After his defeat by Scipio in Spain at Baecula in the spring of 208, yet with much of his army intact, Hasdrubal Barca was again commanded from Carthage to join his brother Hannibal in Italy. This time he made the decision to abandon Spain, since Rome was now establishing its own dominance there. It must have been with some regret that Hasdrubal obeyed, knowing that the wealth of Spain’s silver mines and rich iron was something Carthage could ill afford to lose. Hasdrubal had eluded the army of Scipio in the late fall of 208 by passing with his mixed Carthaginian and Celtiberian force over the low Cantabrian Mountains in the extreme west near a Galician source of the Ebro River. One of several clear differences between Hasdrubal’s and Hannibal’s armies is that Hasdrubal lacked the advantage of the sizable force of Numidian cavalry that his brother had used so well as a tactical weapon in his considerable arsenal.1 The debated original number of soldiers with him may have been fifteen thousand soldiers and fifteen elephants.2
Moving east through Southern Gaul, Hasdrubal wintered there, picking up many Celtic recruits along the way. Because he had started from Spain so late in the year, this was not the best plan of action to spend so much time on his route wintering with an army west of Italy, because it gave the alarmed Romans ample time to prepare for him, as their allies the people of Massilia (modern Marseilles) warned them of Hasdrubal’s coming. Hasdrubal crossed the Alps in the spring of 207. Polybius says Hasdrubal’s arrival in Italy was much easier and quicker than Hannibal’s.3 Appian (ca. 95–165 CE) says that Hasdrubal crossed the Alps using the “same pass” as his brother did almost a decade earlier.4 This is not impossible but unlikely for several reasons, including the ease of marching without resistance from either difficult route or enemies such as the still hostile Allobroges. It is more likely that Hasdrubal used a much lower pass such as the Montgenerve, with much easier conditions, avoiding mountain Allobroges.
After leaving the Alps, Hasdrubal moved east in the Padana but was delayed at fortified Placentia, the same fairly recent (218 BCE) Roman outpost that Publius Scipio and the remaining Roman soldiers had retreated to after both Ticinus and Trebia. At Placentia Hasdrubal attempted to lay siege to the Roman colony, hoping to starve it out. While he waited, he likely thought a victory there might win over more Celts in the region to his new invasion. As the first Roman colony among the Celts of the Padana or Po Valley of what would later be Gallia Cisalpina, or Gaul on this side of the Alps, Placentia’s fortified position was often precarious, sacked multiple times by Celts and Ligurians.5 The Insubres tribe on the west and the Boii tribe on the east were constant threats to Placentia that Hasdrubal hoped to tightly amalgamate under him along with other tribes.
But Hasdrubal’s Placentia encirclement was fruitless, possibly because the Romans had learned to stay put in a siege as long as possible, and as his own resources were being wasted to no effect, he lifted the siege and abandoned hope of taking Placentia. He may have been joined by eight thousand Ligurians around the time he left the area.6
Hannibal certainly thought considerably about his brother’s forces in North Italy in the spring of 207 and hoped to trap Rome between their two armies, but he may have been surprised by how quickly Hasdrubal had crossed the Alps and then possibly assumed Hasdrubal’s siege would last longer, so his timing was thrown off. Added to this, Hannibal was under repeated rear attacks by a Roman army at Grumentum (near Grumento Nova)7 in Lucania as he moved south toward Bruttium along the upper Agri River; he couldn’t free his army from the dogged Romans under Gaius Claudius Nero at his heels, and he was bleeding men and resources from so many skirmishes meant to keep him in the deep south.
The Romans were also well aware that much of Italy lay between the armies of two Barcid brother generals, both of whom had been successful against Roman armies in Italy and Spain, respectively. Livy even later raises the specter of Hamilcar Barca, their father, who had been so difficult to dislodge in Sicily during the First Punic War, no doubt on the minds of Rome itself.8 The Romans had not yet fully mobilized, but a large part of their plan was indeed to keep Hannibal from getting anywhere near his brother’s approach into the heart of Italy or to keep both of them away from Rome itself. As long as Hasdrubal was far north in the Padana and Hannibal down in Lucania or Bruttium, the prospect was less dire, but if somehow the unforeseen tactical pincer movement came, the possibility of another debacle like Cannae would be dreadful. No doubt this was also what Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and even Carthage aimed to make happen.
