An Enemy to Rome

The story

Before the Second Punic War, Hannibal’s father Hamilcar was taking a Carthaginian army to Spain. Hannibal was a child. Two ancient histories tell what happened at the sacrifice, and they do not tell it the same way.

Livy, at the start of Book 21, is about to narrate the war and pauses for what he calls a story. Spillan’s 1849 translation says that Hannibal, about nine, coaxed his father to take him along. He was led to the altar, laid his hand on the offerings, and was bound by an oath to prove himself, as soon as he could, an enemy to the Roman people. Livy’s frame is fama: a story in circulation, not a document he claims to have seen.

Polybius puts the memory in Hannibal’s own mouth, much later. Hannibal is at the court of Antiochus, and the king has grown suspicious of him. Paton’s 1922 translation has him say that he was nine, standing by the altar while Hamilcar sacrificed, and that after he begged to go to Spain his father led him up and ordered him to lay his hand on the victim and swear never to be the friend of the Romans. He tells Antiochus the point of repeating it: while the king means to fight Rome, Hannibal can be trusted; if the king makes peace, he should beware of him.

One version says “an enemy to the Roman people.” The other says “never to be the friend of the Romans.” One is introduced as a story. The other is a speech told years afterward, when Hannibal needed a suspicious king to believe him. Pellegrini’s canvas of 1731 paints the altar and the boy. The war that followed is the one in which Archimedes was killed at Syracuse, in 212, while Hannibal was still in Italy. The slogan “I will find a way or make one” is not this oath, and it is not a line either author records.