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Updated: April 30, 2025
With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio easily reconquered Spain and four years later the Romans were ready for a final attack upon Carthage. Hannibal was called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried to organise the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle of Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. Hannibal fled to Tyre.
The Goths, the Gascons, and the Franks, assembled under the standard of this Christian hero: he repelled the first invasion of the Saracens; and Zama, lieutenant of the caliph, lost his army and his life under the walls of Thoulouse. The ambition of his successors was stimulated by revenge; they repassed the Pyrenees with the means and the resolution of conquest.
Warned by its incidents that the cavalry should be posted nearer to the camp, he began the work of the following day by disposing the whole of this force over that quarter of the ground on which the king had made his appearance; more definite arrangements were also made for the detailed defence of the Roman lines, and the assault of the previous day was renewed on the walls of Zama.
It was a question as to whether he had lost a single man, since there had been no combat. In the battle of Lake Trasimenus, the Carthaginians lost fifteen hundred men, nearly all Gauls; the Romans fifteen thousand and fifteen thousand prisoners. The battle raged for three hours. At Zama, Hannibal had twenty thousand killed, twenty thousand prisoners; the Romans two thousand killed.
"Every one," said Henri, "knows the calm bravery and military genius of your highness, and we beg you not to distress us by attributing to yourself faults which you have not. The best general is not invincible, and Hannibal himself was conquered at Zama."
A custom came into vogue, by which the victor and his descendants derived a permanent surname from the victories they had won a custom mainly established by the victor of Zama who got himself designated as the hero of Africa, his brother as the hero of Asia, and his cousin as the hero of Spain. The example set by the higher was followed by the humbler classes.
Among other liberties he not only ridiculed one Theodotus a painter by name, but even directed against the victor of Zama the following verses, of which Aristophanes need not have been ashamed: -Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose, Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat, Eum suus pater cum pallio uno ab amica abduxit. As he himself says,
The republic had formerly been saved by the delays of Fabius; and, while the splendid trophies of Scipio, in the field of Zama, attract the eyes of posterity, the camps and marches of the dictator among the hills of the Campania, may claim a juster proportion of the solid and independent fame, which the general is not compelled to share, either with fortune or with his troops.
Not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and of the victors at Zama had so utterly degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was not so much in the men who now sat in the senate, as in the times.
This time they gave way, and Hannibal, seeing that the battle was lost, quitted the field, in the hope that somehow or other he might still save his country from destruction. How bitter, in after years, must have been his regret that he had not died fighting among his men at Zama!
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