Originally Posted by
EricD
The name "Hannibal" is famous in the annals of military history. Hannibal Barca was one of the greatest commanders of Mediterranean Antiquity. His three crushing victories over the Romans at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae are rightly renowned as some of the most tactically brilliant victories ever fought. Even in the long stalemate after Cannae, when Hannibal wandered with his army through southern Italy like wayward homeless bandits, the fact that he survived the overwhelming Roman resources and still managed to score crushing victories against the consular armies which still challenged him are testaments to his skill. Just holding his army together for such a long and hard campaign against such a formidable opponent as the Roman Republic and their Italian confederates is a testament to his strength of will and ability as a leader.
It has often perplexed me how incapable Hannibal seems to have been at prosecuting sieges though. In comparison to his stellar record of victories in pitched field battles, his record for sieges was quite miserable. I don't think a lack of ability or education in sieges can explain this difficulty Hannibal had in Italy, given that he was successful against Saguntum at the beginning of the war, and appears to have been well-educated in military matters by his father Hamilcar and perhaps (We can guess) by the study of Hellenistic military history and texts. So why did Hannibal, the great genius Carthaginian general, have such difficulty in laying siege?
His lack of success at sieges was really a critical failure in Hannibal's campaigns in Italy. Sieges were in many ways the truly decisive operation of ancient war. Being able to successful lay siege upon and take an opposing power's fortified places was the critical final step to truly subduing an opponent to your will. If you cannot win the siege, often the best you can do is lay waste to the enemy's lands and farms, loot and pillage, and hope to bring them to the negotiating table by winning in the field. If, on the other hand, this fails as it did against the Romans in Italy, then ultimately all your victories in the field will be irrelevant if you cannot in the final measure go against the opponent's fortified places and take them. Hannibal was often curiously inactive after his victories, taking long periods of time to recover after hard-fought battles like Cannae. So why was this?
I think part of the answer to that question lies in the social nature of Hannibal's army, and more broadly in the social nature of armies in Antiquity in general.
What motivates an army to fight? An army is after all nothing but a collection of hundreds or thousands of individuals, with their own agency, making their own choices to fight or not. There might be many causes which motivate a man to go to war in Antiquity. To defend your home or loved ones, to serve a leader you admire, to advance yourself socially and gain honour and glory, to pillage and plunder the lands of others and enrich yourself. There are many motivations, some noble and others less so. In all cases, one of the most powerful reasons why men remain in battle or on campaign is their horizontal social links: The links of comradeship between soldiers. Now, you may be motivated to go to war, but that does not necessarily mean you will accept the command of another. Obedience in the armies of the pre-modern world was not an automatic assumption as it has become in modern armies. This has several key impacts to how a commander like Hannibal must handle his troops.
Why does a modern soldier obey their commanders? Many reasons. In many militaries they are volunteers who have chosen this as their vocation. A good officer or NCO is often highly respected by their troops. However, the troops are also inculcated with a habit of obedience and discipline throughout their training, before they are ever placed in an actual battle or on an actual campaign. A modern military, as in Canada or the United States, is in many ways close to a total institution, which in a regular unit can administer and order almost every aspect of its soldiers' lives. The military has an institutional identity within society, to which its members learn a culture of obedience. It is not just "the army" but "The Army". The modern military has many legal powers over its members, which its chains of command are empowered to enforce to ensure the discipline and good order of the military. Additionally: Desertion, though not unknown in modern times, is much more difficult to get away with now. Modern militaries have extensive military police branches, and the reach and capability of civilian police branches (Indeed their very existence) is a critical difference from the context of Antiquity. If you desert or go AWOL as a modern soldier, there's a very good chance you will be brought back to the military and be punished. Soldiers of a modern military force would seem miraculously well-behaved and well-disciplined in comparison to the armies of Antiquity. They also have very strong unit morale, very strong social bonds between service members.
