It is no wonder that the “indignant” Hamilcar, “unvanquished in spirit” by the war’s outcome in Sicily, as Polybius tells,1 had been ready to leave contentious Carthage for a new land where he could do almost as he wanted and better use his military acumen. Carthage, like its Phoenician parent, was not highly militarized but a commercial society dependent on mercenaries.2 Spain on the other hand, was a mountainous land, possessing an incredibly rich bounty in precious metals such as silver and additional wealth in game in its forests and abundant fish along its long coastline. Its deep soil was fertile and full of agricultural promise for its Punic colonizers.
Hannibal must have been just beginning to understand how important this fact of Spanish resources was to his father. Although he might not have seen all the implications for Carthaginian independence from the penalties of the Roman indemnity assigned by the Treaty of Lutatius, he would not have been able to avoid hearing about the potential for independence in Spain’s wealth.
Historians in antiquity had mentioned Spanish mining wealth since the sixth century BCE. If Hannibal visited the silver mines near the Sierra Morena with his father, as he probably did, he would have seen that they continued for miles in all directions. The boy would also have heard the clang of iron and bronze on rock, hammers and picks seeking the glint of silver. Wooden ladders descended down into the pits all around, each of them echoing with ringing staccato blows and a din of voices. Man-made hills of ore would have been piled everywhere and the air filled with rock dust. The keen eyes of Hamilcar Barca would have missed nothing, as he likely calculated the time and labor required to amass a treasure of silver bullion.3
If in a few short years after 237 BCE Hamilcar was able to revive the old Phoenician silver mining operations, it would have been because he was intensely driven to pay back the Carthaginian indemnity to Rome as well as to build a new war chest against Rome. Even if he might not live to see it, he would make sure that Hannibal would. Hamilcar traversed Andalucia from east to west not just to reinvigorate the mining of silver but also to visit the Celtiberian tribes, which had a fragile alliance with Carthage.
The Phoenicians had been exploring this southern region of Spain for centuries. At first beaching their ships where wide rivers flowed out along the steep and cliff-indented coast, the Phoenicians had carefully scouted the land. Trading with the Iberian tribes that had slowly been processing the ubiquitous iron, the Phoenicians were always looking for metal and indigenous mining operations they could assimilate. Phoenician merchants had expanded their network of small trading posts, bringing finished products such as Near Eastern and Greek pottery, colored glass beads, and luxury items such as Egyptian ivory, spices, ostrich eggs, purple-dyed textiles for the ladies, and rough but practical textiles along with farming tools for the men in exchange for Iberian mineral and other goods. The Phoenicians were careful not to arm the Iberians with weapons that could be turned against them. The local agricultural products and the teeming fisheries off the coast of Andalucia were also part of the Iberian network of natural wealth. Many fish-processing villages lined the Gulf of Cádiz coast. The island of Ibiza had been the site of a huge fishing industry since the seventh century BCE.
Posidonius the Greek philosopher wrote that the Phoenicians founded the colony of Gadir (also known as Gades, or Cádiz) around 1100 BCE. In Hannibal’s day, it was a thriving city, the center of all Phoenician mining trade in the region. Offspring of Phoenicians here were as proud of their early Temple of Melqart as their Carthaginian cousins were of the Temple of Eshmoun towering above Carthage on Bursa Hill. Along the coast, the local Iberians had also borrowed or adopted the gods of their masters the Carthaginians or joined them to their own deities. Symbols of the Carthaginian goddess Tanit could be seen painted on tombs or pebbled into pavements, her triangular skirt easily recognizable as a Punic religious icon, seen later in a mosaic at Selinus in Sicily.
On the frontiers of Andalucia were the hostile tribes of the Turdetani or Turdulli, who would give Hamilcar much grief. The Celtiberian north was still filled with fierce tribes and clans that were always threatening to muster enough men and weapons for raids on Phoenician outposts. Hamilcar had well-armed groups of trained veterans placed in forts and towns along the frontier that would communicate any unusual tribe movements to him on a regular basis. Messengers regularly went back and forth between the command centers such as Gades and the outposts, since communication was vital and protecting the mines was crucial. Sooner or later Hamilcar would have to move deeper into the interior and deal with the Celtiberian tribes.
Within two years after he left Carthage, Hamilcar Barca founded the Carthaginian colony of Akra Leuke on the Mediterranean coast of northern Andalucia, northeast of the city of Murcia. Akra Leuke sat below looming white plateaus, and its Greek name, meaning “white high place,” later became Alicante in Arabic during the medieval Moorish kingdom of al-Andalus.
In Akra, his new base of operations, from 235 BCE onward, Hamilcar seems to have assigned another teacher to his preadolescent son. While Sosylos continued to teach Hannibal about the ancient Greeks, a new tutor would have trained Hannibal in manly weaponry. Hannibal’s new tutor was most likely a grizzled veteran with only one job: to instruct him in swordsmanship and archery with real weapons instead of toy ones.
Because he went everywhere with his father, Hannibal was already saddle hardened and tanned from the sun. As a soldier in training who had been partly raised in military camps, Hannibal probably rode a horse with skill and ease. A legendary leader who knew his men extremely well, Hamilcar knew that Hannibal must have been ready to fight very early.
