Ancients Behaving Badly (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Hannibal - full transcript

NARRATOR: Hannibal.
The fabled Carthaginian warrior.

His enemies say he's mean, he's

nasty, he doesn't play well with others.

Rule number 1 in the ancient

world: mess with Hannibal, and

there will be blood.

30,000 gallons of blood were

spilled on the battlefield down there.

The question is: should we

trust a guy's enemy?

Was Hannibal a great general,



or just a ruthless killer?

Our investigators will put

Hannibal's life under the

microscope, conducting a range

of scientific tests and

retracing his path of death and

destruction.

It's a detective story,

putting clue to clue to clue.

A psychiatrist will put

Hannibal on the couch...

This is really obsessive thinking.

To reveal whether he was

truly a psychopath, and how he



stacks up against other

Ancients Behaving Badly.

Hannibal has a reputation as the cruelest
general in antiquity, with a special

streak of venom in his heart for Rome.

To understand Hannibal better, psychiatrist
David Mallott will analyze his behavior, then

place him on a one-of-a-kind

Behaving Badly Psychometer to

show how he compares to some of

history's other rogues, like

Genghis Khan and Caligula.

I need to assess whether the
violence and brutality committed

by Hannibal is for a specific

strategic purpose, or whether

it's for his sheer pleasure.

Hannibal has a hair-raising rap sheet.

One story actually states

that Hannibal discussed the

possibility, with his general,

of eating the bodies of the

troops that died along the way

through the Alps to get the

other troops through.

That's cannibalism!

He forces a Roman soldier into a
fight to the death against an elephant.

When a henchman deserts,

Hannibal orders the man's wife

and children burned to death.

This is blood revenge, pure and simple.

He crucifies a scout for

giving him the wrong

directions, and he slaughters

50,000 Roman soldiers in a single day.

Hannibal has this fearsome reputation.

Rapacious, cruel, almost a monster.

But the stories of cruelty

all come from Rome, the city

Hannibal tried to destroy.

Can we trust them?

We can't be sure whether or

not this is just propaganda, but

we can be sure that the Romans

would have tried to depict

Hannibal as a barbarian.

So, who is the real Hannibal?

The search for answers begins in
his childhood. He's born in 248 B.C., in

Carthage, in modern-day

Tunisia on the north coast of Africa.

Sifting through the ruins, archaeologists
have found evidence of religious rituals

which involved the slaughter of

animal, and possibly even human, victims.

This site is a fantastically

preserved, very rare

Carthaginian temple, and in a

site like this, Hannibal was

brought as a child.

He's forced to participate in a

sacrifice, and his hands are

placed in the blood, still warm.

And in that moment, his father

makes him swear an oath and

devote the rest of his life to

trying to destroy Rome.

What's happened here will

shape Hannibal's psychology for

the rest of his life.

We have a 9-year-old boy who

looks up to his father, lionizes

the great hero, wants to join

him on his military adventure.

His father says, "Okay, but

first you must go through this

brutal ritual."

He incorporates the father's

vision, the hatred of Rome, and

makes it his own.

If the Roman stories are
true, there's worse, much worse.

They accuse the Carthaginians

of sacrificing children to the gods.

One historian says that once,

when Carthage was attacked, the

Carthaginians decided to repel

the invaders by putting to death

500 innocent children.

Now, normally you could get

those children from slave

families, or the people from the

lower classes.

But this time, they determined

that a much more profound

gesture was required.

So, they were to take the 500

children from 500 of the noblest

families of Carthage, and those

innocent children were taken

before a statue of Baal and burned alive.

Historians assumed this was

Roman spin, designed to

demonize the Carthaginians.

But discoveries in the area of

Carthage, known as the Tophet,

are giving them second thoughts.

This could be the most

horrific site of the ancient world.

Inside this cave, beneath

these burial stones,

archaeologists discovered layer

upon layer of charred bone fragments.

Their origin was a mystery,

until new analytic techniques

showed them to be human bones,

the bones of young boys.

Now, today in the scholarship

there is a debate, and that is:

is this human sacrifice, or is

it just a child cemetery?

Slaughtering children? Some
archaeologists find it unthinkable.

Surely, it never happened.

It's very difficult to

determine the cause of death of

these individuals, because the

remains of the people are

burned. So, you don't have the

integrity of the skeleton, and

it's not easy to determine "this

person died from a blow to the

head, this person had his neck

broken," or something like that.

