Whether or not these incidents are actually historical, they have entered into the mythology of Hannibal and of Rome.
So, in a less narrowly anecdotal way, has a conventional wisdom come down that Rome's victory over Hannibal came at a moral cost ultimately fatal to the Roman republic. Years of endless campaigning are said to have uprooted those sturdy farmer-soldiers who were the repository of Roman virtues; in the aftermath, in popular historical tradition, came a widening division of rich and poor, leading in succession to the failed reforms of the Gracchi, to the civil wars, and at last to the submergence of the Republic under Augustus and the transformation of Rome into the capital of an empire and a decadent city of bread and circuses.
Such, in impressionistic sketch, is what may be called the folklore or tradition of Hannibal, a tradition lively enough to make him one of the more recognizable names of antiquity--and, apart from the legendary Dido and the semilegendary Hanno, circumnavigator of Africa, the only Carthagenian whose name is known save to those with a particular interest in ancient history.
Hannibal earned his enduring familiarity by invading Roman Italy, and conducting there a series of campaigns that lasted a decade and a half. He defeated most of the Roman armies that came against him, but failed to defeat Rome itself, and his campaigns ended, full circle, with his defeat by Scipio Africanus at Zama, near Carthage itself. Why he conducted such an extraordinary effort, and why his successes ended in failure, are in a broad sense the subject of this inquiry.
This subject is scarcely new ground; Hannibal's career has been trodden by historians as extensively as his own army trod the soil of Italy. One might well ask what new ground there is to be covered? The short answer is that the wellsprings of Hannibal's many successes and ultimate defeat remain mysterious. At almost every stage of h...