In the spring of 218 BC five Roman envoys stood in the council house at Carthage. The oldest of them gathered a fold of his toga in his fist and told the Carthaginians that it held both peace and war. They could have whichever they liked. They told him to choose. He let fall war.
The general it was declared against had been waiting for it all winter. Hannibal was twenty-nine. He marched out of Spain, crossed the Rhone with his elephants on rafts, and took an army over the Alps by a pass that nobody has ever been able to name. He came down into Italy with a third of the men he had set out with.
He beat one Roman army at a river in the snow. He killed another on the shore of a lake, in a morning mist, before it could form a line. And then Rome did something it had not done in a generation. It gave one man the whole command, and that man, Quintus Fabius Maximus, would not fight.
The Invader and the Dictator tells those three years from both camps at once.
On one side is Hannibal, who needed a battle. His war was never aimed at the walls of Rome. It was aimed at the peoples of Italy who filled Rome's armies, and every victory was a message to them. He sent their captured sons home without ransom. He burned their farms under the eyes of the legions.
On the other side is Fabius, an old priest whom his own soldiers mocked. For six months he kept to the hills, cut off foragers, and watched the richest land in Italy burn below him without coming down. Hannibal slipped out of his trap behind two thousand oxen with fire tied to their horns. Rome voted to share Fabius's command with the officer who called him a coward. He sold his own farm to pay a debt the Senate would not honor.
Then his term ended, and Rome went back to seeking a battle. It found one at Cannae.
This is narrative history written for readers, not specialists, and it is honest about its evidence. Everything we have comes from Rome's side. The historians who went with Hannibal are lost, and so is the bronze on which he set down his own count of his army. The book weighs Polybius against Livy in a clause, says in whose houses each story was kept, and never claims more than the record holds. An Author's Note, a Note on Sources and chapter-by-chapter notes show what rests on the sources and what the book has reconstructed.
Inside:
- The declaration of war at Carthage, and the oath Hannibal said he swore at nine
- The Rhone, the Alps, and why the pass cannot be named
- The Trebia and Lake Trasimene
- Rome's answer: a dictator, and the gods consulted first
- The night of the oxen, from both sides of the pass
- The farm Hannibal left standing, and what he meant by it
- Cannae, the day the Roman army won the fight it came for
- The morning after: his offer, and the answer Rome gave
- Why "he should have marched on Rome" is the wrong question, and where it came from
Later Romans gave Fabius a name for what he had done: the Delayer. In the summer he earned it, nobody called him that.
Book 3 of Enemies of Rome. Each book stands alone.
