As part of my blog’s assignment I am to read three
monographs about my subject and write book reviews about them. So for the first
blog of this kind I am reading Hannibal:
The Military Biography of Rome’s Greatest Enemy by Richard A. Gabriel. As the name suggests, it is a biography which
is a new kind of review for me. A biography usually doesn't have an argument or
a thesis and that’s what most of a book review is about. I am sort at a loss
for how to review it.
The other part of a book review is critique of the author’s
work so I guess this will mostly focus on that. To start on that, the opening
chapter brings up the fact that Carthage had a religion that had the practice
of child sacrifice being that there religion descended from Baal worship.
Richard Miles, the author of Carthage
Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall
of an
Ancient
Civilization, similarly dealt with this subject as it
dealt with Carthage as a whole and unique culture. True, Carthage was a
religious society of the ancient world, t however I personally felt this was
out of place to the subject matter. It did sort of set the stage for the
legendary sacrifice where Hannibal swore to never be a friend to Rome. Overall this felt like a tangent that started
the book so that seemed rather strange that the first section of the first chapter
didn’t have much to do with the main subject was not having to with the main
subject.
An interesting point that Gabriel brought up was why the
Carthaginians didn’t have a navy. According to Gabriel, it was because the
Barcid faction, which was in power at the time, had no interest in making a
navy. The main reasoning was because
Hannibal, Mago, Hasdrubal, and Hamilcar had no particular naval experience.
This seems logical but it seems like there is more there. Carthage went from
being the naval power of the world to not building a new fleet till after the
Second Punic War started. Obviously this is speculation on the part of Gabriel
but I find his answer to why the Carthaginians did not build a new navy
unsatisfactory personally. Do I have the answers to these questions? Definitely
not but I think my point still stands.
Perhaps the thing that I found the most
interesting is that he did several calculations to figure out the logistics of
Hannibal’s Alpine Adventure. According
to his calculations Hannibal would have needed over 50,000 pack animals. The
more insane idea is that according to his estimates the Carthaginian column
would be around 100 miles.
Another
interesting point that perhaps I didn’t think of and didn’t add to the blogs
was that perhaps Hannibal lost due to his Hellenistic education. As I mentioned
before, Rome’s strict refusal to give up won them the war but that was rather
uncommon for the Hellenized world. After
a major military loss you surrendered, agreed to terms, and go on your merry
way. So overall the book was rather interesting but had a few points where it
went off on a tangent. It was pretty
good but not the reading I would go to the most.
(I
read a kindle version of this so I don’t have page citations. Not sure what to
do about that because it doesn’t list a page)
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