Hannibal’s Oath: The Life and
Wars of Rome’s Greatest Enemy. By John Prevas. Da Capo. $28.
Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities.
By Bettany Hughes. Da Capo. $40.
Hannibal and his elephants
are known to many people who have no real idea of who Hannibal was and what the
elephants were all about, and “Hannibal crossing the Alps” is one of those
known phrases from antiquity – along the lines of “Caesar crossing the Rubicon”
– that retains currency even among people who are not sure what it means.
Hannibal himself is known to have been so brilliant a military strategist that
some of his campaigns continue to be taught in military academies. And the cry
of Carthago delenda est still has
some currency in modern times, at least in academic circles, even among people
who do not know the phrase’s association with Cato the Elder and may not
realize that the phrase in this form is not found in any reliable source. All
these remnants and revenants of ancient conflicts trace to a greater or lesser
degree to the fanatical determination of Hannibal to overcome Rome, and Rome’s
equally fanatical determination to destroy him and his city-state. There have
been many biographies of Hannibal and many works about the three Punic Wars
that eventually resulted, indeed, in the destruction of Carthage, but they have
generally been scholarly in orientation and weighty, even overweighted, to such
an extent that reading them outside academic circles can be something of a
chore. One very positive thing about John Prevas’ Hannibal’s Oath is that it is not
comprehensive or all-encompassing; another is that it puts an interesting
economic spin on the repeated wars in which Hannibal took part. For example,
Prevas suggests that the First Punic War ended above all for economic reasons –
in a way that enabled Carthage to rebuild quickly and again become a sufficient
power so that there was soon enough to be a Second Punic War. Actually, the end
of the first war went very poorly for Carthage, which depended heavily on
mercenary troops that did not take kindly to being out of a job, and which
showed their displeasure through widespread rapine and murder. The war’s end
was especially humiliating for Hamilcar – who was Hannibal’s father. Prevas
shows how Hamilcar’s defeat had a great deal to do with Hannibal’s unremitting
hatred of Rome, and how Hannibal’s crude but effective understanding of
economics – he basically bought the support of the Carthaginian government by
looting the gold of Saguntum in Spain – made it possible for him to begin his
history-making five-month-long crossing of the Alps. That crossing gets its due
in Hannibal’s Oath – the general lost
half his army, although his elephants survived – and so does Hannibal’s
tactical brilliance, the way he “always retained the initiative and would
determine when, where, and how he would fight.” Hannibal was basically an
outside-the-box thinker, an especially meaningful way to think about him in
light of the boxlike strategies used by the Romans in both offense and defense.
Yet Hannibal, like many great later generals – Robert E. Lee comes to mind in
U.S. history – eventually found that being superior at command was not enough. Rome had far
greater resources than Carthage did, far more fighting men and far more ships
and a far deeper economy. Like the North wearing down the South in the U.S.
Civil War, Rome wore Hannibal down over time, even though none of Rome’s
generals retains the level of military respect still accorded Hannibal after 2,200-plus
years. Hannibal’s Oath is a fine read
in and of itself, and also a fine introduction to Hannibal and his campaigns
for readers unfamiliar with them and with the Punic Wars. Prevas brings history
vividly to life in this book – and in the process brings to life the places
where history was made, through finely detailed descriptions of the mountain
passes, rivers and battlefields where Hannibal made his reputation but
eventually lost out to Rome’s superior military manpower and materiel.
Hannibal’s story is that of
a man more than that of the city-state on whose behalf he fought long and hard.
In contrast, Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A
Tale of Three Cities is the story of a city that looms far larger than any
one individual, or indeed any group of individuals. In a sense, this too is a
story involving the Roman Empire, for the city now known as Istanbul, and
originally as Byzantion (hence the “Byzantine Empire” and the notion that
something of vast over-complexity is “byzantine”), was named Constantinople by
the Roman emperor Constantine in 330 C.E. Indeed, after Rome fell – overrun in part
by tribal groups that had moved into the footprint of destroyed Carthage – the
Byzantine Empire remained for a thousand years, until Muslims under Mehmed II
conquered it in 1453 and changed it from a Christian city to a Muslim one. That
was the 13th Muslim attack on the city, a string dating back to just
after the death of Muhammad. Yes, this is a city with a long history. Indeed,
as Hughes explains, its history dates back at least 8,000 years, thanks to its
position on the narrow straits connecting the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara
– the crossroads of Europe and Asia, as we now think of the area. Hughes writes
of the city as a place of constant reinvention, some of its own making and some
imposed from without. In a series of mostly short and mostly entertaining
chapters, in a style whose breeziness is at odds with the usual approach to
writing history and at times is even a trifle overheated, Hughes writes of the
many, many magnificences and depredations for which the city, under any name,
has been known. Just one example, an especially notable one: the Roman emperor
Justinian and his notorious wife Theodora are the ones who built the
magnificent Hagia Sophia, a still-gorgeous church transformed by the Ottomans
into a mosque and by Kemal Atatürk into a museum at the establishment of modern
Turkey and the city’s renaming as Istanbul. This is a vast, even sprawling book
– 800 pages, while Prevas’ on Hannibal runs fewer than 300 – and as a result
has plenty of time for anecdotes, of which there are indeed plenty. Some of the
more salacious ones are omitted (including those about Theodora), but there is
the story of the sultan’s wife asking Queen Elizabeth I for makeup, and there
are tales of sex and eunuchs, and white slavery, and of many archeological
discoveries and their significance. There is information here on monuments laced
with ancient graffiti, on many-hundred-year-old buildings whose elaborate
hydraulic systems were used to keep their owners cool, on beautiful silk
clothes, and also on the reasons that Lloyd George, early in the 20th
century, characterized the city as “the source from which the poison of
corruption and intrigue has spread far and wide.” Hughes’ exploration of the
ins and outs of Istanbul over the millennia comes to a somewhat unfortunate end
in 1923 with the city’s renaming, the modern era being passed over quickly and somewhat
superficially, in an approach at odds with that of the rest of the book. And
some of Hughes’ focus is a trifle odd: in an apparent attempt to redress the
balance of the usual war-focused and thus male-focused history books of old,
she gives plenty of space to slaves, refugees and women of all sorts – not only
empresses and queens but also nuns, female slaves and lower-class women. She also
dwells not only on the city’s primary religions but also on others, including
paganism and Judaism (Jews were at various times welcomed and persecuted). Many
of these less-than-usual approaches work well, but others seem forced and somewhat
arbitrary – although the extended discussion of eunuchs and their importance to
Christian and Muslim governments alike is a fascinating sidelight. Likewise,
Hughes’ treatment of the harem and her explanation of its function in Ottoman
times are fascinating. Istanbul is
actually a tale of more than three cities – it has been known not only as
Byzantion, Constantinople and Istanbul but also as Byzantium, Konstantinye ,
Asitane, Stambol, and Islam-Bol. At the same time, and this is really Hughes’
point, this is a tale of one city, a
city that has changed dramatically (although usually in gradual fashion) over a
great deal of time, and one that continues to evolve today while retaining its
strategic importance and its wide-ranging cultural significance for people of
many heritages, many faiths and many beliefs.
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