The Roman historian Valerius Maximus tells a story about the young Hannibal. As a boy in Carthage, Hannibal and his younger brothers would wrestle one another. Their father, Hamilcar Barca, would boast proudly to his guests, “My boys are lion cubs reared for Rome’s destruction.” Whether this actually happened, we don’t know, but we can imagine the young Hannibal wanting to please his father and taking pride in Hamilcar’s boast.1
Hannibal was born around 247 BCE during a long war between Carthage and Rome that often took Hamilcar, a famous general, away for extended periods of time. Hannibal’s parents gave him a name rich in religious meaning; “Baal be gracious to me” or “Baal be merciful to me.” Baal was a great Carthaginian god of fertility who manifested himself in thunderous storms; in naming him so, Hannibal’s family tied the boy’s future to his personal god and thus to his destiny. With sacrifices to the gods made at his birth, Hannibal had a long military tradition to follow.
Carthage in North Africa had been deliberately chosen for its location by the Phoenicians, who had founded the city in what is now Tunis. They thought it was perfectly situated for trade. A natural bay and man-made harbors offered shelter to Carthaginian ships that traded with fertile Sicily, only a short voyage away.2 Trade also extended to Spain and over much of the Mediterranean Sea. Although Carthage’s docks were secreted behind a high wall, protected from the prying eyes of the outside world, young Hannibal would have frequently seen his city’s renowned double harbor. He would have walked with family members, maybe elder sisters or servants, passing through exotic markets of redolent spices alongside the famous port. The Phoenicians who established Carthage around 814 BCE were most likely refugees from Tyre who fled from Assyrian invaders swarming like locusts from their Mesopotamian lands in the east. As Carthage’s mother city, Tyre was famous for its mercantilism and its far-flung trade, as the prophet Ezekiel scorns in his tirade against Tyre in Ezekiel 23:7–8: “whose footsteps led her abroad to found her own colonies, whose traders were princes, whose merchants the great ones of the world.” Like mother, like daughter.
As a boy, Hannibal would have heard many times that for a half millennium, Carthage had ruled the western Mediterranean sea unchallenged. In addition to its mercantilism, Tyre bequeathed to Carthage the Phoenician alphabet and the Phoenician language, which in the Carthaginian dialect was known as Punic. (Both languages are extinct.)
After centuries in the Mediterranean, Carthage had no rivals until Rome began to flex its newfound power.3 Now there was a growing shadow from Italy. With an agrarian mindset, the upstart Romans were much more acquisitive than the Carthaginians, constantly seeking to bring new territories under their sway. Carthage had colonies in Spain and elsewhere, but these were largely mercantilist enterprises. Carthage was uninterested in making the Celtiberians of Spain and other colonies into Carthaginians, whereas Rome wanted its colonies to think of themselves as Romans, and indeed it made Roman citizenship a possibility. So long as goods and treasure flowed back to Carthage as expected, the city-state was content to let the colonies organize themselves politically however they wished. In contrast, in the Roman world, even slaves could become wealthy, and in time they might even become free. The available evidence does not indicate that slaves in Carthage ever had such opportunities.
Hannibal’s family was aristocratic, descended from military leaders and merchant princes.4 Hannibal lived in one of his family’s villas, likely atop one of the hills where Carthage caught afternoon breezes from the sea. But Carthage’s harbor was the city’s pride and joy. It possessed the best naval berths the world could offer. The outer rectangular harbor’s water glinted around a merchant fleet and quays that could berth up to 220 sailing ships. The inner circular harbor often bristled with warships and many-oared triremes and quinquiremes, their bronze shields reflecting sunlight. Perhaps the young Hannibal wished to sail in a warship to one of the great naval battles he heard about often.
Hannibal’s family was the Barcid clan, landowners of vast farms a few days’ journey to the south around the Sahel region of North Africa, where wheat was then plentiful, well watered by the forested eastern Atlas Mountains.5 More important, his immediate ancestors were generals and legendary fighters. Because the Barcids were natural leaders in the old pattern of Phoenician aristocracy,6 during his early life Hannibal would see his father only between engagements in Sicily, where he fought the hated Romans. From snippets of household conversations, the boy might have grown to understand that the Romans were now challenging Carthage over which power would control the great island. His father often moved so fast between lightning-strike battles along Sicily’s northern coast that messengers from Carthage would arrive on each other’s heels. The year of Hannibal’s birth, 247, was also about the time that Hamilcar Barca received his military commission to lead much of Carthage’s forces.
