642. Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Bloodbath in Africa (Part 3)

Would the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio successfully march on Africa? What happened when Hannibal and Scipio - the greatest commanders of their age - came head to head at the Battle of Zama, in the ultimate showdown? And, what would be the fate of these two titans of the ancient world? Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the Roman Republic’s audacious invasion of North Africa under the leadership of the dashing Scipio, and his clash with Hannibal. _______ To hear our previous series on the rise of Carthage, Hannibal, and the battle of Cannae, go to episodes: 421, 422, 423, 424, 568, 569, 570, 571. _______ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at ⁠the⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.

• 0:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help.

• 0:42Tom Holland?

  So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 0:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions, there's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 1:10Tom Holland?

  For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 1:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 1:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 2:00Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it, nothing more.

• 2:10Tom Holland?

  Except.

• 2:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the seventeen hundreds, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 2:26Tom Holland?

  And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 2:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.

• 2:45Tom Holland?

  Visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more.

• 3:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is impossible to withhold our admiration for Hannibal's leadership, his courage, and his ability in the field when we consider the duration of his campaigns and take note of the major and minor battles, the sieges, the defections of cities from one side to the other, the difficulties he encountered at various times, and in short, the whole scope of his design and its execution. For sixteen years, he waged ceaseless war against the Romans in Italy. And the whole while, like a good pilot, he kept the love and loyalty of his forces. He had with him Africans, Ziberians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Italians and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither in their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect.

• 3:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nonetheless, the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will, even upon men of such totally diverse origins. If only he'd subdued other parts of the world first and finished with the Romans. Not one of his projects would have eluded him. But as it was, since he turned his attention first to those whom he should have dealt with last, his career began and ended with them.

• 4:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that was the Greek historian Polybius. It's one of those passages that seems written precisely to torment 16-year-old schoolboys and schoolgirls in British schools in the 1940s or something, sort of slogging their way through his torturous prose. Polybius, like him or loathe him, he's our best source for the Punic Wars. And here, in this thrilling passage, he is singing the praises of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal. Now, in today's episode, we are coming to the great showdown of the Punic Wars, one of the most titanic clashes in all history.

• 5:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the showdown between the Romans and the Carthaginians at the Battle of Zarmah. And we'll come to this in a little while. But first, let's have a little chat about Polybius himself, because, Tom, he knew Rome well, and he knew the subject very well. He'd interviewed leading figures in the war against Hannibal, hadn't he? He admired the Roman system of government, and actually, he was quite a fan of the Roman Imperium more broadly.

• 5:29Tom Holland?

  Yes, even though he was a Greek. And slightly disappointed that you didn't follow up your brilliant impression of Livy in our last episode with a, by doing a Greek accent for Polybius.

• 5:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I did think about it, but I didn't do it.

• 5:41Tom Holland?

  But you ducked it. Yeah, so Polybius, for reasons that we will come to, he knows Rome very, very well indeed, and he is particularly close to the family of the Scipios. And they are the family that, as we heard in the previous episode, they played the kind of the leading role in the great Rome's great death struggle with Hannibal. So when it comes to the Punic Wars, Polybius is pretty clearly Team Rome. But even so, as we heard in that opening passage, he can't help but admire Hannibal. And the reasons are self-evident. Hannibal is the man who has led a great army over the Alps into Italy. He's killed 100,000 Romans, perhaps, in, in three terrible and tactically

• 6:25Tom Holland?

  brilliant battles, and who, as Polybius noted in that passage, had kept a force made up of many disparate peoples in the field for a decade and more, in a foreign land, separated by the seas from Carthage, his native city. So an unbelievable achievement.

• 6:47Tom Holland?

  Now, the Romans, unlike Polybius, were not generally in the habit of praising Hannibal. And the reason for that is that they feared and hated him too much. But I think with the Romans, if you have their hatred and their fear, they are paying you a kind of compliment.

• 7:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yeah.

• 7:07Tom Holland?

  They know the man they are facing. I mean, they know that they are facing one of the greatest generals of all time. Now, that said, by 204 B.C., Hannibal's fortunes, this guy who at one point had seemed on the verge of destroying Roman power for good, his fortunes are much, much diminished. So by 204 B.C., he's been in Italy for 14 years. And, you know, that is four times the length of the First World War. So that gives you

• 7:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, yeah.

• 7:37Tom Holland?

  Some sense of what an ordeal this has been.

• 7:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's been a marathon, not a sprint.

• 7:42Tom Holland?

  It really has. And the problem for Hannibal is that, as we heard in the previous episode, the Romans have conquered Spain, which was essentially the place where he was relying on for reinforcements and for supplies and for money and all kinds of things. So that's terrible. His allies in Italy have fallen away, and he is now essentially cornered in Brutium, which is the heel of Italy. But even now, the Romans are incredibly reluctant to engage him in battle. They just think, if we, if we go and fight him, he will defeat us. That is the kind of hoodoo that he has over them. And so their plan now is to just bypass him altogether. And they're going to do this by invading Africa.

• 8:23Tom Holland?

  And this strategy had been articulated the year before by the man who has been mandated by the Roman Republic to execute it. So to quote him, "I shall draw Hannibal after me. I shall force him to fight on his native soil, and the prize of victory will be not some rundown forts in Brutium, Carthage itself." And the man who is speaking these words, he's only 30, but he has already established himself as the greatest military hero in Rome's history. And this is the young, long-haired

• 9:03Tom Holland?

  Smoothly shaved Publius Cornelius Scipio.

• 9:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in the last episode, we heard how over the previous four years, Scipio had destroyed Carthage's power base in Spain. So by doing that, he had eliminated the manpower and the mineral wealth that had sustained Hannibal's war effort and on which Hannibal had been relying for reinforcements to finish his own war effort in Italy. Scipio had gone back to Rome, hadn't he? We discussed this at the end of the last episode. He'd gone back to Rome as the great hero of the, the hero of the Roman people, the darling of the masses. He had won the consulship. He had been appointed to the command in Sicily and he had explicitly been given license to invade North Africa, quote, "if he judged it to be in the interests

• 9:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  of the Republic." And Tom, you entered the last episode by saying, "We will discover if he does." Obviously, the implication is that he will. And he does. He does think it's in the interests of the Republic, even though there are people in the Senate who are a little bit more cautious, aren't there?

• 10:04Tom Holland?

  Yes. And regular listeners to this series will not be surprised that the guy who takes the lead in opposing this strategy is Fabius Maximus Coctart, or the Delayer, the guy who, back in the wake of late Transamin, had been appointed dictator, so put in supreme control of the Roman state for six months. And he had adopted this strategy of shadowing Hannibal, of never engaging him in battle, which then provided the template for Roman strategy in the wake of Canai, and which is still being adopted in 204 B.C. He's now, I mean, unbelievably old. He's about 130. And he is a figure of enormous status. So

• 10:48Tom Holland?

  he has the official title, Princeps Senatus. He's the chief senator. And Fabius had directly accused Scipio in the debate about whether he should be given permission to invade Africa. He accused Scipio of endangering Rome's security by leading an expedition to Africa while Hannibal was still current and present in Italy with his own army. So Fabius had directly accused Scipio essentially of glory hunting. Your glory matters less to me, he told Scipio, than the welfare of our city. If you really want to destroy Hannibal, then go to Brutium and fight him there, which is, I mean, a very stinging rebuke.