So, it renders the whole

situation much more difficult.

Another expert believes the

evidence is simply overwhelming.

People have tried to say
this isn't really child sacrifice;

this is a cemetery for children

who died very young.

But the problem with it is

immediately, if that were true,

where are the females?

It's a huge majority of males.

This is pretty damning evidence, but it's possible
that we have 30,000 human child sacrifices.

The verdict: the horror stories could
be true. >> Hannibal had to put his hand

on the still-breathing sacrifice.

We don't even know if it was an

animal or if it was human.

That would be an incredibly

traumatic, and dramatic, event.

Life-changing.

What kind of impact could it

have had on Hannibal?

He's going to toughen up, harden up.

He's going to learn that life is cheap.

He's like a child soldier, and

as he goes forward, he's going

to pursue his father's vision.

The effect on Hannibal is going

to be profound.

So, why all the hate?
Carthage and Rome have been

battling for years over control

of trade in the Mediterranean.

Hannibal's father was

Carthage's army commander.

A 23-year war rages across the
Mediterranean. Hannibal, still a teenager,

ships out for the fighting in Spain.

By his twenties, he commands an

army, and from the start, he's

no Mr. Nice Guy.

Hannibal lays siege to the
city of Saguntum, allies of the

Romans, and his taste for

treachery goes on full ruthless display.

It had been a long and drawn-out
siege. Finally, the Saguntians sent

their leaders to negotiate with

Hannibal, and that's when he saw

his chance.

Contrary to the rules of war, he

sent in his troops to kill every

single man inside.

People surrender, he says he'll

let them go, then he turns

around and slaughters them anyway.

What kind of man is this?

Today, we call that a war crime.

Hannibal sets a pattern,

which he'll repeat throughout life.

He'll destroy anyone, but

anyone, who crosses him.

In 218 B.C., at the age of 30, Hannibal turns
a malevolent eye on the grand prize: Rome

itself.

It's time, he decides, to fulfill his oath.

Let's put this decision into context.

Rome is one of the world's great

superpowers, and Hannibal's

brother-in-law and father have

gone against Roman armies, but

they've never gone for Rome itself.

Now, Rome becomes the ultimate goal.

Hannibal sets the stage for

an epic struggle that will

destroy entire Roman legions,

and kill tens of thousands of his own men.

NARRATOR: Hannibal of Carthage, at 30
years old, is fulfilling the blood oath he

swore as a boy: to march on Rome.

The shortest way is by
sea, straight across the

Mediterranean, but there's a problem.

For Hannibal, attacking Rome

by sea is no longer an option.

Yes, historically Carthage is a

naval superpower, but after the

last war fought by Hannibal's

father, it's no longer an option.

Rome, and its navy, now dominate

the Mediterranean.

That will mean a forced march

of 1,500 miles, lasting 4

months, for Hannibal's band of mercenaries.

Hannibal's army was a mixture
of foreigners and mercenaries,

drawn from all over.

He had Numidian light cavalry

from modern-day Algeria, for instance.

He had Spanish swordsmen.

He had specialist troops, like

the slingers from the Balearic Islands.

So, it was a real mix of races,

and languages, and costumes and cultures.

As well as 50,000 soldiers, there are
camp followers, even wives and children.

It's an armed circus, right

down to the elephants, 37 of

them Hannibal's super-weapon.

The thing with elephants
is that if you haven't seen one,

they're incredibly terrifying.

Once people see them, once they

get used to them, they won't be

quite so frightened.

So, it's a bit of a one-shot weapon anyway.

It's a gamble.

Taking these lumbering beasts

to the battlefield is the most

well-known decision Hannibal

ever makes, and it could also

have been his dumbest.

Hannibal's problems start when

a Roman army is sent to

intercept him at Massilia,

modern-day Marseilles.

Hannibal decides he'll attack

through the back door, across

the Alps mountains.

Before he even gets that far, the elephants
spell trouble. >> This is the river Rhone, on

the northern outskirts of Arles;

but of course in Hannibal's time

it would have been open country

here, and he's got the problem

of how to get 50,000 men across

this river in the face of

hostile Gaulish tribesmen on the

other side.

That's bad enough, but he's also

got the problem of how do you

get 37 elephants across a river like this?