Not much is known about Hannibal’s mother. We do not even know her name, but she would have likely descended from a similar aristocratic family of Carthage and would have wedded with a dowry of silver, land, and slaves, as was common for aristocratic families at the time. In between engagements, when his father would return with Carthaginian fleets for a few months, Hannibal’s mother bore two other boys, Hasdrubal and Mago. His mother and father already had three daughters before Hannibal, although their names, too, have been lost to history. Hannibal’s parents guaranteed that their daughters would marry well, usually into other leading military families. The eldest married a man named Bomilcar, who would become admiral over a Carthaginian fleet. The second daughter would marry Hasdrubal the Fair, who later helped Hamilcar conquer and govern Iberia, as much of Spain was known then. The third daughter later wed outside the Carthaginian aristocracy, marrying a local chief of nearby Numidia for a political alliance. Thus, the Barcids were a well-connected family in Carthage.
Hannibal’s education would have been similar to that expected for a young aristocratic boy. Not much can be said other than that he had a Greek tutor in literature named Sosylos who must have taught him some of Homer’s epics and probably how to read. Sosylos may have taught him from Aristotle’s Logic, because Hannibal knew much about Aristotle’s famous pupil Alexander the Great and his military exploits. The boy may well have known about Odysseus because Hannibal shared the cunning character of this Greek hero, full of stratagems. We do not know when Hannibal’s education started, but Sosylos even accompanied Hannibal later on his military campaigns in Italy.
But everything changed in 241 BCE when Hannibal was six years old. Military disaster struck the Carthaginians as events near the end of the First Punic War reversed earlier successes. Although the enemy Romans had lost fleet after fleet, more than seven hundred ships, and up to a hundred thousand men in a series of naval disasters starting in 264 BCE, when war had broken out, they refused to give up. Carthage had a very different leadership after 244 BCE. Its Council of Elders—the Gerousia—increasingly opposed the long Punic War that had dragged on for twenty years. (Punic was the Roman word for Carthage, a possible abbreviation of the Greek word Phoinikes, which may have originally meant the people of “red dye.”7 This important cloth dye derived from shellfish was a commodity in which the Phoenicians had a trading monopoly for centuries.) The Romans had refused to surrender during two decades of bad outcomes and had only the final naval victory in their favor. But Carthage was already intimidated by Roman mobilization of endless resources.
The Gerousia was Carthage’s governing body. According to Aristotle’s Politics, Carthage had a form of constitution and elected magistrates. The Gerousia was not as powerful as the contemporary Roman Senate, but like the Roman Senate, it was oligarchic in nature. In Carthage, the upper class consisted of wealthy merchants and landowners, and so the Gerousia sought to protect commercial interests. As a consequence, the Gerousia tended to be conservative and cautious about military action. Military families such as the Barcas were often at odds with the Gerousia if there was not an imminent threat. We should remember, too, that much of Carthage’s military was made up of mercenaries, who might not have even been Carthaginian by birth.
The leaders in Carthage wrongly assumed that the last Sicilian battle at Drapanum (now Trapani) in 249 BCE had been such a complete victory for Carthage that the Romans would soon relinquish their claim to western Sicily, traditionally Punic territory. Led by Hanno, a great landowner rather than a military man, the now-dovish Gerousia began recalling and dismantling the fleets. In demobilizing their great navies, the Carthaginians turned many back into merchant vessels and sent them out again on far-flung trade. Hanno believed the future of Carthage lay in Africa and not overseas. Hamilcar Barca still led forces of thousands in Sicily and even raided South Italy in quick attacks, but Carthage’s Senate wanted peace so much that it blindly underestimated Roman tenacity of will.
