The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Will Cuppy
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at all. We hear nothing of them at the Battle of the Ticino, and there were only a few at Trebia. The last one died before the Battle of Trasimene, where Hannibal simply erased the Romans for the time being. Hannibal was again fresh out of elephants at Cannæ, the greatest of his victories in the first three years of his Italian campaign. What was I telling you?12
I have a theory about Hannibal’s failure to take Rome when he had the chance after Cannæ and his strange inactivity for the next dozen years, when he only held out and nothing more. He was waiting for something. His brother Hasdrubal reached Italy with ten elephants in 207 B.C., but they behaved so badly that they had to be killed by their own side and Hannibal never saw them. Carthage sent forty more after a while. They were shipped to Sardinia by mistake.
So Hannibal went back home where he could get what he wanted. At Zama, the final showdown of the Second Punic War fought near Carthage in 203 B.C., he had his way at last. He placed eighty elephants in the front line of battle. They turned on the Carthaginians, and Scipio Africanus did the rest.
Hannibal never succeeded in his efforts to stir up another war. The Carthaginians were tired of it all. He tried to interest Antiochus the Great of Syria in a scheme involving elephants and was forced to flee from Carthage when the Romans demanded his person. He then wandered through Asia for years, finally taking refuge with Prusias, King of Bithynia, the only true friend he had left in the world. One day he discovered that Prusias had notified the Romans to come and get him. He took poison, dying at the age of sixty-four, nineteen years after Zama.
Whether Hannibal was a truly great man or only middling, which is my own view, each of us must decide for himself. The Romans accused him of treachery, or Punic faith, for constantly drawing them into traps and killing them. They expected him to behave according to the classic rules of warfare, and they found they could not depend on him. I have not dwelt in much detail upon his military virtues, as they are obvious enough. I have merely endeavored to point out what I believe to have been one of his weaknesses as a strategist and tactician. But I don’t suppose it will do any good. Some people never learn.
Hannibal was no gift to the ladies. Some say he had a wife in Spain. If so, she was lost in the shuffle and nobody took her place. Seems the right girl never came along. That’s about all we know of his private life. Sosilus, a Greek historian who accompanied him throughout his military career, who ate, drank, and chummed with him, wrote it all up for posterity, but he was not in the right literary set, and his hook was allowed to perish. Polybius says it was nothing but a collection of barnyard anecdotes, just intimate, vulgar facts not worth bothering with. Oh, well! We can be fairly certain, at least, that he hated the Romans to his dying day, because he had promised his father to do so. And he probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if only he had a few you-know-whats.
As Carthage grew prosperous again, the Romans besieged it from 149 B.C. to 146 B.C. They finally broke in, massacred the inhabitants, plundered the city, burned it to the ground, and planted grass where it used to be. I thought you’d like to know how it came out.
1 Carthage was governed by its rich men and was therefore a plutocracy. Rome was also governed by its rich men and was therefore a republic.
2 Scholars tell us little about the Etruscans. Why should they?
3 They sailed by the stars at night, depending chiefly upon the North Star. Ask a friend to point out the North Star some night and see what happens.
4 The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can’t be literary without a few vowels.
5 He must not be confused with the other Carthaginian general of the same name in the same war, nor with the four earlier and later Hamilcars.
6 The Carthaginians had a custom of burning their babies alive in time of peril as a sacrifice to the god Baal, or Moloch. I’m afraid they did this in the hope of saving their own carcasses. Obviously, it did the babies no good.
7 The Romans captured more than a hundred elephants in one battle in the First Punic War. They sent them to Rome to amuse the populace.
8 Dr. Arnold of Rugby stoutly championed the Little Saint Bernard as the pass used by Hannibal. He never forgave Polybius, who examined Hannibal’s route step by step, for certain descriptions which do not sound at all like the Little Saint Bernard.
9 He was riding on an elephant.
10 Livy informs us that Hannibal split the huge Alpine rocks with vinegar to break a path for the elephants. Vinegar was a high explosive in 218 B.C., but not before or since.
11 This was done by Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of the Publius Cornelius Scipio who was afterwards Scipio Africanus. If I had time, I’d explain the eleven most important Scipios.
12 After Trasimene, Quintus Fabius Maximus got Hannibal to chase him from place to place in order to gain time for the Romans. This won Fabius the title of Cunctator, or Delayer. Shortly before his death he received the highest honor the republic could bestow, a wreath of grass.
CLEOPATRA
CLEOPATRA VII, Queen of Egypt, was the daughter of Ptolemy XIII. The name of her mother is unknown and it doesn’t matter, as nobody with a grain of sense would have bothered with Ptolemy XIII. He was called Ptolemy the Piper because he sat around playing the flute all day long. The Egyptians drove him out of the country, but of course he came back. He died in 51 B.C., leaving Egypt to Cleopatra and her ten-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIV.1
Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV were always quarreling, and she didn’t seem to click with the right politicians.2 Cleopatra was put off her half of the throne and fled to Syria to save her life. She was twenty-one years old at this time and very unhappy. She felt she was not getting anywhere.
Then Julius Cæsar, greatest of the Romans, arrived in Egypt on business, and Cleopatra returned to see him about things.3 Cleopatra had herself carried into his presence in a roll of bedding and spent the rest of the night telling him about her trip. So he put her back on the throne with Ptolemy XV, another of her young brothers, Ptolemy XIV having been drowned somehow. Ptolemy XV didn’t live long. Cleopatra poisoned him, but you mustn’t hold it against her, for it was royal etiquette to poison as many of the family as you could. Cleopatra did not poison her sister Arsinoë. She had someone else do it.4
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