The situation in Antiquity was quite different. Many armies lacked the cultural or legal powers to punish disobedience at all, and many of the cultures of the Mediterranean region had no tradition of physical punishment for disobedience, or very limited versions of it. The militaries of Antiquity were, in most cases, not standing forces which were maintained as near-total institutions in the modern way. In most cases they were seasonal forces, raised for a given campaign, and generally maintained existing civilian social bonds. Time available for training was often very limited, and so maintaining peacetime social bonds meant essentially "instant" unit morale for a force in war without the necessity of long training periods to bond strangers together. This also meant that the elites of peacetime life, the nobles and aristocrats and big men of a community, often became the leaders in wartime of their own local communal unit. The companies of the Athenian army were based on the tribes of Athens, for example. These officers were also often (at least in the Greek armies) elected by their men, giving them an authority dependent upon their troops's acceptance of them and independent of their chain of command to the overall commander of an army. Other armies from more aristocratic or monarchical societies, like Thessaly or Makedon pre-Philip II, were based on the retinues of landowning noblemen, and the lesser aristocrats who served them. The overall army of a King would thus be a "retinue of retinues" (Your retinue of nobles, and their retinues, and so forth). Each leader within your army thus has his own independent power base, and at the same time is in his own way beholden to the men. Men who don't want to continue campaigning, because your discipline is too harsh or your leadership does not inspire confidence, can desert. They can pick up in the night and take off, and you have little to stop them from doing so and little means of bringing them back if they do. This is quite a different dynamic than how command works in modern armies. The ancient commander needs to rely even more on their own charisma, their oratory, and leadership by persuasion and example, because they lack the institutional supports to their authority which the modern commander has.
A key point to understand here is the concept of "Leadership Capital". That can be defined as: Your ability to extract or enforce obedience to your command from individuals whom may not want to be doing the thing that you need them to do. Leadership capital is a renewable but finite resource. When you, the leader, are doing anything which builds your follower's trust or respect in you, you are building your leadership capital. When you demand that your followers do something which they really don't want to do, which in war means it is dangerous or unpleasant or may result in their likely injury or death, you are spending leadership capital. Fail to build enough of it, and spend it too much and too freely, and your followers' patience with and obedience to you will run out. This can cripple a commander. A modern military officer or NCO is invested with a certain amount of inherent leadership capital by dint of their position and rank within the modern institution, which they can then further build up with their personal ability, charisma, and prowess. However, in Antiquity, often leadership capital had to be entirely built by the individual commander, and any cultural or institutional leadership capital was much more comparatively limited in availability.
I posted a piece before on TWC, The Disobedient Roman Soldier, which touched on some of the social aspects of an army in Antiquity through the lens of incidents of military disobedience in the Roman armies. Discipline in the Roman armies was seen as uncommonly harsh for the time, the Romans put people to death for desertion. Yet all the same Roman military history is full of anecdotes and incidences of Roman soldiers being disobedient and headstrong, disobeying the orders of the leaders they had sworn sacred oaths to obey. If the uncommonly harsh discipline of the Romans could not fully control their soldiers, how much more willful and headstrong would the armies of others with less harsh customs have been?
It is often said of Alexander the Great that he achieved as much as he did because of the army his father built and bequeathed to him. Alexander was one of the great captains of military history to be sure, but he had the privilege of commanding perhaps the most professional army in the world at the time, and of commanding that army with the cultural and institutional expectation of obedience and deference which was due to him as the King of Makedon. As the King, he had a certain degree of leadership capital by dint of that. But even Alexander had to build his leadership capital, continually proving himself and his prowess to his Macedonians, riding and fighting in the forefront and thick of battle. But Alexander had the necessary leadership capital, both by his personal prowess and as the King of Makedon, to order an army to sit down and lay a siege and get them to do it successfully. This is a considerable feat of leadership.
