Hannibal (247–c. 183 BC) was a Carthaginian general who battled the Roman legions during the Second Punic War. He may be best known for marching his army—which included a detachment of war elephants—across the snowy Alps in a failed effort to invade Italy.
Although Hannibal was defeated, his mastery of military tactics made him one of the most feared and famous generals of the ancient world. Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, a general who had been defeated by Rome during the First Punic War. When the child was nine years old, his father made him take an oath to the god Baal to devote his life to fighting the city’s great enemy. (Hannibal means “Baal’s grace.”) In 221 BC, Hannibal inherited the position of commander in chief of Carthage’s armies.
Two years later, he launched his invasion. The Carthaginian force included about 25,000 men, thousands of horses, and a few dozen elephants. His exact route is unclear, but it ended near the northern Italian city of Turin. Up to half of his troops (and most of the elephants) may have died during the crossing.
For the next seventeen years, Hannibal battled Rome in its own backyard. He never lost a battle to his foes, but was forced to rush back to Carthage when the Romans attacked that city. Hannibal was defeated at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC and shortly thereafter fled into exile in the city of Tyre, never to return to Carthage.
However, Hannibal’s days of fighting the Romans were not over. He was a military advisor to the Greek Seleucid Empire and also commanded a Bithynian naval force that defeated a Roman ally. The Romans were determined to capture Hannibal and pressured the Bithynian king to hand him over, but Hannibal committed suicide before the Romans could capture him.
The Roman victory in the Second Punic War was an important milestone in history. With its most formidable rival defeated, Rome established military supremacy over the Mediterranean world—a position it would enjoy for centuries to follow.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Hannibal appears in Gulliver’s Travels, a classic satirical novel written by English author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in 1726.
- The city of Hannibal, Missouri—the boyhood home of author Mark Twain (1835–1910)—derived its name from the Carthaginian general. The town and its residents provided the inspiration for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of Twain’s best-known works.
- Carthage was decisively defeated by the Romans in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC). Vengeful Roman soldiers supposedly poured salt on the fields around the city to ensure that it would never prosper again. Although historians have raised doubts about the story, Carthage never again challenged Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean.