• 11:29Tom Holland?

  And I think it's clearly animated by a kind of personal animus as well as anxiety about strategy. And I think it portrays what, right from the beginning of Scipio's career, has been an anxiety on the part of conservative elements in the Senate about his character.

• 11:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, part of this is his youth, right? And his glamour and his eye for a sort of, as it were, a Roman photo opportunity. It's about his hair and his shiny cheeks.

• 12:00Tom Holland?

  His claims to have been born from a serpent, all of that stuff.

• 12:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, his general sense of un-Roman-ness, of Greek-ness even. And of course, we mentioned in the previous episode that while he had been in Spain, some of the Iberian warlords had hailed him as a king, a word that for the Romans, you know, is the most sort of shocking and toxic label that there could possibly be. Everything about him just seems wrong, doesn't it? It just seems un-Roman.

• 12:27Tom Holland?

  It's not just that he's been hailed king, but that he is incredibly popular, both with his troops and with the mass of the Roman people. So in Spain, in the wake of his great victories, his soldiers had taken to hailing him as imperator, which is a word that means general, but which in the long run will become the title that Augustus claims and which gives us our title of emperor. So he doesn't have that connotation at this point. But nevertheless, it's a straw in the wind. I mean, no one has been hailed in this way before, and so senators back in Rome are anxious about this. And they're also anxious about the fact that he's become consul when he's only 30 and you're meant to be 40.

• 13:09Tom Holland?

  And essentially, he's been swept to power on a great wave of popular enthusiasm. And so there's a sort of nervousness, what will he do with this power, I think? But Scipio, he's not having any of this. He throws Phoebias's criticisms back in his face. And he says that if you block my intention to invade Africa, then I am going to turn to the people and I will get them to force this strategy through.

• 13:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey.

• 13:38Tom Holland?

  You know, you Phoebias and, and all your conservative allies in the Senate, you will be publicly humiliated. And so Phoebias essentially steps down and the conservatives very reluctantly give him the green light.

• 13:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the summer of 204, Scipio's expedition sets sail from Sicily. He has his troop ships, troop transports. And they are escorted by 40 warships. Scipio and his brother Lucius are commanding the, the right wing, as it were, of the fleet, 20 ships. And the 20 ships on the left wing are commanded by his friend Lilius, who we talked about last time, and by a young paymaster called Marcus Portius Cato. And Cato, a name that will recur in Roman history. He is a young man with reddish hair and grey eyes. He is in his early 30s, Scipio is. But his political identity is very different, isn't it?

• 14:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Cato is the most traditional of the traditionalists, the most conservative of the conservatives. He is a big admirer of Phoebias Maximus. And he's an impressive man, but he is by no means a natural ally of somebody like Scipio.

• 14:49Tom Holland?

  No, he's followed all the rules. He has this post of the paymaster, he's a coister, it's called. So he's responsible for keeping an eye on Scipio's spending. And that is absolutely the kind of role that someone of his age should have. You know, he's not swanning around like a consul with long hair and talking about snakes.

• 15:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 15:08Tom Holland?

  He is performatively conservative. That means that he's absolutely not a Scipio soulmate. But of course, waiting for Scipio in Africa is a guy who absolutely is a Scipio soulmate. And that is his old mate, Massinis. So we met him in the previous episode. He's a Numidian king who had fought in Spain, first of all, for the Carthaginians, and had then changed sides and become a big ally of Scipio and Rome. And Massinis has every reason to welcome Scipio's arrival with open arms. Because Just as Rome is engaged in a death struggle with Carthage, Massanissa is engaged in a death struggle of his own.

• 15:52Tom Holland?

  Because people who listened to our last episode may remember, he is not the only Numidian king. There is another king who leads his own federation of Numidian tribes. And this is a guy called Siphax. And Massanissa has been fighting him all his life. So as a teenager, he had kind of had the beating of Siphax. And that was what had then enabled him to travel to Spain and fight for the, for the Carthaginians. But he's now come back and Siphax is still on the scene and still causing all kinds of trouble. And the fact that that Massanissa has come back to Africa as an ally of the Romans means that Siphax, who previously had been an ally of the Romans,

• 16:34Tom Holland?

  has now obviously swung round and become an ally of the Carthaginians.

• 16:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  The way diplomacy works.

• 16:40Tom Holland?

  It is.

• 16:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  But there's another element, isn't there? So there's one thing that in this story, this story has had everything, of course, except one element. There's one element that's been missing. And it's brilliant to be able to unveil that element now in the third episode of this series. And that element is a woman.

• 16:59Tom Holland?

  I know, absolute scenes.

• 17:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this woman is called Sophonisba. And brilliant name and exciting person. Tell us all about Sophonisba.

• 17:08Tom Holland?

  So she is the daughter of a Carthaginian general, whose name, it will stun listeners to learn, is Hasdrubal.

• 17:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, but of course.

• 17:18Tom Holland?

  I mean, basically, unless you're called Hannibal or Mago, your name is Hasdrubal. And he had been serving in Spain alongside Hasdrubal Barker. So he was in command of one of those three armies camped out in what was going to become Lisbon, when Scipio captured new Carthage. He's gone back to Carthage and he's become the leading figure in the Carthaginian Senate. And he's now that, um, that Hasdrubal and Mago are both dead. He's basically the best general the Carthaginians have, with the exception of Hannibal. And this isn't really to say much. So Fabius Maximus, I mean, very bitchy, described him as a general who best displayed his speed in retreat.

• 18:00Tom Holland?

  So not promising. Anyway, Hasdrubal has this daughter Sofisba. And Sofisba is very smart, very beautiful, very, very patriotic. And Hasdrubal says to Sofisba, look, it is your duty to go and marry Sifax and to get a meeting out of your hand and to make sure that he remains as a loyal ally of Carthage. And so Sofisba does her duty. She goes off, she marries Sifax and Sifax thinks she's absolutely great. He adores her. And so this really cements the alliance, which is obviously bad news for Massanissa.

• 18:39Tom Holland?

  Because in Africa, if Sifax with his Numidian horsemen and the mass weight of the Carthaginians in Africa, in Carthage, if they combine, Massanissa is in real trouble. So he's desperate for Scipio to arrive and provide him with the backing of the legions. And so when Scipio does land in Africa, you know, Massanissa is thrilled and he feels it's payback time. And sure enough, neither Hasdrubal nor Sifax prove any match for Scipio. And it turns out, in fact, that Scipio is prepared to play very, very dirty against Sifax and Hasdrubal indeed.

• 19:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no, that's poor from Scipio. What does Scipio do that's so dirty?

• 19:22Tom Holland?