The blow that Hamilcar Barca anticipated was slow to develop but quick to strike. The Roman Senate heard from its well-placed spies that Carthage was sending ships home. In Italy, southern Campanian senators and rich landowners had always had the most to lose from a close Carthaginian presence in Sicily. These wealthy Romans formed an unusual plan. Because Rome was either unable or unwilling to finance a new fleet, they dug deep into their own pockets and absorbed all the costs. Even borrowing against their land, they took advantage of the downsizing of Carthaginian naval power and paid for outfitting as many new ships as they could. Smart businessmen, these rich Romans asked for reimbursement only in the event of victory. Back in Carthage, Hamilcar was dismissed as a hawk. The general’s messengers who conveyed his warnings about the piles of fresh cut timber on the wharves and quickly growing hulls in Italian harbors went unheard.
After many Roman losses at sea, one naval battle decided the outcome of this struggle between Carthage and Rome. The Romans had recently dredged a storm-wrecked Carthaginian ship’s hull out of the Sicilian water to be examined by their carpenters and shipwrights. To their surprise, the Italian ship builders discovered an amazing fact: every piece of wood on the Carthaginian ship was numbered. The Romans were not long in figuring out that the Carthaginian boats were easily assembled from timbers according to a template. This made shipbuilding easier, since all the wood dimensions were predetermined and merely slotted into place and caulked. It was hardly necessary to have a master shipwright in charge of building each boat. Many ships could be assembled simultaneously. The practical Romans quickly duplicated the technique, accelerating the usual time needed to build a navy.
On March 10, 241 BCE, in the Battle of the Aegates Islands west of Sicily, Rome’s new fleet completely outmanned the small and hastily prepared Carthaginian fleet. Once the mightiest power on the seas, Carthage’s navy was destroyed. Demoralized by its first naval defeat—an unthinkable event—the Council of Elders negotiated a quick surrender that infuriated Hamilcar. The terms of surrender left nothing to Carthage and everything to Rome. This was partly because the Hanno-led Carthaginian Senate was not interested in maintaining maritime power—unlike Rome, which understood its destiny in the need to expand. Hanno’s Senate faction thought only of its status quo control of African territory. The Treaty of Lutatius in 241, so named after the victorious Roman consular admiral Gaius Lutatius Catulus, was a permanent blow to Carthaginian maritime might and apparently also a personal affront to Hamilcar Barca. It was a disaster, demonstrating Roman intents that Hamilcar could never forgive. In one treaty, Carthage’s traditional monopoly of the seas was lost forever. Hamilcar Barca even refused to come to the negotiating table with Rome.
The Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about the rivalry between Rome and Carthage, carefully recorded the terms of surrender. First, Carthage would have to remove every Carthaginian citizen from Sicily and give up all claims to this huge, fertile island. Second, all Punic ships and men were to withdraw from the many islands around and between Sicily and Italy. These had been convenient places where Carthaginian ships had harbored for centuries. Third, Carthage would also have to cut off all ties with Siracusa, a powerful city-state in Sicily that the Romans wanted badly to control because of its superb harbor. Hamilcar saw correctly that this treaty would end Carthage’s historic claims to sail and trade in the western Mediterranean. Finally, Carthage would have to pay an indemnity of 3,200 talents of silver, a total of almost 10 million shekels, a third of it due immediately because Rome demanded war reparations. In the short term, accepting these circumstances was dire enough, but over the long haul, this could be a death sentence to Carthage, however slow the squeeze would be. Hamilcar knew it and was enraged. He believed Carthage could rise again.
A bitter Hamilcar Barca came home from Sicily, reluctantly obeying the recall mandate from Carthage, and the troops soon followed. So many mercenaries were unpaid, however, that they rebelled in 239 BCE, and the weak city elders hesitated to make any restitution. Carthage itself was now under siege from its Libyan and other alien mercenary veterans who rightly demanded their promised back pay. After brutal decimation of men on both sides, including generals such as Gisco, who had led some of Carthage’s armies in Sicily, Hamilcar defeated the rebellious mercenaries, some of whom had even fought with him in Sicily. As the battle advantage fluctuated between the rebels and the city, many died a cruel death by crucifixion. Both rebels and Carthaginians were tortured and nailed in public view along roads and on city walls. Hamilcar finally prevailed and trampled the rebel leaders with war elephants. The general’s popularity rose due to his leadership, which broke the siege and saved Carthage.