After Placentia, Hasdrubal sent six messengers on horseback—two Numidians and four Celts—with a sealed letter on the long journey south toward where he expected Hannibal to be, requesting him to meet him halfway down Italy, seemingly “in Umbria.” But Hasdrubal made at least one very foolish mistake. Unfamiliar with the territory and unaware that Hannibal was on the move constantly putting out fires or coming to the aid of his allies, the messengers made it almost all the way to the farthest southern coast of Italy along the Gulf of Taranto but got lost down by Tarentum. The messengers had planned to find Hannibal somewhere around Metapontum, since they apparently knew that Tarentum had been retaken by Rome in 209, but they were discovered and captured by a Roman patrol much more familiar with the region. The first error of getting lost and being captured was greatly compounded by the fact that when their letter was found on the messengers, Hasdrubal had also made everything plain in the sealed letter, which could have also provided sufficient details of his route. Worse yet, the communiqué was possibly also written in Punic, easily translated by Roman military interpreters, instead of being written in a cipher, or perhaps best transmitted only in verbal form. Whether or not the messengers’ interrogation included torture, the damage was irrevocable once the Romans read and acted on the contents of the letter. Moving up the chain of command, the letter came to Claudius Nero. He immediately dispatched the letter to Rome, where he recommended decisive action.
Never having received the letter—maybe not even knowing one had been sent—Hannibal only knew his brother was somewhere in the north of Italy but had no way of connecting without specific details. Part of the irony of this dilemma tells how very different Hannibal’s overall position was in 207 relative to 218 to 216. Before, he had ample military intelligence with a network of spies everywhere, many of them bilingual or trilingual Celts or disaffected local mercenary Italians who could melt into different communities, including those that must have provisioned Roman armies. Hannibal’s line of communication was now far more haphazard, fragile, and easily disturbed.9 His resources were also much more limited—with apparently less silver to bribe for vital information—and his live assets for ground intelligence seemingly greatly reduced.10
One bold move by a united Rome was almost all that was needed. An army under the consul Marcus Livius Salinator now marched north to meet Hasdrubal if he chose the coastal route. It would eventually be reinforced by either two legions from near Ariminum under Porcius Licinius or by another army coming from Etruria if Hasdrubal came via the Apennines. This last force was under previously disgraced Gaius Terentius Varro, who had disastrously abandoned Cannae but still had plebeian electoral popularity. Thus the separate Roman armies hoped to contain Hasdrubal on one or the other side of the Apennines and force him to choose a route—either west of the mountains or along the Adriatic coast—and guard both of these options.11 Now with a force numbering around thirty thousand, Hasdrubal followed the Po River Valley all the way east, possibly on the Via Aemilia, which took him along the Adriatic coast route south past Ariminum.12 There the combined Roman armies of the consul Livius Salinator and the praetor Licinius assembled to stop him. The Senate was also concerned that Hasdrubal would rouse the rebellious Etruscans of Etruria, a region “ripe” for rebellion.13
More dramatic and consequential was that after having followed Hannibal south to Grumentum in the late spring of 207, the other consul, Gaius Claudius Nero, had moved his army about a hundred miles north to Canusium (modern Canosa di Puglia)—very near Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae—when he received the intercepted message about Hasdrubal’s movement around mid-May. Such was the seesaw movements of cat and mouse between the Romans and Hannibal that after Grumentum, Hannibal had also turned around northward to follow the Romans back toward Canusium. Claudius Nero quickly persuaded a divided Senate in late May to let him quickly take a secret force to meet Hasdrubal and to keep Hannibal completely in the dark, thinking he and his army were still nearby. This Roman deception would not have worked either between 218 and 216, but it seemed to take a page from Hannibal’s own tactics.
