness amid the lengthening, empty streets. On the roofs, water tanks caught the brimming sun and shone like stars. The lighthouse on the promontory of Hermaeum grew pale. Baal Hammon was pouring over Carthage the golden rain of his veins.
Now I could make out below the wall the rampart of turf and, beyond that, a great ditch, deep and wide and dark. In the shadow of the rampart was Malqua, the sailors’ and dyers’ quarter, a place of dirt and ugly hovels. About it lived the Un-named, people of no Punic blood but of unknown race and origin, eaters of porcupines and shellfish, hyenas, snakes. Their huts of seaweed and slime clung to the cliff like nests. They had lived so, without rulers or religion, execrated, naked, sickly and wild, as long as the memory of man.
Turning, I looked over the city within the wall on which I stood. Cube-shaped houses rose in tiers towards the Acropolis. Public squares stood levelled here and there. The greenery of temple precincts broke up the uniformity of grey. First the golden tiles of Khamon’s roof caught the rising sun, then the coral of Melkarth’s. My eye was drawn on, up to the Acropolis hill, in the centre of Byrsa. The strengthening light caught its copper cupolas, its capitals of bronze, the white Parian marble of its architraves, its obelisks of azure stripes, its buttresses from Babylon. Here, drawn together from the corners of the earth, was the soul of Carthage.
As day broke, the city stirred to life. Great wagons and laden dromedaries approached the gates. Passing in, they moved lurching on the flagged streets to the market. At the crossroads, the moneychangers rolled up the awnings of their booths. From the potters’ quarter, Mappalia, the kilns began to smoke. From Tanit’s sacred glade came the sound of the chants and tambourines of her holy harlots.
My father spoke. “You are a Barca, Hannibal, and my son. You see this great city unfold before you. You feel its call, yes?” I nodded. “It calls you because its life is your life. Your forefathers came to this place from Tyre in Phoenicia and found poor and huddled huts. See what we have made. Always has our family been pre-eminent among the Carthaginians.
“But do not be deceived. Carthage has no friends. We rule through fear and greed, not love. What you see is an island, alone against the world. We must trade to live and the Romans would pen us in” – and his voice grew rough and angry – “like cattle. Of the Elders, I see this and fight. When I am gone, this fight will be yours.” He held my shoulders. I can still see his burning eyes. “Do you understand?”
I held his gaze. “Yes, Father,” was all I said. It was done.
“Good. Then your training will begin. Go back to your room. Hamilax will come for you.”
Within the hour, Hamilax and I were gone, I knew not where. We slipped out of Carthage through an obscure wicket gate, then walked east through terraces of olives and vines. A man met us. We mounted mules, went on.
Peaceful were the months that followed. Hamilax took me to a distant beach, three days’ ride from Hadrumetum, to a shore of turtles and high palms. Above the beach were cliffs of sandstone, caves. In one of these we made our home and the learning began.
Hamilax began to teach me, as he had been told, such things as I had need to know. I learnt of our gods, of Melkarth first, honoured by the Phoenicians, our ancestors, and how he waged a great war against Masiasbal to avenge the serpent queen. For forty ages they fought, then forty more, locked in bitter combat. From the depths of Tartessus they fought, to the high mountains of Ersiphonia until they came to the utmost bounds of the world. There the she-monster Masiasbal turned at bay, against the flaming walls of the world and, under a blood-red moon in the sight of women dragon-tailed, Melkarth slew her.
All this I learned and more. It was for Silenus to teach me Greek, but Hamilax was versed in the old Canaanite tongue of my people and this too he began to teach me, that which is written in the books of Sakkun-yathon.
Aesneth karith nago
Walkhah um ubefo
Karith an shem …
Being but a man I walk alone
Seeking in the darkness
Under the eye of god …
By day, I began to learn the ways of animals and how to trap them, the art both of the javelin and the sword. I went barefoot, like a shepherd. Of all my childhood, these were golden days.
Hamilax was a man of grudging words. One evening we were sitting on the beach, watching a huge and flaming sun set in the sky. I asked him what was the sun, and why it was leaving. “Ask your own heart, Hannibal,” he said. “Many things become clear to those who learn to ask their own hearts in silence.”
We returned to Carthage in silence, as we had gone. At home, nothing had changed. The servants went their way. The bakers baked, the weavers wove. I did not see my mother at first, for she had given birth. I had, I learned, another brother, Hasdrubal, but he was with a nursemaid. My mother was confined to bed. My brother Mago seemed afraid of me. We played no more. Something had come between us. We kept to separate ways. My father was away. I felt alone.