Although Livy does not agree with the epithet, he sarcastically mentions Hamilcar’s reputation among his admirers as a “second Mars” as a war commander.4 Hannibal would have learned an officer’s sense of authority and how the chain of command worked both in peace and in war. Hamilcar’s force was usually a mobile, well-trained force, and divided into experienced officers on horseback and many hundreds or thousands of foot soldiers. Hamilcar would have surrounded himself with handpicked Carthaginian veterans and have chosen Numidian cavalry officers, among others. The Numidians were famous horsemen and were allies of Carthage. Hannibal would have learned to think of himself as a unit with his horse, learning both on horseback and on foot how fast an army could march in different terrain—and he would have done it himself to test and develop his youthful stamina. He would have learned from the Numidians how to pretend to retreat but instead fight even harder facing backward in a surprise feint when the enemy least expected it. Hannibal eventually earned his own battle experience, including slight wounds from grazing arrows or skirmishes.
Most of all, Hannibal would have learned from his father how to lead by example and how to be fair with every soldier; when to encourage and when to express justifiable anger. Judging from later military experiences, young Hannibal seemed to have picked up quickly not to be impetuous or to let anger rule him, when to engage and when to disengage, how to choose the terrain on which to fight, and how to lead men to respect him not only because of his father but also due to his own developing sense of strategy and battle logic. Hannibal’s childhood passed into adolescence far from his mother and family females to coddle him.
If Hannibal loved or was infatuated with anyone in the passions of adolescence, history has not preserved any names. His loves and concubines throughout his long life must have been fairly private, because other than a brief mention of a Spanish wife named Imilce, we never learn their names, not even when he lived with a courtesan in Salapia. Nor do we know whether he had any children, which is not as unusual as it might seem. On the other hand, Hannibal lived a military life without ever being tied down to one place long enough to develop relationships outside of his family (and mistresses) and his eventual close circle of military advisors. That is not to suggest that young Hannibal was lonely while surrounded by his military comrades and his father’s officers. Seldom in history has any young man been so devoted to one thing alone: the art of war, and that was due greatly to his father, probably the best general of his generation.
After founding Akra Leuke, Hamilcar turned his full attention to bringing the people between the rest of Andalucia and even western Valencia under his control in several military campaigns between 235 and 231 BCE. Near the Gulf of Cartagena, the Batuli tribes around Cape de Palos were assimilated as a conquered people fairly quickly by Hamilcar, who was accompanied by his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair (husband of Hannibal’s older sister) around 236 BCE. Hasdrubal the Fair had also founded Cartagena in one of the best natural harbors in the Mediterranean, adjacent to land rich in silver ore a few miles to the east. Shipping from this deep harbor, well protected against raids, could hardly have been easier. Here Hasdrubal built a fort, as well as several temples and a thriving colony with stone structures whose foundations still remain—no doubt with Hamilcar’s military assistance or the supervision of his military engineers.
A new minting of silver coins was apparently stamped with Hamilcar’s visage, much of it sent to Carthage from the fine, deep port and the rest stockpiled for the general’s future campaigns. Hamilcar must have also taught Hannibal the value of silver for military negotiation with locals for food and supplies or paying an army’s mercenaries. When the Romans sent a deputation to inquire around 231 BCE about the purpose of the Punic silver mining activity, Hamilcar’s answer must have referred to repaying the war indemnity from 241 BCE.5 Apparently the Romans accepted this answer and left him alone.
The Mastetani tribe near Murcia, just north of Cartagena, was also soon within Hamilcar’s military vision, apparently a mostly successful campaign, and in 229 BCE Hamilcar was attempting to conquer the area of Helike, near modern Toledo to the north. This was where the Celtiberian Vettoni tribe was located, northern allies of the warlike Turdulli and Turdetani. Unfortunately for Hamilcar, this interior location deep in Spain—where negotiations were set to take place—was quite far removed from his long supply lines on the coast. The Celtiberian Oretani tribe marched south from the Manchegan plains to help defend the Vettoni until Hamilcar was greatly outnumbered, the main body of his army having been left a few miles to the east while he went to negotiate. However, the Vettoni feared and respected Hamilcar’s leadership too much to attack the entire Carthaginian army. Hannibal would have been alongside his father in almost every campaign, and was certainly near his father at this one.
One source, Diodorus Siculus, writing a couple of hundred years later, says that while Hamilcar was negotiating with the treacherous Vettoni, accompanied by only a few officers, he was ambushed. This went completely against the protocols of ancient warfare, because there was a truce during negotiations. But the Celtiberians were more chaotic barbarians than a unified army.
Hamilcar feared for Hannibal, who led a small scouting detachment also removed from the larger army. Hannibal would have been around nineteen, and his younger brother Hasdrubal was with him in this small force. According to the ancient sources, Hamilcar diverted attention from the small force with his sons during the ambush and sacrificed himself to save them. Diodorus has Hamilcar drowning in the Júcar River, probably wounded, but a terse account by Polybius has him surrounded and fighting the Vettoni down to his last man and then being killed himself. Finally, Cornelius Nepos, a Roman biographer who lived in the first century BCE, writes that Hamilcar engaged at first with the Vettoni but then drowned in the Tagus River.6 Taken all together, an ambush by the Vettoni seems likely, and Hamilcar, severely wounded, managed a partial escape only to drown. Furthermore, considering how good a soldier he was and a master tactician, sacrificing himself for his sons was in keeping with Hamilcar’s character.
Hannibal was now bereft of his father before he was twenty. But enough of his father’s will and experience had been imparted that Hannibal would have been prepared to lead, however premature the timing seemed. While Hannibal must have deeply mourned the loss of his father privately, he was by now every inch a warrior, and soldiers are supposed to be emotionally and psychologically steeled for sudden death in battle. Knowing that good decisions must be made despite personal loss, there is little time for sentiment, as soldiers are taught to put the deaths of their comrades behind them and move on. Hannibal already had years of dedicated military training at his father’s side, in which he had been prepared for leadership. He must have been ready to take his father’s mantle as well as carry out the life-changing promise he had made back in Carthage: the vow to hate Rome.