Gaius Claudius Nero was a member of one of the most ancient and venerable patrician families, the gens Claudia, and also one of Rome’s increasingly more qualified generals as the Second Punic War dragged on. Claudius Nero had been a staff member under heroic consul and kinsman Claudius Marcellus at Nola in 214 during Hannibal’s effort to secure Campania, which was excellent training for a rising officer. Later, holding the military office of praetor and civilian office of propraetor14 in the cursus honorum, Rome’s expected sequence of offices for its elite, Claudius Nero took part in the siege of Capua in 212 and 211.15 Perhaps Claudius Nero was even one of the Roman officers present under Marcellus when the Romans repelled one of the armies of Hannibal at Nola in 214, as discussed in the previous chapter, and who learned then that Hannibal, however brilliant, was not invincible.16 Showing he was a teachable Roman military leader, Claudius Nero had even been wisely using some of Hannibal’s own tactics against him at Grumentum by concealing some of his soldiers and coming at Hannibal from both directions—a successful strategy that Livy said was “taking a page from his enemy’s book.” Although not a very Roman tactic, it resulted in difficult attrition for Hannibal’s troops.17
Whatever his ambitions, Claudius Nero managed to overcome the fears of the Senate that to leave Hannibal and go north to Hasdrubal could be disastrous if Hannibal knew and followed. Out of his army, he chose six thousand of the best soldiers—the cream of veteran Roman soldiers with great stamina and strength—and a thousand cavalry of the same caliber. He left behind the rest to guard Hannibal, leaving on a secret night march in the deepest quiet but with the greatest haste.
In order to cover the distance of more than three hundred miles between Venusia (Venosa) and the Metaurus River at an almost unheard-of pace, most likely traveling not far inland along the Adriatic coast but certainly east of the Apennines, Claudius Nero’s small army marched day and night.18 Because the troops traveled extremely light for speed, much of their provisions came from the local people who watched them march by the rich farmland, apparently in generosity for protection. Some of the food came from the Piceni,19 the local Adriatic population, which had never sided with Hannibal. The Roman soldiers had brought little more than their weapons and ate along the way only what they needed. The pace was such that while we do not know how long the march took, it must have been at least seven or more days. It would have been extremely unlikely to make more than thirty miles a day on foot even in fairly open farm country from Apulia northward past Ancona, the chief city of Picenum, originally a Greek colony from Siracusa in the early fourth century. The countryside between Apulia and Ancona itself consists of many rolling hills above a shallow coastal plain, and whether Claudius Nero’s army kept fairly along the hilltop ridges or marched on the coastal plain, his journey was so fast that Hannibal’s scouts had possibly been unaware of his nocturnal exit. If Hannibal even noted the prolonged absence of seven thousand soldiers, he may have been stymied because there was still a substantial Roman army camped at Venusia under the legate (a high officer of the Roman army from the patrician or senatorial class) Quintus Catius and possibly one under the proconsul Fulvius Flaccus in the area of Canusium. Hannibal may have been unable to follow even if he did know, since the “curtain wall” of Roman forces numbered about thirty thousand between Venusia and Canusium.20
From the outset, Claudius Nero had first sent an envoy on horseback ahead to his senior coconsul, Livius Salinator, now camped near Hasdrubal, who had also arrived south of Ariminum close to Sena near the Metaurus River and not far from the Via Flaminia.21 Sena, or Senagallia (also Sena Gallica),22 was a Roman colony on the coast in the territory of the former Senones tribe along the Misa River near Ancona. The present Senigallia town is about ten miles south of where the Metaurus River flows into the Adriatic. Hasdrubal was evidently well aware of the presence of the combined Roman army under Livius Salinator and Licinius.
When Claudius Nero’s army arrived as quietly as possible by night, although their direction had been from the south, his scouts had no doubt apprised him of the least likely angle of approach to be discovered by any Carthaginians, who were likely coming directly up the coast now and entering from the east. To complete the deception, Livius Salinator’s army shared its tents with the new soldiers so that the Roman army camp looked exactly as before: no new tents, no visible expansion of space or spreading of quarters that Punic spies would notice by daylight.23 The Romans were cramped and uncomfortable, but the Hannibal-like ruse worked almost perfectly. Against the protests of Livius Salinator, whose day it must have been to order time and place of battle in the shared leadership pattern, Claudius Nero advocated immediate battle the next day despite how tired his men were.
Not wanting to lose the element of surprise, before Hasdrubal discovered he was now facing a much larger army, worsening his chances considerably, Claudius Nero won the argument against his senior colleague. Claudius Nero’s speech before the battle and the oratio recta (straight talk) have been noted in Livy’s narrative of a general’s harangue before battle with rhetorical similarity to Thucydides, suggesting a deliberate literary narrative following precedents.24 Claudius Nero had encouraged his men before they left Venusia to think of themselves as the small weight added to the scale to tip it to victory; even an incremental change such as theirs would be decisive. In addition to the initial element of surprise, their presence alone would soon unsettle Hasdrubal. On the night before battle, Claudius Nero emphasized that maintaining a brisk marching pace—in this case more than halfway up Italy—would make their strategy successful; any delay would reduce it to a reckless adventure. Ignorance worked in their favor as long as Hannibal down south thought nothing amiss. Delaying battle against Hasdrubal would give more time to both the Barcid brothers, eliminating their dual advantage: it would betray the Roman camp down south to Hannibal as having fewer troops on hand and take away any surprise benefit of larger troops assembled here against Hasdrubal.
Morning broke with the Roman army mobilizing a short distance away. Hasdrubal’s camp was possibly only seven hundred meters from the Roman camp. In a famous story related by Livy,25 Hasdrubal, with a small cavalry escort, cannily observed some old shields facing him along with some emaciated horses. Both seemed unusual to him, and he had not seen them before. Wondering if the army facing him had been reinforced, a canny deduction, he sent out his scouts to reconnoiter a long way around the Roman camp. But they reported back that the camp was the same size, with no new tents. Uneasy at the mixed report of what seemed possibly contradictory, the experienced general looked for other evidence as he had his men pull back from their camp, calling off the immediate battle. Hasdrubal soon found his answer when a report told what the Roman trumpets blared: one trumpet sounded in the praetor Licinius’ camp but two trumpets sounded in what was supposed to be only the consul Livius Salinator’s camp. The trumpet peals must have been different to distinguish a praetor from a consul, and Hasdrubal was seasoned enough to know the difference. This revealed what he possibly suspected: that two consuls were now present, where only one had been the day before. Many have said this kind of detail is too clear to be fiction, but Hasdrubal now had a conundrum to unravel with multiple possible bad implications. Could he fight a battle facing a now-compounded Roman force, leaving him even more outnumbered? Had the new consular army facing him won against his brother Hannibal? Was that why they could mobilize to meet him? Had he come to Italy too late? Had his message to his brother been intercepted? Whatever the answer, it wasn’t good and wasn’t in his favor. Hasdrubal avoided battle that day and began to retreat to the southwest, quickly making distance away from Sena until he could come up with the best strategy. Some commentators think that Hasdrubal’s quick retreat to the Metaurus panicked his army and turned their resolve to fight into fear, the worst possible scenario for planning a battle.26 Everything fell apart from that point on.
Hasdrubal had by now hired or acquired some local guides to help him avoid the coastal route he had taken to Senal and began to march mostly west that day. Maps of the region, including satellite maps, show many twisting oxbows of the Metaurus River about ten miles upstream from the coast. And, at that time, it was heavily wooded in many places. Beginning above present-day Calcinelli on the north bank of the Metaurus, many of these old oxbows are steeply sided and joined on both sides by many stream gullies off the surrounding plateau.27 The guides were not exactly trustworthy, however, and if they had promised to lead him to safety or over the river at a major fording place, they did not keep their word. It is even possible they had some allegiance to Rome and were hoping to lead Hasdrubal into a tight spot before disappearing.
