Review: Philip Freeman’s “Hannibal”

“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”

It is like a perfect scene from a biopic of Golden Age Hollywood: “The young African boy and his father walked up the cold stone steps of the temple in the hour just before dawn. The light rising from behind the distant mountains to the east beyond the wide bay was just beginning to spread across the city. He was only nine years old, but the boy had lived here all his short life and knew every street and back alley.” This young African boy was Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general who climbed the Alps with his war elephants to wreak havoc on Rome before eventually being defeated decades later by Publius Cornelius Scipio, who then became known as Scipio Africanus for his victory over Hannibal.

Hannibal: Rome’s Greatest Enemy by Philip Freeman, which was published earlier this year, tells the story of Hannibal and his “ultimate underdog” fight against the Roman Republic. And this fight would determine the fate of the western Mediterranean and, indeed, Western Europe and Western civilization, by extension. It is a romantic tale with which we are all familiar. Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.

The story of Hannibal is also, in part, the story of the city of Carthage. Founded by Dido, or Elisa, the Phoenician city-state established in what is today Tunisia became a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis that attracted the attention and envy of the entire civilized world in the Mediterranean. Its wealth and trade allowed it to fund seafaring adventures that were rumored to stretch as far north as the British Isles and as far south as rounding the coast of South Africa and supposedly completing a circumnavigation of the entire African continent. Aristotle lauded the Carthaginian constitution and its mixed body politic as the finest in the world. Would-be conquerors and tyrants from the Greek city-states during the Hellenistic Golden Age sought to conquer Carthage and its wealth but failed.