What happened at the Siege of Saguntum?
In 219 BC Hannibal besieged Saguntum, an Iberian city on the east coast of Spain that had placed itself under Roman protection. After about eight months his army took it by storm. Rome demanded that Carthage hand Hannibal over, Carthage refused, and the Second Punic War began.1
In 219 BC a Carthaginian army camped below a fortified hill on the coast of eastern Spain and began to batter its walls. The city on the hill, Saguntum, held out for about eight months, hoping for help from Rome that never came. Its fall gave Rome the reason it cited for going to war, and within a year Hannibal was marching for the Alps. This is the story of why he attacked, what the city really was, how the siege was fought and ended, and why historians have argued for two thousand years about who started the war. It is the opening chapter of our guide to the Punic Wars and the long contest of Rome against Carthage.2
Why did Hannibal attack Saguntum?
Carthage had lost the First Punic War in 241 BC, and a few years later Rome took Sardinia from it as well. Polybius counted that seizure, and the tribute added to it, among the real causes of the next war. The family of Hamilcar Barca then built a new Carthaginian dominion in southern and eastern Spain, with its base at New Carthage. In about 226 BC Hamilcar's son-in-law Hasdrubal agreed with Roman envoys that the Carthaginians would not cross the river Iber, the Ebro, in arms.3
When Hasdrubal was murdered, the army in Spain chose Hamilcar's son Hannibal as its commander, and the government at Carthage confirmed him. He spent his first campaigns in the interior. Livy says he stormed Cartala, the chief town of the Olcades, wintered at New Carthage, and the next spring took the Vaccaean towns of Hermandica and Arbocala; Hermandica is identified with Salamanca. On his way back a coalition that Livy puts at 100,000 men attacked him at the Tagus and was broken by his cavalry and forty elephants.4
The sources disagree on Hannibal's motives. Polybius says he at first kept clear of the city, following his father's advice not to hand Rome an open pretext, and then attacked it to deny the Romans a base in Spain, to cow the tribes, to secure his rear and to win money and supplies. The tradition preserved by Zonaras says he wanted war with Rome and was after the city's wealth.5
The spark was a local quarrel. Livy says Hannibal stirred up the Saguntines' neighbors, the Turdetani. Appian reverses the roles: a people he calls the Turbuletes complained that the Saguntines were raiding their land, and Hannibal sent their envoys to Carthage with letters claiming that Rome was turning Carthaginian Spain against its masters. Enrique Hernández Prieto notes that each version puts the blame on the other side.6
Was Saguntum a Roman ally?
Saguntum lay well south of the Ebro, so on Polybius's reading of the treaty Hasdrubal had not promised to leave it alone. Polybius instead rests Rome's claim on a separate bond. Some years before the war, he writes, the Saguntines had placed themselves under Roman protection, and during a civil quarrel they had asked Rome, not Carthage, to settle it. Hannibal told the Roman envoys who came to him that in that settlement the Romans had unjustly put some leading Saguntines to death.7
Later writers made the case stronger. Livy says the treaty with Hasdrubal itself guaranteed the freedom of the Saguntines, and Appian even places the city between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, which is wrong. Most recent scholars, Eduardo Sánchez Moreno notes, read the treaty as a military limit set on Carthage alone. He argues that Roman annalists of the second and first centuries BC reread it through the later quarrel over war guilt, turning that limit into a frontier between two empires.8
No ancient writer says when Saguntum came under Roman protection, and Polybius says only that it was several years before the time of Hannibal, a phrase Eckstein calls very vague. Modern proposals range from the Roman treaty with Carthage of 348 BC, through about 231 BC, to the years just after the Ebro treaty. Hernández Prieto, reviewing the debate, thinks the later date most likely and suggests that the Roman arbitration removed a faction friendly to Carthage, which would explain both Hannibal's anger and the city's later unity. Arthur Eckstein points to another remark of Polybius, that Hannibal kept clear of Saguntum on his father's advice: he dates the bond to before Hamilcar's death around 228 BC, with a legal basis in the Roman treaty with Carthage of 348 BC, so that it was no provocative novelty.9
Who were the Saguntines?
