Assisted by his brother Hasdrubal, Hannibal rose to command the people of Carthage in 221 BC.

Drawing on the accounts of Livy and Polybius, Ernle Bradford documents the Punic War between Carthage and Rome. After gaining the support of the Gauls Hannibal made his way over the Alps with 37 elephants and attacked Italy, winning important battles at Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, where the Roman forces lost over 50,000 men. He was finally defeated in Africa at Zama by Scipio Africanus, who had learned how to beat Hannibal from his opponent's own military organisation.

Hannibal gives us a complete biography, exploring the strategies of his greatest triumphs and showing him as the soldier, the general, the statesman, and the private man. Within this portrait stands the memory of a charismatic leader whose actions, two centuries after he marched through Europe and dared to take on the Roman Empire, still resonate in a world of drone warfare.