Hannibal orders his man to

build a huge raft to float the

elephants across.

They got the elephants on in

small groups, but of course,

once the rocking started, the

elephants panicked, and some of

them jumped off into the river,

their handlers were swept away and drowned.

They say that all of the

elephants got across, but it

must have been complete chaos.

And there's worse ahead. Here's
what now lies between Hannibal and Rome.

The mountains of the Alps,

rising in places to nearly 16,000 feet.

He left Spain in July, but it's

now October.

His army isn't equipped for

mountaineering, let alone in

rapidly falling temperatures.

The conditions are horrific.

The mercenary army is used to

rough terrain; it's used to

difficult situations in North Africa.

It's a totally different reality

from going up through the Alps,

16,000-plus feet, the snow, the cold.

It's a new experience, and they

are going to be traumatized.

To understand how tough it

will be, we need to know what

route Hannibal takes.

A team from Stanford University
in California hopes to find out.

Hannibal's route, even after
2,230 years, is still a mystery.

It's enough of a mystery that

hundreds of books have been

written about it.

It's a detective story.

You're putting clue to clue to

clue, trying to match them up.

They investigate possible sites
where Hannibal's army may have camped.

They're looking for coins,

weapons, the ash from thousands

of campfires, any clue that

Hannibal passed this way.

If you notice here, we've got

some black-colored material in the soil.

So far, they've come up dry,

so they turn to the ancient

histories for clues instead.

If you look at this, we have

3 clues that we can extrapolate from this.

The best source, the Greek

Polybius, writing 70 years

after the crossing, gives no

place names, but he does

mention certain features of the landscape.

One is called "the place of the

white rock," where local tribes

attacked Hannibal.

This place has been a white

rock place through history, and

notice how it stands out

dramatically, because it's

framed by the dark green forest around it.

It fits Polybius' account exactly.

Based on this evidence, Hannibal must be
heading for a high pass, called the Col de

Clapier, 8,000 feet above sea

level, where temperatures can

fall well below freezing.

It's a totally alien

environment for an African army.

HUNT: Many of them may have

never even seen snow before, and

now suddenly, they're ascending

up these Alpine valleys, and

they're seeing this snow on the

heights above them, and it's

getting closer and closer, and

colder and colder.

In this region, temperatures

can fall to 23 degrees Fahrenheit at night.

It's bitterly cold for those

troops who are clad only in

light, linen garments.

The effect of cold temperature and thin air...
Oxygen at that height is 25% than at sea

level... can be tested
using a cold chamber.

We are going to have the
chamber at -5 degrees Celsius,

which is 23 degrees Fahrenheit,

and there will be a wind to

simulate as if he was up on a

mountain pass, and we can

control oxygen levels at the same time.

So, we can replicate what Hannibal's
soldiers would be doing in the Alps.

A volunteer wears a thin

smock, simulating the clothing

of Hannibal's Numidian cavalry.

It's ideal for the hot

conditions they're used to in

Spain, but not for the windy,

freezing October Alps.

Hannibal's march from sea level to the high pass
takes 10 days, with the temperature steadily

dropping.

The volunteer begins to shiver

after just a few minutes.

He tries a dexterity test, but

already his fingers can't

perform the simplest task.

He's barely able to do any

manual task at all with his

hands and fingers right now.

Okay, we are now at 18 minutes. Can we have
you stand up again, and do the hand-grip test,

please?

Stephen, I just did the hand-grip
test, and my results were 29 kilograms.

His grip strength has

declined by 40%, so how could

he fight with a sword or

grapple with an enemy?

Overall, their ability to use

their hands, which are critical

in survival, would have dropped

quite a bit already, and this is

only after 15 to 20 minutes in the cold.

Another 10 minutes, and the

volunteer is really beginning to suffer.

The shivering is exhausting,

his brain demands more oxygen

to fight the fatigue, the rapid

breathing sucks energy from his body.

If this was one of Hannibal's men, he would no
longer be able to think straight, or even walk

straight, on the perilous mountain trails.

One of the first signs of

hypothermia is that you have

difficulty focusing.

You're really just focusing on

putting one foot in front of the other.

You don't really notice

peripheral dangers that may happen.

If the body temperature's still

going to continue dropping, you

start running the risk of cardiac arrest.

After 32 minutes, the doctor

stops the experiment.

