Titans of History

Sometimes known as the “Father of Strategy,” Hannibal pioneered the idea that war could be won beyond the set-piece battle. A master of the ambush, he attacked the enemy’s communications and seized cities and supplies behind its back. The Romans accused him of duplicity, but he was also masterly in open battle, as his overwhelming victories over the Romans at Lake Trasimene (217) and the bloodbath that was Cannae attest. His deployment of encirclement at Cannae (216), resulting in a reported 50,000 Roman deaths, was admired by Napoleon and Wellington and is still discussed by military tacticians. After this humiliation of Roman military prestige, some of Rome’s allies in Italy deserted to the Carthaginian side.

Receiving negligible support from Carthage, Hannibal had to levy troops on the spot and provision his men himself. Eventually the Romans deployed guerrilla tactics too, wearing their enemy down. Hannibal continued to campaign, largely in southern Italy, with little help from his Italian allies. Despite winning some further victories, his army was never strong enough to attack Rome itself. In 207 his younger brother, Hasdrubal Barca, led another Carthaginian army into Italy to join with Hannibal in a march on Rome, but Hasdrubal was killed and his army defeated at the River Metaurus.

When, in 203, the Roman general Scipio Africanus mounted a counter-invasion of North Africa, Hannibal was recalled to Carthage, and the following year was defeated decisively by Scipio at the Battle of Zama. Charged by Carthage’s senate with misconduct of the war, Hannibal entered politics, where his admirable administrative and constitutional reforms alienated Carthage’s old elite; before long they denounced him to the Romans. Hannibal fled.

Hannibal spent his last years waging war against Rome for any prince who would have him. He served Antiochus III of Syria and then was heard of in Crete and Armenia. He ended up at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, but the Romans had long memories and were set on revenge. Eventually they pressured Prusias to give Hannibal up, but the general chose death over captivity. In the Bithynian village of Libyssa he drank the poison that he had long carried with him in his ring, and so evaded his old enemy one final time.

JUDAH THE MACCABEE AND HIS BROTHERS

2nd century BC

God forbid that we should forsake the law and our ordinances. We will not hearken to the king’s words to go from our religion

1 Maccabees 2:19

The Maccabees, so named for their hammer-like military force, were five brothers—and their elderly father—who, against all odds, rebelled against and defeated the oppressive Greek empire of the Seleucid dynasty to win religious and political freedom—and establish their own Jewish kingdom.

The Greek kings of Asia who then dominated the Near East were descended from Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals who, after his patron’s death, had seized a vast empire. Now, thanks to the conquests of Antiochus III the Great, they ruled a Middle Eastern empire that included Judaea, where the Jews worshipped their one god. The dynasty practiced religious tolerance, but after the early death of Antiochus III his beautiful but unhinged son changed all that.

Antiochus IV tried to add Egypt to his empire. He successfully conquered Egypt but the Romans foiled his plan—and the Jews of Judaea rebelled at his rear. The furious Antiochus, who took for himself the name Epiphanes (meaning the manifestation of a divine being), decided to crush the Jewish religion. He issued a series of decrees banning Judaism in all its manifestations. Observance of the Torah, the laws of keeping kosher, the practice of circumcision—all were forbidden on pain of death. In 168 BC the Jewish Temple, the holiest place in Jerusalem, was forcibly converted to a shrine to Zeus, while troops patrolled the streets and the countryside to make sure the Judeans were now worshipping Hellenic gods. Antiochus himself entered the Temple and sacrificed pigs on its altar.

Many Judaeans did comply with the new laws, while a minority fled. It was old Mattathias, a priest at the hill town of Modin, who initiated active resistance by lashing out at a Jew complying with the new orthodoxies and killing a soldier of the evil empire. With his five sons, Mattathias retreated to Jordan to marshal his Jewish forces into a formidable guerrilla army. People flocked to join them from across Judaea, rightly sensing that in these men they had found the champions of their faith.