642. Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Bloodbath in Africa (Part 3)

It is impossible to withhold admiration for Hannibal's leadership, his courage, and his ability in the field when we consider the duration of his campaigns, and take note of the major and minor battles, the sieges, the defections of cities from one side to the other, the difficulties he encountered at various times, and in short, the whole scope of his design and its execution. For sixteen years he waged ceaseless war against the Romans in Italy, and the whole while, like a good pilot, he kept the love and loyalty of his forces. He had with him Africans, Iberians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Italians, and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither in their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect. Nonetheless, the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will, even upon men of such totally diverse origins. If only he had subdued other parts of the world first, and finished with the Romans, not one of his projects would have eluded him. but as it was since he turned his attention first to those whom he should have dealt with last his career began and ended with them so that was the greek historian polybius it's one of those passages that seems written precisely to torment 16 year old school boys and school girls in british schools in the 1940s or something sort of slogging their way through his torturous prose philippius like him or loathe him he's our best source for the punic wars and here in this thrilling passage he is singing the praises of the great carthaginian general hannibal now in today's episode we are coming to the great showdown of the punic wars one of the most titanic clashes in all history this is the showdown between the romans and the carthaginians at the battle of zama and we'll come to this in a little while but first let's have a little chat about polybius himself because tom he knew rome well and he knew the subject very well he'd interviewed leading figures in the war against hannibal hadn't he he admired the roman system of government and actually he was quite a fan of the roman imperium more broadly yes even though he was a greek and so disappointed that you didn't follow up your brilliant impression of livy in our last episode with a by doing a greek accent for polybius i did think about it but i didn't do it but you ducked it yeah so polybius for reasons that we will come to he knows rome very very well indeed and he's particularly close to the family of the scipios and they are the family that as we heard in the previous episode they played the kind of the leading role in the great rome's great death struggle with hannibal so when it comes to the punic wars polybius is pretty clearly team rome but even so as we heard in that opening passage he can't help but admire hannibal and the reasons are self-evident hannibal is the man who has led a great army over the alps into italy he's killed a hundred thousand roman perhaps um in uh in three terrible and tactically brilliant battles um and who as polybius noted in that passage had kept a force made up of many disparate peoples in the field for a decade and more in a foreign land separated by the seas from Carthage, his native city. So an unbelievable achievement. Now the Romans, unlike Polybius, were not generally in the habit of praising Hannibal And the reason for that is that they feared and hated him too much. But I think with the Romans, if you have their hatred and their fear, they are paying you a kind of compliment. Of course. Yeah. They know the man they are facing. I mean, they know that they are facing one of the greatest generals of all time. now that said by 204 bc hannibal's fortunes this guy who at one point had seemed on the verge of destroying roman power for good his fortunes are much much diminished so by 204 bc he's been in italy for 14 years and you know that is four times the length of the first world war so that gives you some sense of what an ordeal this has been it's been a marathon not a sprint it really has and the problem for Hannibal is that as we heard in the previous episode the Romans have conquered Spain which was essentially the place where he was relying on for reinforcements and for supplies and for money and all kinds of things so that's terrible his allies in Italy have fallen away and he is now essentially cornered in Brutium which is the heel of Italy but even now the Romans are incredibly reluctant to engage him in battle they just think if we if we go and fight him he will defeat us that is the kind of hoodoo that he has over them and so their plan now is to just bypass him altogether and they're going to do this by invading africa and this strategy had been articulated the year before by the man who has been mandated by the roman republic to execute it so to quote him i shall draw hannibal after me i shall force him to fight on his native soil And the prize of victory will be not some rundown forts in Brutium, Carthage itself. And the man who is speaking these words, he's only 30, but he has already established himself as the greatest military hero in Rome's history. And this is the young, long haired, smoothly shaved Publius Cornelius Scipio. Scipio so in the last episode we heard how over the previous four years Scipio had destroyed Carthage's power base in Spain so by doing that he had eliminated the manpower and the mineral wealth that had sustained Hannibal's war effort and on which Hannibal had been relying for reinforcements to finish his own war effort in Italy Scipio had gone back to Rome hadn't he we discussed this at the end of the last episode he'd gone back to Rome as the great hero of the air the hero of the Roman people, the darling of the masses. He had won the consulship. He had been appointed to the command in Sicily, and he had explicitly been given license to invade North Africa, quote, if he judged it to be in the interests of the Republic. And Tom, you entered the last episode by saying we will discover if he does. Obviously, the implication is that he will. And he does. He does think it's in the interests of the Republic, even though there are people in the senate who are a little bit more cautious aren't there yes and regular listeners to this series will not be surprised that the guy who takes the lead in opposing this strategy is fabius maximus conctator the delayer the guy who back in the wake of late transamine had been appointed dictator so put in supreme control of the roman state for six months and he had adopted this strategy of shadowing Hannibal of never engaging him in battle which then provided the template for Roman strategy in the wake of Cannae and which is still being adopted in 204 BC he's now I mean unbelievably old he's about 130 and he is a figure of enormous status so he has the official title princeps sonatus he's the chief senator and Fabius had directly accused Scipio in the debate about whether he should be given permission to invade Africa. He accused Scipio of endangering Rome's security by leading an expedition to Africa while Hannibal was still current and present in Italy with his own army. So Fabius had directly accused Scipio essentially of glory hunting. Your glory matters less to me, he told Scipio, than the welfare of our city. If you really want to destroy Hannibal, then go to Brutium and fight him there, which is, I mean, a very stinging rebuke. And I think it's