Considering its historical significance, Canne della Battaglia is difficult to reach. If you have independent means of transportation, you can set out and hope your map leads you where you need to go. If not, you will be forced to rely on the single bus that departs from Barletta once a day, with a return departing only one hour after your arrival. Unless, that is, the driver decides to take a shortcut going back. In that case, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, or, as the Italians say: a casa del diavolo – in the house of the devil.

Nor is it a particularly scenic place, certainly not compared to the Adriatic coast with its picturesque fishing villages, or the mountainous terrain of central Puglia, where the famous trulli stone huts can be found. Here, dusty fields stretch out endlessly in all directions, in a flat, deserted territory where the ruins of the ancient village are located on the only elevation in the landscape. This hill, inhabited from pre-Roman times until its final destruction in 1083, contains occasionally well-preserved remains from this entire period. Looking out from the top, one can easily imagine the troops camped out across the countryside on the eve of 2 August 216 BC: to the east, 86,000 Roman troops, and to the west, the far smaller Carthaginian army led by Hannibal. When the battle was over, Rome had suffered one of the worst defeats in its history, and as many as 70,000 men lay dead in the field.

This was the second time Rome went to war against their Carthaginian – or Punic, as they called them – enemies. After the First Punic War, the young Hannibal was enjoined by his father, Hamilcar, to swear eternal enmity against Rome. In 218 BC, he crossed the Alps and invaded Italy. The campaign is perhaps most famous for its use of elephants, but the truth is that only one of the 37 animals survived its first winter in Italy. This was probably a blessing, since these voracious giants only added to an already difficult logistic situation.[1] After a couple of less decisive engagements, the Romans fatefully decided to give him battle at Cannae. Thanks to skilful use of cavalry, Hannibal managed to surround the Roman forces, and a massacre ensued.

Rome’s military was now weakened to the point where it was difficult for the nation to defend itself, and an invasion of the city of Rome itself seemed imminent. For reasons debated by historians ever since, Hannibal did not push his advantage, but continued indecisive operations in the south for several years, until he was recalled to Carthage in 203 BC. By now, a restituted Rome could again take the initiative. Bringing the battle to Africa, Scipio Africanus (up until that point, plain Scipio) defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.[2]

What if Hannibal had acted differently? What if he had marched on Rome, invaded the city and done what the Romans did with Carthage after the Third Punic War: razed the buildings, deported the citizens and salted the earth so that nothing could ever grow there again? What if the Roman empire had fallen before it ever really began?

Well, for the foreseeable future, Carthage would have been the unrivalled power of the western Mediterranean. Primarily a maritime and commercial power, however, their empire is unlikely to have had much interest in continental Europe north of the Mediterranean. