for six years a single general held the roman legions in check without fighting one pitched battle. he won none and he lost none: he settled on a mountain above palermo, made himself invisible, and set about bleeding rome one blow at a time. the year is 247 before our era and the man is hamilcar barca, hannibal’s father.
the first punic war was seventeen years old. both powers had lost entire fleets —rome above all, and more to storms than to combat— and neither could finish the other off. carthage, which had watched its generals string together disasters from agrigentum to panormus, handed the command of sicily to a young officer with no defeat behind him. hamilcar then gave up what carthage had spent seventeen years attempting and losing: the decisive battle.
he fortified mount hercte, a steep massif above panormus with its own water, pasture, only three practicable approaches, and a cove where his ships could anchor. it should not be read as an impregnable fortress: polybius stresses that installing himself there was a calculated recklessness, because it left him «in the midst of the enemy», with roman positions on either side. he held it for almost three years on a diet of daily ambuscades and counter-ambuscades, attempts and assaults, while his squadron ravaged the italian coast as far as cumae. in 244 he moved to eryx, the sacred mountain of venus above drepana, and held out there another two from a position absurd on paper: the romans held both the summit and the town at its foot, and he installed himself between the two.
hamilcar was not harrying in order to win. he was harrying in order not to lose, which in that war had come to much the same thing.
polybius, who does not hand out praise for free, gives in to the spectacle and compares it to two boxers of the very first rank: evenly matched, brave, and in perfect training, trading so many blows that not even the chronicler can keep count. and here it is worth stopping, because this is almost always told backwards. the thing ended in a draw, polybius writes, «not, as fabius says, from utter weakness and misery, but like men still unbroken and unconquered». the reading of exhaustion is not polybius’s: it is precisely the one polybius rejects, and he pins it on fabius pictor.
what was exhausted was the money. both treasuries, emptied by two decades of naval expense and of fleets lost in storms, were scraping bottom. rome could not drive hamilcar out of the mountains, and hamilcar could not drive rome out of sicily.
now the historiographical caveat, which should not be skipped, and here there are three. the first is a matter of vocabulary: “guerrilla war” is a modern term —it is born in the peninsular war against napoleon, more than two thousand years later— and while it describes the tactics well, it lends them an air of popular resistance that does not belong. hamilcar commanded a professional mercenary army paid for by a commercial empire, not an insurgency. the second is geographical: we do not even know for certain which mountain hercte was. the candidates are monte pellegrino and the castellaccio, both above palermo, and polybius’s description is not enough to decide between them.
the third weighs heaviest. polybius is effectively our only source for these years, he writes a century later, and his undefeated hamilcar fits far too neatly with what came next: the unsurpassable father from whom hannibal inherits. dexter hoyos warns that much of the tradition around the “barcid wrath” —the inherited grudge, the revenge planned as a family programme— is built backwards from the second punic war, once everyone already knew how it would end. the oath sworn by the boy hannibal, by contrast, hoyos takes as historical: what he disputes is not the scene but the policy drawn out of it. the hamilcar of sicily is better read without the hannibal who does not yet exist.
and even so the bare fact holds: cornelius nepos wrote that hamilcar left sicily undefeated, and in two thousand years nobody has been able to disprove it. what happened is that it did him no good. the war was decided not in his mountains but on the water, and carthage lost it while he stood unbeaten on his. years later it was the public treasury that would be ruined, and it was rome’s wealthiest citizens who advanced the cost of one last fleet out of their own pockets —one quinquereme each, singly or in pairs— on the understanding that the state would pay them back if things went well. things went well, and with that fleet the whole thing ended.