clearly animated by a kind of personal animus as well as anxiety about strategy. And I think it portrays what right from the beginning of Scipio's career has been an anxiety on the part of conservative elements in the Senate about his character. yeah part of this is his youth right and his glamour and his eye for a sort of as it were a roman photo opportunity it's about his hair and his shiny cheeks his claims to have been born from a serpent all of that stuff right his general sense of un-roman-ness of greekness even um and of course we mentioned in the previous episode that while he had been in spain some of the iberian warlords had hailed him as a king a word that for the romans you know is the most sort of shocking and um and toxic label that there could possibly be everything about him just seems wrong doesn't it just seems un-roman it's not just that he's been held king but that he is incredibly popular both with his troops and with the mass of the roman people so in spain in in the wake of his his great victories his soldiers had taken to hailing him as imperator which is the word that means general but which in the long run will become the title that augustus claims and which gives us our title of emperor so it doesn't have that connotation at this point but nevertheless it's a straw in the wind i mean no one has been hailed in this way before and so senators back in rome are anxious about this and they're also anxious about the fact that he's become consul when he's only 30 and you're meant to be 40 and essentially he's been swept to power on a great wave of popular enthusiasm and so there's a sort of nervousness what will he do with this power i think but scipio he's not having any of this and he throws fabius's criticisms back in his face and he says that if you block my intention to invade africa then i am going to turn to the people and i will get them to force this strategy through crikey you know you fabius and and all your conservative allies in the senate you will be publicly humiliated and so fabius essentially steps down and the conservatives very reluctantly give him the green light so the summer of 204 scipio's expedition set sail from sicily uh he has his troop ships his troop transports and they're escorted by 40 warships scipio and his brother lucius are commanding the the right wing as it were of the fleet 20 ships and the 20 ships on the left wing are commanded by his friend Lelius who we talked about last time and by a young paymaster called Marcus Porcius Cato and Cato a name that will recur in Roman history he is a young man with reddish hair and gray eyes he is in his early 30s Scipio is but his political identity is very different isn't it so Cato is the most traditional of the traditionalists the most conservative of the conservatives he is a big admirer of fabius maximus and he's an impressive man but he is by no means a natural ally of somebody like scipio no he's followed all the rules he has this post of the paymaster he's a quaester it's called so he's responsible for keeping an eye on scipio spending and that is absolutely the kind of role that someone of his age should have you know he's not swanning around like a console with long hair and talking about snakes right he is performatively conservative that means that he's absolutely not a scipio soulmate but of course waiting for scipio in africa is a guy who absolutely is a scipio soulmate and that is his old mate masinissa so we met him in the previous episode He's a Numidian king who had fought in Spain, first of all, for the Carthaginians and had then changed sides and become a big ally of Scipio and Rome. And Masinissa has every reason to welcome Scipio's arrival with open arms, because just as Rome is engaged in a death struggle with Carthage, Masinissa is engaged in a death struggle of his own. because people who listened to our last episode may remember he is not the only numidian king there is another king who leads his own federation of numidian tribes and this is a guy called cifax and masanissa has been fighting him all his life so as a teenager he had kind of had the beating of cifax and that was what had then enabled him to travel to spain and fight for the for the carthaginians but he's now come back and cifax is still on the scene and still causing all kinds of trouble and the fact that that masinissa has come back to africa as an ally of the romans means that cifax who previously had been an ally of the romans has now obviously swung around and become an ally of the carthaginians the way diplomacy works it is but there's another element isn't there so there's one thing that in this story this story has had everything of course except one element there's one element that's been missing and it's brilliant to be able to unveil that element now in the third episode of this series and that element is a woman i know absolute scenes and this woman is called sofonisba and brilliant name and exciting person tell us all about sofonisba so she is the daughter of a carthaginian general whose name it will stun listeners to learn is Hasdrubal but of course I mean basically unless you're called Hannibal or Mago your name is Hasdrubal and he had been serving in Spain alongside Hasdrubal Barker so he was in command of one of those three armies camped out in what was going to become Lisbon when Scipio captured New Carthage he's gone back to Carthage and he's become the leading figure in the carthaginian senate and he's now that um that hasribal and mago are both dead he's basically the best general the carthaginians have with the exception of hannibal and this isn't really to say much so fabius maximus i mean very bitchy uh described him as a general who best displayed his speed in retreat so not promising anyway hasribal has his daughter Sofinesba and Sofinesba is very smart very beautiful very very patriotic and Hasdrubal says to Sofinesba look it is your duty to go and marry Sifax and to get a meeting out of your hand and to make sure that he remains as a loyal ally of Carthage and so Sofinesba does her duty she goes off she marries Sifax and Sifax thinks she's absolutely great he adores her so this really cements the alliance which is obviously bad news for Masinissa because in Africa if Sifax with his Numidian horsemen and the mass weight of the Carthaginians in Africa in Carthage if they combine Masinissa is in real trouble so he's desperate for Scipio to arrive and provide him of the backing of the legions and so when Scipio does land in Africa you know Masinista is thrilled and he feels it's payback time and sure enough neither Hasdrubal nor Sifax prove any match for Scipio and it turns out in fact that Scipio is prepared to play very very dirty against Sifax and Hasdrubal indeed oh no that poor for Scipio what does Scipio do that so dirty Well so a few months after his arrival he in winter quarters so there no campaigning Scipio arranges a truce with Sifax, the Numidian king, and his goal is to try and win him back to the Roman cause, because Scipio and Sifax had actually met before Scipio had gone as an ambassador to him, and they got on well enough. um siphax said no i'm not interested i love carthage now and i've got this gorgeous wife you know i'm not betraying her scipio then goes on a makes a personal visit to siphax tries to press his case again again siphax rebuffs him but scipio notices something interesting about siphax's camp and that is that all his quarters are made of reeds so not made out of kind of earth or mud or whatever but reeds and then his spies come back from hasdrubal's camp which isn't far from syphaxes and they say well um hasdrubal's camp their winter quarters aren't made of mud or earth either they are made of wood so scipio ponders this and then he intimates to hasdrubal that he might be interested in opening negotiations with him and he floats the possibility that perhaps a peace treaty could be arrived at whereby the romans would keep what they have in italy and the carthaginians could keep what they have in africa and maybe that would be the basis for a settlement well that sounds promising that's nice and hasdrubal is interested in this and so negotiations start opening between his camp and the roman camp and cifax gets involved as well and so the romans when they send their ambassadorial teams to these two camps are really able to scope it out and they work out the best way to set syphax's camp which is made of reeds and hasdable's camp which is made of wood on fire oh dear and so scipio with this information he sends laelius and masinissa to torch syphax's camp which duly goes up um is incinerated uh and large numbers of syphax's men with them and then he sends out another squad to set fire to the carthaginian camp all the carthaginians come rushing out scipio's men are on hand to slaughter them and polybius he thinks this whole wheeze is absolutely brilliant so to quote him of all scipio's many brilliant exploits this it seems to me was the most splendid and inventive but i mean it's it's blatant treachery he's meant to be negotiating it's he's broken all kinds of oaths and it's i think very very rich considering that the romans are endlessly going on about what they call punica of fides so punic faith the sense that the carthaginians are uniquely treacherous but don't the romans take the view that basically it's war so the ideal thing is to kill your enemies and to win actually the romans are very anxious as we will see to present themselves as being on the sides of of right and of the gods okay so i think i think skip here is playing very very dirty there anyway i mean it works for him yeah because he's wiped out large numbers of carthaginian and numidian troops um and even though siphax and hasdrable managed to escape the inferno there's a sense now i think that scipio clearly has the beating of them and so it proves because the moment spring arrives um he moves in for the kill and first he meets with um what remains to siphax and hasdrable so their combined army um in a battle that has the brilliantly custer-esque name of of the great plains so the battle of the great plains um and uh you know scipio displays tactical mastery yet again wipes them out siphax and hasribal again managed to escape um but 30 000 are left as food for the vultures on the great plains and scipio's cavalry commanded by masinissa and laelius pursue siphax they take him prisoner and also they take prisoner his queen the beautiful and patriotic daughter of hasdrubal sophonisba and she knows her duty um so we're told that she's actually very like cleopatra that she was so charming that merely to see her merely to hear her talk was at once to be utterly smitten and so she knows that in this situation with siphax knocked out she has to marry masinissa and try and persuade him to jump ship yeah and masinissa is completely swept away by her i mean she's clearly absolutely gorgeous he immediately marries her and he goes to scipio and says look i've got this great new wife isn't she tremendous scipio is appalled because he's very understandably anxious that sofinisbo will try and kind of win masinissa round to the carthaginian cause and also it has to be said he's not very keen on women this is something that is often said about him that you know women are kind of introduced into his camp and he won't have anything to do with them like a sort of royal navy officer in the 18th century who won't have women on board ship that kind of thing very much that vibe i think i mean you get you know he marries right i don't think he's a great one for having ladies hanging around with him in his in his camp and so he essentially tells massonista well it's you know you have to choose between your wife or me and massonista isn't an idiot and so he um he chooses scipio and sofinisba who is composed and dignified to the end um prepares a cup of poison drinks it and as she's dying she berates masanissa for for being absolutely useless so that's the end of her and it's like the end of women in this in this series well basically until they all end up being enslaved at the very end of our series so okay female listeners can look forward to that um all right so carthage is now staring down the barrel right completely syphax is gone hasdrubal is out they are staring into the basically and this carthaginian senate have no choice now other than to open negotiations with the romans that must have been utterly gawning for them yeah so they send 30 ambassadors to scipio and scipio's terms are predictably harsh so he tells them that carthage will have to withdraw all her troops from lands beyond africa the city will be allowed 20 warships no more than that uh the carthaginians will have to provision scipio's army while you know people are sent back to rome to find out whether the senate agrees to these terms and they will have to pay another kind of versailles treaty type indemnity in the way that they'd had to do at the end of the previous punic war the senate is very reluctant to agree to these terms because they can see that it effectively spells you know the end of their city as a great power but they feel they haven't really got any choice so they say yeah well okay the terms are taken to rome and the treaty is there ratified by the roman senate simultaneously however they haven't completely given up the fight because of course back in italy in brutium the heel of italy hannibal and his army are still there yeah i was wondering what's happened to hannibal during all this so he's just been hanging around in southern italy yeah they say listen you're completely wasting your time there come back to africa we you know we really need you and so they send him a transport fleet um and hannibal i mean he's gutted absolutely gutted he spent all this time there and now essentially he's got to recognize that it's it's been wasted so he he boards the transport ships um with his army and they head back to um to africa and they disembark um at a place called leptis minor which is a port about 100 miles to the south of carthage um and he is aware that you know the peace negotiations are going on so he doesn't want to interrupt them but equally he wants to prepare for the worst i mean suppose the peace negotiations break down and so he maintains his army and he drills it very hard all that summer and summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter by this point the peace treaty has been ratified in rome by the senate and it is sent back to carthage where the carthaginian senate have to ratify it themselves and at this point faced with the prospect not just of losing the war but of losing their status as the capital of a great empire essentially accepting that from this point on they're going to be a provincial second division power lots of leading figures in the carthaginian senate get cold feet and they also know of course that they have hannibal back on african soil and hannibal is the greatest