That brings us back to Hannibal the Barcid. What was the nature of his army? The Romans stood as the hegemon of a Italian confederation which Rome had led successfully in war for many decades, and the Roman consuls were legally vested with the imperium, the legal and religious right to demand obedience, which meant a certain degree of positional leadership capital. The Macedonians were the feudal subjects of their King, bound to him by ancient tradition and custom. Hannibal, on the other hand, was leading a very ad hoc and cobbled together multi-national force. He had Liby-Phoenicians from the Carthaginian homeland, he had Numidian cavalry, he had Iberians from the tribes and peoples his father Hamilcar had subdued during his campaigns in Iberia, he had Celts from his Gallic allies, he had men of the Balearic Isles, his troops were from many nations and peoples. In many ways it may have resembled a feudal "retinue of retinues", as Hannibal's Iberians, Gauls, and Numidians seem to have been led by their own chieftains and princes, whom Hannibal had swayed to his cause. His contingents spoke different languages, they had different customs, they worshipped different gods. Many of the contingents would have hailed from tribes which in other times had warred with each other. Those contingents may have had unit morale within themselves, but building those critical horizontal bonds of solidarity to hold the entire army together in battle would have been extremely difficult. Each contingent and company would have had its own leaders, its own officers, and like those men were prideful and self-aggrandizing elites. All of them had been welded together into Hannibal's army by different purposes and promises. Hannibal would have had to manage a massive amount of egos and personality and cultural conflicts within his army. Against this challenge he did not have the positional leadership capital which was granted to a King of Macedon or a Roman consul. He only had his personal authority, stemming from his own charisma, his ability to inspire, his intelligence, and his prowess, perhaps somewhat aided also by being the son of the famous Hamilcar Barca. Earning the respect and loyalty of such an army, managing its many inherent conflicts, and commanding it successfully (Indeed convincing it to follow commands at all, let alone complex battle plans), must have been an immense challenge to Hannibal, and it is a testament to his great ability as a leader that he was as successful as he was with such a force.
So why was Hannibal unable to successfully lay sieges in Italy? Why could he not assault Rome? I would argue that a part of the reason lay in the social nature and the challenges of leadership in such a divided and socially cumbersome army. So long as he could keep his army moving, so long as there were Italian lands to plunder and a Roman consular army ahead of them to fight (An immediate threat, in other words), Hannibal could keep his army together. But asking an army to sit down, stationary, for the long and wearisome struggle of a siege? That is a different challenge entirely. It took Hannibal 8 months to take even the comparatively small city of Saguntum, how much worse could a siege of Rome have been? A siege is months or years of enforced inactivity, of long, boring, dreary waiting, and cruel and often attritional assaults and raids. Often in an ancient siege, the besiegers starve just as much as the besieged, as an army will exhaust the food resources of the local landscape. Hannibal may have had the leadership capital to make his men follow him all over Italy, fighting Roman army after Roman army, but he judged perhaps that the morale and obedience of his force was too fragile to risk against in a great siege of Rome or the other principle cities of the Italian confederation. This might have been especially the case as he was reliant on his Iberians and Gauls, who may have lacked a tradition or experience of prolonged sieges in their own cultures at that time. I think Hannibal was mindful of the limits of his leadership capital, and his often prolonged periods of inactivity after major and fierce battles would likely have been spent rebuilding his army's trust in him, and tending to their fragile morale.
We remember Hannibal for his brilliant victories over the Romans, for the genius of his tactics. I think we should remember, however, that for the commander in a pre-modern army, command was more leadership than tactics, more art than science. Keeping an army together, keeping them on the campaign, managing the conflicts of proud and willful leaders, not having them all desert, making men obey orders when you don't have the institutional or cultural enforcement of obedience, these are considerable leadership challenges. That Hannibal was able to achieve what he did, with the handicaps he had in the social nature of his army, indicates his enormous ability and strength of character and I suspect that that was as much, or more, the cause of his successes than his genius for tactics.
When you seek to understand the actions of ancient armies or ancient generals, you have to keep in mind the social context in which they lived and operated. Armchair commanders will often say "Well, obviously this loser would have won this battle if he had merely done this instead of that", and that's easy to say from an armchair. But remember this: Your troops, your followers, your subordinates (In any form of social organization with hierarchical leadership, not just an army) are not robots, they are not computer programs, they are human beings with minds of their own. Only by understanding this can you understand history.