About this same time in 238 BCE, young Hannibal lived through a new crisis when Rome annexed the island of Sardinia. This was not one of the territories ceded to Rome in the Treaty of Lutatius of 241, yet Rome took advantage of Carthage’s siege and a Punic economy weakened by the rebel war. Rome had long been uneasy about the island of Sardinia, with its centuries-old Phoenician colonies such as Tharros. One Roman description even referred to Sardinia “as a long ship anchored against Italy’s side.”8 But when Rome seized Sardinia, Carthage could do nothing except send ambassadors to Rome to protest. The Senate of Rome responded that any hostile action by Carthage would be considered an act of war. Making matters worse, Rome added a new clause to the treaty. Long after the fact, it demanded an additional fine against Carthage of 1,200 more silver talents. Even the pro-Roman Polybius writes in his histories that Rome made Hamilcar Barca more of an implacable enemy by this cavalier action, and that the results would be nothing short of calamitous for a soon desperate Carthage.9 The frustration in Hamilcar’s voice must have now carried through his house as he raged against both Rome and the shortsightedness of his own people. The general also unleashed tirades against his rival Hanno for leading the Carthaginian Senate into appeasing a Rome that would never be satisfied.
When young Hannibal, now between the ages of around five and eight, watched quietly or heard his family’s heated conversations between 241 and 238 BCE, he would have formed opinions likely modeled after his father’s. Weighing most heavily on Hamilcar’s mind was revenge against the Romans. Young Hannibal would have heard such sentiments frequently.
In 237 BCE, at age nine, Hannibal’s life was altered irrevocably. Hamilcar had finally persuaded the Carthage Council of Elders to let him go to Spain, where Carthage could more quickly raise money to pay the penalties Rome had imposed. Spain’s silver mines were fabulously rich, and the more democratic Hamilcar was fed up with the ruling oligarchy under Hanno and more than ready to leave Carthage. The Hanno faction, meanwhile, saw an opportunity to keep a popular opponent at a distance where he could not stir up trouble against Rome so easily. Like many boys, young Hannibal must have adored and worshipped his father. Surely his parents would have talked about Hamilcar’s and the family’s options. If his father had talked about not wanting to return to Carthage, the boy would not have wanted to wait in futility. Hannibal would have done anything in his power to accompany his father.
According to Polybius and the later Roman historian Livy, Hamilcar took young Hannibal with him to a place that could forever haunt the boy. Some of the sacred precincts of Carthage, including the Temple of Baal, a place of possible ancient human sacrifice, and the sacred cemetery called the tophet, often were interpreted as a repository for human sacrifice. Whether Carthaginians still practiced human sacrifice is a contentious subject. That there could be original Canaanite or Phoenician antecedents of likely child sacrifice—as the modern scholar Brody maintains from fairly recent Iron II (1000–550 BCE) tophet contexts at the tombolo (sandy “mound”) of Tyre10—does not necessarily mean full continuation into Punic culture in the West. The Semitic word tophet as a cremation burial place itself may even relate to a Greek word, taphos, meaning both funerary rites or a tomb and burial place.11 The debate about tophet practices still embroils scholars in heated arguments and equally acrimonious counterarguments. This story of human sacrifice is hardly new, because historians such as Diodorus Siculus had made this assertion long ago, although more than a few interpret it mostly as propaganda against Punic religion.12 While Polybius says nothing about the element of human sacrifice, he does emphasize this event as the defining moment of young Hannibal’s life.
Hamilcar and Hannibal went to the precinct of the Temple of Baal, entering through the gates and doors where priests waited. Beyond the sacred threshold of a temple, a quiet hush would have surrounded the visitors. Hannibal’s name may be a clue to what happened next, if the story is true. We are told in Hannibal’s own words—repeated much later in his life—that his father brought his young son to the place of sacrifice. Hamilcar likely made his son ascend the altar and there place his hand on the sacrificial victim in order to make a vow. As the animal tied to the altar breathed away its last few minutes, Hannibal would have felt the warm flesh rise and fall. Placing his hand on the sacrificial victim—the exact words of Polybius13—in making his vow, this physical act would have fused a clear connection in the boy’s mind between himself and the victim. Hannibal would have known that such vows made before gods such as Baal were unbreakable. That a living creature died in witness of a vow to the gods was the most serious part of this sacrifice ritual.