Livy and Appian call Saguntum a colony of the Greek island of Zacynthus, and Livy adds settlers from Ardea in Italy. He describes it as the richest city beyond the Ebro, about a mile from the sea, grown wealthy on trade by land and sea.10
Modern scholars see it differently. Saguntum was an Iberian town on a hilltop, of a kind common in the region, and its own coins call it Arse. A Greek origin is now ruled out, though trade made the town strongly Hellenized. María José Estarán Tolosa argues that the legend of Zacynthus was probably worked up only in the first century BC. The town had a port, the site now called El Grau Vell, about 6.5 kilometers from the walled settlement on the hill, and it struck coins on Greek models from the third century BC.11
The Saguntines had their own interests. A rich trading city on the edge of Carthaginian Spain, it looked to Rome for support against neighbors who looked to Carthage. Sánchez Moreno stresses that communities like Arse pursued regional aims of their own, which the surviving sources, written from Rome's side, mostly leave out.12
How was the siege fought?
Hannibal ravaged the city's farmland and attacked from three sides. Livy says he aimed at a corner of the wall that overlooked gentler, more open ground, pushed up siege sheds and brought rams against it, but a huge tower and an unusually high wall stopped him. The defenders answered with missiles and sorties. While approaching the wall too carelessly, Hannibal was hit in the thigh by a javelin, and the alarm nearly made his men abandon the siege works. Zonaras also records that he was badly wounded.13
Livy describes the Saguntines' special weapon, the falarica: a javelin with an iron head three feet long, wrapped in tow and pitch and set alight, so that even when it stuck in a shield the soldier had to throw the burning shield away. When the rams finally brought down three towers and the wall between them, the two sides fought in the breach. The Saguntines threw up a new wall behind the gap, and Zonaras says a sortie once drove out Carthaginians who had broken in.14
The siege dragged on. Hannibal had to leave to put down a rising of the Oretani and Carpetani, and Maharbal, son of Himilco, kept up the pressure. Livy says a Saguntine named Alco slipped out to ask for terms and stayed with the enemy when he heard them: restitution to the Turdetani, surrender of all gold and silver, and departure with one garment each to wherever the Carthaginians chose. A Spaniard in Hannibal's service, Alorcus, then brought similar terms to the city's senate, but the Saguntines never accepted them.15
How did Saguntum fall?
The ancient accounts of the end differ. Livy says the leading men piled public and private gold and silver on a fire in the forum and many threw themselves into it, a tower then collapsed, and Hannibal took the town with his whole army, ordering every adult male killed. Appian says the Saguntines melted their gold and silver with lead and bronze to make it useless, then made a night sortie in which they all died, while women threw themselves from roofs or killed their children and themselves; an enraged Hannibal had the surviving adults tortured to death. Zonaras tells of a truce, valuables burned and a last hopeless sally.16
Polybius, the earliest and most sober of them, says only that Hannibal took the city by storm after eight months, kept the money for his own purposes, shared the captives among his soldiers according to merit and sent the rest of the spoil to Carthage. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana notes that the destruction was not total: prisoners were taken and part of the booty was public.17
Polybius dates the siege to 219 BC and gives eight months; Zonaras agrees on the length, and Livy repeats it as the view of some writers. The Catalan encyclopedia places it from spring to autumn of that year; Arthur Eckstein runs it from spring 219 BC into the following winter. Livy's own chronology muddles the year and puts the fall in 218 BC. Luciano Pérez Vilatela notes that current scholarship sides with Polybius, and traces Livy's error to his sources and to the way they counted the year.18
Why did Rome not help Saguntum?
According to Livy, the Senate first sent two envoys, Publius Valerius Flaccus and Quintus Baebius Tamphilus, to warn Hannibal off. He sent word to the harbor that it was unsafe for them to come on and that he had no time for embassies, so they sailed on to Carthage. Appian says the Senate debated sending help but held back, because the treaty named the Saguntines only as free and autonomous, not as Roman allies.19
Polybius says Rome had expected to fight in Spain, with Saguntum as its base, but was busy with a war across the Adriatic in Illyria, and Hannibal's quick capture of the city carried the war to Italy instead. Jona Lendering of Livius.org also blames the Second Illyrian War for leaving the town without relief. Theodor Mommsen judged harshly that Rome wasted the months of the siege on a petty Illyrian war, when a landing in Spain could have saved its client. Hernández Prieto adds a political reading: the stubborn resistance suggests the Saguntines expected Roman help, and a group in the Senate may have encouraged them to hold on until the new consuls took office.20
How did the siege start the Second Punic War?
