WHAT IF...HANNIBAL HAD TAKEN ROME?

Professor Greg Woolf talks to Nige Tassell about what might have happened to Rome and the Romans had the Carthaginian military mastermind managed to conquer the city

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When he led his men and his elephants through the Alps in 218 BC, Hannibal had Rome firmly in his sights. But after several notable victories - most notably the Roman annihilation at Cannae two years later - and despite remaining on the Italian peninsula for the next 15 years, the Carthaginian general failed to conquer the city, suffering from a depletion in manpower and lacking the necessary equipment to breach Rome's city walls.

But what if Hannibal had been successful? How would European culture have been different? And would the Roman empire have still risen to dominate the continent for centuries? Greg Woolf - Ronald J Mellor professor of ancient history at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose books include The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Rome: An Empire's Story (Oxford University Press, 2012) doesn't believe the Carthaginian capture of Rome would necessarily have meant the extinction of the Romans.

"The most likely scenario is that the Romans would have been forced into a humiliating peace, maybe had war indemnities imposed on them, and lost their leadership role in Italy. Rome was already a huge city by ancient standards at the time of the Hannibalic War, and it may have struggled to stay so large without its position of power. Most likely, we'd have seen a smaller, weaker city-state, much more like the Italian cities that had been defeated in actuality."