I was feeling pretty cold at the
end there. I'm starting to warm up a bit,

but as you can see, my hands are

pretty red and they're pretty sore.

Yeah, it's pretty gruesome.

To save themselves, Hannibal's men would
have lit fires, and taken the clothing

off the dead.

But half of Hannibal's army,

25,000 men, die in the Alps.

Most of them perish from cold

and exhaustion, others from disease.

So imagine we're an army. We're following
along each other's tracks, but this is a

column that could be miles long.

This column could be 20 miles long.

The people at the top are

walking through fresh snow, but

the people at the back are

walking through slush and muck,

and the drainage of the water

they've urinated into, and now

there are feces in this water.

Something like cholera can bloom.

In 6 hours, you can be dead.

It should have taken one week
to cross the Alps. Hannibal takes 2.

Why?

It's down to those elephants.

They slow down the whole army,

and they eat 300 pounds of fodder a day.

All that food has to be carted

over the Alps.

(Elephants roaring)

Another commander might have

thought, "Elephants in the Alps?

Bad idea."

But not Hannibal.

Hannibal's confronted with 2 choices.

He hears from his lieutenants,

"My elephants are dying; my men

are dying; we've just undergone

this tremendous ordeal."

"On the other hand, another

piece of me is saying from my

childhood, my father's vision

and mine is to go conquer Rome."

At this point, despite that

advice, his vision wins out.

And something else could be fueling Hannibal's
obsession. He may have put himself in the

hands of his god, the fearsome

Baal, supreme god of the Carthaginians.

Baal's a mountain god,

Baal's a storm god.

Baal's a god who throws lightning bolts.

You hear the rolling thunder in

the mountains.

We've just been hearing that in

the last few minutes, as a

thunderstorm is moving in.

Hannibal could mean something

like "grace of Baal," "favor of Baal."

Hannibal might be predisposed

to going over the mountains,

where his god, Baal, is the god

of those mountains.

His obsessive thinking, his

fixation on Rome, now takes on a

religious dimension.

It becomes like a crusade.

Hannibal now sees the world

around him validating this goal,

to go attack Rome.

By the time Hannibal reaches this spot,
looking down on Italy, he's lost half his army.

The Col de Clapier is littered

with dead soldiers and the

carcasses of elephants.

Almost every one of those

elephants is dead.

The net effect of their use in

battle is null.

Hannibal's obsession has killed 25,000 of
his own men. Clearly, he's behaving badly.

But worse, much worse, is to

come, as he drives his army

forward with acts of unspeakable savagery.

NARRATOR: 218 B.C. Hannibal of
Carthage has gambled everything on his

lifelong obsession: the

destruction of Rome.

Hannibal has one goal in
mind, and because he disregards

everything else, you get the

idea that this is really

obsessive thinking.

This fixation about Rome will

drive him forward.

Crossing the Alps into Italy, Hannibal has
lost half his force of 50,000 men to cold,

hunger and disease.

The survivors aren't happy.

Hannibal needs to show them

who's boss, so he rounds up

some prisoners and makes them

fight to the death.

The last man standing can go
free. What's he trying to prove?

Hannibal demonstrates his

view of life to all of his men.

Life will be a struggle between

life and death.

Only the strongest, only the

cleverest are going to survive.

That's not just Hannibal's view;

that's now everybody's view.

Hannibal's team talk works,

just like he hoped.

He defeats Roman legions sent

to stop him at 2 battles in north Italy.

How does he manage it with his

weakened army?

The answer is, Rome's not the

superpower it will become in

later centuries.

The city's ruled by 2 consuls.

Incredibly, they also take it

in turns to command the army, a

recipe for military disaster.

It was purely a political
thing, to make sure no one had

supreme power, to share the job.

Alternating day by day, command

of the army never lasting more

than 24 hours.

Ideally, the 2 colleagues should cooperate,
should both agree on a common plan.

But if they didn't, there was

nothing to stop one man doing

the exact opposite of his

colleague when it was his day in charge.

Hannibal will exploit the

Romans' weakness for all he's worth.

He hears that they've raised a

new army in southern Italy, and

so he bypasses Rome to seek out the enemy.

Along the way, the ancient

histories list a catalog of war crimes.

Pliny the Elder, the
historian, tells a bizarre

story.

