Hannibal occupied southern Italy for 15 years and still lost the war
Hannibal marched an army and 38 elephants over the Alps, beat Rome again and again, and held much of southern Italy for a decade and a half. Rome's answer was to stop fighting him head-on. Starved of reinforcements, he was eventually recalled to Africa and beaten at Zama.
Hannibal was born in 247 BC, probably in Carthage, a son of the general Hamilcar Barca, whose surname meant lightning and was earned by the speed of his attacks. Carthage had just lost the First Punic War, and resentment ran deep. According to Polybius, Hannibal later said his father made him swear, as a boy begging to join a campaign in Spain, never to be a friend of Rome. After Hamilcar drowned in battle and his successor Hasdrubal was assassinated in 221 BC, the army acclaimed Hannibal, then 26, as its commander.
Rome's alliance with Saguntum, a city well south of the treaty line on the Ebro, gave him a pretext. He besieged it for eight months in 219 BC and took it. When a Roman delegation led by Fabius demanded that Carthage choose war or peace, the Carthaginians told Rome to choose, and Fabius chose war. In the spring of 218 BC Hannibal left New Carthage, crossed the Pyrenees, won over Gaulish chiefs along his route and reached the Rhône by September with some 38,000 foot soldiers, 8,000 horsemen and 38 elephants. The Alpine crossing killed nearly all the elephants, but around 10,000 Celts joined him in the Po Valley.
Victories followed at Ticinus, Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, and several Italian cities switched sides. His gift was reading the strengths and weaknesses of both armies and planning around them. Under Fabius Maximus, however, Rome adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle and wearing him down. Carthaginian defeats in Spain cut off his reinforcements, and when Scipio Africanus invaded North Africa, Hannibal was summoned home and defeated at Zama.
He then won election as sufet, a chief magistrate, and reformed Carthage's finances to pay Rome's war indemnity, angering aristocrats at home and suspicion in Rome. He fled to advise Antiochus III against Rome, and after Antiochus lost at Magnesia he moved on to Bithynia, where, betrayed to the Romans, he took his own life. Plutarch reports that when Scipio asked him who was the greatest general, Hannibal named Alexander, then Pyrrhus, then himself.
Source: Hannibal
