Hannibal - Ioakim Ioakim

He made his son swear an oath at the altar of the gods before he let him come to war. The boy was nine years old. Swear that you will be the enemy of Rome for as long as you live. The boy swore. The boy kept the oath for fifty-five years - through the crossing of the Alps and the battles of Trebia and Trasimene and Cannae and the fifteen years in Italy and the defeat at Zama and the exile and the flight from city to city ahead of the Roman demand for his surrender, until he took the poison rather than be handed over to the people he had sworn to hate.

He is Hannibal Barca. The greatest tactical commander of the ancient world. The man who crossed the Alps in winter with thirty-seven elephants. The man who organized the double envelopment at Cannae that destroyed a Roman army of eighty thousand - the most complete tactical encirclement in the history of ancient warfare, the battle that military academies studied for two thousand years. The man who spent fifteen years in Italy without losing a significant battle and still lost the war, because winning battles was not the same as winning wars and because Rome had something that his genius could not overcome: the capacity to absorb catastrophic defeats and keep fighting.

Hannibal: The Enemy of Rome enters the consciousness of the Carthaginian general from the oath at nine years old to the poison at sixty-four - from the boy who begged his father to take him to war to the old man who drank the poison rather than surrender to the people he had been hating for fifty-five years.

The book follows the full arc of the most extraordinary military career of the ancient world. Carthage and the Barcid dynasty - the family whose military genius would define the second confrontation between Carthage and Rome. The crossing of the Alps - the most improbable military operation in the history of ancient warfare, the approach that Rome had not prepared to defend because Rome had not imagined it was possible. The battles: the ambush at the Trebia River, the massacre in the fog at Lake Trasimene, the masterpiece of Cannae where the double envelopment destroyed eighty thousand Roman soldiers in a single afternoon. The fifteen years in Italy without defeat - and without the strategic result that the victories should have produced, because Carthage failed to reinforce the campaign and the Italian allies did not defect in sufficient numbers and Maharbal was right that Hannibal knew how to win a victory but not how to use one. Hasdrubal’s march over the Alps and death at the Metaurus. The recall to Africa. The defeat at Zama by the pupil who had learned from the master. The exile. The oath kept until the end.

Hannibal is the eighth book in I. Ioakim’s Warriors series - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history’s greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.