general of his day if they're facing relegation why not roll the dice and go for it one last time absolutely and so as winter turns to spring and the 16th campaigning season of the war begins it becomes evident that the peace is not going to hold and this is massive for fans of great generals because it's clear that Hannibal and Scipio both of the men who have never in their entire careers lost a battle the greatest commanders in the entire history of their respective cities that these two colossi are going to be going head to head after all i mean it's massive sport it's napoleon and wellington isn't it it's very exciting i mean there's proper tension sort of uh the world cup final is coming pre-match tension yeah pre-match tension so Scipio is inland he's moved inland from his coastal base and he is hoovering up towns but obviously the risk for him is as he's hoovering up towns he might be cut off from the sea Hannibal um he needs I mean manpower troops is his thing and he is spending the summer drilling his recruits raising troops as many as he can he's got some elephants right 80 80 war elephants I mean the one thing he doesn't have is cavalry which is ironic because cavalry had always been his strongest arm but he does have these 80 war elephants you know i mean he has a serious force um and it takes him all summer essentially to to raise an army that he feels is large enough to to take on scipio and his legions and finally with the coming of autumn he's ready and at the head of his troops he marches inland making um for the town near which scipio has his base and this town dominic is called zama so hannibal is approaching zama scipio is in situ these two commanders drawing near to each other they've never met before but it becomes evident the nearer they come that actually they're really keen to meet with the other one you know peace feelers have gone out you know and and the justification for this is that they're going to have one last attempt at negotiation but i think basically you know they they both know that this is very unlikely to result in in a peace treaty they just want to meet each other there are terms on the table though aren't there so hannibal for example offers scipio a deal and he says we can preserve the status quo effectively the romans you know you can keep sicily you can keep spain i mean you know that's the carthaginians giving up on two massive prizes carthage however will keep her possessions in north africa and we won't have to pay a big indemnity there'll be no kind of reparations and we won't have a limit on the size of our navy and scipio he is not taking that because his terms are very simple they are unconditional surrender yeah i mean he'd already offered terms that didn't involve unconditional surrender but now the carthagin is carrying on the fight he feels well you know it's surrender or nothing um and clearly hannibal's terms are unacceptable to scipio and scipio's terms are unacceptable to hannibal and so the interview comes to an end there will be no more negotiations consequentially battle is now inevitable and this means that the two greatest commanders of the age are about to meet in the ultimate clash of titans well we love a clash of the titans on the rest is history come back after the break and the battle of zama begins hello everyone i am here with some exceedingly exciting news now as all our beloved club members will already know one of the very best things of being a member of the rest is history club is getting access to exclusive members only mini series that's right mini series not just individual episodes so these are special episodes every other month which only club members can listen to no one else and we've got a brand new one coming out this february so that's going to be the very first one of 2026 and it is presented by me and the great art critic laura cumming four episodes and it's about paintings that shed a particularly fascinating light on history and it covers a broad range of times and places so everything from Velázquez's Las Meninas described by many critics as the greatest of all paintings right the way up to Henry Rayburn's Skating Minister what do these paintings tell us about the times in which they were painted it's really really fascinating stuff and if you are not watching it on YouTube or Spotify if you're just listening to it as a don't worry because we will be sending all our members an email which will be going into greater written detail about the painting but also obviously giving you an image of the painting itself so you can have a quick look at that perhaps before you listen to the episode although i have to say that laura's descriptions of each painting are so good that perhaps you don't even need to look at the painting so if you would like to sign up to that mini-series and to the other five mini-series that we will be doing this year which will be covering everything from history's greatest photographs the vietnam war to uh england's she wolves then uh you know where to go go to the rest is history.com if you are not already a club member and sign up there welcome back everybody to the rest is history now we promised you the titanic showdown between Hannibal and Scipio this is the moment towards which not just this series but our previous series about Rome and Carthage have been building so Tom we don't have all day so let's just get into the highlights take us through the highlights of this titanic clash okay so as we said Hannibal for the first time is weak in cavalry um so he's therefore weak on his wings Scipio by contrast has excellent cavalry he has his own we've mentioned them before the best trained cavalry the romans have ever had and of course he has massinissa's numidians even though they almost miss the battle because massinissa turns up very late so laelius is in command of the roman cavalry massinissa is in command of his numidians and they meet with the carthaginian cavalry route them and chase them from the battlefield now Hannibal's strength as we've said is in his war elephants and he places them in the front line 80 of them terrifying sight uh the Roman front lines you know they're kind of quaking in their sandals but Scipio has prepared for this onslaught and again remember the infantry like the cavalry are very very well drilled much better drilled than any roman army before them in history and so when the elephants charge them they essentially step aside and open up corridors down which the elephants just go rampaging and they kind of burst out the other side and they can be kind of easily tracked down and eliminated that way so that's hannibal's strongest card played and it you know it hasn't worked and so what now happens is that it comes down to the infantry these great rival blocks of men on foot and they advance and they smash into each other and to quote polybius many fell on both sides fighting with fierce determination where they stood but at length the squadrons of masinissa and of laelius returned from their pursuit of the Carthaginian cavalry and arrived by a stroke of fortune at the crucial moment and the result Dominic listeners is that Scipio is able to inflict on Hannibal the kind of wipeout that he had so often inflicted on the Romans the irony of it yeah the irony and Hannibal himself takes horse he manages to flee the disaster but according to polybius um 20 000 of hannibal's men are left dead on the battlefield and the same number are taken prisoner and