I love reading Hannibal. For those who need to visually see his exploits, there are tons of documentaries on Youtube. He did a “General Sherman” in Italy: right in the Romans frontyard and goated Roman armies into his trap. Always outnumbered, yet somehow wins. No one had more hatred of Rome than he did.
Those Romans always did fall for goats.
What he did was amazing — since politics had turned against him and his family and faction back in Carthage, he seldom received resupply of any kind, had to live off the land, and yet remained in Italy for sixteen years. Then he was done. Politicians haven’t changed much in the years since. Well, some of them haven’t, that is.
Had it not been for Hannibal, regularization of the Roman army probably wouldn’t have taken place, there wouldn’t have arisen a series of de facto kings (Julius Caesar wasn’t the first imper iter) who based their power on their control of successful armies, the importance of the hidebound aristocracy would not have declined in the way or at the time that it did, and history would not have unfurled quite the way that it did, being the product after all of specific series of acts by specific individuals.