Hannibal and Scipio by Simon Hornblower

Hannibal and Scipio: Parallel Lives

By Simon Hornblower

Cambridge University Press 2025

Despite the title of his new book, Hannibal and Scipio: Parallel Lives, classicist Simon Hornblower here isn’t primarily taking the great ancient historian Plutarch, he of the Parallel Lives, as his model for aligning biographies of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who inflicted some of the worst military defeats on ancient Rome, and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who eventually beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. Instead, delightfully, his model is Alan Bullock’s mammoth 1993 book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, which provides biographies of each tyrant in tension with each other.

Plutarch himself never wrote a life of Hannibal, never wrote a programmatic life of Scipio Africanus, and never wrote one of his comparative essays about the two. But plenty of writers have seen the prospect as irresistible, and one caught Hornblower’s attention mid-composition: Giovanni Brizzi’s Scipione e Annibale: la Guerra per salvare Roma from 2007.

“Halfway through writing my own book, I bought a copy of Brizzi’s 2007a online, attracted by the book title and name of author (I could find no review in any language),” he writes in one of the countless fantastic footnotes that fill the bottom of every page of this book. “Until it arrived, I wondered if I had been wasting my time, and the author had already done in Italian what I had set out to do in English.”

He, and we, quickly find out that he needn’t have worried. Brizzi gamely lards his dual account with fictionalized bits and pieces, and Hornblower’s clear implication is that he won’t be doing that himself – until, that is, he immediately does that himself, by starting off his book with two brief autobiographical sketches Hannibal and Africanus might have written about themselves. “If we want a sense of how Hannibal and Scipio might have presented themselves and their careers,” he writes with a cheeky lack of shame, “we must improvise and use our imaginations.”

Nevertheless, as the shrubbery of footnotes and the extensive cited references might suggest, Hornblower’s book goes to elaborate lengths to ground any speculation in which it indulges. Such speculation is naturally necessary when dealing with ancient sources that are in only the sketchiest of agreement with each other; as Hornblower notes, we can’t even be sure what Hannibal or Scipio would have called the major events in their own lives. The Battle of the Metaurus River, for instance, was fought in 207 BC between Carthaginian general Hasdrubal and the Roman consuls Marcus Livius Salinator and Gaius Claudius Nero, but Livy doesn’t specifically name it, nor does Polybius, nor Ennius, nor Stabo. “Ovvid knew the battle but did not name it,” Hornblower writes; Silius Italicus mentions the river but is “non-committal” about the name of the battle. What Hannibal and Africanus called it, much less what they thought about it, is an open invitation to improvisation.

This book, a solid physical production from Cambridge University Press, amounts to an incredibly detailed study of everything we can know about these two famous men, both each through the prism of each other and each standing in isolation. For long stretches it can be more theme-driven than narrative; it won’t entirely work as a full-dress biography of either man, but, as with Bullock, there’s a strong case to be made (mostly through the reading experience itself, which is superbly fine-grained, although probably not for beginners) that these two lives are more interesting when studied in tandem.

Both men certainly had an eerie amount in common. Born ten years apart, they were both, as Hornblower writes, “precocious children of successful military leaders whose lives were cut violently short in Iberia,” and “they both enjoyed dazzling early battlefield successes” that were followed by civic embarrassment. “Their fellow citizens rejected them absolutely,” we’re told; “Hannibal had to flee Carthage in 195, Scipio faced humiliating legal attacks in 187 and 184 – and they died in the same year 183, the one hunted down in distant eastern exile, the other in local disgrace.”

Into the interstices of these broad outlines Hornblower pours the fruits of a lifetime of reading and study. Every ancient source is here in abundance, as is a formidable array of more modern historians (delightful to read a book in which Livy and the great HH Scullard crop up cheek-to-cheek so often), all consulted on the subject of what united these two commanders and what differentiated them. Take, for example, just one question: did they both bring soothsayers on campaign with them, as so many military leaders before and after did? The Roman general Marius had a seer named Martha; the Roman traitor Sertorius had a pet doe allegedly imbued with prophetic powers; what about our two stars, Hannibal who allegedly swore a childhood oath against all Romans and Africanus, whose mother Pomponia was allegedly impregnated by a snake?

Not much in either case, it seems:

But no such gifted creature … was to be found in the retinue of Hannibal or Scipio. Perhaps this silence is merely part of a general and unexplained decline in literary mentions of divinatory sacrifices before battles. But it has been suggested that named diviners were a feature of the early and late, but not the middle Roman Republic; and that the return of such individuals attached to great men was ‘part of the reorientation towards the dynasts.’

(The quote is from another premiere more-modern author, JA North)

Hornblower even spares some space for naming traditions, noting that “there was even a no very Hannibalic pope whose birth name was Annibale; he was Leo XII (pope from 1823 to 1829),” and that the Venetian author Francesco Scipione Maffei and the Roman Catholic Cardinal Scipione Borghese were both named after Scipio (“There were other cardinals with the name,” he writes. “But no actual pope was born a Scipione, so Hannibal is one up there”). On this heading, one of those delightful footnotes even touches on the first such example to come to mind: “The most famous modern bearer is fictional, Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs and in the film based on it,” the author writes, omitting the three other books, the four other movies, and the TV series. “The reason for the choice is said not be known for sure, but presumably the rhyme with ‘cannibal’ is behind it.”

Hannibal and Scipio is far more focused and specialized than its inspiration, Hitler and Stalin, with far more of the feeling of a monograph about it. But what it lacks in cohesive narrative drive it more than gains in fascination and overwhelming detail. No one interested in classical history (or how we do and don’t construct it) should miss this masterful book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News