the romans by contrast lost only 1500 men and again to quote polybius this was the result of the final battle between these two commanders and it decided the war crikey so what a turnaround from the battles of late Trasimene or Cannae and a question for you is there a world in which the battle of Zama goes differently or do the Roman institutional advantages at this point do they outweigh the Carthaginian strong points so heavily that there's basically no way Hannibal can win this battle I mean anything can happen in a battle right against a less competent commander and against less well-trained troops you can imagine Hannibal winning but it's clear that the effects of the fighting over you know these these decade and more has been to hone the Roman army into a much more lethal killing machine than it had been at the start of the war they're much better drilled they have the gladius now this stabbing sword they've borrowed from the Spaniards it makes their infantry superb but the other factor i think which dooms hannibal in this battle is we said he doesn't have cavalry and hannibal's great genius has always been for coordinating infantry and cavalry yeah and it just doesn't work and the one card he really had his elephants the romans know how to deal with them they're frightening but they know how to cope with them how much do those factors so the extraordinary preparedness and proficiency of the roman infantry but also the carthaginian lack of cavalry how much do they reflect deeper issue which is rome's institutional resources compared with carthage's economic resources manpower and so on i mean absolutely because rome's great strength throughout has been her manpower and carthage has has always opted to rely on mercenaries so it's that classic thing where basically you can lose and lose and lose but one day if you win you win the whole thing yeah if you're the bigger power essentially and by this point rome is indisputably bigger power because um over the course of the war she has occupied the whole of sicily and spain of course yeah and she's in the process of conquering the um the road that joins uh spain to italy which will become the provincia or provence as it's still called to this day so southern france southern gaul so the carthaginians have rolled the dice hannibal has gambled and he has lost and the result of this i mean they probably thought well we have nothing to lose but they do but now they discovered precisely what they do have to lose because Scipio's terms when they return to the negotiating table are that much harsher precisely because the Carthaginians didn't agree immediately so the indemnity is going to be even bigger and what is more it's going to be paid over 50 years so that is a deliberate policy of tying the Carthaginians down crippling their economy for half a century they cannot go to war without explicit roman permission so that essentially means that the romans have now taken over carthage's foreign policy and previously they've been permitted 20 warships now they can only have 10 but the guy who is laughing i mean the guy who's really come out well from this of course is masinissa the numidian king and scipio confirms him as king not just over his own tribal federation but over syphax's numidians as well and i think even more faithfully and whether this was a deliberate policy to create trouble or not it's unclear but i mean it definitely will create trouble um the peace terms imposed on the carthaginians obliged them and i quote to restore to massinissa all the houses territory cities and other property which had belonged to him or to his ancestors so effectively this is to leave carthage with its own hinterland but what the borders are between that hinterland and numidia is very unclear and you know massonessa will obviously have one point the carthaginians will have another massonessa is an ally of rome the carthaginians are not allowed to go to war without roman permission you can see that it is you know this is going to be a sea of troubles for the carthaginians yeah and it will give masinissa all kinds of opportunities right it's for bad behavior um in the future so there are a lot of carthaginians presumably when these terms come in even now after their defeat at zama they must still be thinking god is there anything we can do to avoid signing up to this you know look rather like i mean the obvious comparison is germany at the end of the first world war right i mean that's the shadow that's hanging over this whole story or uh hitler in the bunker right could you go down in flames yeah it's that bad and there is actually a carthaginian senator called gisco who stands up and makes this case to a public assembly but hannibal hears him and he is infuriated and he physically hauls gisco down from the rostrum where he's standing with his own hands and this is not acceptable behavior at all and so everyone's very cross with him and hannibal apologizes very gracefully and he says look you know i haven't been in the city since i was nine or whatever i've been living in an army camp all these decades my manners are very rough and ready so i do apologize however he then goes on to say gisco is mad if he thinks that these terms from scipio are bad they could have been much much worse and he says you know we will still be governing ourselves there will not be a roman garrison planted in the middle of our city we still have you know our hinterland and that hinterland is very rich and prosperous and fertile and he says he makes an appeal to the carthaginian people i beg you not even to debate the matter instead pray with one single voice that the roman people will ratify scipio's terms and of course hannibal is the great enemy of rome he is the man who you know year after year after year has been in the front line fighting the romans and for him now to say we have to make peace means that there can really be no arguing with the case that he's making yeah of course if the guy who's the hero of the carthaginian cause is saying let's do a deal they're clearly going to do a deal and so in the long run they do um the carthaginians agree scipio in rome gets approval um from the senate for his treaty and at last i mean this great war i mean capital g capital w a war that has gone on for almost 20 years it is over and actually this is kind of um the end for both hannibal and scipio as well because their time in the sun you know the opportunity to shine has now been been taken away it's certainly the end of their military careers neither of them will command armies ever again but Hannibal I mean he remains the dominating figure in the Carthaginian state and he actually proves very impressive as a civilian leader he streamlines the finances in Carthage there's kind of endless fraud embezzlement and so on and he appreciates that Carthage is going to need every last bit of coin that it can scrounge together and he also democratizes the carthaginian government so he is essentially a populist he's not popular with his fellow carthaginian aristocrats but he's very very popular with the mass of the carthaginian people and so he introduces reforms that are designed to weaken the hold of the carthaginian aristocracy on the justice system and simon hornblower a great ancient historian author of a brilliant dual biography of Hannibal and Scipio describes him as an energetic left-wing innovator left-wing innovator the Tony Benn of wow of Carthaginian history I mean obviously this means that loads of his his fellow senators have even more reason now to loathe him I mean not only are they jealous of him but they they're resentful of him that he's kind of trying to undermine their power but you know he remains massively popular with the carthaginian people and so for now hannibal seems safe enough something quite american about hannibal i think the americans love electing generals as presidents and he has returned from the war okay he hasn't won i mean so he's an american general who's um been serving in vietnam but uh he has returned with his luster undimmed i guess for the ordinary carthaginians and what about scipio so scipio surely must now sort of glitter as the greatest here in the roman pantheon he's trailing clouds of glory and he is given a stupefying succession of honors so he's given a triumph interesting that he you know he doesn't insist that hannibal walks in that triumph it reflects the fact that scipio continues to respect hannibal and that treating hannibal with respect in a way burnishes his own glory because if you humiliate hannibal then in a sense you're downgrading him as an enemy so i think that's probably what's been going on in scipio's mind anyway he has his triumph he's awarded uh fabius by this point is dead so the title of princeps sonatus chief senator is vacant so scipio takes it and he's given the title of africanus um so scipio the african meaning that he has essentially defeated the africans and livy notes that he was the first general in rome to be celebrated by the name of the people he had conquered so scipio africanus I mean, he's clearly a massive, dominating, glamorous, prestigious figure. But it's interesting that he seems to have adjusted less successfully to civilian life than Hannibal. And we've been comparing him on and off throughout this episode in the previous one to the Duke of Wellington, who fought a war in Spain and then met with the greatest enemy of his country and defeated him in a climactic battle that ended that enemy's career. So you could think of Zama as the, you know, the Waterloo of the Punic Wars. And then like the Duke of Wellington, who became prime minister and was a terrible prime minister, Scipio finds it hard to take the Senate with him. So there's this brilliant thing, isn't there, of the Duke of Wellington has his first cabinet meeting and is outraged. He says, I gave them their orders, but they wanted to stay behind and discuss them. and i think there's a similar feeling with with scipio yeah you know he's got his long hair he's very glamorous he's you know son of a snake um he can't be bothered with senators sitting on their dignity talking about drainage talking about well i mean probably moaning about him right and i think you know the very range of honors that he's got you know his titles princeps um imperator um they generate jealousy i think um and there is one person in particular who really detests him and this is a guy we met um traveling with the roman fleet to africa from sicily and this is the erstwhile quaester the paymaster in scipio's army m porcius cato this man who was scipio's opposite in every way and to quote one of his later biographers as scipio's quaestor during the war in africa cato was appalled by scipio's habitual extravagance and how ready he was to lavish money on his soldiers and he's appalled both because it's a waste of money that cated which cato doesn't approve of but also because i think the sense that perhaps scipio is buying the favor of his soldiers and again cato is very very disapproving of this we talked about his slightly performative but no doubt deep-seated and um and heartfelt conservatism so when they return in the years after the battle of zama cato turns himself doesn't he into the champion of the conservatives he doesn't take bribes he lives very austerely he for example sets his heart against legislation that would allow women to wear jewelry in public yeah so it's good to have women back on the show yeah brilliant for them um plutarch tells us that cato despised philosophy and as a patriot was thoroughly contemptuous of greek culture and lifestyle so he doesn't even use doctors no because doctors are greek um and both his wife and his children then die but cato's unapologetic he'd rather have them dead than use a greek doctor right exactly and i guess you know we compared um scipio with alexander that aspect of um scipio's personality the populism the showiness the charisma is precisely what cato despises as un-roman so when cato is campaigning you know he shares the rations of the men he wears the kind of fatigues he carries his own armor you know he is very different from the kind of glamour boy style that um scipio incarnates yeah and actually their enmity is going to become one of the great drivers of roman politics in this period so scipio has been in charge of a campaign in spain where he's been doing all this you know carrying his own armor and stuff uh and it's very successful and when he returns to rome in 194 he is awarded a triumph um and i think that he feels well i've made my name now and he's ready to bring his enmity with scipio out into the open um and so this means that scipio now has a rival who can kind of provide a counterweight to scipio's prestige in the senate something else that is slightly putting scipio's luster into shade is developments in the eastern mediterranean which we have not yet talked about in this series but their very dramatic developments have taken place because as we've already mentioned rome has finished the great war against hannibal with what is probably the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in the whole of history and if you have the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in history very tempting to use it right i mean why let it go to waste yeah of course and carthage obviously remains rome's you know the chief object of her vigilance but she is not in any mood to take insubordination from other famous powers either so in macedon on the other side of the adriatic what's now northern greece there is a king there who sits on what had once been the throne of alexander the great and this is a guy who's who's been macedonian king for for many decades philip v um and in the course of the punic war he had made a terrible mistake because he had assumed in the immediate wake of the battle of cannae that rome was bound to lose and so he had signed up to an alliance with hannibal didn't actually go anywhere but the romans in their kind of best mafia style do not forget this show of disrespect and so in the year 200 so very shortly after the battle of zama a roman task force crosses the adriatic begins a war against macedon and in 197 the legions meet with philip's great phalanx this great kind of bristling porcupine of spears at a battle at a place called kinocephali and the romans cut the macedonian phalanx to pieces and the guy who has won that victory a man called flaminius the following year He goes to the Isthmian Games which are held in Corinth the city that you know on the kind of the join point between northern Greece and the Peloponnese and there he proclaims the freedom of the Greeks in flamboyant language at the same time with a kind of completely unembarrassed hypocrisy which will become very very typical of Roman behavior over the succeeding decades he also replaces the Macedonian garrisons that had been occupying various strongholds in greece and which were