Hannibal: Enemy Of Rome

For its age a very good biography of one of the worlds greatest generals. Written in the 60's it has the benefit of being written by the author as he traveled from New Carthage to and down Italy, attempting to follow Hannibals exact route as much as possible. This lends itself to some unique view points and scholarly conclusions on the authors part.

While the author is firmly in the 'Hannibal was motivated purely by revenge' camp believing the exact scene where his father makes him swear an oath etc he is fairly objective in dissecting the rest of the Roman sources and pointing out which is probably propaganda and which is not. The author has a knack for putting you on the ground level in some of the battle scenes which is excellent in show more my opinion. Very good read. show less

This is the only book I've read on Hannibal, I found the author took an interesting course with the book by trying to trace Hannibal's steps from Carthage to Rome. This gives you a picture of the landscape as it stands today and of the incredible journey Hannibal made in reaching Rome. Hannibal managed to stomp around Italy for 16 years with little to stop him, eventually Cicero defeated him using Hannibal's own tactics, to me it was a good read.

Short and sweet military history of the second Punic War. pretty boring and hard to finish. The descriptions of the battles were captivating but the history was very loosely put forward and many things were not mentioned, or skimmed over that deserved at least some attention. It would be a great book to start the subject with, but for a more thorough military history of the Second Punic War try Henry Dodge's "Hannibal".

I'm really interested in Hannibal, but this book sucked. Really poorly written.