Professor Greg Woolf talks to Nige Tassell about what might have happened to Rome and the Romans had the Carthaginian military mastermind managed to conquer the city <\/p>
When he led his men and his elephants through the Alps in 218 BC, Hannibal had Rome<\/a> firmly in his sights. But after several notable victories \u2013 most notably the Roman annihilation at Cannae two years later \u2013 and despite remaining on the Italian peninsula for the next 15 years, the Carthaginian general failed to conquer the city, suffering from a depletion in manpower and lacking the necessary equipment to breach Rome\u2019s city walls.<\/p>\n But what if Hannibal had been successful? How would European culture have been different? And would the Roman empire have still risen to dominate the continent for centuries? Greg Woolf \u2013 Ronald J Mellor professor of ancient history at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose books include The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Rome: An Empire\u2019s Story<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2012) \u2013 doesn\u2019t believe the Carthaginian capture of Rome would necessarily have meant the extinction of the Romans.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most likely scenario is that the Romans would have been forced into a humiliating peace, maybe had war indemnities imposed on them, and lost their leadership role in Italy. Rome was already a huge city by ancient standards at the time of the Hannibalic War, and it may have struggled to stay so large without its position of power. Most likely, we\u2019d have seen a smaller, weaker city-state, much more like the Italian cities that had been defeated in actuality.\u201d<\/p>\n Culturally, there may have been little difference had Rome fallen. Despite the Carthaginians speaking and writing the Semitic language of Punic, Professor Woolf doesn\u2019t believe this would have been imposed on their new territories. Greek would have remained the most common language across the ancient Mediterranean. Similarly, there would have been no religious upheaval: \u201cRoman and Punic religion was pretty similar. They found it easy to recognise each other\u2019s gods.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Then there\u2019s the issue of whether the capture of Rome would have been a springboard for further Carthaginian expansion. \u201cIt is a fair bet that they would have dominated the western Mediterranean in the second century BC,\u201d explains Professor Woolf, \u201cand maybe extended their power in Spain and their influence in southern France.\u201d<\/p>\n But something like the Roman invasion of the British Isles<\/a> seen in AD 43 was unlikely to have been on the cards, although second-guessing the Carthaginians is a difficult pursuit, thanks to one episode in particular. \u201cWhen Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, it scattered its libraries, translating only one book \u2013 a massive guide to agriculture. As a result, we have no access to Carthaginian voices, and so we see them mostly through the eyes of their enemies: the Greeks of Sicily and then the Romans. We do not know what they wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n At the start of his journey across the Alps, Hannibal had 40 war elephants at his disposal. However, the tough conditions meant that only one of the animals (which were mainly used for charging at the enemy and instilling a sense of panic) survived the ordeal.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Subsequent studies of the Carthaginians, limited by the paucity of contemporaneous information about them, have tended to paint them with fairly broad brushstrokes \u2013 and largely portrayed them as traders, as opposed to the more violent Romans. Professor Woolf suggests the wholesale adoption of that portrait may be misguided. \u201cThere\u2019s no real sign the Carthaginians were very calm. Older textbooks claim they were a merchant people, but there is probably a fair bit of anti-Semitic bias at work there. Ancient testimony makes it clear they were military conquerors, that they exploited conquered lands for grain, silver and manpower \u2013 just like the Romans, in fact. The earliest treaties between Rome and Carthage envisaged both cities as being military powers with some trade interests.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the expansion of the Carthaginian empire, it remains unlikely that Hannibal had designs on improving his personal power by staking a claim to be made emperor as reward for his military victories. At this point, Carthage was ruled by a pair of suffetes<\/em> (chief magistrates) elected annually, a situation that most likely would have remained unchanged whether Rome was conquered or not. \u201cRome itself did not have emperors until two centuries after Hannibal\u2019s death,\u201d explains Professor Woolf. \u201cThere were occasional tyrants in Syracuse on Sicily, but the western Mediterranean mostly belonged to city states in this period.\u201d<\/p>\n It remains a moot point as to whether the fall of Rome to Hannibal would have precluded the Roman empire<\/a> ever rising and expanding to the extent it subsequently did. As Professor Woolf concludes, the permanence of Carthaginian rule would have been far from set in stone.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is perfectly possible that Rome might have fallen to Hannibal and then recovered. The Romans themselves believed that they had survived disasters in the past, and that they were strongest when their backs were against the wall. The Gauls sacked Rome in the early 4th century BC but Rome bounced back. Hannibal\u2019s victory at Cannae was remembered both as Rome\u2019s darkest hour and the moment when Roman politics worked better than any time before or since. Hannibal was a scary bugbear for a long time, but he was also remembered as the man who didn\u2019t know how to make the most of his success.\u201d<\/p>\nMore from our alternate history series<\/h4>\n
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Did you know?<\/h4>\n
The last elephant<\/h6>\n
A Roman recovery?<\/h3>\n