Hannibal's Legacy

The Second Punic War had a profound effect upon Sicily. The kingdom of Hieron II was destroyed and Syracuse, the island’s largest urban centre, was sacked after a bitter Roman siege. In the third century, the Romans did not have any means or processes by which they could simply setup an overseas province. Indeed, a provincia at this time very much remained, primarily, a zone of military responsibility rather than a defined territory outside of Italy which was administered by an imperium-holding magistrate.

The idea of feminising an enemy in antiquity reaches back at least to Archaic Greek traditions and certainly comes to maturity in the Athenian views of the Persian male in the 5^th century BCE. The literary and artistic evidence reveals a tendency in ancient depictions of enemies to invert gender roles.A well-established method to criticise a culture or a specific man was the way in which men are feminised through the behaviour of their women.

The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) was remembered even centuries later for the heightened visibility of Roman women’s wartime activity. When Carthage was threatening Rome’s very existence during this traumatic and socially disruptive war, Roman authorities relied on women to take on new domestic and public roles. This paper explores late republican and early imperial memories of Roman women’s contributions to the war effort.

Livy’s opening to Book VI of the Ab Urbe Condita states that the events in the previous five books appear “like remote objects which are hardly discernible through the vastness of the distance.” This description is often presented as being paradigmatic for the entirety of Rome’s early history.

This paper uncovers a ‘Lost Generation’ of Roman senators who were killed in the Hannibalic War, and it examines the impact of their deaths on the Middle Republican Senate. Approximately half of the Senate’s 300 members perished while serving as officers and soldiers in the war against Carthage between 218 and 216 BCE. That the Republic recovered from such a blow is astounding. Indeed, my paper argues that these deaths amounted to a ‘Lost Generation’ of Roman elites.

Historians have long recognized that the Second Punic War increased the prestige and importance of the Roman Senate. Although the Romans suffered many great military defeats in the war, the steady leadership of the aristocracy in the constant state of national emergency solidified the senators’ roles as the natural leaders of the state and the proper guardians of Roman tradition.