Its subjects—Hannibal and Scipio, Rome and Carthage—are big. Its learning is deep. Its keen, focused curiosity is an inspiration. And its style, conversational and lucid, is a pleasure to read. This, in sum, is a delightful and instructive book. There can be only a very few readers who will not learn something, or even quite a lot, from it. By putting in parallel the lives of Hannibal and Scipio, Simon Hornblower endeavours to furnish a fuller picture both of their twinned yet distinctive careers and personalities but also of Carthaginian and Roman ambitions, local as well as geo-political, during the late third and early second centuries bce. And he succeeds admirably.
Hannibal and Scipio were central to great events, and Hornblower takes us through all of them. He also depicts, with sympathy but without sentimentality, each man’s late-life misfortunes. His account of Hannibal’s post-Zama career especially is extensive and detailed. Here the reader will learn much about the Carthaginian state and Hannibal’s role as a political figure. Much, too, about the nature of Hellenistic courts and the sharp practices which animated them. Sharp practice in Rome is also to the fore in Hornblower’s rehearsal of what can be known or surmised about Scipio’s political collapse. True to the format of lives rendered in parallel, comparisons recur along the way, especially in ch. 16, which matches up their respective military qualities.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Hannibal and Scipio, and certainly of the Second Punic War, to the subsequent history of the ancient Mediterranean world or of Roman society. A welcome feature of Hornblower’s book lies in its probing examinations of the war’s effect on the Romans’ relationships with their Italian allies, which looks ahead to the consequences of the Social War, and the Hannibalic war’s effect on the Italian economy (in a superb retrospective on Toynbee in ch. 19), which looks ahead to the Gracchi. Hornblower also has valuable things to say about his subjects’ afterlives, in literature as well as historiography. From start to finish, this is a book marked by erudition and independent thinking. It will be, it certainly should be, consulted often.
Hornblower writes for the general reader as well as the scholar and is scrupulous in furnishing translations and explanations of technical vocabulary. In the opening Prologue, Hornblower orients his readers toward his project and its design. He lays out his prepossessions about historiography and various aspects of Roman culture. He also discusses a few of his predecessors. This section is aimed mostly at non-specialist readers, yet here Hornblower pauses (pp. 5-6) to warn them against two books, one by Brizzi, the other by Moore, which they are unlikely ever to confront—certainly not in this book (Brizzi is cited only once, on p. 367, n. 160; Moore never resurfaces).
Chapter 1 introduces Hannibal and Scipio by way of proleptic summaries of their career highlights. In the case of Hannibal, this is done by concentrating on the literary remains, recoverable from Polybius and Livy, of a bronze inscription he erected and on which he recorded his Italian exploits. A text of this inscription, recast and filled in a bit, is then closely examined, in no small measure as a heuristic device to give the general reader an introduction to Carthaginian society. No comparable inscription survives for Scipio, so Hornblower confects one and again puts it to work to lay out important, relevant aspects of Roman culture. After this preparation, Hornblower turns to his paired biographies.
By now it will be clear that Hornblower’s is not a conventional biography. This remains true even after ch. 1. Narrative sections are interspersed amid detailed cultural, historical, and philological divagations. Some are designed to supply the reader with useful context (e.g., ch. 13 on the extent of Scipio’s and Hannibal’s acquaintance with Greek high culture) or explain technical matters (e.g., Polybius’ use of the expression hoi peri in a discussion of Hannibal’s range of associates during his Italian campaign, pp. 107-10). Hornblower is a distinguished commentator, and much of this book is in many ways something of a commentary on his own narrative. This approach demands a reader’s concentration, but the effort is fully repaid.
Hornblower’s narrative, too, unfolds in a distinctive way. The best historian of ancient Greece or Rome must also be a historiographer, and this book, unsurprisingly, is animated by historiographical sophistication. This facet of Hornblower’s reading of the past is often explicitly to the fore: again and again one encounters a close reading of Polybius or Livy out of which the historicity (or not) of an episode is extracted before the reader’s very eyes. The practice is pervasive and instructive. A fine illustration is Hornblower’s treatment of the Aristo affair (pp. 310-14). There he unpacks Polybius and Livy (and Ennius) in order to illustrate the importance, in any attempt at understanding this episode, of rumour and misinformation in international affairs. It is also a lesson against too readily taking ancient accounts at face value.
Qualifications? There will always be points of disagreement, especially in a study so wide-ranging as this one. I am, for instance, less inclined that Hornblower to believe in Hannibal’s childhood oath against Rome (p. 51, but see pp. 314-16 for a convincingly nuanced analysis of the sources) or in the military tribune Scipio’s terrorising of his colleagues, in the aftermath of Cannae, into remaining loyal to Rome (p. 106). But these are small things. My principal qualification centres round the narrative. In some instances, it is perhaps too brisk: more could have been said and I should very much like to know what Hornblower would have said had he paused to say more. Three examples follow.
