Who won the Battle of Ilipa?
Rome won. In 206 BC, near Ilipa (modern Alcalá del Río, north of Seville), Publius Cornelius Scipio, later called Africanus, routed the largest army Carthage still had in Spain, led by Hasdrubal son of Gisgo and Mago. He switched his Roman and Spanish troops on the day of battle and outflanked both enemy wings.1
For a decade the Second Punic War was fought in Spain as fiercely as in Italy. Spain was Carthage's richest province, the base from which Hannibal had marched on Rome, and the source of the silver and soldiers that kept his war going. In the spring of 206 BC its last great army met the young Roman commander Publius Cornelius Scipio on a plain beside the river Baetis, today's Guadalquivir. By nightfall that army was beaten, and within months Carthaginian rule in Spain had collapsed.2
This is the story of Ilipa from both sides: why the Carthaginian generals decided to stake everything on one battle, how Scipio fooled them with a single change in his battle order, the storm that saved their camp, the pursuit down the river and what the victory opened, from Gades to Africa. It belongs to our guide to the Punic Wars; for the man himself, see our life of Scipio Africanus.
Why was the Battle of Ilipa fought?
Rome had sent the brothers Publius and Gnaeus Scipio to Spain in the first years of the war to keep Carthaginian armies there from reinforcing Hannibal. In 211 BC both were defeated and killed, after their Spanish allies deserted them. The next year the Senate gave the Spanish command to Publius' son, also named Publius Cornelius Scipio. In 209 BC he took New Carthage, the Carthaginian capital in Spain, by surprise, and in 208 BC he beat Hasdrubal Barca at Baecula.3
Hasdrubal Barca slipped away northward and crossed into Gaul and then Italy to join his brother, only to be destroyed on the Metaurus in 207 BC. In Spain the war went on. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, who was not of the Barcid family, spread his troops among the fortified towns of the south and refused battle, and Scipio, unwilling to waste a season besieging town after town, withdrew after his brother Lucius had stormed the town of Orongis.4
Why did Carthage risk a pitched battle?
Carthage had not given up on Spain. It sent fresh troops from Africa under a general named Hanno, who joined Mago Barca, Hannibal's brother, in raising Celtiberian mercenaries, though a Roman column under Marcus Junius Silanus scattered that force and captured Hanno. For the campaign of 206 BC Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, whom Livy calls the greatest and most distinguished general of the war after the Barcids, and Mago gathered every man they could raise in southern Spain.5
H. H. Scullard explains their choice. After the Metaurus, waiting for the war to be decided in Italy no longer made sense: only a victory in Spain could still free troops and money for Hannibal, while a slow defensive war would let Scipio win the towns of the south one by one. The Spanish historian José Millán León adds a second reason: the lower Guadalquivir valley was the last Carthaginian heartland in Spain, the road to Gades and to the silver mines of the Sierra Morena, which paid the mercenaries.6
So the two generals marched to Ilipa, a town on the Baetis, and camped at the foot of the hills with an open plain in front of them. Polybius describes the ground as well suited for a pitched battle, and Livy says the two generals had resolved not to refuse one.7
How big were the armies at Ilipa?
The ancient figures differ. Polybius gives Hasdrubal 70,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 32 elephants. Livy gives about 50,000 infantry and 4,500 cavalry, and adds that some writers claimed 70,000 foot. Appian, who follows a different tradition, has 70,000 foot, 5,000 horse and 36 elephants.8
Scipio, by Polybius' count, brought 45,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry, including Spanish allies collected on the march: Silanus brought 3,000 foot and 500 horse raised by a chieftain named Culchas. In the Cambridge Ancient History B. L. Hallward thought the Roman army perhaps 40,000 strong, with little more than 25,000 Roman troops, and Adrian Goldsworthy reckons that only just over half of Scipio's men were Roman or Italian.9
Modern historians distrust the largest Carthaginian figure. Hallward thought Polybius' total came from an inferior source that inflated it to Scipio's greater glory, and Gaetano De Sanctis judged the scale of the battle smaller than Polybius makes it appear. What everyone agrees on is that Scipio had fewer men than his enemy, and that a large part of his army was Spanish.10
What happened in the days before the battle?
