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Rome Asks Help to Its Allies
The Romans possessed great reserves of manpower, although they could not mobilize all their potential soldiers at one time. According to Polybius (2.23), several years before the war, the Romans had ordered their allies to compile lists of men eligible for military service. According to these lists, 250,000 Romans and Campanians could be summoned to serve in the infantry and 23,000 in the cavalry, along with 80,000 Latins who could serve on foot and 5,000 potential cavalrymen. Altogether, Samnites and Lucanians, along with Messapians and Iapygians from Apulia, could provide up to 150,000 infantry and 26,000 cavalry, while several small groups in the mountains of central Italy could muster another 20,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry.
The record as transmitted by Polybius is plainly incomplete—there are no Etruscans, Umbrians, Bruttii, or Greeks here, for example—and it is unclear whether those actually serving in Rome’s armies at the time were included in the totals given. Even so, there can be no question that Hannibal had far fewer soldiers. Polybius saw a bronze tablet that Hannibal later erected in the south of Italy; his claim here was that he had 12,000 African and 8,000 Iberian infantry, and no more than 6,000 cavalry, when he entered Italy. He may have hoped to win victories that would be sufficiently impressive to encourage the Romans to make peace, or Rome’s allies to revolt. If so, he would be only partially successful in achieving such aims.
When Hannibal crossed the Alps, he entered a region disturbed by warfare between Romans and Gauls. In 232, a tribune of the plebs, Gaius Flaminius had proposed and carried a law instructing officials to assign land taken from the Gauls here in small parcels to citizens. One consequence was that the two largest tribes, the Boii and Insubres, became more openly hostile. In 225, they crossed the Apennines into Etruria with a large force of infantry, cavalry, and chariots, and defeated a Roman force. Later in the same year, the two consuls one of them hurriedly recalled with his army from Sardinia trapped the Gauls between their own pair of armies at Telamon, less than one hundred miles (160 km) from Rome, and won a major victory. Over the next few years, Roman armies regularly invaded and devastated the territories of the Boii and Insubres, and, in 219, Roman commissioners founded colonies at Placentia and Cremona. In the next year, however, the Gauls succeeded in capturing Placentia. When Hannibal arrived, they made common cause with him, and some would join his army.
Hannibal’s successes continued in 217. When he crossed the Apennines and invaded Etruria, Gaius Flaminius marched to block him, but Hannibal succeeded in ambushing and destroying this consul’s army at Lake Trasimene. At this starkly critical juncture for Rome, Quintus Fabius Maximus, already twice a consul, was appointed dictator. He adopted a firm strategy of avoiding battle with the Carthaginians unless there were conditions especially favorable for the Romans. Instead, he harassed Hannibal’s army on the march, attacked detachments forag-ing for supplies, and looked for any opportunity to exploit some advantage. For this reason, he was mockingly dubbed “the Delayer” (Cunctator). Fabius’ strategy was most unpopular, and incurred sharp criticism not least from his own magister equitum, Marcus Minucius Rufus, who persuaded a citizen assembly to make him codictator, an unprecedented post. According to accounts that favor Fabius, Rufus then deployed his army rashly, and his more cautious colleague had to res¬cue him from the Carthaginians.
The consuls of 216, Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, did not follow Fabius’ strategy either. Instead, they marched against Hannibal with a com-bined army of Romans and allies that may have numbered as many as 80,000 sol-diers. The battle they fought at Cannae in Apulia was a further Roman disaster: Paullus lost his life, and only a small fraction of the army escaped. Afterwards, some of Rome’s allies began to change sides. The cities of Sabinum, Etruria, and Umbria largely remained Roman allies. In the south, however, many Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttii either served as soldiers in Hannibal’s army, or provided supplies for it, or fought against the Romans on their own. Capua in Campania, one of the largest cities in Italy and a Roman municipium for the past century, also joined Hannibal’s alliance; Roman writers would claim that it was the mass of cit-izens who decided to reassert Capua’s autonomy in this damaging way, against the wishes of the local elite. In Sicily, some Syracusans also persuaded their fellow citizens to support Carthage. In 212, Hannibal captured Tarentum, although a Roman garrison held out in a fort on the harbor, preventing the use of the only major port he would gain.