  Well, so a few months after his arrival, he's in winter quarters. So there's no campaigning. Scipio arranges a truce with Sifax, the Numidian king. And his goal is to try and win him back to the Roman cause because Scipio and Sifax had actually met before Scipio had gone as an ambassador to him. And they got on well enough. Sifax said, no, I'm not interested. I love Carthage now and I've got this gorgeous wife. You know, I'm not betraying her. Scipio then goes on, makes a personal visit to Sifax, tries to press his case again. Again, Sifax rebuffs him. But Scipio notices something interesting about Sifax's camp, and that is that all his quarters are made of reeds.

• 20:05Tom Holland?

  So not made out of kind of earth or mud or whatever, but reeds. And then his spies come back from Hasdrubal's camp, which isn't far from Sifax's, and they say, well, Hasdrubal's camp, their winter quarters aren't made of mud or earth either. They are made of wood. So Scipio ponders this, and then he intimates to Hasdrubal that he might be interested in opening negotiations with him, and he floats the possibility that perhaps a peace treaty could be arrived at whereby the Romans would keep what they have in Italy and the Carthaginians could keep what they have in Africa, and maybe that would be the basis for a settlement.

• 20:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that sounds promising, that's nice.

• 20:49Tom Holland?

  And Hasdrubal's interested in this, and so negotiations start opening between his camp and the Roman camp, and Siphax gets involved as well. And so the Romans, when they send their ambassadorial teams to these two camps, are really able to scope it out. And they work out the best way to set Siphax's camp, which is made of reeds, and Hasdrubal's camp, which is made of wood, on fire.

• 21:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh dear.

• 21:17Tom Holland?

  And so Scipio, with this information, he sends Lellius and Massinis to torch Siphax's camp, which duly goes up, is incinerated, and large numbers of Siphax's men with them. And then he sends out another squad to set fire to the Carthaginian camp. All the Carthaginians come rushing out. Scipio's men are on hand to slaughter them. And Polybius, he thinks this whole wheeze is absolutely brilliant. So to quote him, "Of all Scipio's many brilliant exploits, this, it seems to me, was the most splendid and inventive." But I mean, it's blatant treachery. He's meant to be negotiating. He's broken all kinds of oaths, and it's, I think, very, very rich, considering that the Romans are endlessly going on about what

• 21:58Tom Holland?

  they call "punic faith", so "punic faith", the sense that the Carthaginians are uniquely treacherous.

• 22:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  But don't the Romans take the view that basically it's war, so the ideal thing is to kill your enemies and to win?

• 22:10Tom Holland?

  Actually, the Romans are very anxious, as we will see, to present themselves as being on the sides of right and of the gods.

• 22:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 22:18Tom Holland?

  So I think Scipio is playing very, very dirty there. Anyway, I mean, it works for him.

• 22:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Tom Holland?

  Because he's wiped out large numbers of Carthaginian and Numidian troops. And even though Siphax and Hasdrubal managed to escape the inferno... There's a sense now, I think, that Scipio clearly has the beating of them. And so it proves because the moment spring arrives, he moves in for the kill. And first he meets with what remains to Siphax and Hasdrubal, so their combined army, in a battle that has the brilliantly Custer-esque name of the Great Plains. So the Battle of the Great Plains. And, you know, Scipio displays tactical mastery yet again, wipes them out. Siphax and Hasdrubal again manage to escape, but 30,000 are left as food for the vultures

• 23:07Tom Holland?

  on the Great Plains. And Scipio's cavalry, commanded by Massinis and Laleus, pursue Siphax. They take him prisoner and also they take prisoner his queen, the beautiful and patriotic daughter of Hasdrubal, Sophanisba. And she knows her duty. So we're told that she's actually very like Cleopatra, that she was so charming that merely to see her, merely to hear her talk was at once to be utterly smitten. And so she knows that in this situation with Siphax knocked out, she has to marry Massinis and try and persuade him to jump ship.

• 23:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Tom Holland?

  And Massinis is completely swept away by her. I mean, she's clearly absolutely gorgeous. He immediately marries her and he goes to Scipio and says, look, I've got this great new wife, isn't she tremendous? Scipio is appalled because he's very understandably anxious that Sophanisba will try and kind of win Massinis a round of the Carthaginian cause. And also, it has to be said, he's not very keen on women. This is something that is often said about him, that, you know, women are kind of introduced into his camp and he won't have anything to do with them.

• 24:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like a sort of Royal Navy officer in the 18th century, who won't have women on board ship, that kind of thing.

• 24:15Tom Holland?

  Very much that vibe, I think. I mean, you get, you know, he marries.

• 24:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 24:19Tom Holland?

  I don't think he's a great one for having ladies hanging around with him in his, in his camp. And so he essentially tells Massinis, well, it's, you know, you have to choose between your wife or me. And Massinis isn't an idiot. And so he. He chooses Scipio and Sophan Isba, who is composed and dignified to the end, prepares a cup of poison, drinks it, and as she's dying, she berates Massanissa for being absolutely useless. So that's the end of her.

• 24:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And is that the end of women in this, in this series?

• 24:46Tom Holland?

  Well, basically, until they all end up being enslaved at the very end of our series.

• 24:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, okay. Female listeners can look forward to that. All right. So Carthage is now staring down the barrel, right?

• 24:57Tom Holland?

  Completely.

• 24:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Siphax is, is gone. Hasdrubal is out. They are staring into the abyss, basically. And this Carthaginian Senate have no choice now other than to open negotiations with the Romans. That must have been utterly galling for them.

• 25:13Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So they send 30 ambassadors to Scipio and Scipio's terms are predictably harsh. So he tells them that Carthage will have to withdraw all her troops from lands beyond Africa. The city will be allowed 20 warships, no more than that. The Carthaginians will have to provision Scipio's army while, you know, people are sent back to Rome to find out whether the Senate agrees to these terms and they will have to pay another kind of Versailles Treaty type indemnity in the way that they'd had to do at the end of the previous Punic War. The Senate is very reluctant to agree to these terms because they can see that it effectively spells, you know, the end of their city as a great power, but

• 25:57Tom Holland?

  they feel they haven't really got any choice. So they say, yeah, well, okay. The terms are taken to Rome and the treaty is there ratified by the Roman Senate. Simultaneously, however, they haven't completely given up the fight because of course, back in Italy, in Brutium, the hill of Italy, Hannibal and his army are still there.

• 26:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I was wondering what's happened to Hannibal during all this. So he's just been hanging around in southern Italy.

• 26:25Tom Holland?

  Yeah, they say, listen, you're completely wasting your time there. Come back to Africa. We, you know, we really need you. And so they send him a transport fleet and Hannibal, I mean, he's gutted. Absolutely gutted, he spent all this time there and now essentially he's got to recognise that it's been wasted. So he boards the transport ships with his army and they head back to Africa and they disembark at a place called Lepus Minor, which is a port about 100 miles to the south of Carthage. And he is aware that, you know, the peace negotiations are going on, so he doesn't want to interrupt them, but equally he wants to prepare for the worst. I mean, suppose the peace negotiations break down. And so

• 27:10Tom Holland?

  he maintains his army and he drills it very hard all that summer. And summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter. By this point, the peace treaty has been ratified in Rome by the senate and it is sent back to Carthage where the Carthaginian senate have to ratify it themselves. And at this point, faced with the prospect not just of losing the war, but of losing their status as the capital of a great empire, essentially accepting that from this point on, they're going to be a provincial second division

• 27:49Tom Holland?

  power. Lots of leading figures in the Carthaginian senate get cold feet. And they also know, of course, that they have Hannibal back on African soil and Hannibal is the greatest general of his day.