He says that Hannibal takes a

captured Roman soldier, and he

puts him up against an elephant.

He says to the soldier, "If you win in combat
against an elephant, you will go free."

Now, the strange thing is, the

Roman soldier wins.

(Elephant roaring)

What can Hannibal do? He can't let the story
get out. He has the soldier put to death

immediately.

Hannibal's discipline code is simple
and brutal. When one of his supporters

deserts, he seizes the wife and

daughter he left behind.

These innocent victims are

tortured and then burned alive.

The wife, the children, they

are innocent, but it doesn't matter.

This is blood revenge, pure and simple.

Hannibal would have felt

absolutely justified in his actions.

He has been betrayed, and with

betrayal comes punishment.

Something quite trivial can

also get you killed.

When Hannibal's scout takes a

wrong turning, Hannibal explodes with rage.

He has the man crucified.

Why is Hannibal behaving so badly?

Is this mindless violence, or

is there a rational explanation?

He's not a psychopath; he's

not doing this for fun.

He's setting examples for his troops.

It's cruel, but it's cruelty

with a purpose.

During the long march south, Hannibal gets an
infection that permanently blinds him in his

right eye, and it doesn't help

his disposition.

August, 216 B.C. Hannibal's army
reaches Cannae in southern Italy.

With rebels enlisted along the

way, his army's now 40,000 strong.

The Roman army Hannibal

confronts is twice as big.

But 2 rookie generals, Paulus

and Varro, are fighting each

other, instead of working out a

game plan to defeat Hannibal.

The Roman generals at Cannae

certainly weren't very experienced.

Paulus had been consul once before.

Varro had never held that

office, and he'd never commanded an army.

But they were concerned that the

battle should be fought when

they were in charge, because if

they were in charge on the day,

they would get the most credit for victory.

By the end of the day, these

fields will be soaked in Roman blood.

It's really hard to get your

head around the numbers.

Something on the order of 30,000

gallons of blood were spilled on

the battlefield down there.

Today, even today, it's still

called the Campo di Sangue,

"the Field of Blood."

The Roman generals' inexperience
makes them easy meat for Hannibal.

What he does is, he lines his

troops in a crescent shape.

His weakest infantry is here.

Now, that sounds like it's

crazy, but Hannibal has a plan.

He keeps his elite infantry

in reserve, and uses the less

experienced soldiers in the

middle of the crescent as bait.

When this crescent collapses,

as he knew it would, the Romans

rush forward.

They think they're winning.

The Romans plunge into the

center of the Carthaginian

army, and Hannibal springs his trap.

That's when Hannibal sends

his troops around, and totally

encircles the Romans.

That's when the real slaughter begins.

The Romans are so hemmed in,

they can't fight.

50,000 Romans are slaughtered,

a 70% casualty rate.

Remember that all these men were either
slashed, stabbed, clubbed or crushed to death.

It must have been extremely

exhausting for the guys doing the killing.

Is Hannibal magnanimous in victory?

No way.

He orders his troops to slash

the hamstrings of defeated

Romans, so they can't run away.

They die slowly in agony.

Many commit suicide.

The morning after presents a
gruesome scene. The Cannae battlefield is

littered with corpses, with

their heads buried in shallow holes.

This must have seemed really

bizarre, but it turns out, in

order to end their suffering,

the Roman troops were scraping,

digging holes and sticking their

heads inside, to eat the dirt,

to suffocate themselves.

It's like drowning with dirt,

and that gives you the sense of

the agony they must have felt.

That gives you a sense of the

terror, and the suffering they

would have experienced that

night after the battle of annihilation.

Cannae is the most crushing

defeat Rome will ever suffer.

The city itself is now at Hannibal's mercy.

NARRATOR: 216 B.C. After 2
years of war, Rome is at Hannibal's mercy.

So, why doesn't he go in for the kill?

It's a question that has

intrigued historians ever since.

It's really hard to know
what's going on in the mind of

Hannibal.

What's he thinking?

Now, they say that he didn't

attack the walls of Rome because

he didn't have siege equipment.

But this was a guy that wrote

his own rules.

This was a guy that took an army

and elephants over the Alps.

Surely, if Hannibal had wanted

to besiege Rome, he could have

gotten the siege engines.

Hannibal's good in battle, maybe even a
genius, but he's a better soldier than he is a

politician.

