between 237 and 221 before our era, two generals of the same family, hamilcar barca and his son-in-law hasdrubal, turned the south and east of the iberian peninsula into carthage’s great power base, and left it as an inheritance to a third, hannibal. the video says that carthage rebuilt itself in secret and thanks to a single resource, silver. neither claim is exact: silver was one piece among several, and polybius, our main source, reports that rome was watching.
polybius is clear about the starting point: as soon as they had restored order in libya, the carthaginians sent hamilcar to hispania «entrusting him with an adequate force». he took with him his son hannibal, nine years old — the boy of the oath at the altar, a scene that, according to polybius, hannibal himself told antiochus iii decades later — crossed the strait and set about subjecting hispania to carthage. it was not virgin territory: diodorus recalls that gadir, today’s cádiz, was a phoenician colony, and that hamilcar carried his campaigns that far. in some nine years he subdued many iberian peoples, by arms or by diplomacy. the purpose polybius attributes to him is explicit: to use the resources of hispania for the war against rome. that is his interpretation, written knowing how it all ended.
the idea of a private empire, beyond the reach of the carthaginian senate, has an author. polybius attributes it to fabius pictor, the roman senator and historian who lived through the events: according to fabius, hasdrubal — not hamilcar — tried to turn carthage into a monarchy, failed, and from then on ruled hispania as he pleased, paying no heed to the senate; hannibal would have inherited the method and started the war against the wishes of his city. polybius takes it apart with a simple argument: had carthage disapproved of hannibal, nothing would have been easier than to hand him over to rome, and instead it fought for seventeen years under his command. dexter hoyos, who has devoted a whole book to the dynasty, concludes that fabius is wrong to present hasdrubal as independent of carthage. the barcas had enormous autonomy on the ground; they were not a separate state.
hamilcar died around 228, and the sources do not tell the same death. polybius says he fell bravely in battle against one of the most warlike and powerful peoples of the peninsula. diodorus tells something else: he was besieging helice, had sent the bulk of his army and the elephants to winter at akra leuke, a city he had founded, and the king of the orissi, pretending to be an ally, defeated him; hamilcar sent his sons off by another road and, pursued, rode his horse into a river and drowned. the command passed to hasdrubal. polybius praises him for a wise administration, which grew carthaginian power more through the friendship of local chiefs than by arms; livy adds that he owed the command to the barcid faction, strong among the soldiers and the common people, and «not exactly by the will of the leading men». hasdrubal founded the city that some called carthage and others the new city, carthago nova, which polybius later describes as the chief ornament and the capital of the carthaginian empire in hispania.
and the silver? that there was silver is certain; the figures, on the other hand, are almost all from another age. pliny the elder writes that wells opened by hannibal were still in use in hispania, and that one of them, baebelo, yielded him three hundred pounds of silver a day; hoyos warns that it is the only statistic of its kind to have survived from the barcid period. the famous mines of carthago nova, with forty thousand workers and twenty-five thousand drachmas a day, are described by polybius, quoted by strabo, but for his own time and for the treasury of rome. the contrast the video suggests is real, though: this is the same carthage that in 241 had been unable to pay its mercenaries and had paid for it with the truceless war.
in the oldest version we have, the ebro treaty binds only one of the parties.
rome was slow to react, but it reacted. polybius reports that, on seeing that hasdrubal was building an empire greater and more formidable than the one carthage had held before, the romans realised they had been asleep until then; but, with a gallic invasion expected any day, they dared not give him orders or make war on him, and chose to appease him. they sent him envoys and made a treaty in which, polybius says, the rest of hispania was not mentioned: the carthaginians undertook not to cross the ebro under arms. hoyos dates it to 225, on the eve of the invasion that would end at telamon. that is the whole clause in polybius. livy, two centuries later, tells something else: that the roman people had renewed with hasdrubal a treaty by which the ebro would be the boundary of the two empires and saguntum, in between, would keep its freedom. the symmetry and saguntum appear in the late roman version, not in the greek one, and saguntum is precisely the city over which the war would begin: the difference between the two versions is no detail. who upset the balance first is still argued over.
in 221, after eight years in command — nine, according to diodorus — hasdrubal was murdered, and here too the sources disagree. for polybius he was killed at night, in his quarters, by a celt, over private grievances; for livy, by a barbarian, in full view of everyone, enraged because hasdrubal had had his master put to death; for diodorus, by one of his household slaves. the soldiers unanimously chose hannibal, who was still young, and the assembly of carthage ratified the choice: once again, an army that does not act behind its city’s back. polybius writes that, from the first day, his measures made it clear he meant to make war on rome. that is the judgement of someone who already knew there would be one.
