Who won the Battle of the Great Plains?
Rome won. In 203 BC Publius Cornelius Scipio marched five days inland from Utica and routed the new army of the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, and the Numidian king Syphax on the Great Plains of the Bagradas valley, in modern Tunisia. Both allied wings fled at the first charge.1
In the spring of 203 BC the war between Rome and Carthage was being decided not in Italy, where Hannibal was still holding out in the far south, but in the river plains of North Africa. Publius Cornelius Scipio had landed near Utica the year before. After burning the winter camps of the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, and his Numidian ally King Syphax, he marched inland and destroyed their new army on a broad plain of the Bagradas valley that the ancient writers simply called the Great Plains.2
This is the story of the battle from all three sides: Scipio's gamble, the choices of the Carthaginian council and of Syphax, a king who was fighting his own war for Numidia, and the Spanish mercenaries who died where they stood. It belongs to our guide to the Punic Wars and leads straight to the Battle of Zama.
Why was the Battle of the Great Plains fought?
Scipio crossed from Sicily in 204 BC to carry the war to Africa and laid siege to Utica, a port north of Carthage. The siege failed, and he spent the winter in a fortified camp near the town, the Castra Cornelia.3
Carthage had two armies close by. One was its own, under Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo. The other belonged to Syphax, king of the Masaesyli, the largest and most powerful of the Numidian kingdoms, which reached across much of what is now Algeria. Syphax had once been courted by Rome, but Carthage won him back by letting him enlarge his realm at the expense of his Numidian neighbors and by giving him Hasdrubal's daughter Sophonisba as his wife.4
The Numidian question was the heart of the war in Africa. Syphax had driven his young rival Masinissa, heir to the smaller kingdom of the Massyli, into the mountains, and Masinissa now rode with Scipio. For the Spanish historian Enrique Gozalbes, the fight to the death between the two Numidias was the purely African reading of the war between Carthage and Rome.5
Over the winter Syphax offered to mediate: Carthage would leave Italy, Rome would leave Africa, and each would keep what it held between the two. Gozalbes points out what such a peace would have meant for the king: Carthage shut up in its own territory, Rome out of Africa, the Massyli subdued, and Syphax the arbiter of North Africa.6
How did Scipio burn the Carthaginian camps?
Scipio pretended to listen. His envoys to Syphax took experienced officers dressed as slaves, who studied the gates and the huts of the two enemy camps. Hasdrubal's men had built theirs of wood and boughs; the Numidians lived in huts of reeds and matting, many of them outside the rampart.7
At the beginning of spring he broke off the talks and attacked by night. Laelius and Masinissa set fire to Syphax's camp; when the Carthaginians ran out unarmed to help, thinking the blaze an accident, Scipio fell on them and fired their camp too. Hasdrubal got away with about 2,000 foot and 500 horse, and Syphax escaped as well. Polybius called the night the most brilliant and daring of all Scipio's achievements, though Adrian Goldsworthy notes that breaking off the talks the way Scipio did was legally questionable by the standards of the day.8
How many died is unknown. Livy says 40,000 were killed and over 5,000 captured; Appian has a little under 30,000 dead and 2,400 prisoners; Polybius gives no figure at all. H. H. Scullard judged Livy's total impossible, since the allies had a new army in the field within a month, and Goldsworthy doubts Polybius' own count of some 93,000 men in the two camps, an army that would have been very hard to feed through a winter.9
Why did Carthage and Syphax decide to fight on?
The disaster set off a fierce debate in Carthage. Three proposals were put to the council: to ask Scipio for peace, to recall Hannibal from Italy, or to rebuild the army and urge Syphax to keep fighting. The third won, backed, Livy says, by Hasdrubal and the whole Barcid faction, and Livy, no friend of Carthage, praised it as worthy of Romans in adversity.10
Syphax had begun to retreat to his own kingdom. What turned him was the arrival near the town of Abba of more than 4,000 Celtiberian mercenaries hired by Carthage in Spain, together with the pleas of his wife. In Carthage rumor made the Celtiberians 10,000 strong and invincible. Goldsworthy sees in their arrival a sign of how little of Spain Rome really controlled.11
Gozalbes argues that Syphax was not simply the fickle ally swayed by a woman whom the Roman tradition paints: he kept faith with the side he had chosen to the end. Within about thirty days the allies had a new army camped on the Great Plains, five days' march from Utica. Stéphane Gsell and Scullard read the choice of place the same way: far from Scipio, where Syphax could easily draw reinforcements from Numidia and the new levies could be trained in safety.12
How big were the armies at the Great Plains?
