Ephesus was totally a date, seriously

[dhampyresa]

sineala : I wish to hear all about your love for Hannibal and Scipio (or Hannibal/Scipio, as the case may be).

It was probably all my dad's fault, at first. After that, it was mostly my fault.

I can't remember when I first heard about Hannibal, but I must have been pretty young, because I remember being eight or so on top of the Alps, looking at the part that didn't have any people skiing on it yet and was just fresh snow as far as the eye could see, and, once the intila awe died down, thinking 'And they did it with elephants?!'.

My father, my brother and me have spent several dinners arguing on the relative merits of various generals. I am always and forever Team Hannibal, my brother is Team Napoleon and my dad is Team French Cavalry Victory on the Netherlands Fleet. We are totally objective and not biased at all. It's during one of these conversations that I realised that if Hannibal and Scipio had been on the same side, they could have conquered the world.

And then I was sad, because I was under the impression they'd never met each other; I thought that was an awful mistake on History's part.

Last year, around late November/early December, my brother mentionned Hannibal and Scipio meeting at Ephesus, because he knew I'd be interested. Boy, was I ever. While I was looking for sources on that meeting, I found out that both Scipio and Hannibal died under mysterious circumstances, with no records of death or funeral, at an unknown date around 183 BCE.

If you don't think that means they both faked their own death to have adventures together, you're entitled to your opinion, but it is the wrongest opinion that was opinioned. As far as I'm concerned, that really happened and nothing will ever convince me otherwise.

As for why I ship them... You have to understand that my default is frendshipping instead of just plain shipping, but either way, these two are all about each other.

I mean that in the most literal way possible, tat their lives are wrapped up with each other's on such a fundamental level that neither of them would be the person they are without the other there. Admittedly, this goes more Scipio than for Hannibal, in that I can (just barely) imagine what Hannibal would be without Scipio, but I can't even begin to do the opposite.

From the moment Hannibal crosses the Alps and possibly even earlier, Rome becomes all about kicking Hannibal out of Italy. Scipio spends his early adulthood with that threat looming over him, sometimes up close and personal (Trebbia, Cannae). When he moves to Spain, a lot of his early tactics are derived from Hannibal's, something he never quite gets rid off. If you were to say he's been planning the battle of Zama his whole life, you would most likely be correct. The reason Scipio is still remembered to is because he's the guy who beat Hannibal. Everything else he ever did pales before that achievement. Hell, even his very name, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, he owes to Hannibal.

At some point, Hannibal becomes all about Scipio too. It's all arguable until Zama, (I like to think that the moment that really made Hannibal sit up and take notice was the fall of Carthago Nova, personally) but then, it's not. It's really really not. Zama is the first battle Hannibal's lost. This is the first time he's been defeated, by a Roman even! And no matter how close a call it was, he still lost. There is no way that, having been the absolute best at what he does for all of his life so far, he wouldn't obsess over this defeat, wouldn't want to know who he lost to. He's going to learn that Scipio and his shock troops are veterans of Cannae and he's probably going to see this as his one mistake coming back to haunt him again. If he'd marched on Rome then, he wouldn't be defeated now. So he blames himself, more than Scipio, and now Scipio isn't his enemy anymore, because the war is over, but someone he can talk too, someone who'll understand when he talks strategy, someone who'll laugh when told that if he hadn't defeated Hannibal at Zama, Hannibal would have been the greatest general that ever lived, instead of the third greatest.

I think they bring out the best in each other. No. I think they make each other better people.

Hannibal's arrogant, because he's the best at what he does. He's the kind of man who crosses the Alps in winter. That takes enormous amounts of will and the arrogance to say that you'll "find a way or make one". You have to be extremely proud to be willing to take on Rome on a finite army, because how are you going to get back-up in Italy?

Then along comes Scipio, and Zama.

Here, Hannibal learns that even if he is 95% as smart and competent as he thinks he is, there's still that 5% that he's not and Scipio will be there to remind him every time he forgets. This is where Hannibal's arrogance turns to confidence, and maybe, just maybe, this is where he starts thinking outside of the elephant box into the snake bombs box.

Cannae makes Scipio into a coward. Each of those barely three thousand men (out of about a hundred thousand to Hannibal's fifty thousand) that survives Cannae gets branded a coward. But then Scipio sticks by them, and leads them on a series of victories in Spain and Sicily. In the eyes of Rome, there're still cowards, until Zama comes along. There, Scipio becomes a hero. He's the man who beat Hannibal, the saviour of Rome. Most of all, she shows Rome his men were never cowards and he shows himself that neither is he and that he is as smart as Hannibal is. That no matter how bad at politics he is or how bad his relationship with Rome gets (and it gets pretty bad there, towards the end), he is still the man who turned Hannibal from the greatest general in History to the third greatest and they both know it.

Scipio's a genius, but without Hannibal, no one would ever have known.

Why is no one else shipping it? I don't know. CATER TO ME, FANDOM. Here, have some links so you can ship it too and write me fic. Hannibal: Rome's Worst Nightmare (starring Alexander Siddig as Hannibal) and Extra Credits: The Punic Wars (cartoon-y and fun history of the Second Punic War).

TL;DR: If you don't think Hannibal and Scipio faked their deaths to run away together, you're WRONG WRONG WRONG OMG HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO WRONG?

Comments

[taiyou_to_tsuki.livejournal.com]

I WANT FIC.

I WANT NOVEL-LENGTH FIC.

I WANT AN ACTUAL BOOK.

I WANT TEN BOOKS.

[sineala.livejournal.com]

I SHIP IT. I SHIP IT. This is an awesome post and you should feel awesome. :)

Also, hey, I can believe that they faked their own deaths -- I read a book about Mithridates (who is also a fascinating figure) where at the end the author concluded that Mithridates ran away with his lover, who changed her name to the masculine version of it and became his historian.

I like your observation here that Scipio owes everything to Hannibal, even his name, because, wow, is that ever true. It's a good thing they had each other to fight, because, really, their brilliance would have been wasted on anyone else.

And sometimes I wonder what the world would look like now if Hannibal had kept going and taken Rome...