Titus Livius Livy - The War with Hannibal: The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Books XXI-XXX

THE WAR WITH HANNIBAL

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

TITUS LIVIUS was born in 59 BC at Patavium (Padua) but later moved to Rome. He lived in an eventful age but little is known about his life, which seems to have been occupied exlusively in literary work. When he was aged about thirty he began to write his History of Rome, consisting of 142 books of which thirty-five survive. He continued working on it for over forty years until his death in AD 17.

AUBREY DE SLINCOURT, scholar and translator, translated Livys The Early History of Rome (Books IV) and The War With Hannibal (Books ), The Histories of Herodotus and The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian, all for the Penguin Classics. He was born in 1896 and educated at Rugby, and University College, Oxford. A schoolmaster of genius for twenty-six years, he retired in 1947 to the Isle of Wight where he lived until his death in 1962.

BETTY RADICE read classics at Oxford, then married and, in the intervals of bringing up a family, tutored in classics, philosophy and English. She became joint editor of the Penguin Classics in 1964. She translated Plinys Letters, Livys Rome and Italy, the Latin comedies of Terence, the Letters of Abelard and Heloise and Erasmuss Praise of Folly, and also wrote the Introductions to Horaces The Complete Odes and Epodes and The Poems of Propertius, all for Penguin Classics. She also edited and introduced Edward Gibbons Memoirs of My Life for the Penguin English Library. She edited and annotated her translation of the younger Plinys works for the Loeb Library of Classics, and translated from Italian, Renaissance Latin and Greek for the Officina Bodoni of Verona. She collaborated as a translator in the Collected Works of Erasmus and was the author of the Penguin Reference book Whos Who in the Ancient World. Betty Radice was an honorary fellow of St Hildas College, Oxford, and a vice-president of the Classical Association. She died in 1985.

Books XXIXXX of
The History of Rome from its Foundation

*

Translated by
AUBREY DE SLINCOURT

Edited with an Introduction by
BETTY RADICE

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This translation first published 1965
Reprinted with an Index 1972
31

Copyright the Estate of Aubrey de Slincourt, 1965
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196306-8

Put Hannibal in the scales: how many pounds will that peerless
General mark up today? This is the man for whom Africa
Was too small a continent, though it stretched from the surf-beaten
Ocean shores of Morocco east to the steamy Nile
To tribal Ethiopia, and new elephants habitats.
Now Spain swells his empire, now he surmounts
The Pyrenees. Nature sets in his path
High Alpine passes, blizzards of snow: but he splits
The very rocks asunder, moves mountains with vinegar.
Now Italy is his, yet still he forces on:
We have accomplished nothing, he cries, till we have stormed
The gates of Rome, till our Carthaginian standard
Is set in the Citys heart. A fine sight it must have been,
Fit subject for caricature the one-eyed commander
Perched on his monstrous beast! Alas, alas for glory,
What an end was here: the defeat, the ignominious
Headlong flight into exile, everyone gawping at
The once-mighty Hannibal turned humble hanger-on,
Sitting outside the door of a petty Eastern despot
Till His Majesty deign to wake. No sword, no spear,
No battle-flung stone was to snuff the fiery spirit
That once had wrecked a world: those crushing defeats,
Those rivers of spilt blood were all wiped out by a
Ring, a poisoned ring. On, on, you madman, drive
Over your savage Alps, to thrill young schoolboys
And supply a theme for speech-day recitations!

Juvenal, Satire X, lines 14767.

(TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN)

All military commanders who have been masters of strategy and great leaders of men have left their legends to inspire or to intimidate later generations, and something unforgettable about Hannibal could fire the imagination of the Romans whenever they thought of their historic past. Even Juvenal, an embittered satirist writing on the vanity of human wishes, cannot stifle a grudging admiration for the enemy at the gates of Rome three centuries before his own day.

Hannibal ad portas became part of the tradition as a nursery threat or a rallying-cry, much as Boneys name was used in nineteenth-century homes and survives in sea-shanties. For a comparable episode in English history which retains its power to stir public sentiment, we must go back to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, though those of us who remember the years 193945 can surely recognize the moment when a Hannibal stood at our gates and there seemed nothing to hold him but the obstinacy of the peoples refusal to accept defeat.

Ten books out of Livys History of Rome were devoted to the seventeen years of the second war between Rome and Carthage, and these ten have come down to us practically intact among the thirty-five survivors of the original 142. Livys plan for the whole grouped the books in fives, ends with the victory over Hannibal at Zama.

Livy was born at Patavium (Padua) in 59 B.C., moved to Rome and started on his history about the age of thirty, and continued to work on it for over forty years until his death in A.D.17. Little is known of his life; like Virgil and Horace he was inspired by deep patriotic feeling and gratitude to Augustus for the security he enjoyed after the civil wars. Tacitus (Annals IV: 34) says he was friendly with Augustus, who appreciated his objectivity as well as his eloquence, and Suetonius (Claudius 41) mentions how he encouraged the Emperor Claudius in his own attempts to write a History of Rome. Quintilian more than once quotes the gibe of Livys contemporary, the critic Asinius Pollio, about his patavinitas, his provincialism (Instit Orat. I: 5, 56; VIII 1, 3). This refers probably to the north-Italian accent and idiom which offended the Roman purist, though it may also indicate a certain lack of sophistication and a simplicity of judgement. But Plinys story of the Spaniard who came to Rome only to have one look at Livy (Letters II: 3) suggests that he was well known in the capital as a literary figure. His position as a writer was soon firmly established; by Martials day the History existed in potted as well as in its complete form (