Polybius puts the allied army at no less than 30,000 men. Modern historians think it was smaller. Scullard suggested some 20,000; Gaetano De Sanctis perhaps 15,000, the nucleus of a larger army still being raised; and Georg Veith no more than 10,000, most of them the Celtiberians, since it took the whole Roman infantry to beat them.13
No ancient writer gives Scipio's numbers. He left part of his army and the fleet to keep up the siege of Utica and marched in light order. De Sanctis thought he had no more than one legion of heavy infantry and hardly more than 12,000 men in all; Scullard reckoned 12,000 to 15,000.14
How was the Battle of the Great Plains fought?
Scipio reached the Great Plains on the fifth day and camped on a hill about 30 stades, some 5.5 kilometers, from the enemy. The next day he came down into the plain and drew up about 7 stades, little more than a kilometer, away. For two days there was only skirmishing; on the fourth day both sides came out to fight.15
Scipio formed his infantry in the usual Roman three lines, the hastati in front, the principes behind them and the triarii at the rear, with the Italian cavalry on his right and Masinissa's Numidians on his left. Hasdrubal and Syphax put the Celtiberians in the center against the legions, Syphax's Numidians on their left and the Carthaginians on their right.16
The battle was decided on the wings. At the first charge the Numidians gave way before the Italian horse and the Carthaginians before Masinissa. Livy explains why: Syphax's men were mostly peasants and the Carthaginians raw levies, and De Sanctis adds the memory of the night of the burning camps.17
The Celtiberians stood. They did not know the country, so flight offered no safety, and having come from Spain to fight against Rome, they expected no quarter. While the hastati held them in front, Scipio led his principes and triarii out from behind the first line in column, half to the right and half to the left, and they closed on the mercenaries' open flanks. The Celtiberians were cut to pieces where they stood.18
Their stand saved their allies. While the Romans were busy with them, Syphax rode off with his cavalry to his own kingdom and Hasdrubal led the survivors back to Carthage. Night ended the killing.19
Why does the Great Plains matter in the history of tactics?
Scullard saw the battle as the next step from the tactics Scipio had used at Ilipa in Spain. The principes and triarii no longer simply fed the first line: each line became a unit that could march out and lengthen the front, so that the best troops, not the cavalry, did the outflanking, and Scipio could now encircle an enemy with his legions as Hannibal had done at Cannae with a riskier crescent. De Sanctis called it a brilliant idea: not yet a true reserve, but an offensive reserve that pointed toward one. Goldsworthy calls such maneuvers the trademark of Scipio's armies.20
There is a puzzle, which Veith first pointed out: why did the whole Roman infantry face only 4,000 Celtiberians, while two bodies of cavalry beat everyone else? Veith concluded that only a small part of the allied army was on the field. Scullard answered that the Celtiberians need not have formed the whole center, and that the loss of a weak detachment would hardly have thrown Carthage into such despair.21
How many died at the Great Plains?
No ancient source gives casualty figures. Polybius says only that the Celtiberians were cut to pieces almost to a man, while Syphax's cavalry and Hasdrubal's survivors got away. De Sanctis judged the material losses of the Carthaginians and Numidians small but the effect of the defeat immense: it broke the first core of a new resistance and, for the moment, cost Carthage the help of its powerful Numidian ally. Roman losses are not recorded.22
How was Syphax captured, and what happened to Sophonisba?