Scipio knew how his father and uncle had died. Polybius says he did not dare rely on his Spanish allies to win the battle, yet without them he was too weak to fight; he decided to use them for a show of numbers while his own legions did the real fighting.11
As the Romans were pitching camp on low hills facing the enemy, Mago and the Numidian prince Masinissa charged with the Carthaginian cavalry, hoping to catch them at work. Scipio had foreseen it and had hidden horsemen behind a hill. Their sudden charge broke the attack, and the Carthaginian cavalry was driven back to its camp with loss.12
For several days afterward both armies drew up on the plain between the camps without fighting, apart from skirmishes of cavalry and light troops. Each day Hasdrubal led out late, with his best infantry, the Libyans from Africa, in the center, his Spanish troops on the wings and the elephants in front of the wings; each day Scipio came out later still, with his Romans in the center facing the Libyans and his Spaniards on the wings. Livy and Liddell Hart both say Scipio let this pattern become fixed in both camps before he changed it.13
What did Scipio change on the day of battle?
On the evening before the battle Scipio ordered his men to feed themselves and their horses before dawn. At first light his cavalry and light troops rode up to the Carthaginian camp and attacked the outposts, and behind them the legions marched onto the plain. There Scipio formed his line in the reverse of his usual order: the Spaniards in the center, the Romans and Italians on the wings.14
Hasdrubal, roused by the shouting, had no time to think. He sent his cavalry and light troops against the Roman horsemen and drew up his infantry below his camp in its usual order, the Libyans in the center. His men went into line without breakfast. As Goldsworthy puts it, by the time Hasdrubal saw what Scipio had changed it was too late to change his own orders.15
How was the Battle of Ilipa fought?
Scipio did not attack at once. The skirmishing went on through the morning while the hungry Carthaginians stood in the sun; the legions did not charge the wings until about the seventh hour, around midday. Then Scipio drew his light troops back through the gaps in his line, placed them behind his two wings and advanced.16
At a short distance from the enemy, about a stade by Polybius' account, he ordered the Spaniards in the center to keep advancing slowly. On the right wing, which he led himself, and on the left, under Lucius Marcius and Silanus, the leading cavalry squadrons, light troops and maniples turned outward into column, marched past the ends of the Carthaginian line, wheeled and came back into line against its flanks. Polybius describes the movement step by step. Hallward thought his account full of unsolved, perhaps insoluble difficulties, and Georg Veith wondered whether the maneuver itself or only its description was more complicated than it needed to be; Scullard, who studied it closely, judged it complicated but, followed step by step, in the main coherent.17
The elephants, struck with missiles by the cavalry and light infantry, panicked and did as much harm to their own side as to the Romans. The Spanish troops on the Carthaginian wings fought hard, but they were facing the best Roman and Italian soldiers, and as the heat grew they weakened from hunger. In the center the Libyans, the best part of Hasdrubal's army, never fought at all: if they left their place to help the wings, the Spaniards in front of them would follow, and those Spaniards never came close enough to engage. De Sanctis and Georg Veith both saw in Scipio's plan an echo of Hannibal's tactics at Cannae.18
The Carthaginian wings gave way, step by step at first, then in a rush to the foot of the hills. The Carthaginians tried to make a stand there, but the Romans pressed on and the whole army fled to its camp. Only a sudden cloudburst stopped the Romans from taking the camp that day. Veith saw no reason to doubt the storm, and Scullard thought the midday heat may well have broken in one.19
How did the Carthaginian army retreat?
The defeat broke the loyalty of Hasdrubal's Spanish allies. Attenes, chief of the Turdetani, deserted to Scipio with a large force, and two fortified towns were handed over to the Romans with their garrisons. Fearing that his army would melt away, Hasdrubal broke camp in silence that night.20
Livy says Scipio's guides took the Romans by a shorter road to the Baetis, so that Hasdrubal found the crossing closed and turned along the river toward the Ocean. The Roman cavalry and light troops caught his column and harried it until the legions came up; then, in Livy's words, it was a slaughter rather than a battle. Hasdrubal escaped to the hills with about 6,000 men, many without arms, and fortified a camp on a steep height.21
His men began to desert. Since the sea was not far away, Hasdrubal sent for ships and fled by night to Gades, leaving his army behind. Scipio left Silanus with 10,000 foot and 1,000 horse to finish the siege, Mago sailed to Gades on the ships Hasdrubal sent back, and the rest of the army broke up. Masinissa met Silanus in secret and crossed to Africa, the first step toward his change of sides.22
How many died at the Battle of Ilipa?
Nobody knows. Polybius and Livy give no casualty figures, as Goldsworthy notes. Appian, whose account places the fighting near Carmo (modern Carmona) and differs in many details, puts the Roman dead at 800 and the Carthaginian at 15,000. Millán León warns that Appian's narrative is a string of anecdotes to be used with great caution. De Sanctis, for his part, thought the bulk of the Carthaginian army probably escaped, some by sea and some to the fortified towns of the province.23
Who won the Battle of Ilipa, and why does it matter?
Rome won, and the victory ended Carthaginian power in Spain. Livy closes his account with the words that the Carthaginians were thus driven from Spain under the command and auspices of Publius Scipio. Mago held out in Gades for some months; when he left by sea in the autumn of 206 BC for a failed attempt on New Carthage, the city shut its gates against him, and he had its chief magistrates crucified before sailing to the Balearic Islands. Gades then went over to Rome, and centuries of Carthaginian presence in Spain came to an end.24
Military writers have admired the battle ever since. The British theorist B. H. Liddell Hart wrote that “Military history contains no more classic example of generalship” and praised Scipio's double outflanking of an enemy whose center was fixed in place. Scullard, quoting him, was more measured: the maneuver left Scipio's own center isolated and could have been punished had Hasdrubal's Libyans charged, yet it held the enemy's best troops while the wings were destroyed. Veith went further: in his view no true envelopment was achieved, since the Carthaginians could fall back to the front, and the storm saved them from a ruinous pursuit rather than from encirclement.25
Goldsworthy warns against measuring Ilipa against Cannae, since the two battles were fought in very different circumstances. What Scipio showed, in his view, was mastery of the formal battle: he decided when and how the fight would happen, and wrong-footed his opponent much as Hannibal had wrong-footed Roman commanders in 218 to 216 BC.26
The victory also turned Scipio toward Africa. Polybius reports that when his friends urged him to rest, Scipio replied that until then the Carthaginians had made war on Rome, but now fortune allowed Rome to make war on Carthage. That year he sailed with two warships to visit Syphax, king of the Masaesyli in Numidia, and arrived just as Hasdrubal son of Gisgo did; the two enemies dined at the king's table.27
Before leaving Spain, Appian writes, Scipio settled his sick and wounded soldiers in a town he named Italica after Italy. The Spanish archaeologist Pilar León-Castro describes it as a military post placed in a nearby Turdetanian village after the victory at Ilipa, the seed of the Roman city near modern Seville that would later produce the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Scipio was elected consul for 205 BC and in 204 BC landed in Africa, where his campaign led to the Great Plains and to Zama.28
How do we know what happened at Ilipa?
The fullest account is Polybius', but his text breaks off after the storm. Livy follows Polybius closely, so for the battle itself the two are one line of evidence rather than two; for the retreat, where Polybius is lost, Livy is the main source. Appian preserves a separate and less reliable tradition, with the Carthaginian muster at Carmo, a claim of divine guidance, a personal charge by Scipio and his own casualty figures.29
Even the year is disputed. Livy places Ilipa in 206 BC. De Sanctis and Hallward moved it to 207 BC, judging that Livy had crowded too many events into one year; Scullard argued that a timetable can still fit everything into 206 BC, and Stéphane Gsell, the historian of Carthage, keeps 206 BC.30
Where was the Battle of Ilipa fought?
Ilipa stood on the right bank of the Baetis, on the site of modern Alcalá del Río, a short distance north of Seville. Livy calls the town Silpia, and the manuscripts of Polybius give a garbled name that editors correct to Ilipa. Excavations published by the Andalusian regional government have found there the remains of the Turdetanian settlement and of the forum of the later Roman town, Ilipa Magna.31
The exact battlefield is less certain. In 1936 Scullard proposed that the Roman camp stood on a hill called Pelagatos, 79 meters high and about 10 kilometers northeast of Alcalá del Río, with the Carthaginian camp on another hill some 5 kilometers away and a plain between them. Adolf Schulten, who visited the hill in 1940, at first agreed, then voiced doubts in 1943.32
Spanish scholars have debated the question since. Ramón Corzo and Antonio Sancho Royo, giving weight to Appian, placed the battle south of the river near Carmona. Millán León argued that Livy's account of a retreat that found the Baetis crossing closed only makes sense north of the river: in his reconstruction Hasdrubal gathered his army at Carmo, as Appian says, then crossed north to hold the ford near Ilipa, so that both ancient traditions are partly right.33
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