colloquially known as the fetters of greece with roman garrisons so even as he is proclaiming the fact that i've defeated maceda and i freed greece from macedonian tyranny greece is now free he is replacing those macedonian garrisons with roman garrisons and it means that greece is now effectively within less than a decade of the battle of zama it's become a roman protectorate so listeners may be wondering um so much of this story has been about the western mediterranean what's been going on in the eastern mediterranean And the answer is in the previous 120 years or so, Alexander the Great's empire, covering some of the richest parts of the kind of classical world, had broken up into different competing kingdoms ruled by the so-called successors. So the descendants of his captains and lieutenants. You can almost think of them as lots of different Greek run or Macedonian run kingdoms. And there are other Macedonian kingdoms. Obviously, Ptolemaic Egypt is one. Yeah, so there are basically three. So there's Macedon, which governs Greece, but have now been defeated by the Romans. the Ptolemies in Egypt as you say and then there's the largest of the lot Seleucid Empire Seleucid Empire which at this point is ruled by Antiochus III who is the heir of Seleucus who had been one of Alexander's generals and under Antiochus who comes to be known as Antiochus the Great the Seleucid Empire reaches its furthest extent so it it ends up stretching from the Aegean all the way to the frontiers of India and Antiochus understandably feels that as the ruler of an empire as massive of this he doesn't need to put up with any nonsense from the romans who he views as kind of upstart barbarians um and so when he crosses the hellespont into thrace he moves from asia into europe and begins menacing the greek cities on the eastern um seaboard of the aegean so what's now the coast of turkey and the romans send protests he responds to the roman ambassadors with absolute contempt yeah and it's not just that he rules this massive empire it's not just that he rules the romans as barbarians who should keep out of greek affairs it's also the fact that by this point he is in communication with the best possible man to advise him on how to defeat the romans and that is of course hannibal right so he's basically his intention is to hire hannibal as in the same way that you would hire a football coach or a brilliant sporting star to be the star player for his team presumably to a degree i mean hannibal at this point is still in carthage and it is not a hundred percent clear initially that hannibal is in communication with antiochus he almost certainly is um but certainly the romans feel that um they cannot risk hannibal kind of teaming up with with antiochus and so they send a party of three senators to carthage um to say look you know hand him over and Hannibal is informed that this is going to be happening and he plays it very very cool he kind of walks around the marketplace he doesn't let anyone know that he's planning anything and then the moment night falls he slips out to a side gate where he's had a horse prepared for him he climbs onto it he gallops away to the coast where there is a fortress on a private estate of his and there's a jetty with a galley and he gets onto the galley there are men at all ready to take him away and he makes his escape from Carthage and this galley sails all the way across the Mediterranean eastwards really kind of a journey back in history to the city of Tyre the city from which the colonists who had originally founded Carthage came and he lands in Tyre and he then goes overland up through Syria and he ends up in the city of ephesus on the aegean coast of what is now turkey and there he meets with antiochus so he's he's met the ruler of the seleucid empire antiochus and what does he say to him what happens he says listen i will be your coach and you know as you said i'm in i'm in five-year contract there it is yeah unsurprisingly the romans are furious about this and so they send a delegation to antiochus's court and it is said that attached to this delegation not an official member of it but going with with the delegation was scipio africanus and he had come to persuade the um the salukid king not to go to war hannibal of course is busy urging him the opposite you know the two old enemies there they are like i guess kind of people who'd played football in the world cup or something and now are imposing sides in the champions league or something like that you know as managers right but it doesn't stop them so the story goes from meeting up again they're having a chat and Scipio asks Hannibal which general do you think is the greatest of all time this is a great conversation this is exactly the conversation you'd want them to have Hannibal answers and giving his reasons as he does so that obviously in first place is Alexander the Great and then he says actually i would also place pyrrhus in second and pyrrhus was the guy who had um invaded italy a kind of few generations before hannibal's invasion and again hannibal gives reasons why pyrrhus has the number two position and scipio who's obviously a little bit disappointed that hannibal hasn't mentioned him then says oh and who would you put in the third place um and hannibal then says well i put myself at number three brilliant and scipio to give him credit laughs at this and says well what if you had beaten me at the battle of zama and hannibal replied oh well in that case i would have put myself above alexander and above pyrrhus and above all other commanders god hannibal's not giving scipio anything is he i think it's a wonderful conversation and i like the fact that scipio laughs i mean there hasn't been much laughter in this story it's the only the only record we have of either scipio or hannibal laughing and it's obvious from hannibal's reply that he's a very witty and amusing man or is he witty or is he just boastful he is witty the account that we have of it specifies that he was being witty oh great banter that in a sense Scipio didn't quite know how to reply to it because he felt that Hannibal had had the better of him in that exchange are they speaking in Greek they would presumably have been speaking Greek yes okay when they met before Zama they had interpreters because they they didn't want to leave open any chance of uh their communications being mistaken but i guess at this point they were speaking in so late in 192 antiochus and the seleucids invade greece and the romans respond with overwhelming force don't they so they route him at of all places thermopoly and when antiochus withdraws across the aegean they pursue him into asia what is now i guess turkey and this army is led by Scipio's brother Lucius so Scipio himself is there as an advisor he's a sort of director of football yes yeah yeah um well so it is said um but if if I mean if he is actually there and it's much debated by ancient historians um he's not at the big shootout which takes place at a place called magnesia where the seleucids are comprehensively defeated lucius scipio is the victor and if scipio africanus hadn't been present neither was hannibal so by this stage both the kind of the old war horses are fading into the background but even so the romans remain paranoid about the mischief that hannibal might get up to and so part of the terms that lucius imposes on his defeated foe is that Hannibal has to be surrendered into Roman hands and Tychus has to quit Europe