He tries to build an alliance

of rebel Italian cities, and

fails miserably.

He wants to take on Rome, and

yet he has a very limited skill set.

Hannibal knows how to win a

battle, but what he lacks is the

flexibility and creativity to be

a diplomat.

Instead of winning over new

allies, Hannibal still thinks a

super-weapon is the way to victory.

The elephants prove to be a disaster.

Next, he tries to turn snakes

into a weapon of war.

Hannibal's credited with
inventing this rather novel

technique, where he gets his men

to gather basketfuls of snakes,

and then these are fired by

artillery over onto the decks of

enemy warships.

Now, a crowded warship, lots and lots of rowers,
this isn't something where you want panic

and everybody running out of the

way of these ferocious reptiles.

It sounds scary, but would it
work? Forensic engineer Jeff Archbold

will simulate a snake bomb

attack, to find out whether the

snakes would even survive being

fired through the air.

We're assuming that the 2
warfaring ships are about 200

feet apart, about 60 meters apart.

In order to get one of these earthen pots to
travel 200 feet, it's going to have to have an

initial launch velocity of about

55 miles per hour.

To make the pot do this, it's

going to get launched 50 feet in the air.

The major impact is going to be

the vertical impact, so that's

what we're going to try and recreate.

Reptile expert Lee Parker

believes this substitute for a

real snake will tell him all he

needs to know.

We've gone with the closest
density of what a snake would

kind of be like, with a skin

casing which would similar to

that on the skin of the snake.

The organs that would be inside

a snake, muscle tissues and

things like that, would

definitely be like this.

The test will measure
the force of the impact.

What we've recorded here is a peak
impact of a little over 1100 kilograms.

So, we're looking at about 130

to 140 Gs of force.

That's the type of thing that

would kill a human, but snakes

being smaller, they may have survived.

The snakes in the base of the

pot cushioned the impact for

those above, so most of them survive.

The feasibility of this is

actually quite high.

10 to 20% of the snakes in a pot

would have died upon impact, but

80% of the snakes would survive,

and it would be psychologically

quite a shock, to have a bunch

of snakes land.

The weapon works in theory,

but was it any use?

It might win a few early

engagements in a battle.

It isn't going to win the battle

on its own, and Hannibal doesn't

manage a full success.

Hannibal's fixation on a

super-weapon, whether elephants

or snakes, shows his lack of

strategic judgment.

It's a little bit like the
way in which Hitler invested

huge resources in developing

rocket technology in the Second

World War, when almost certainly

he'd have been much better off

plowing the resources into

conventional weaponry.

I think Hannibal had the same problem.
He thought the super-weapon was

the solution to his problem.

He probably would have been

better off investing more

resources in more infantry, more

cavalry, more conventional weaponry.

Hannibal's war began as a blitzkrieg
but now turns into a long, slow stalemate.

The major miscalculation that Hannibal
made was underestimating the ability of

the Romans to soak up punishment.

They could lose 50,000 men in a

battle, but there were still

700,000 men altogether,

available to be recruited in Italy.

So, they could suffer the

horrendous losses of a battle

like Cannae 10 times over, and

still keep fighting.

Hannibal lingers in Italy for 13 years.

He's 45 years of age when the

Romans launch their own

surprise attack on Carthage.

In 203 B.C., Hannibal is

ordered to come back here to

Carthage by the elders.

There's a Roman army camped

right outside the city.

What is he still doing in Italy?

The showdown happens here, on

the plain of Zama in North Africa.

Despite his disastrous experience with
them in the Alps, Hannibal once again turns

to his favorite super-weapon:

the war elephant.

Hannibal has about 80 elephants at his
disposal, and he's got to get these guys fired

up for the battle.

So, what the ancient sources say

he does is he gives them

alcohol, and he's also going to

antagonize them.

He's going to stab them in the ankles.

So, you've got them both drunk,

and you've also got them infuriated.

Then, all you've got to do at

that point is turn them towards

the enemy and let them loose.

But the Romans have a simple

defense plan.

The legions open up gaps in the

ranks, and the great beasts

thunder right through.

Some even turn back, and plow

into Hannibal's own lines.

The battle is a crushing defeat for
Hannibal. Hannibal's reputation for

military genius now passes to

the man who beat him, the Roman

general Scipio.

Hannibal won many battles against the Romans
but never came close to winning the war.