Thus, Hannibal’s own destiny was both “sacrificed” and consecrated to Baal, his god. Hannibal must have soon realized that his own life owed all to the god’s mercy; he must have comprehended that an animal died while he lived in order to make this vow.
At the climax of this momentous event, Hannibal’s father asked him to swear undying hatred to Rome, and Hannibal did so. Even though the boy might not have grasped the meaning, its sense would grow on him throughout his life. If Polybius and others have related this story accurately, Hannibal would remember the details until the end of his life, telling it to Antiochus III, another enemy of Rome in the East, only a few years before his death. In a way, the child Hannibal died that day. He would increasingly come to know thereafter that he lived only to see Rome’s destruction.
Livy claimed later that Hannibal was impious and nulla religio, “without religion.” This is not true. While Hannibal respected Roman oracles later in his military campaigns—naturally taking advantage when the Roman omens were against Roman victory—he was certainly also religious with respect to Carthaginian gods. Apparently the Romans would never fully understand what Hannibal’s devotion meant. They did not comprehend the implications of Hannibal’s childhood vow.
A few months later in the same year of 237 BCE, Hannibal prepared to accompany his father in their departure from Carthage. Hannibal was about to leave his mother, older sisters, and younger brothers behind. Hasdrubal and Mago were too young to make this hard journey to Spain, but they would come years later. Perhaps his mother had too many ties to Carthage, including her other children and relatives, as she did not accompany them. We hear nothing about her again.
In 237 BCE, either during spring when the sea-lanes reopened after winter or in summer when the land was dry enough to march across, Hamilcar and his young son left Carthage accompanied by a small retinue of loyal soldiers, junior officers, and slaves. Dawn was usually the best time to begin traveling as many possible miles in a day. The city was probably not yet awake except along the harbor markets where the fishnets were already being hauled in with their morning catch. The Barcids were also followed by an unknown number of thousands of Carthaginian troops, proud cavalry from Numidia, the adjacent kingdom (mostly modern-day Algeria) allied to Carthage, and many Libyan and other mercenaries—as well as pack animals, traveling metalsmiths, cooks, suppliers, civilian quartermasters (paymaster and supply officer), and camp followers, as well as the usual stragglers and hawkers of wares and human vices.
Several routes to Spain lay open to the army, including by land or sea. Hamilcar and Hannibal could have taken a ship out of the bay and sailed along the Maghreb coast west toward Spain, as Diodorus Siculus claims. Polybius, on the other hand, implies that they marched overland in Africa with the army toward the coast opposite Gibraltar.14
Young Hannibal, perhaps excitedly wide awake the first night due to the novelty, must have enjoyed the traveling spectacle of the noisy army, uncountable soldiers of every size and garb, with tribal and clan outfits alongside recognizable Carthaginian armor. It was certainly unusual for a general to take along his ten-year-old son. Hannibal would have heard coarse jokes, camp songs, and daily reports to his father, and been amazed at the spectrum of decorum and behavior. Most of all, the boy would have seen and soaked up the army’s respect for his father as chief general at the pinnacle of his soldierly world.
Finally leaving Africa by sea, they would have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and the legendary Pillars of Hercules, where headlands rose to windblown cliffs. As would have been customary, after landing on the Spanish shore, Hannibal likely followed his father and a few of his chosen guards up a path to one of the windy and rocky points—maybe up Gibraltar Rock itself—where an altar to the god Melqart stood in this forlorn but sacred place. Hamilcar’s journey required the blessing of Melqart, once the city god of Tyre in the old Phoenician homeland and now also the god of new ventures. In addition, Melqart was Hamilcar Barca’s personal god—the deity his father’s own name honored.
Whatever guarded thoughts Hamilcar had, he knew there was no turning back. From high up on Gibraltar, the boy would have enjoyed a magnificent view of the blue Mediterranean in one direction eastward and the often gray Atlantic Ocean in the other direction westward. Doubtless, Hannibal would have looked back toward Africa, which he would not see again for a long time. Hannibal could have also seen where the silver-rich Sierra Morena Mountains beckoned northward, now a blue horizon in the shimmering distance across the water and the curving coastline.