• 28:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  If they're facing relegation, why not roll the dice and go for it one last time?

• 28:06Tom Holland?

  Absolutely. And so as winter turns to spring and the 16th campaigning season of the war begins, it becomes evident that the peace is not going to hold. And this is massive for fans of great generals, because it's clear that Hannibal and Scipio, both of the men who have never in their entire careers lost a battle.

• 28:36Tom Holland?

  The greatest commanders in the entire history of their respective cities.

• 28:42Tom Holland?

  That these two colossi are going to be going head to head after all. I mean, it's massive sport.

• 28:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's Napoleon and Wellington, isn't it? It's very exciting. I mean, there's proper tension, sort of the World Cup final is coming.

• 28:58Tom Holland?

  Pre-match tension, yeah.

• 28:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pre-match tension. So Scipio is inland. He's moved inland from his coastal base and he is hoovering uptowns. But obviously the risk for him is as he's hoovering uptowns, he might be cut off from the sea. Hannibal, he needs, I mean manpower, troops is his thing. And he is spending the summer drilling his recruits, raising troops as many as he can. He's got some elephants, right?

• 29:23Tom Holland?

  Eighty, eighty war elephants. I mean, the one thing he doesn't have is cavalry, which is ironic because cavalry had always been his strongest arm. But he does have these eighty war elephants. You know, I mean, he has a serious force. And it takes him all summer essentially to to raise an army that he feels is large enough to to take on Scipio and his legions. And finally, with the coming of autumn, he's ready. And at the head of his troops, he marches inland, making for the town near which Scipio has his base. And this town, Dominic, is called Zama. So Hannibal is approaching Zama. Scipio is in Situ.

• 30:06Tom Holland?

  These two commanders drawing near to each other, they've never met before. But it becomes evident, the nearer they come, that actually they're really keen to meet with the other one. You know, peace feelers have gone out, you know, and and the justification for this is that they're going to have one last attempt at negotiation. But I think basically, you know, they they both know that this is very unlikely to result in in a peace treaty. They just want to meet each other.

• 30:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are terms on the table though, aren't there? So Hannibal, for example, offers Scipio a deal and he says, we can preserve the status quo effectively. The Romans, you know, you can keep Sicily, you can keep Spain. I mean, you know, that's the Carthaginians giving up on two massive prizes. Carthage, however, will keep her possessions in North Africa and we won't have to pay a big indemnity. There'll be no kind of reparations and we won't have a limit on the size of our navy. And Scipio, he is not taking that because his terms are very simple. They are unconditional surrender.

• 31:04Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I mean, he'd already offered terms that didn't involve unconditional surrender, but now the Cuthberts are carrying on the fight. He feels, well, you know, it's surrender or nothing. And clearly Hannibal's terms are unacceptable to Scipio and Scipio's terms are unacceptable to Hannibal. And so the interview comes to an end. There will be no more negotiations. Consequently, battle is now inevitable. And this means that the two greatest commanders of the age are about to meet in the ultimate clash of titans.

• 31:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we love a clash of the titans. On the rest is history. Come back after the break and the battle of Zama begins.

• 31:49Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 32:03Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 32:29Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 32:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it's, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure for the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people.

• 33:11Tom Holland?

  So they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 33:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.

• 33:31Tom Holland?

  Hello everyone. I am here with some exceedingly exciting news. Now, as all our beloved club members will already know, one of the very best things of being a member of the Rest is History Club is getting access to exclusive members only mini series. That's right, mini series, not just individual episodes. So these are special episodes every other month, which only club members can listen to, no one else. And we've got a brand new one coming out this February. So that's going to be the very first one of 2026. And it is presented by me and the great art critic Laura Cumming.

• 34:12Tom Holland?

  Four episodes and it's about paintings that shed a particularly fascinating light on history. And it covers a broad range of times and places. So everything from Velázquez's Las Meninas, described by many critics as the greatest of all paintings, right the way up to Henry Rayburn's Skating Minister. What do these paintings tell us about the times in which they were painted? It's really, really fascinating stuff. And if you are not watching it on YouTube or Spotify, if you're just listening to it as a podcast, don't worry because we will be sending all our members an email which will be going into greater written detail about the painting, but also obviously giving you an image of the painting itself.

• 34:56Tom Holland?

  So you can have a quick look at that, perhaps before you listen to the episode. Although I have to say that Laura's descriptions of each painting are so good that perhaps you don't even need to look at the painting. So if you would like to sign up to that mini series and to the other five mini series that we will be doing this year, which will be covering everything from history's greatest photographs, the Vietnam War, to England's she-wolves, then you know where to go. Go to therestishistory.com if you are not already a club member and sign up there.

• 35:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back everybody to The Rest Is History. Now, we promised you the Titanic showdown between Hannibal and Scipio. This is the moment towards which not just this series, but our previous series about Rome and Carthage have been building. So Tom, we don't have all day, so let's just get into the highlights. Take us through the highlights of this Titanic clash.

• 35:57Tom Holland?

  Okay, so as we said, Hannibal for the first time is weak in cavalry. So he's therefore weak on his wings. Scipio, by contrast, has excellent cavalry. He has his own, we've mentioned them before, the best trained cavalry the Romans have ever had. And of course, he has Massanissa's Numidians, even though they almost missed the battle because Massanissa turns up very late. So Laleus is in command of the Roman cavalry, Massanissa is in command of his Numidians, and they meet with the Carthaginian cavalry, rout them and chase them from the battlefield. Now Hannibal's strength, as we've said, is in his war elephants, and he places them in the

• 36:38Tom Holland?

  front line, 80 of them. Terrifying sight. The Roman front lines, you know, they're kind of quaking in their sandals. But Scipio has prepared for this onslaught. And again, remember, the infantry, like the cavalry, are very, very well drilled, much better drilled than any Roman army before them in history. And so when the elephants charge them, they essentially step aside and open up corridors down which the elephants just go rampaging. And they kind of burst out the other side, and they can be kind of easily tracked down and eliminated that way.

• 37:14Tom Holland?

  So that's Hannibal's strongest card played, and it, you know, it hasn't worked. And so what now happens is that it comes down to the infantry, these great rival blocks of men on foot, and they advance and they smash into each other. And to quote Polybius, "Many fell on both sides, fighting with fierce determination where they stood. But at length, the squadrons of Massanissa and of Laleus returned from their pursuit of the Carthaginian cavalry and arrived by a stroke of fortune at the crucial moment." And the result, Dominic, listeners, is that Scipio is able to inflict on Hannibal the kind of wipeout that he had so often inflicted on the Romans.

• 37:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  The irony of it.

• 37:58Tom Holland?

  Yeah, the irony. And Hannibal himself takes horse, he manages to flee the disaster. But according to Polybius, 20,000 of Hannibal's men are left dead on the battlefield and the same number are taken prisoner. And the Romans, by contrast, lost only 1,500 men. And again, to quote Polybius, this was the result of the final battle between these two commanders, and it decided the war.

• 38:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey. So what a turnaround from the battles of late Transamin or Cannae. And a question for you. Is there a world in which the Battle of Zama goes differently? Or do the Roman institutional advantages at this point, do they outweigh the Carthaginian strong points so heavily that there's basically no way Hannibal can win this battle? I mean, anything can happen in a battle, right?

• 38:50Tom Holland?

  Against a less competent commander and against less well-trained troops, you can imagine Hannibal winning. But it's clear that the effects of the fighting over, you know, these decade and more has been to hone the Roman army into a much more lethal killing machine than it had been at the start of the war. They're much better drilled. They have the gladius now, this stabbing sword they've borrowed from the Spaniards. It makes their infantry superb. But the other factor, I think, which dooms Hannibal in this battle is, we said, he doesn't have cavalry. And Hannibal's great genius has always been for coordinating infantry and cavalry.

• 39:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Tom Holland?

  And it just doesn't work. And the one card he really had, his elephants, the Romans know how to deal with them. They're frightening, but they know how to cope with them.

• 39:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  How much do those factors, so the extraordinary preparedness and proficiency of the Roman infantry, but also the Carthaginian lack of cavalry, how much do they reflect deeper issue, which is Rome's institutional resources compared with Carthagia's economic resources?

• 39:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Manpower and so on.

• 39:55Tom Holland?

  I mean, absolutely, because Rome's great strength throughout has been her manpower. And Carthage has has always opted to rely on mercenaries.

• 40:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's that classic thing where basically you can lose and lose and lose, but one day if you win, you win the whole thing.

• 40:08Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you're the bigger power.

• 40:09Tom Holland?

  Essentially, and by this point, Rome is indisputably the bigger power because over the course of the war, she has occupied the whole of Sicily.

• 40:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Spain, of course.

• 40:18Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and she's in the process of conquering the the road that joins Spain to Italy, which will become the Provincia or Provence, as it's still called to this day. So Southern France, Southern Gaul.

• 40:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Carthaginians have rolled the dice. Hannibal has gambled and he has lost. And the result of this, I mean, they probably thought, well, we have nothing to lose.

• 40:37Tom Holland?

  But they do.

• 40:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  But now they discovered precisely what they do have to lose because Scipio's terms, when they returned to the negotiating table, are that much harsher precisely because the Carthaginians didn't agree immediately. So the indemnity is going to be even bigger.

• 40:51Tom Holland?

  And what is more, it's going to be paid over 50 years. So that is a deliberate policy of tying the Carthaginians down, crippling their economy for half a century. They cannot go to war without explicit Roman permission. So that essentially means that the Romans have now taken over Carthage's foreign policy. And previously, they'd been permitted 20 warships. Now they can only have 10. But the guy who is laughing, I mean, the guy who's really come out well from this, of course, is Massinisus, the Numidian king, and Scipio confirms him as king not just over his own tribal federation, but over Siphax's Numidians as well.

• 41:35Tom Holland?

  And I think even more faithfully, and whether this was a deliberate policy to create trouble or not, it's unclear. But I mean, it definitely will create trouble. The peace terms imposed on the Carthaginians obliged them, and I quote, "to restore to Massinisus all the houses, territory, cities and other property, which had belonged to him or to his ancestors." So effectively, this is to leave Carthage with its own hinterland. But what the borders are between that hinterland and Numidia.

• 42:09Tom Holland?

  Is very unclear. And, you know, Massanissa will obviously have one point, the Carthaginians will have another. Massanissa is an ally of Rome. The Carthaginians are not allowed to go to war without Roman permission. You can see that it is, you know, this is going to be a sea of troubles for the Carthaginians.

• 42:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and it will give Massanissa all kinds of opportunities, right, for bad behaviour in the future. So there are lots of Carthaginians, presumably when these terms come in, even now, after their defeat at Zama, they must still be thinking, God, is there anything we can do to avoid signing up to this? You know, rather like, I mean, the obvious comparison is Germany at the end of the First World War, right? I mean, that's the shadow that's hanging over this whole story.

• 42:53Tom Holland?

  Or Hitler in the bunker.

• 42:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Could you go down in flames?

• 42:56Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's that bad. And there is actually a Carthaginian senator called Gisco, who stands up and makes this case to a public assembly. But Hannibal hears him, and he is infuriated, and he physically hauls Gisco down from the rostrum where he's standing with his own hands. And this is not acceptable behaviour at all. And so everyone is very cross with him. And Hannibal apologises very gracefully, and he says, look, you know, I haven't been in the city since I was nine or whatever. I've been living in an army camp all these decades. My manners are very rough and ready, so I do apologise. However, he then goes on to say, Gisco is mad if he thinks that these terms from Scipio are bad. They

• 43:40Tom Holland?

  could have been much, much worse. And he says, you know, we will still be governing ourselves. There will not be a Roman garrison planted in the middle of our city. We still have, you know, our hinterland, and that hinterland is very rich and prosperous and fertile. And he says, he makes an appeal to the Carthaginian people. I beg you not even to debate the matter. Instead, pray with one single voice that the Roman people will ratify Scipio's terms. And of course, Hannibal is the great enemy of Rome. He is the man who, you know, year after year after year has been in the front line, fighting the Romans. And for him now to say we have to make peace means that there can really be no arguing with the case that he's making.

• 44:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. If the guy who's the hero of the Carthaginian cause is saying, let's do a deal. They're clearly going to do a deal. And so in the long run, they do. The Carthaginians agree. Scipio in Rome gets approval from the Senate for his treaty. And at last, I mean, this great war, I mean, capital G, capital W, a war that has gone on for almost 20 years. It is over. And actually, this is kind of the end for both Hannibal and Scipio as well, because their time in the sun. You know, the opportunity to shine has now been been taken away.

• 45:04Tom Holland?

  It's certainly the end of their military careers. Neither of them will command armies ever again. But Hannibal, I mean, he remains the dominating figure in the Carthaginian state. And he actually proves very impressive as a civilian leader. He streamlines the finances in Carthage, there's kind of endless fraud, embezzlement and so on. And he appreciates that Carthage is going to need every last bit of coin that it can scrounge together.

• 45:35Tom Holland?

  And he also democratizes the Carthaginian government. So he is essentially a populist. He's not popular with his fellow Carthaginian aristocrats, but he's very, very popular with the mass of the Carthaginian people. And so he introduces reforms that are designed to weaken the hold of the Carthaginian aristocracy on the justice system. And Simon Hornblower, a great ancient historian, author of a brilliant dual biography of Hannibal and Scipio, describes him as an energetic left-wing innovator.

• 46:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Left-wing innovator.

• 46:10Tom Holland?

  The Tony Benn of Carthaginian history. I mean, obviously, this means that loads of his fellow senators have even more reason now to loathe him. I mean, not only are they jealous of him, but they're resentful of him that he's kind of trying to undermine their power. But, you know, he remains massively popular with the Carthaginian people. And so for now. Hannibal seems safe enough.

• 46:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Something quite American about Hannibal, I think. Americans love electing generals as presidents. And he has returned from the war. Okay, he hasn't won. I mean, so he's an American general who's been serving in Vietnam. But he has returned with his luster undimmed, I guess, for the ordinary Carthaginians. And what about Scipio? So Scipio surely must now sort of glitter as the greatest hero in the Roman pantheon.

• 46:58Tom Holland?

  He's trailing clouds of glory, and he is given a stupefying succession of honours. So he's given a triumph. Interesting that he, you know, he doesn't insist that Hannibal walks in that triumph. It reflects the fact that Scipio continues to respect Hannibal and that treating Hannibal with respect in a way burnishes his own glory. Because if you humiliate Hannibal, then in a sense you're downgrading him as an enemy. So I think that's probably what's been going on in Scipio's mind. Anyway, he has his triumph. He's awarded, Fabius by this point is dead, so the title of princep senatus, chief senator, is vacant. So Scipio takes it and he's given the title of Africanus.

• 47:39Tom Holland?

  So Scipio the African, meaning that he has essentially defeated the Africans. And Livy notes that he was the first general in Rome to be celebrated by the name of the people he had conquered. So Scipio Africanus, I mean, he's clearly a massive, dominating, glamorous, prestigious figure. But it's interesting that he seems to have adjusted less successfully to civilian life than Hannibal. And we've been comparing him on and off throughout this episode and the previous one to the Duke of Wellington, who fought a war in Spain and then met with the greatest enemy of his country and defeated him in a climactic battle

• 48:18Tom Holland?

  that ended that enemy's career. So you could think of Zama as the, you know, the Waterloo of the Punic Wars. And then like the Duke of Wellington, who became prime minister and was a terrible prime minister, Scipio. Finds it hard to take the Senate with him. So there's this brilliant thing, isn't there, of the Duke of Wellington has his first cabinet meeting and is outraged. He says, I gave them their orders, but they wanted to stay behind and discuss them. And I think there's a similar feeling with with Scipio. Yeah, he's got his long hair. He's very glamorous. He's, you know, son of a snake. He can't be bothered with senators sitting on their dignity.

• 48:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Talking about drainage.

• 48:58Tom Holland?

  Talking about, well, I mean, probably moaning about him.

• 49:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 49:03Tom Holland?

  And I think, you know, the very range of honours that he's got, you know, his titles, princeps, imperator, they generate jealousy, I think. And there is one person in particular who really detests him. And this is a guy we met travelling with the Roman fleet to Africa from Sicily. And this is the erstwhile coister, the paymaster in Scipio's army, M. Pausius Cato, this man who was Scipio's opposite in every way. And to quote one of his later biographers, "As Scipio's coister during the war in Africa, Cato was appalled

• 49:44Tom Holland?

  by Scipio's habitual extravagance and how ready he was to lavish money on his soldiers. And he's appalled, both because it's a waste of money that Cato, which Cato doesn't approve of, but also because I think the sense that perhaps Scipio is buying the favour of his soldiers. And again, Cato is very, very disapproving of this."

• 50:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  We talked about his slightly performative, but no doubt deep-seated and heartfelt conservatism. So when they return in the years after the Battle of Zama, Cato turns himself, doesn't he, into the champion of the conservatives. He doesn't take bribes. He lives very austere. He, for example, sets his heart against legislation that would allow women to wear jewellery in public.

• 50:25Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So it's good to have women back on the show, isn't it?

• 50:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, brilliant for them. Plutarch tells us that Cato despised philosophy and as a patriot was thoroughly contemptuous of Greek culture and lifestyle. So he doesn't even use doctors.

• 50:38Tom Holland?

  No, because doctors are Greek. And then both his wife and his children then die. But Cato is unapologetic. He'd rather have them dead than use a Greek doctor.

• 50:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly. And I guess, you know, we compared Scipio with Alexander. That aspect of Scipio's personality, the populism, the showiness, the charisma, is precisely what Cato despises as un-Roman. So when Cato is campaigning, you know, he shares the rations of the men, he wears the kind of fatigues, he carries his own armour. You know, he is very different from the kind of glamour boy style that Scipio incarnates.

• 51:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, their enmity is going to become one of the great drivers of Roman politics in this period.

• 51:22Tom Holland?

  So Scipio has been in charge of a campaign in Spain, where he's been doing all this, you know, carrying his own armour and stuff. And it's very successful. And when he returns to Rome in 194, he is awarded a triumph. And I think that he feels, well, I've made my name now, and he's ready to bring his enmity with Scipio out into the open. And so this means that Scipio now has a rival who can kind of provide a counterweight to Scipio's prestige in the Senate. Something else that is slightly putting Scipio's luster into shade is developments in the eastern Mediterranean, which we have not yet talked about in this series.

• 52:05Tom Holland?

  But there, very dramatic developments have taken place. Because as we've already mentioned, Rome has finished the great war against Hannibal with what is probably the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in the whole of history. And if you have the most lethal and battle-hardened fighting force in history, very tempting to use it.

• 52:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 52:30Tom Holland?

  I mean, why let it go to waste?

• 52:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 52:33Tom Holland?

  And Carthage obviously remains Rome's, you know, the chief object of her vigilance. But she is not in any mood to take insubordination from other famous powers either. So in Macedon, on the other side of the Adriatic, what's now northern Greece. There is a king there who sits on what had once been the throne of Alexander the Great, and this is a guy who's been Macedonian king for many decades, Philip V. And in the course of the Punic War, he had made a terrible mistake because he had assumed in the immediate wake of the Battle of Cannae that Rome was bound to lose, and so he had

• 53:14Tom Holland?

  signed up to an alliance with Hannibal. Didn't actually go anywhere, but the Romans in their kind of best mafia style do not forget this show of disrespect. And so in the year 200, so very shortly after the Battle of Zarma, a Roman task force crosses the Adriatic, begins a war against Macedon. And in 197, the legions meet with Philip's great phalanx, this great kind of bristling porcupine of spears, at a battle at a place called Kynocephalae, and the Romans cut the Macedonian phalanx to pieces. And the guy who has won that victory,

• 53:57Tom Holland?

  a man called Flaminius, the following year, he goes to the Isthmian Games, which are held in Corinth, the city that, you know, on the kind of the join point between northern Greece and the Peloponnese. And there he proclaims the freedom of the Greeks in flamboyant language. At the same time, with a kind of completely unembarrassed hypocrisy, which will become very, very typical of Roman behaviour over the succeeding decades, he also replaces the Macedonian garrisons that had been occupying various strongholds in Greece and which were colloquially known as the fetters of Greece, with Roman garrisons. So even as he is proclaiming the fact that I've defeated Macedon, I freed Greece from

• 54:39Tom Holland?

