ABSTRACT
Our only account of Hannibal’s sufeteship is Livy’s, and like most other episodes of Carthaginian history told by Greeks or Romans it is compressed and some details are unclear. Even so, it is firmly pro-Hannibal in tone, which suggests that though Livy probably drew on Polybius for it, Polybius himself may well have used the account of someone like Sosylus or Silenus. Just where Hannibal’s friends’ histories ended we do not know, but according to Nepos the pair were by his side ‘as long as fortune permitted it’—and that would likely have lasted until his sudden flight in 195. Nor of course did separation, whenever it happened, have to mean a loss of interest in his doings.