He's a colossal failure, yet

history says he's a genius.

How come?

NARRATOR: Hannibal spent 15
years trying to conquer Rome and failed.

He's fought a major battle on

his home turf, and lost.

Good job!

Or at least, that's what

history seems to be telling us.

How can that be?

If you describe Hannibal
as a great leader, as a great

military genius, and then you

beat him, it makes you look even better.

You always have to ask who's

written the history.

Is there a vested interest?

Is there a hidden agenda?

In this case, the answer's

fascinating, and may very well

explain why we have the image of

Hannibal that we do.

The most detailed account of Hannibal's
invasion of Italy comes from the historian

Polybius, writing 70 years after the event.

Polybius tells us that he

visited many of the locations

(the Alps, some of the battle

(sites and so on), and also that

he spoke to some of the

veterans, men who had actually

fought with Hannibal, and this

is why we should trust his account.

But if you think about it, even

if those veterans had been boys

at the time of the war, they'd

have been well into their 80s

when they were supposedly

talking to Polybius.

And this is a world where life

expectancy is low.

So at the very least, we have a

question mark over the

reliability of Polybius'

account.

Why would Polybius lie?

It turns out he was paid by the

family of Scipio, the man who

had defeated Hannibal.

In effect, Polybius was the

family spin doctor.

The best way to make Scipio into

a military genius, was to

portray Hannibal as a military

genius as well.

There was really no credit for

Scipio if Hannibal was portrayed

as a second-rater and a loser.

The verdict?

Hannibal's not nearly the

military genius that history

and legend make him out to be.

Hannibal quits Carthage after the disastrous
battle of Zama, but he's still looking for a

fight.

He's still got to make
a living, he's still got to

survive.

So, he goes to the eastern

Mediterranean where kingdoms

are still independent, and some

of them are hostile to Rome.

Hannibal still likes the idea of fighting against
the Romans, but really he's just a mercenary.

Hannibal's a marked man,

Rome's most wanted.

In 182 B.C., in Bithynia in

modern-day Turkey, Hannibal

hears a Roman strike force is

moving in on his position.

He won't let the Romans kill

him; he certainly won't let them

capture him and perhaps drag him

back to Rome in triumph, in chains.

So, Hannibal takes poison, and

takes his own life.

Right to the very end, he is in

charge of his own destiny.

So, who is the real Hannibal?

He grew up steeped in hatred

for Rome, and crushed anyone

who crossed him.

Even the smallest slight, like

giving him wrong directions,

could get you killed.

A great general?

He won battlefield victories,

but lost the war.

He made cold-blooded choices

that killed half his army, and

stubbornly pursued plans that

were pure folly.

So, where does Hannibal fit on the
psychological scale of Ancients Behaving Badly?

Hannibal has caused tens
of thousands of deaths: 50,000 at

the battle of Cannae, 25,000 of

his own men crossing the Alps.

But these deaths are

goal-directed; they have a purpose.

That puts Hannibal on the

same level as Julius Caesar and

Genghis Khan, for whom killing

was strictly business rather than pleasure.

If this represented psychopathic killing,
we would see it as much more random, much

more sadistic, much more for his

own pleasure, and not attached

to a grand idea.

And there's something else

about Hannibal's personality.

On the Alpine death march, it

was obvious that he blundered,

but he wouldn't, or couldn't, quit.

Hannibal scores very high on

the mental obsessiveness scale.

Since he was 9 years old, he has

single-mindedly pursued this

obsession to destroy Rome, a

vision he inherited from his father.

It doesn't matter what else is

going on in life, he doesn't

have the flexibility to look beyond that.

And so, this is how Hannibal
scores, a profile similar to

the 13th century Scottish

warlord William Wallace, the

inspiration for the movie

Braveheart, and whose fatal

obsession was to crush the English.

We have 2 guys who are both willing
to sacrifice troops to get the job done.

It's about winning a battle.

They're brilliant tacticians,

and yet off the battlefield, we

see 2 gentlemen who do not have

the flexibility and creativity

to excel in other aspects of their life.

The Romans turn out to be
far better empire-builders than

Hannibal.

They were better image-makers

too, cleverly building up the

reputation of their bitterest enemy.

40 years after Hannibal's

death, the Romans obliterate

Carthage, and the only Hannibal

to survive is the one that

suited their purposes.

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