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these major charges cannot be substantiated and there is no evidence—even in Livy’s own account—of any of them. It is as if the historian, having acknowledged Hannibal’s known virtues, suddenly became afraid of his own temerity and had to neutralise them with a recital of evil traits that would account for Rome’s justifiable hatred of him and, in the eyes of the gods, her righteous triumph over such a monster.
    It is even more curious that none of those later commentators on Hannibal (including Livy) ever found anything scandalous to say about his private life. Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, Tiberius, and almost all other Roman rulers of distinction are commonly accused of drunkenness, adultery, fornication, sodomy, or sadism, and the unfortunate Tiberius of almost every aberration that can be found in the textbooks of sexual pathology. The writers of antiquity, in fact, who managed to find some more or less scandalous anecdotes about nearly all the great men in their history, found themselves baffled when it came to Hannibal. The second-century historian Justin says almost reluctantly that his behaviour towards his female captives was such that ‘one would not think he was born in Africa’—an interesting example of early racial bias. The unreliable Appian, writing in the second century A.D., over three centuries after the events and basing his account on some unknown source, states that while wintering in Lucania in south-east Italy Hannibal indulged in luxurious living and ‘the delights of love’. It would have been scarcely surprising if he had; certainly not unnatural in a soldier who by then had been years away from his home in Spain. He had married in Castulo the daughter of the local chieftain, called Imilce and possibly of Greek blood. There is no certain record of any children, although tradition has it that she bore him a son. It is unlikely that Hannibal ever saw her again after he left on his expedition to Italy. Certainly it would have been politic for him to have married into the ruling caste of that city, for Castulo commanded the Silver Mountains of the Olcades people and their friendship was therefore important to the Carthaginians. The poet Silius Italicus, in his epic, Punica, pictures Imilce pleading with her husband to be allowed to go with him across the Alps and being refused. Elsewhere he says that the love of Hannibal and Imilce was one of memories.
    Just as no letters from Hannibal, whether to his wife or to anyone else, have been preserved (letters which might have told us more about the man than anything in the histories) so no bust or statue exists that can safely be identified with him. Of the coin portraits which may well depict him one of the most interesting was struck at Cartagena about 220 B.C., shortly after he had taken command. Since coins in the ancient world assumed for a mostly illiterate people an importance that it is difficult for the modern world to understand—being both pictures and pronouncements—it is very probable that Hannibal’s succession to the leadership would have been marked by the striking of a number of silver coins. The Cartagena coin shows a handsome young man (the beardless head of Melqart, the Phoenician Hercules), with a profile unlike a Greek or Roman in that the straight nose ends in nostrils with a Semitic flare. The full mouth is slightly down-turned and firmly delineated. The hair is curly and the eye large, prominent and thoughtful. It is interesting to note that this coin portrait is almost identical to a bronze bust of a young man found at Volubilis, Morocco, which on good authority has been claimed as being of Hannibal. Hair, eyes, nose, mouth and jawline are so similar to the coin as to make the attribution credible. This is not merely the head of a handsome young man, in the classic tradition, but of a thoughtful and powerful personality—quite different from the Antinous-like youths of which antiquity has yielded so