  Macedonian tyranny, Greece is now free, he is replacing those Macedonian garrisons with Roman garrisons. And it means that Greece is now effectively, within less than a decade of the Battle of Zarma, it's become a Roman protectorate.

• 54:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So listeners may be wondering, so much of this story has been about the Western Mediterranean. What's been going on in the Eastern Mediterranean? And the answer is in the previous 120 years or so, Alexander the Great's empire, covering some of the richest parts of the kind of classical world, had broken up into different competing kingdoms ruled by the so-called successors, so the descendants of his captains and lieutenants. You can almost think of them as lots of different Greek-run or Macedonian-run kingdoms. And there are other Macedonian kingdoms, obviously Ptolemaic Egypt is one.

• 55:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so there are basically three. So there's Macedon, which governs Greece, but have now been defeated by the Romans. The Ptolemies in Egypt, as you say, and then there's the largest of the lot.

• 55:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Seleucid Empire.

• 55:34Tom Holland?

  Seleucid Empire, which at this point is ruled by Antiochus III, who is the heir of Seleucus, who had been one of Alexander's generals. And under Antiochus, who comes to be known as Antiochus the Great, the Seleucid Empire reaches its furthest extent, so it ends up stretching from the Aegean all the way to the frontiers of India. And Antiochus understandably feels that as the ruler of an empire as massive as this, he doesn't need to put up with any nonsense from the Romans, who he views as kind of upstart barbarians. And so when he crosses the Hellespont into Thrace, he moves from Asia into Europe and begins menacing the Greek cities on the eastern seaboard of the Aegean, so what's now the coast of Turkey.

• 56:16Tom Holland?

  And the Romans send protests. He responds to the Roman ambassadors with absolute contempt.

• 56:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Tom Holland?

  And it's not just that he rules this massive empire. It's not just that he rules the Romans as barbarians who should keep out of Greek affairs. It's also the fact that by this point, he is in communication with the best possible man to advise him on how to defeat the Romans, and that is of course Hannibal.

• 56:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, so he's basically, his intention is to hire Hannibal, as in the same way that you would hire a football coach or a brilliant sporting star, to be the star player for his team, presumably?

• 56:54Tom Holland?

  To a degree. I mean Hannibal at this point is still in Carthage. And it is not 100% clear initially that Hannibal is in communication with Antiochus, he almost certainly is. But certainly the Romans feel that they cannot risk Hannibal kind of teaming up with Antiochus. And so they send a party of three senators to Carthage. Um. To say, look, you know, hand him over. And Hannibal is informed that this is going to be happening. And he plays it very, very cool. He kind of walks around the marketplace. He doesn't let anyone know that he's planning anything. And then the moment night falls, he slips out to a side gate where he's had a horse prepared for him. He climbs onto it.

• 57:38Tom Holland?

  He gallops away to the coast where there is a fortress on a private estate of his. And there's a jetty with a galley and he gets onto the galley. There are men at oars ready to take him away. And he makes his escape from Carthage. And this galley sails all the way across the Mediterranean eastwards. Really kind of a journey back in history to the city of Tyre. The city from which the colonists who had originally founded Carthage came. And he lands in Tyre and he then goes overland up through Syria. Um. And he ends up in the city of Ephesus on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey. And there he meets with Antiochus.

• 58:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's he's met the ruler of the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus. And what does he say to him? What happens?

• 58:25Tom Holland?

  He says, listen, I will be your coach. And you know, as you said.

• 58:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm in.

• 58:28Tom Holland?

  I'm in.

• 58:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Five year contract.

• 58:30Tom Holland?

  There it is. Yeah. Unsurprisingly, the Romans are furious about this. And so they send a delegation to Antiochus's court. And it is said that attached to this delegation, not an official member of it, but going with with the delegation was Scipio Africanus. And he had come to persuade the Seleucid king not to go to war. Hannibal, of course, is busy urging him the opposite. You know, the two old enemies. They're they are like, I guess, kind of people who'd played football in the World Cup or something. And now are on opposing sides in the Champions League or something like that. You know, as managers.

• 59:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 59:12Tom Holland?

  But. It doesn't stop them, so the story goes from meeting up again. They're having a chat and Scipio asks Hannibal, "Which general do you think is the greatest of all time?"

• 59:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is a great conversation. This is exactly the conversation you'd want them to have.

• 59:27Tom Holland?

  Hannibal answers, and giving his reasons as he does so, that obviously, in first place, is Alexander the Great. And then he says, "Actually, I would also place Pyrrhus in second, and Pyrrhus was the guy who had

• 59:41Tom Holland?

  invaded Italy a kind of few generations before Hannibal's invasion." And again, Hannibal gives reasons why Pyrrhus has the number two position. And Scipio, who's obviously a little bit disappointed that Hannibal hasn't mentioned him, then says, "Oh, and who would you put in the third place?" And Hannibal then says, "Well, I'd put myself at number three."

• 1:00:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant.

• 1:00:00Tom Holland?

  And Scipio, to give him credit, laughs at this and says, "Well, what if you had beaten me at the Battle of Zama?" And Hannibal replied, "Oh, well, in that case, I would have put myself above Alexander and above Pyrrhus and above all other commanders."

• 1:00:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  God, Hannibal's not giving Scipio anything, is he?

• 1:00:17Tom Holland?

  I think it's a wonderful conversation and I like the fact that Scipio laughs. I mean, there hasn't been much laughter in this story. It's the only, the only record we have of either Scipio or Hannibal laughing. And it's obvious from Hannibal's reply that he's a very witty and amusing man.

• 1:00:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or is he witty or is he just boastful?

• 1:00:38Tom Holland?

  He is witty. The account that we have of it specifies that he was being witty.

• 1:00:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, great banter.

• 1:00:43Tom Holland?

  That in a sense, Scipio didn't quite know how to reply to it because he felt that Hannibal had had the better of him in that exchange.

• 1:00:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Were they speaking in Greek?

• 1:00:51Tom Holland?

  They would presumably have been speaking Greek, yes.

• 1:00:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:00:54Tom Holland?

  When they met before Zama, they had interpreters because they, they didn't want to leave open any chance of their communications being mistaken. But I guess at this point, they were speaking in Greek.

• 1:01:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So late in 192, Antiochus and the Seleucids invade Greece and the Romans respond with overwhelming force, don't they? So they rout him at, of all places, Thermopylae. And when Antiochus withdraws across the Aegean, they pursue him into Asia, what is now, I guess, Turkey. And this army is led by Scipio's brother Lucius. So Scipio himself is there as an advisor. He's the sort of director of football.

• 1:01:34Tom Holland?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, so it is said.

• 1:01:41Tom Holland?