(1) Scipio’s early election to an aedileship in 213 is rightly identified by Hornblower as an important episode. The achievement, striking though it was, was anything but a sudden one. Canvassing for office began early: advice was taken, supporters confirmed, constituencies wooed. The tribunician resistance which the young Scipio faced was doubtless anticipated, but one wonders how early it arose. Were the tribunes who challenged him convinced by Scipio’s invocation of the popular will or was it the strength of his coalition which sufficed to stymie them? This episode may also call attention to Scipio’s precocious talent for self-fashioning, underlined by Livy (Liv. 26.19.3-4). Hornblower calls attention to the part played by Pomponia in her son’s campaign by way of her ostentatious circuit through the temples of Rome (pp. 41-2), pageantry with which we should connect Scipio’s practice each morning of visiting the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest—and advertising his association with the god. These activities contributed to the elaboration of the Scipionic Legend, true, but if they are not for that reason dismissed, then they also suggest a brand of public display—amid the Hannibalic crisis—which was designed to win public confidence in a potentially exceptionable canvass for office. And they show that there was more to the calculating young Scipio than his valour.
(2) In 206 Scipio requested and was denied a triumph. He was refused on the grounds that never before had an individual who was not a magistrate or pro-magistrate celebrated a triumph. But before Scipio there had never been a victorious general, possessed of imperium auspiciumque, who had exercised an extraordinary command instead of a magisterial one. Hornblower accepts the view that Scipio did not qualify for a triumph and knew it. Still, he suggests, Scipio had nothing to lose in asking for one and the occasion offered him an opportunity to rehearse his glorious deeds (p. 135, where Hornblower deftly untangles some of the serious snarls in our sources, especially Polybius; cf. p. 117 and 177). Perhaps, however, we should look again at this episode.
Was there a rule in 206 forbidding triumphs to individuals who had not been magistrates but possessed imperium auspiciumque? It is hard to imagine why there should have been before Scipio came along. In Livy’s account, it is the absence of any precedent that is the issue (Liv. 28.38.4-5). Things had changed by the time we come to Pompey’s demand for a triumph in 81: Plutarch can speak of a nomos (Plut. Pomp. 14.1). The convention against extraordinary triumphs, well-established by Pompey’s day, probably began only with Scipio’s request for one (as opposed to the longstanding view, e.g., Mommsen StR 1.126f. and 131f., that Scipio’s case proves the early existence of this convention). In which case, it is the senate’s reaction, not Scipio’s perfectly reasonable petition, which calls for an explanation: do we discern here jealousy or institutional perplexity? Or both?
(3) Hornblower duly cites (pp. 353-4) Scipio’s speech, at the beginning of his second consulship in 194, in which he urged the senate to send one consul to Macedon (instead of keeping both in Italy). In Livy, Scipio adduces Hannibal, by then a fixture at Antiochus’ court, as a danger and Hornblower concentrates on that feature of the episode. This meeting took place in a crowded senate (so Liv. 34.43.12), and it is worth considering whether Scipio’s speech on that occasion was understood as his bid for an eastern command (so Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, Books 34-37, Oxford 1981: 116-17). In any case, not only did the senate reject Scipio’s proposal but it decided that Rome’s military forces in the east should return to Italy (Liv. 34.43.3-9)—a conspicuous, one might say humiliating, political defeat for the great man. Hornblower is of course right to wonder whether Scipio actually deemed Hannibal a threat to Rome at this early stage in Rome’s tensions with Antiochus. But what, I wonder, does he make of Scipio’s disappointment here?
One omission strikes me as important. In his treatment of the campaign against Antiochus in 190, Hornblower correctly focuses on Scipio’s role as his brother’s advisor, understood here to lie, if not behind Lucius’ election to the consulship, then certainly behind his selection by the senate for the eastern province. The sources are emphatic on this latter point. But here Hornblower passes over Lucius’ decision, upon arriving in Greece, to remain there and prosecute the war against the Aetolians. This is an intriguing (and for Scipio it was an exasperating) development and it must complicate our view of the senate’s expectations at that time. Polybius insists that Scipio was determined, one way or another, to extricate his brother from the Aetolian war in order to move against Antiochus. Livy takes the same line: Scipio sought an honourable pretext for leaving Aetolian affairs behind him (Liv. 37.6.5). Why was a pretext needed? Lucius, it appears, was disinclined to move on—until it was proposed that a truce be declared which would allow the Aetolians to pursue negotiations with the senate. Then (and only then) was Scipio able to persuade his brother to move against Antiochus. Still, Lucius had to be persuaded. (Plb. 21.4.4-5; 21.4.12-3; 21.5.10-2; Liv. 37.6.5-7). These actions perhaps suggest that Lucius, at least, did not see the war against Antiochus as the priority of his provincial assignment. Why not? And what, one wonders, was the view of the senate, or perhaps some significant section of the senate, when Lucius handed back Aetolian affairs in order to invade Asia? What conclusions should we draw from Scipio’s exertions? And does any of this matter to the later trials of the Scipios?
I hope it will be seen as a compliment when a reviewer complains that a long book could only be better if it were longer still. This is indeed a long book, but it doesn’t feel long. Its exuberant and engaging style carry the reader along swiftly—but not unhesitatingly: there is too much to think about. General readers, students, and experienced historians alike will all benefit from reading it. Teeming with ideas and original scholarship, Hannibal and Scipio: Parallel Lives opens up the careers and circumstances of its subjects in new and important ways. It is an impressive achievement.