The Romans were in hot pursuit, and night brought the darkness Hasdrubal hoped would cover his next move. It might have given him an option to escape into the forested hills, where he could hide, or he might have intended to follow the general course of the Metaurus deep into its Apennine source where he could cross the mountains, but we cannot easily reconstruct his reasons.28 In any case, the Romans were too close for Hannibal’s brother to escape without detection.
Hasdrubal was possibly unnerved by the prospects of what had happened to his brother Hannibal, who had not met up with him while an enemy army had met him instead. His army was in flight mode, and this signaled a bad portent to his allied Celts and his guides. The retreat backfired when his two guides disappeared during the night, likely not wanting to be caught with his army. Hasdrubal was now forced to follow the river course with its channel cut into the plateau, his only topographical clue of direction in the dark. Caught in the bends of the river valley, Hasdrubal may have been looking for a fording place in the river29 where he could cross with his army to relative safety at some point, but without the guides, his army became lost in the steep bends, enabling the Romans to catch up easily by morning. Livy notes the “twists and turns of the tortuous river,”30 suggesting that Hasdrubal’s retreat was now deep into the old Metaurus oxbows. Many of his Celts had also either scattered, abandoning the rest of the marching army somewhere along the way, or had made camp where Hasdrubal had initially planned to rest until he found his army too closely pursued. The Celts may have stopped to sleep, aligned in their tribal groups—reverting to old loyalties when Hasdrubal’s infrastructure began collapsing—although they had also consumed enough wine to be in a stupor.31 Many knots of Celts possibly slept along high gullies or up streams they had followed. Hasdrubal forged on in the dark with the rest of his army. The Romans intercepted Hasdrubal partly because their scouts were following an army rather than a river, and the Romans could have avoided the oxbows by traveling above along the plateau away from the bends, knowing where the oxbows would come back if they had proper local guides. Many of the Roman troops could have come straight across from Sena, halving the distance once advance scouts who observed from safe distances signaled Hasdrubal’s troop movement directions.
That next morning—ironically, about the midsummer solstice, possibly even the same day Hannibal had won at Trasimene a decade earlier—a weary Hasdrubal heard and saw he was trapped. He had to face a Roman army bristling and ready for battle. He may or may not have made his way out of all the oxbows, but his back was to the steep hillside in the Metaurus River Valley. He had no choice but to do battle. He tried to assemble his army in order in the tight space, setting his Spanish forces on his right behind his fifteen elephants at the far edge, with his remaining Celts on his left but uphill.
Hasdrubal knew the Romans would find it difficult fighting uphill and that his doughty Spanish forces on lower ground would face the brunt of the battle. Livius Salinator’s army faced Hasdrubal’s Spanish, who fought bravely and gave no quarter, although outnumbered. Porcius Licinius faced Hasdrubal’s center with his army. At first, the battle was fairly even because Hasdrubal used his remaining Celts in the steep terrain to his advantage to attempt offsetting the numerical discrepancy—an echo of his brother’s tactics. But having no time to escape, Hasdrubal also had no hidden ambushes for the Romans as Hannibal had often set up.
The Punic war elephants were mostly useless and unmanageable, charging pell-mell into the tight space, causing as much havoc to Carthaginians as Romans. Six elephants were killed outright—some slain in battle with their drivers or miserably by their drivers, who pounded spikes with mallets into the base of their skulls when they attacked their own forces—and at least four elephants crashed right through all the Roman lines, wandering aimlessly in the countryside until captured later. The elephants were either abandoned by their drivers or some drivers were picked off along the way through the Roman lines.32 War elephants needed open ground to build up any momentum in charging and were not at all effective in a steep river valley.