for good he has to withdraw inland from the Aegean seaboard inevitably has to pay a massive indemnity but the point is made we are not going to allow you to have Hannibal and there's a sense perhaps that that is for the Romans although it might seem a minor demand is in fact the key one they hate him and fear him that much obviously Hannibal knows that this is going to be happening and so he's already made sure to scarper um and for the next seven years he leads the life of a fugitive he's constantly finding refuge in you know a court here a court there and then being forced to go on the run again um the romans are endlessly pursuing him and finally in 183 on a country estate in bithynia which is now northwestern turkey he is cornered and hannibal who had known what was coming he'd had various kind of tunnels dug out from his house but the romans have cornered him they block off the exits from the tunnels and so they're that you know hannibal knows that he's got no way out um and so he does what um sophon ispa had done many years before and he glugs down some poison and that is the end of him and rome's greatest enemy at the age of 64 at last is dead what a depressing and downbeat and sadly kind of banal way for Hannibal's life to have ended. This extraordinary character who blazed like a meteor across the pages of the classical world. And now he just is, you know, he's in Turkey and is flipping basement of his bunker taking poison. Disappointing. Yeah, it's miserable. And in the long run, the poet Juvenal will write a poem. You know, he was this great guy who led elephants over the Alps. And now he's, you know, a dead loser in a basement in Bithynia. we're all dead losers and ultimately tom that's the lesson of history i mean it's interesting you say that because because scipio actually dies in the same year 183 and he unlike hannibal had died in his bed of natural causes uh he died very wealthy adorned with honors admired by his fellow citizens secure in his fame as the man who had beaten hannibal but amazingly he also had died as an exile and the reason for this is that in 187 when Scipio returns with his brother Lucius from the eastern campaign you know and they are loaded down with wealth and money and cash and you know tremendous piles of plunder this causes consternation in the senate that these two Scipio brothers are now so wealthy that perhaps they might end up putting rome itself in their shade and cato and his allies feel strong enough to go on the attack and so they openly accuse lucius of embezzlement remember you know cato's background as a a paymaster he he knows where to sniff around and scipio is accused of complicity in this and he's so offended that he arrives in the senate and he pulls out his account books and he rips them up before the full gaze of the senate and indignantly and to a degree justifiably reminds his accusers of all the treasure that he has won for rome but the thing is he's not prepared to stand and fight because he feels the humiliation of it too deeply he's not going to bother swatting aside these pygmies as he sees them instead he retires in high dudgeon to his country um estate in campania so down by the bay of naples and essentially for the rest of his life he's a broken man it's a triumph for the conservatives who had always hated him and it's a triumph for what they see as an absolute point of principle um that and to quote livy no one citizen should be permitted an eminence so formidable that it prevents him from being questioned by the laws i.e. even Scipio Africanus is not above the law yeah and of course there is one man in particular who had harried Scipio to his death and that was M. Porcius Cato and Cato with Scipio dead has now inherited Scipio status as the most admired and prestigious man in the senate and the question is what is he going to do with this prestige so hato even by roman standards has a pathological hatred and contempt for carthage doesn't he he does um and this is going to be very very ominous for the carthaginians they're beaten but they're still you know a name to conjure with one of the wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean but for Carthage the clock is ticking Tom very sad so we will find out the fate of Carthage in the fourth and final episode of this epic series so that final episode the climax of this tremendous journey will be out on Thursday is it possible there are any people out there who have not already been motivated to join the rest is history club human beings are strange creatures so maybe there are if you want to join it now as your last chance before that episode go to the rest is history.com and you can hear what happens to Carthage right away what excitement Tom thank you very much and goodbye bye-bye Tom we have some absolutely unbelievable news to share with our listeners probably the most exciting news you ever shared no oh I mean no dispute this is the most exciting news of all time right so we are announcing the launch of some brand new rest is history merchandise and the important thing about this is that it is exclusively for you the members nobody else will be able to get this that's absolutely right so these are t-shirts that have been designed by one of our beloved Athelstans Graham Johnson and what he's done is to do designs for six of the biggest series that we have coming up over the next few months yes it's exclusive merch for our members and the very first iteration is this amazing t-shirt it really is a wonderful design it's showing Hannibal as Hercules crossing the Alps on an elephant it's beautifully imagined I have to say and I would wear it with enormous pride myself and it's so good that it has a Roman hydra with lots of different heads um Hannibal's chopped off some of them but there are others with Roman helmets on I mean it could not be more epic epic is the word now if you want to show your epic status as a member of the rest is history club i think it's important for you to wear one of these t-shirts so when you're going out around town when you see people if you want to impress your husband or wife wear this t-shirt and or wear multiple t-shirts get several if you can and you'll want to know how to get hold of it the way you get to get hold of it is this you go to the new exciting rest is history website log in and go to the members merch section and tom what about if you're an apple member because i want to get this absolutely right i'm going to read out what i have been given if you're an apple member you will need to join our members mailing list to get access just send an email to the rest is history at goal hanger.com with apple member in the subject line and a screenshot of your membership and we will add you in and honestly that couldn't be easier could it dominic no so that's the rest is history at goal hanger.com with apple member in the subject line now what if you're not a member of the show not yet a member of the show i should say well this is a wonderful opportunity for you to put that right and to get involved with the show so not only will you be able to get your hands on this unique and uniquely cool example of merch but you'll also get all the great benefits early access to series bonus episodes exclusive new mini series and so much more i mean those are just sensational benefits not only do you get to wear a Hannibal themed t-shirt but there is so much else so don't hang around sign up head to the rest is history.com bye-bye bye-bye