  But if, I mean, if he is actually there, and it's much debated by ancient historians, he's not at the big shootout, which takes place at a place called Magnesia, where the Seleucids are comprehensively defeated. Lucius Scipio is the victor. And if Scipio Africanus hadn't been present, neither was Hannibal. So by this stage, both the kind of the old war horses are fading into the background. But even so, the Romans remain paranoid about the mischief that Hannibal might get up to. And so, part of the terms that Lucius imposes on his defeated foe is that Hannibal has to be surrendered into Roman hands. And Tarchus has to quit Europe for good. He has to withdraw inland from the Aegean seaboard. Inevitably,

• 1:02:26Tom Holland?

  he has to pay a massive indemnity. But, the point is made, we are not going to allow you to have Hannibal. And there's a sense, perhaps, that that is, for the Romans, although it might seem a minor demand, is in fact the key one. They hate him and fear him that much. Obviously, Hannibal knows that this is going to be happening. And so, he's already made sure to scarper. And for the next seven years, he leads the life of a fugitive. He's constantly finding refuge in, you know, a court here, a court there, and then being forced to go on the run again. The Romans are endlessly pursuing him. And finally, in 183, on a country estate in Bithynia, which is now northwestern Turkey, he is cornered.

• 1:03:09Tom Holland?

  And Hannibal, who had known what was coming, he'd had various kind of tunnels dug out from his house. But the Romans have cornered him. They block off the exits from the tunnels. And so there, you know, Hannibal knows that he's got no way out. And so, he does what Sophanispa had done many years before, and he glugs down some poison. And that is the end of him, and Rome's greatest enemy, at the age of 64, at last. Is dead.

• 1:03:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  What a depressing and downbeat and sadly kind of banal way for Hannibal's life to have ended. This extraordinary character who blazed like a meteor across the pages of the classical world. And now he just is, you know, he's in Turkey and his flipping basement of his bunker taking poison. Disappointing.

• 1:03:57Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's miserable and in the long run, the poet Juvenal will write a poem. You know, he was this great guy who led elephants over the Alps and now he's, you know, a dead loser in a basement in Bithynia.

• 1:04:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're all dead losers and ultimately, Tom, that's the lesson of history.

• 1:04:11Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's interesting you say that because Scipio actually dies in the same year, 183. And he, unlike Hannibal, had died in his bed of natural causes. He died very wealthy, adorned with honours, admired by his fellow citizens, secure in his fame as the man who had beaten Hannibal. But amazingly, he also had died as an exile. And the reason for this is that in 187, when Scipio returns with his brother Lucius from the eastern campaign, you know, and they are loaded down with wealth and money and cash and, you know, tremendous piles of plunder.

• 1:04:53Tom Holland?

  This causes consternation in the Senate that these two Scipio brothers are now so wealthy that perhaps they might end up putting Rome itself in their shade. And Cato and his allies feel strong enough to go on the attack. And so they openly accuse Lucius of embezzlement. Remember, you know, Cato's background as a paymaster. He knows where to sniff around. And Scipio is accused of complicity in this. And he's so offended that he arrives in the Senate and he pulls out his account books and he rips them up before the full gaze of the Senate. And indignantly, and to a degree justifiably, reminds his accusers of all the treasure that

• 1:05:38Tom Holland?

  he has won for Rome. But the thing is. He's not prepared to stand and fight because he feels the humiliation of it too deeply. He's not going to bother swatting aside these pygmies as he sees them. Instead, he retires in high dudgeon to his country estate in Campania, so down by the Bay of Naples. And essentially, for the rest of his life, he's a broken man. It's a triumph for the conservatives who had always hated him. And it's a triumph for what they see as an absolute point of principle. That, and to quote Livy, "No one citizen should be permitted an eminence so formidable that it prevents him from being questioned by the laws." I.e. even Scipio Africanus is not above the law.

• 1:06:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Tom Holland?

  And of course, there is one man in particular who had harried Scipio to his death. And that was M. Pausius Cato. And Cato, with Scipio dead, has now inherited Scipio's status as the most admired and prestigious man in the Senate. And the question is, what is he going to do with this prestige?

• 1:06:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Cato, even by Roman standards, has a pathological hatred and contempt for Carthage, doesn't he?

• 1:06:55Tom Holland?

  He does.

• 1:06:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is going to be very, very ominous for the Carthaginians. They're beaten, but they're still, you know, a name to conjure with, one of the wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean. But for Carthage, the clock is ticking, Tom. Very sad. So we will find out the fate of Carthage in the fourth and final episode of this epic series. So that final episode, the climax of this tremendous journey, will be out on Thursday. Is it possible there are any people out there who have not already been motivated to join the Rest is History Club? Human beings are strange creatures, so maybe there are. If you want to join it, now is your last chance before that episode. Go to therestishistory.com and you can hear what happens to Carthage right away.

• 1:07:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  What excitement. Tom, thank you very much and goodbye.

• 1:07:43Tom Holland?

  Bye bye.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

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• 1:09:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tom, we have some absolutely unbelievable news to share with our listeners. Probably the most exciting news you've ever shared, no?

• 1:10:00Tom Holland?

  Oh, I mean, no dispute. This is the most exciting news of all time.

• 1:10:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, so we are announcing the launch of some brand new Rest is History merchandise. And the important thing about this is that it is exclusively for you, the members. Nobody else will be able to get this.

• 1:10:15Tom Holland?

  That's absolutely right. So these are T-shirts that have been designed by one of our beloved Athelstans, Graham Johnson. And what he's done is to do designs for six of the biggest series that we have coming up over the next few months.

• 1:10:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so it's exclusive merch for our members. And the very first iteration is this amazing T-shirt. It really is a wonderful design. It's showing Hannibal as Hercules crossing the Alps on an elephant. It's beautifully imagined, I have to say, and I would wear it with enormous pride myself.

• 1:10:49Tom Holland?

  And it's so good that it has a Roman Hydra with lots of different heads. Hannibal's chopped off some of them, but there are others with Roman helmets on. I mean, it could not be more epic.

• 1:10:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Epic is the word. Now, if you want to show your epic status as a member of the Rest is History Club, I think it's important for you to wear one of these T-shirts. So when you're going out around town, when you see people, if you want to impress your husband or wife, wear this T-shirt or wear multiple T-shirts, get several if you can. And you'll want to know how to get hold of it. The way you get to get hold of it is this. You go to the new, exciting Rest is History website, log in and go to the Members Merch section. And Tom, what about if you're an Apple member?

• 1:11:32Tom Holland?

  Because I want to get this absolutely right. I'm going to read out what I have been given. If you're an Apple member, you will need to join our Members mailing list to get access. Just send an email to [email protected] with Apple Member in the subject line and a screenshot of your membership and we will add you in. And honestly, that couldn't be easier, could it, Dominic?

• 1:11:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, so that's [email protected] with Apple Member in the subject line. Now, what if you're not a member of the show, not yet a member of the show, I should say? Well, this is a wonderful opportunity. For you to put that right and to get involved with the show. So not only will you be able to get your hands on this unique and uniquely cool example of merch, but you'll also get all the great benefits, early access to series, bonus episodes, exclusive new mini-series and so much more. I mean, those are just sensational benefits. Not only do you get to wear a Hannibal themed t-shirt, but there is so much else.

• 1:12:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So don't hang around, sign up, head to therestishistory.com. Bye bye.

• 1:12:39Tom Holland?

  Bye bye.