I held his gaze. “Yes, Father,” was all I said. It was done.
“Good. Then your training will begin. Go back to your room. Hamilax will come for you.”
Within the hour, Hamilax and I were gone, I knew not where. We slipped out of Carthage through an obscure wicket gate, then walked east through terraces of olives and vines. A man met us. We mounted mules, went on.
Peaceful were the months that followed. Hamilax took me to a distant beach, three days’ ride from Hadrumetum, to a shore of turtles and high palms. Above the beach were cliffs of sandstone, caves. In one of these we made our home and the learning began.
Hamilax began to teach me, as he had been told, such things as I had need to know. I learnt of our gods, of Melkarth first, honoured by the Phoenicians, our ancestors, and how he waged a great war against Masiasbal to avenge the serpent queen. For forty ages they fought, then forty more, locked in bitter combat. From the depths of Tartessus they fought, to the high mountains of Ersiphonia until they came to the utmost bounds of the world. There the she-monster Masiasbal turned at bay, against the flaming walls of the world and, under a blood-red moon in the sight of women dragon-tailed, Melkarth slew her.
All this I learned and more. It was for Silenus to teach me Greek, but Hamilax was versed in the old Canaanite tongue of my people and this too he began to teach me, that which is written in the books of Sakkun-yathon.
Aesneth karith nago
Walkhah um ubefo
Karith an shem …
Being but a man I walk alone
Seeking in the darkness
Under the eye of god …
By day, I began to learn the ways of animals and how to trap them, the art both of the javelin and the sword. I went barefoot, like a shepherd. Of all my childhood, these were golden days.
Hamilax was a man of grudging words. One evening we were sitting on the beach, watching a huge and flaming sun set in the sky. I asked him what was the sun, and why it was leaving. “Ask your own heart, Hannibal,” he said. “Many things become clear to those who learn to ask their own hearts in silence.”
We returned to Carthage in silence, as we had gone. At home, nothing had changed. The servants went their way. The bakers baked, the weavers wove. I did not see my mother at first, for she had given birth. I had, I learned, another brother, Hasdrubal, but he was with a nursemaid. My mother was confined to bed. My brother Mago seemed afraid of me. We played no more. Something had come between us. We kept to separate ways. My father was away. I felt alone.
But Silenus had been told and a new learning had begun. Day after day I was with him alone. He had instructions that I was to learn not just Latin, but also Greek, the language of command for Carthaginian armies since the generalship of the Spartan mercenary, Xanthippus.
Both were hard, but as one year passed, then another, I began to see the rigour in the first, the beauty in the second. I owe much to Silenus, that wrinkled, stooped old man who knew so much, had seen so much. And he tried to make the learning fun. We had been studying the Latin imperative. “The imperative, Hannibal, is the voice of command. Study it with care, for you are born to command. It is a clear part of speech in Latin. The Romans are a people who command clearly and simply.”
But I didn’t find it clear at all. I foundered on the irregular imperatives. Rather than being angry, Silenus was patient. He made up for me mnemonics – I knew already that this word was from the Greek for “remember” – and still I remember them. “Dic the duc has no fer and that’s a fac – tell, lead, bear, do,” the irregular Latin imperatives. And we played with little poems. I thought we were just having fun, but of course Silenus was teaching me. He was pleased, I remember, with my:
Puella Carthaginis ridebat
Quam tigris in tergo vehebat.
Externa profecta
Interna revecta
Sed risus in tigre manebat.
There was a young lady Carthaga
Who rode with a smile on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
What else did I learn that shaped me? Of Alexander, great golden Alexander. As my Greek improved, Silenus brought from his chest and gave to me those treasured rolls of papyrus that were a copy of the work of Eumenes of Cardia, Alexander’s Ephemerides, his Journal. We read this together many times.
We studied again and again Alexander’s victories: how, at Issus, he made the Persians fight on unfavourable ground and then routed them with his cavalry, his golden armour gleaming in the sun. How, at the Hydaspes, he defeated even the great Indian elephants of King Porus or how, at Gaugamela, he showed the virtue of patience before the mortal strike. At Tyre Alexander was patient and, in the end, that great city fell for all its mighty walls.
Once my father came in when we were reading the Ephemerides. “Reading again, Hannibal? Silenus, I want a doer of deeds, not a reader of words.” But I knew what I was reading to do and what I did not even Alexander could have done. I had none of Alexander’s Macedonians. I took a mercenary army, men brought together from the corners of the earth, and held them together through fear and love. They were often hungry and unpaid, but they did not betray me. For sixteen years we fought in Italy alone.
But let my story tell itself. I am still in Carthage. I am six or seven. Silenus teaches me. I learn. Those days seem still. Each passes as the last. I sit alone with Silenus from breakfast. A slave brings us lunch. Then two hours more of learning, then my ride. An hour of instruction from Abdolonim, my father’s chief groom, then freedom to gallop far.
How good Silenus was. He would marry ride and lesson with Xenophon. “You can’t know too much Xenophon,” he would say. “Good for your Greek and even better for the life that awaits you.” So would we read from the Pen Hippikes, On Horsemanship. “Look well at the horn of the hoof. A thick horn makes for much sounder feet than a thin one. Take care, too, to see the hoofs are high front and back, not flattened …” Silenus told me that Xenophon wrote this for the instruction of his own sons, Gryllus and Diodorus. I liked to know that. I wondered what they were like, these sons. One fell at the battle of Mantinea, fighting the Thebans. “But how did he die?” I asked Silenus. He did not know. Bravely, I was sure.
So these days came and went untroubled, calm. Sometimes at night I would wonder at my solitude as I drifted into sleep. But I knew in my youth of something to come for which all this was preparation. I did not question. Then the messenger came.
I had never heard the gong before, though I passed it every day. It stood below the terrace of the great hall. Each morning, as I crossed the courtyard to my classroom, two slaves would be polishing its bronze surface, taller than a man, until it shone like a mirror. Above the crossbars of beki wood on which it hung was a great hammer, a thing as old, they said, as Carthage itself. This gong was heard as Aeneas deserted Dido, Queen of Carthage, and as she mounted her own funeral pyre in her madness and her grief. None knew who had sounded it.
Its sound that afternoon made my neck hairs bristle, so pure was the pitch. I was studying with Silenus. My boisterous brother Mago burst through the door. His stammer was always worse when he was excited. “H-H-H-annibal! A aa messs-senggger has come!” Outside, the household was already assembling in the yard. From below the gardens in their cages, my father’s elephants were trumpeting, disturbed by the gong. Hamilax was busy here and there, marshalling the folk, for all had come at the wondrous sounding of the gong, the kitchen slaves, the