The Battle of Ilipa was fought in Spain in 206 B.C. between a Roman army commanded by P. Cornelius Scipio (Scipio Africanus) and Carthaginian forces under Hasdrubal Gisco and Mago, the brother of the renowned Hannibal. 

The engagement was one of the most important of the Second Punic War, for it signaled the permanent downfall of Carthaginian power on the Iberian peninsula.  Carthage’s expulsion from Spain denied it a critical source of raw materials and manpower; the region would soon become a staging ground for Rome’s final assault on the Punic heartland in north Africa.  As is the case with many ancient battles, we have only a vague conception of its unfolding.  Livy and Polybius both record it, but their accounts are not fully congruent; we are not even certain of the battle’s precise location.  Modern scholarship places the battle-site near Seville.

The Second Punic War has been called the first “world war” in Western history, in the sense that the belligerents fought each other for supremacy over a wide expanse of the known world.  Rome pursued a gradualist strategy against Carthage, similar to how the United States deployed its forces against Japan in the Pacific War:  it sought to capture Carthage’s foreign holdings, shut off her access to raw materials, and eventually confine her to a small geographic area.  Scipio controlled about 45,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry; most modern estimates assert that he was at a slight numerical disadvantage to the Carthaginians.  But Scipio was a shrewd and decisive commander, and this more than compensated for any deficiency in numbers.

After several days of indecisive skirmishing, Scipio believed he had taken proper measure of their strength and dispositions.  He ordered his light infantry and cavalry to rise before dawn, eat, and then attack Carthaginian outposts without delay.  The alarm was sounded in the Carthaginian camp, and the men were apparently deployed and arranged in battle order without having first eaten.  The movement of forces during the battle was complicated, but Scipio was essentially able to grind down the enemy’s flanks, while holding the Carthaginian center in place without engaging it.  Livy’s account of the battle is given in book XXVIII, chapter 13 of his history.  It is tinted with that frustrating vagueness so common among ancient historians, but it does provide the reader with a rudimentary flavor of the event.  The battle was “longer in duration and uncertain in outcome for a long while (longior et diu ambigua pugna fuit).”    

As the day wore on, the tenacious Romans were able to cripple the enemy’s flanks; Scipio then ordered his army to finish off the depleted and exhausted Carthaginians.  We are told that, from an original number of around 50,000, only around 6,000 men of Hasdrubal and Mago’s forces were able to escape.  The rest perished on the Iberian plain.  It was a terrifying and brutal contest; even though removed more than two millennia from the event, the modern reader shudders to contemplate images of the close-quarters fighting and the aftermath of the slaughter. Ancient combat was close and personal: shield pressed against shield, and armor against armor, as blades and limbs contested with each other in an uncontrolled fury. A haze of dust and dirt hung over all; and the cries of the wounded were rivaled by the grunts of murderous exertions.  

Yet it is what happened after the battle that most inspires the philosophical mind to contemplate the strange and mysterial links between death and birth.  Scipio decided in 206 B.C. to found a city for the veterans of his Spanish army, an urban habitation that would form the nucleus of a Roman colony.  He called his new city Italica, and it was located near the city of Hispanis (Seville).  Because no other cities were later built on top of it, Italica’s ruins are in a remarkable state of preservation.  It was the first Roman city to be constructed outside the Italic peninsula.  According to the historian Appian (VII.38), Italica was the birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian.  Like many archaeological sites around the Mediterranean, it was unprotected and unconscionably looted for many centuries.  Only in the 20^th century were the city’s protective boundaries defined and marked out for serious archaeological study. 

I have a good friend who visited Italica last week.  He sent me a number of photographs of the site, some of which I present below.  The mosaics are extraordinary, and provide a glimpse of what the city must have looked like in its heyday.  Thus from the carnage of Ilipa sprouted the sturdy walls of Italica, as so many Colchian dragon’s teeth sown in the rocky Iberian soil.  So in history does the blood of the fallen fertilize the growth of the new.       

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An audio version of this essay, read by the author, can be found here.

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Read more about the lives and achievements of great commanders of antiquity in the new translation of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders: