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No verified portrait of me survives from antiquity. This bust from Capua may be me, or may be a Hellenistic general, or may be no one in particular. Carthage was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC — sixty years after my death. The Romans burned the city, and with it every document, every portrait, every archive. My history survives only through the accounts of my...

Thirty-seven war elephants, eighty thousand infantry, twelve thousand cavalry. Fifteen days to cross the Alps in October, 218 BC — late in the season, snow already on the higher passes. I lost perhaps half my army to cold, avalanche, ambush by the Gauls, and the descent on the Italian side, which was worse than the ascent.

The Romans had calculated this...

Cannae, 2 August 216 BC. I had eighty-six thousand Romans in a flat field on the Aufidius River, and forty thousand Carthaginians, Gauls, and Iberians. They had three times my numbers. I won by destroying all but fourteen thousand of them in an afternoon.

The mechanism was the double envelopment. I placed my weakest troops — the Gauls and Spanish infantry...

I kept my army of Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, Numidians, and Italians together in hostile country for sixteen years without a mutiny. Men who cannot speak each other's languages fight beside one another when they are paid honestly, led well, and win. Loyalty follows competence and fairness. It does not follow promises.

Rome pursued me even in exile — to Antiochus, to Prusias, to the end. When I saw that I was surrounded, I took the poison I carried for this purpose. I said: let us relieve the Romans of their long-standing anxiety about an old man. I had defeated them in every major battle they fought against me in Italy. They could not forgive it. I could not regret it.

At Ephesus, they asked me who the greatest general was. I said Alexander. The second greatest? Pyrrhus of Epirus. The third? Myself. Scipio Africanus, who had defeated me at Zama, was listening. He asked where I would rank myself if I had beaten him at Zama. I said: above Alexander. He did not seem displeased. A soldier understands a soldier's answer.

After Cannae, Maharbal urged me to march on Rome immediately: in five days we would dine on the Capitol. I did not. This decision has been my epitaph ever since. Perhaps I was wrong. But Rome's allies did not defect as I expected. Rome raised new armies while I waited for Carthage to supply me properly. My greatest miscalculation was not a battle. It was...

Lake Trasimene was a great slaughter. I placed my infantry along the road and hid my cavalry and light troops in the hills in a morning mist so thick that Flaminius could not see the trap closing. Fifteen thousand Romans died without forming a battle line. Rome learned at Trasimene that confidence in a march is not safety.

At the Trebia I sent cavalry across the cold river before dawn to provoke the Roman consul Sempronius. He was rash enough to take the bait. His army waded across in winter water before breakfast. Cold, wet, starving — then they met my line. A battle can be won before it begins if the enemy is persuaded to fight on your terms rather than his.

At Cannae I let Rome believe the centre was breaking. It was bending. Their confidence pulled them inward until my wings closed around them. A battle is often decided before the killing begins, in the mind of the enemy who mistakes invitation for weakness.

The Alps were not a road. That was precisely why they were useful. Rome expected armies where roads expected them. I brought mine where expectation failed: over snow, rock, hunger, and terror, down into Italy as if impossibility were merely poor reconnaissance.