At a council after the battle Scipio split his army. Laelius and Masinissa went after Syphax with the Numidians and part of the legions, while Scipio took the towns around, some of which gave up gladly after years of hardship under Carthage, and then seized Tunis, in full view of Carthage.23
Syphax raised yet another army, mostly raw recruits. Laelius and Masinissa reached Numidia after fifteen days and met him in a battle that the Roman infantry decided. Syphax was thrown from his horse and captured. Appian tells it differently, with Masinissa himself seizing the king, a version Gozalbes doubts.24
Masinissa took Cirta, Syphax's capital, by showing its leading men their king in chains. Ovid's calendar of Roman festivals marks a victory of Masinissa over Syphax in late June, which the historian Patrick Marchetti reads as 22 June in the Roman calendar of the time and as the date of this final defeat; De Sanctis had referred the same line to the Great Plains.25
At Cirta, Livy says, Sophonisba met Masinissa at the palace door and begged not to be handed over to the Romans, and he married her that day. Scipio insisted that she was a captive of Rome, and Masinissa sent her poison, which she drank. The Treccani encyclopedia calls Livy's version a tradition that is certainly romanticized, and Gozalbes sees heavy melodrama in it. Appian has another story, in which Sophonisba sent envoys of her own to Masinissa and the captive Syphax warned Scipio against her.26
Whatever the truth, the outcome was political. Scipio publicly hailed Masinissa as king and gave him a golden crown, an ivory scepter and the robes of a Roman general in triumph. Rome now had its own Numidian king.27
How did the Great Plains lead to Zama?
The Great Plains made Carthage recall Hannibal. Its council sent envoys to Italy at once and, at the same time, sent its fleet against the Roman ships at Utica, which were fitted for the siege, not for battle. Scipio hurried back from Tunis and lashed his transports together in rows in front of his warships as a floating wall. The Carthaginians broke into the outer row with grappling irons and towed off some transports, but the warships were saved.28
When Syphax fell, the war party lost its hearing. A delegation of the most senior councillors came to Scipio, and he named his terms, as Livy gives them: prisoners and deserters returned, the armies withdrawn from Italy and Gaul, Spain and the islands given up, all but twenty warships surrendered, grain for the Roman army and an indemnity whose size the sources disagree on. Carthage accepted and sent envoys to Rome, but, as Livy and Cassius Dio both suggest, it had no intention of keeping the terms and was playing for time until Hannibal arrived.29
Hannibal left Italy, most probably in the autumn of 203 BC in Scullard's view. Livy has him groaning at the order and blaming not Rome but the Carthaginian senate. During the armistice Carthage seized Roman supply ships that a storm had driven into its bay, the truce broke down, and in 202 BC the two commanders met at Zama.30
Syphax did not see the end. Polybius says he was led in Scipio's triumph in 201 BC and died soon afterward in prison; Livy says he died shortly before the triumph at Tibur, where he had been moved from Alba, and was given a public funeral. The Treccani encyclopedia leaves the question open.31
Who won the Battle of the Great Plains, and why did it matter?
Rome won, decisively. In little more than a month, from the burning of the camps in March to the battle in April, Scipio destroyed two allied armies, and the capture of Syphax soon followed. Britannica sums up the battle as a double flanking movement that smashed the enemy.32
For Carthage it was a strategic turn. It had to bring Hannibal home and fight in Africa with an army it had to raise once more, while Masinissa's Numidian horse, which had won the Great Plains on the left wing, now served Rome. Zama would be fought on those terms.33
How do we know what happened at the Great Plains?
Almost everything comes from Polybius, whose book XIV survives only in fragments, and from Livy, who for the African war copied him closely. De Sanctis, Veith and Marchetti all treat Livy here as a version of Polybius, so the two are one line of evidence, not two.34
Appian, writing in the second century AD, does not describe the battle at all, and Gsell regards his account of these months as unreliable. Zonaras, summarizing Cassius Dio, has only a garbled note of Spanish troops attacking the Romans on the morning after the fire.35
No Carthaginian or Numidian account survives. The Roman tradition paints the Numidians as fickle; Polybius wrote that they were constant neither to gods nor men. Gozalbes calls Syphax perhaps the clearest example of a loser in this war, and notes that the historian H. Ghazi ben Maïssa has praised his dignity as an African against what he sees as Masinissa's collaboration with Rome.36
Where was the Battle of the Great Plains fought?
The Great Plains, Campi Magni in Latin, lay on the middle course of the Bagradas, the modern Medjerda, in northwestern Tunisia, about 120 kilometers upstream from Utica. Veith described a fertile plain some 25 kilometers long and 20 wide around Souk el Khemis, where four tributaries join the river.37
The exact battlefield is unknown. Veith placed it just north of Souk el Khemis, toward the Oued Bou Heurtma, but admitted that fixing it was problematic, as in every battle where the ground plays no part, and Gsell thought the spot could not be fixed at all.38
