Talk:Hannibal

Hannibal is ranked as one of the best military commanders in history - By whom? RickK 04:57, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Doesn't everybody know that? :-) But his article in the OCD, by the eminent Howard Hayes Scullard, says "by common consent adjudged one of the world's greatest soldiers", so there you have it. Stan 05:09, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

OK, and what's the OCD? I don't necessarily disagree with the contention in the article, but it should probably say who thinks so. RickK 05:12, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Oxford Classical Dictionary. Most of my military history books are more specialized, so they don't have an opportunity to say "one of the best" about Hannibal. It would be good to have a specific source, like a top-10 list from some expert. I'm visiting library tomorrow, will see if I can find something. Stan 07:03, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I am a fan of Hannibal Barca, and am rather biased to him as opposed to the others on the list, with the possible exception being Alexander the Great. I believe however that it isn't within the spirit of Wikipedia to note anyone as being "one of the best" of any field without an independent source to qualify it. --Ahmed Stephens 07:20, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

---

This page is going to be moved to Hannibal Barca in the near future and Hannibal transformed to disambiguation page. Muriel 11:41, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Why? Out of the hundred-odd link to "Hannibal", maybe 1-2 are not to Barca, and it's always going to be that way. Just create a Hannibal (disambiguation) and link to it from the top, a la London. Stan 13:35, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Contents

1 Who Says He's the greatest? 2 The fate of Saguntum 3 Dating system 4 Who committed the suicide? 5 2006 film in Aramaic? 6 Misrepresentation

Who Says He's the greatest?

Perhaps we don't have any information on who says specifically that Hannibal was one of the greatest Generals. By comparison to his record on the battlefield and his brilliant strategies at which he used to attain victory to other famous generals, I would write in this article "Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in history, says I" or simply leave that which is already writen.

The fate of Saguntum

I was reading the Alexander Wiki and thinking "what a white wash" but then I thought what about Saguntum. I'v read the Livy account: the mass suicide and how Hannibal had givven orders to put all adult males to the sword. But it is so similar to the fate of Carthage that I smell Roman propaganda or is that the Hannibal fan in me speaking? Does anyone know what modern scholarship hav to say on this?

Dating system

Please excuse my ignorrance as I know little about wikipedia. Is BC and AD or BCE and CE the accepted format here?

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) allows either. The year articles themselves use "BC", so it's slightly favored. Since all Hannibal dates are in the same era, it's good style to only use "BC" the first time and then piping, as in "[[202 BC|202]]" for subsequent years. Exception is life dates, which are normally written "247-182 BC". Stan 12:29, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Who committed the suicide?

In the last sentence of the second paragraph, I assume that Hannibal commited suicide, not Prusias? The grammar makes it look like Prusias committed suicide, but it's ambiguous. -- Creidieki 17:59, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yeah it was Hannibal who committed suicide, and I've changed the sentence to make that clear. Prusias may have committed suicide too for all I know, but if he did, he did it mighty late for it to be about avoiding handing Hannibal over to the Romans. Binabik80 01:06, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

2006 film in Aramaic?

I removed the info that the 2006 film will be in Aramaic because I couldn't find anything anywhere to confirm it. The fact that its star is an English-speaker & that none of the English-language sites I visited mentioned its language strongly indicates to me that it's in English. Binabik80 02:16, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Misrepresentation

The problem isn't lack of citation to the Roman quotes. Rather, the problems with this section are many-fold: (1) It summarily dismissed the validity of the Roman accounts without a factual basis for doing so (attacking the source without providing anything that actually refutes the characterization is a logical fallacy); (2) it wasn't presented NPOV; and (3) doesn't deal at all with why the Romans' considered his tactics brutal/cruel. The flaws in this section are MAJOR, and until they get ironed out, it's inclusion "as is" is inappropriate. Brian Brockmeyer 04:53, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Let's take a look at the excised section:

Hannibal has suffered a long history of distortion. The only writings left to us are the very hostile Roman sources, and Rome considered him the greatest enemy it had ever faced. Livy gives us the idea that he was extremely cruel. Not only does this charge seem motivated by a general hatred of Hannibal as Rome's enemy, it is almost hypocritical. When Hannibal's successes had brought about the death of two Roman consuls, he searched vainly for one on the shores of Lake Trasimene, and he sent Marcellus' ashes back to his family in Rome. When Nero had accomplished his wonderful march back and forth to and from the Metaurus he flung the head of Hannibal's brother into Hannibal's camp. It would not seem that Hannibal was possessed of more cruelty than his opponents, yet the idea that he was still persists. Even Cicero, when he talked of Rome and her two great enemies, spoke of the "honorable" Pyrrhus and the "cruel" Hannibal.

And your objections, point by point:

1) It summarily dismissed the Roman accounts without a factual basis for doing so (attacking the source without providing anything that actually refutes the characterization is a logical fallacy)

This is simply not true. The paragraph states that all our sources for Hannibal were written by people hostile to him, which is true & is cited in every treatment of Hannibal of the Punic Wars I can ever remember reading. Two specific examples are used to criticise the Roman sources for calling him cruel—by implication, especially in the case of Cicero (who contrasts him with Pyrrhus), more cruel than the Romans or the Romans' other opponents. The original editor (who appears to have been anonymous) then provides an example of Hannibal's treatment of the defeated Romans (searching Trasimene for the consuls' bodies, & returning Marcellus' ashes to his family), and contrasts it with Roman behaviour (throwing Hasdrubal's head into the Carthaginian camp).

2) it wasn't presented NPOV

This is true, but I think is largely addressable without a major rewrite. The first sentence is certainly POV, but it can be removed without affecting the integrity of the rest of the paragraph. The same goes for the fourth sentence. Let the reader draw his own conclusions, rather than drawing for him.

3) doesn't deal at all with why the Romans considered his tactics brutal/cruel

This is true and will require some work, though I think that it would entail more of an addition to the section than a rewrite of it. The most famous example of Hannibal's cruelty is, I think, Saguntum—see above on this talk page for a discussion of why the questions about that story's credibility. Why the final decision was simply not to mention it, rather than to include & mention the reservations about it, I don't know. But this Misrepresentation section seems to me like the perfect place to include it. There are

I've reinserted the section & will now do some trimming for (2). (3) might take me a day or two to get to. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, Chapter 63 ("The Man and the Soldier") of Theodore Ayrault Dodge's has a pretty good dissection of the unreliability of the Roman sources on Hannibal. I'd like to reiterate, as a general principle, the necessity of bringing problems to an article's talk page before summary deletion of sections from articles. Binabik80 15:46, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)