Claudius Nero soon realized he would not prevail uphill against the Celts and could not come around their flank on the right because of the steep topography, so he changed his tactics by improvising brilliantly. He pulled back a considerable number of his rear troops, leaving the rest engaged against the Celts, and moved the smaller force around behind Livius Salinator’s fighting line all the way to the far left, where the ground was flatter and more open. Now Hasdrubal’s veteran Spanish troops were exposed in a dual attack on their rear from Claudius Nero while still fighting Livius Salinator’s army on their front. Claudius Nero’s maneuver proved to be the deciding factor at Metaurus, as the Spaniards, however resolute, along with Hasdrubal himself, were mowed down from both sides—“cut to pieces,” as Polybius says.33 The Celts gave way to the relentless onslaught once the Spanish were decimated, or even before, when they saw the battle turning, some fleeing. Hasdrubal now knew the battle was lost and threw himself courageously and somewhat suicidally into the thickest fighting where he fell, choosing to die honorably rather than be taken prisoner and paraded through Rome in shackles.
The Romans ransacked the Carthaginian camp, killing the sleeping Celts, who could barely move. Gathering up loot and as many of the captured enemy who had survived or surrendered, the Romans were elated at their success—perhaps the first major victory in Italy. Hasdrubal, a once mighty but now slain Barcid, was likely soon decapitated to relieve years of Roman frustration. Once the knowledge of victory soaked into the minds and emotions of the resting Roman soldiers, the news bolted like lightning to Rome along the Via Flaminia. Although some rumor possibly trickled in an advance wave, the city quickly knew by the sight of the joy and confidence on the faces and demeanor of the victory envoy of cavalry officers riding thunderously into the city and straight to the Senate. Rome declared the victory of Metaurus a temporary national holiday, and rejoicing was heard everywhere by an astonished people rushing along the streets to the heart of the city to celebrate ridding themselves of one of the shadows looming over their shoulders. Although the long war was far from over, the sun must have seemed to shine brighter that day than most could remember in Rome.
For his part, Claudius Nero turned quickly southward with his tired army back to Venusia, marching as fast as possible—it all happened in about two weeks—before Hannibal had any news of the defeat and death of his brother. Unless the military intelligence in the ancient world had a superb chain of human links and spies on horseback, two weeks would be a fair time for word to travel on foot three hundred miles, especially if the Romans were attempting to keep the news from Hannibal. Perhaps it is not odd given the patrician politics of Rome that the bold consul Claudius Nero was not given the victory he mostly earned; instead, the credit went to his coconsul Livius Salinator, who had commanded a larger force. At this time, the Claudii were greatly overshadowed by the Aemilii, Fabii, Cornelii, and other families. If Claudius Nero felt robbed, we will likely never know, although he served out the war honorably but quietly mostly in the backwaters.34 On the other hand, because he did his duty by returning quickly to the field in Lucania, he apparently did not accompany Livius Salinator back to Rome, where the senior consul received the hero’s welcome.
More dramatic, the number of Carthaginian dead at Metaurus is likely best summed up by Polybius as only ten thousand Carthaginians and Celts (in contrast to Livy),35 although the “Carthaginians” included Spanish as well as African troops.36 Some important captured Carthaginian officers who had survived were held for ransom. After this defeat, the Celts were almost done as an ally of Carthage. The Romans lost only two thousand in the battle, and Metaurus was the most lopsided battle since Cannae but with a dramatic reversal of fortune. Metaurus became the turning point of the war both in confidence for war-hardened Rome and in undermining whatever success Hannibal had achieved in his string of incredible victories. This was a squandering of capital that Hannibal had accumulated as a fearsome juggernaut. The double threat Barcid invasion of Italy feared for so long was finally answered.
Partly because he was still hemmed in by Roman armies and because his own intelligence network had failed for resources and dwindling revenue, Hannibal found out after Rome did about the Carthaginian disaster at the Metaurus. But Claudius Nero had a trophy Livius Salinator did not, even though his colleague had the victory. If the story is true, Hannibal was in his tent in his camp, possibly wondering where his brother was, when a hard-riding Roman cavalry envoy was allowed under diplomatic truce into the camp. The Roman horseman flung a sack into his tent, and the startled Hannibal peered inside to see his brother’s gory head. Hannibal responded: “There lies the fate of Carthage.”