Secrets of the Dead: “Hannibal in the Alps” (Mentorn Barraclough Carey, PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards PBS showed a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Hannibal in the Alps,” originally aired April 10, 2018, about the efforts of archaeologists and historical researchers to reconstruct the journey the Carthaginian general Hannibal took his 30,000 soldiers, several thousand horses and donkeys, and 37 elephants on his way to his invasion of Italy in 218 B.C.E., where he laid waste to the countryside and nearly conquered the Roman Republic until the Romans fought back and invaded Carthage (the legendary city located in what is now Tunisia). In some respects Hannibal was the Rommel of the Second Punic War (even though Hannibal led his army from Africa to Europe and Rommel, of course, did it the other way around) and Publius Scipio, the Roman general the republican government put in charge of the army after everyone else who had gone up against Hannibal had failed (sort of like Ulysses S. Grant in the U.S. Civil War) was its Patton. The show focused on what an amazing feat Hannibal had to pull off to get his army across western Europe and to Rome in the first place, landing it on the coast of what is now southern Spain, marching up to the Pyrenees, crossing them along what is now the coast of France (though he had to avoid the port that is now Marseilles because Scipio had an army camped there) and then into the Alps.

I came away from this show with a new admiration for what Hannibal was able to pull off – especially given that he was the sort of general who would generally take the road least taken because he wanted to surprise the enemy and intimidate them with surprise – and also the marvelous ways modern researchers were able to reconstruct his journey. The basic source for what happened is the Roman historian Polybius, who wrote about Hannibal’s invasion about 50 years after it happened but while there were participants still alive and able to be interviewed, and his detailed descriptions of the terrain Hannibal and his men traversed and in particular where they were able to camp and rest for several days before moving on served as guides for the modern researchers. Among the ways they were able to figure out Hannibal’s route was to take soil-sample cores and look for major disruptions that indicated the presence of large numbers of men and animals, all eating and dropping their wastes at once. They also researched how Hannibal’s allies, the Numidians, used their horses and how they were able to ride without reins, bits, saddles or stirrups, with just one giant ring that looked like a hula hoop and fitted around the horses’ necks. Hannibal used the Numidian light cavalry as scouts because their horses could literally lie flat on the ground with their riders still on them, giving the riders an excellent view of an enemy encampment, and could then ride away again virtually silently to report to Hannibal’s home base what he was up against,.

The show also showed a recently discovered Carthaginian coin with a picture of Hannibal’s father on one side and an elephant on the other – itself an historical mystery because it showed an African elephant. Apparently you can tell the difference because an African elephant has a dip on the top of its body, while an Indian one has a flat back – previous historians had assumed Carthage’s elephant force had been imported from India but this coin suggested that the animals had come from what is now sub-Saharan Africa at a time when the Sahara Desert was considerably smaller and less desert-y than it is now. So it’s possible that some African elephants made their way to the continent’s northern coast and created a population that got cut off from the rest as the Sahara became nastier and more impassable – only the Carthaginian elephant population eventually died out (the fact that, just to make sure Carthage would never again threaten their power, the Romans started a Third Punic War and literally wiped Carthage off the face of the earth, including sowing salt into the ground to make sure nothing would ever grow there again, probably didn’t help the elephant population’s chances for survival) and African elephants survived only south of the Sahara. It’s also unclear just what Hannibal did with the elephants; were they just what would now be called a shock-and-awe weapon meant to intimidate the Romans, who had never seen elephants before, or did he have wooden boxes on top of them with soldiers armed with bows and arrows or spears, essentially turning the elephants into the era’s version of tanks?

I remember my stepfather being a huge Hannibal fan – he was a major reader of war books in general, most of them about World War II but some dealing with earlier conflicts, and among his collection were several books about Hannibal, including Howard Fast’s historical novel about him. (He even dragged us to a drive-in showing of a movie about Hannibal, made in 1960 in Europe, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Victor Mature and Rita Gam; it’s probably a lousy movie but I’d like to see it again if only because I’ve become quite an Edgar G. Ulmer fan over the years.) This Secrets of the Dead episode was an intriguing look at an historical figure I hadn’t thought about in years, and also a nice tale about how modern-day researchers piece together bits of evidence and thereby find out new secrets about the past – though I found it amusing that their principal authority on how you herd elephants and get them to go where you want them to was a Spaniard, so in a show about an army from North Africa marching through France to get to Italy the voice we heard describing a key element of how they got there was speaking Spanish.

Also one fun fact I didn’t know before was that elephants are matriarchal – their herds are led not by alpha males but by alpha females (yay, elephants!), and the only way to control them is to identify the alpha bitch and not let her out of the pen until after you’ve released all the other elephants. Otherwise she’ll reassert control of them and lead them where she wants them to go instead of where you want them to go – and of course, given how Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey and other circuses that used elephants and other animals have been driven out of business largely from public revulsion about the way they treated and trained the animals (Ringling’s grosses dropped below sustainability largely due to audiences flocking instead to Cirque du Soleil and other shows that use only human performers amid a growing public revulsion against the use of animals for entertainment, much the way slavery and castrati were once generally accepted until public opinion turned against them), the show’s writers stressed that the people training the modern-day elephants shown in the films were using only the mildest and least discomfiting forms of restraint. It was also fascinating that they described the softness of elephants’ feet and their ability, sort of like foam-fitting mattresses, to reshape their soles depending on what sort of terrain they’re marching on – and it mentioned how sensitive an elephant’s feet are, which reminded me of the story about the making of the Merian Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack film Chang in 1927. In one scene they were staging an elephant stampede and one of the elephants seemed to have stepped on and killed a baby – only the baby was alive and well when the elephant passed by. When they developed their film, Cooper and Schoedsack found out why: the elephant had sensed something under its foot and eased up, standing only on the back of the foot so it wouldn’t put its weight on the baby and the baby would be able to survive without injury.