After the city fell, Rome sent a second embassy to Carthage with a blunt demand: hand over Hannibal and his council, or accept war.21
The Carthaginians argued their case. The treaty with Hasdrubal, they said, had never been ratified by Carthage, just as Rome had once refused to be bound by the first peace terms of Lutatius until its people approved them, and the Saguntines had not been Rome's allies when the peace of 241 BC was made. In the tradition preserved by Zonaras, the statesman Hanno argued against drawing a war on Carthage over foreign complaints, but the younger men and Hannibal's partisans fiercely opposed him.22
The Roman envoy gathered a fold of his toga and told the Carthaginians it held war and peace: they could choose. They told him to give whichever he liked. He let the fold fall and said he gave them war.
Polybius, who tells the scene, calls the speaker simply the eldest of the envoys; the tradition in Zonaras names him Fabius. The Carthaginian council accepted war.23
The envoys then toured Spain looking for allies. Livy says the Bargusii welcomed them, but the Volciani answered that the nations of Spain saw in the ruins of Saguntum a sad and emphatic warning not to trust Rome, and ordered them out. Hannibal wintered at New Carthage and set out for Italy the next spring.24
Who was to blame for the Second Punic War?
Polybius already argued the question. He separated the beginnings of the war, the siege of Saguntum and the crossing of the Ebro, from its causes: Hamilcar's anger, Rome's seizure of Sardinia and the Barcid success in Spain. If Saguntum was the cause, he wrote, Carthage was in the wrong; if Sardinia was, Carthage had good reason to fight. He also warned readers not to trust the Roman senator and historian Fabius Pictor simply because of his rank.25
Modern historians still disagree. Hernández Prieto sums up R. M. Errington's view that the war grew from mutual misreading, then rejects it: a Roman alliance with a city inside the Carthaginian sphere could only be read as a provocation. Sánchez Moreno calls the sources overwhelmingly Roman and the link between treaty, Saguntum and war guilt a construction of the historical tradition. Arthur Eckstein, answering W. V. Harris's picture of Rome as the aggressor, concluded that it was Hannibal, not Rome, who sought to change the status quo south of the Ebro. Lendering considers the legal question unsolvable.26
Hannibal's own logic matters too. Hernández Prieto points out that no source says he denied the treaty's validity, and that he did not cross the Ebro until war had been declared; he may have aimed to secure Spain rather than to start a war with Rome. The Roman tradition told another story, of a boy sworn to hate Rome who wanted war from the start.27
What happened to Saguntum after the siege?
Hannibal used the captured fortress to hold hostages, the sons of leading Iberians, as a guarantee of their peoples' loyalty. In 217 BC an Iberian named Abilyx persuaded the Carthaginian commander Bostar to release them, then handed them to the Roman generals Publius and Gnaeus Scipio, who sent them home and won over many tribes. Mommsen also notes that Hannibal held hostages from the Spanish communities in the stronghold of Saguntum.28
The Romans took Saguntum back later in the war, rebuilt it and punished the neighbors whose quarrel had started the siege. Livy places this in his narrative of 214 BC, but Pérez Vilatela, following current scholarship, and the Treccani encyclopedia date it to 212 BC; the Real Academia de la Historia gives 213 to 212 BC.29
Saguntum became a federated city allied to Rome. Its coins kept Iberian script for decades and added Latin legends only from the 130s BC, and it became a Roman municipium late in the first century BC. Its theater, built in the middle of the first century AD on the north slope of the castle hill, held about 4,000 spectators.30
Where was Saguntum? Sagunto today
Saguntum is modern Sagunto, in the province of Valencia. Its castle hill controls the coastal corridor and the valley of the Palancia leading inland. The Iberian town of Arse stood on the western part of the hill. The walls seen today are mostly an Islamic circuit of the eleventh century with Gothic, Renaissance and Napoleonic-era repairs, resting in places on the Ibero-Roman fortification; a stretch of Iberian wall at Tres Pouets is closed to visitors.31
The castle has been a protected historic monument since 1931 and holds Iberian, Roman, Islamic and later remains. The town's master plan for the castle notes that excavations in the 1970s explored only one stretch of the Iberian wall, so the exact extent of Arse is still unknown, and it recalls that local memory pairs Saguntum with Numantia as a heroic city. Finds from the town, among them an inscription honoring Scipio, are shown by the Museo de Arqueología de Sagunto and in the epigraphic collection on the castle hill.32
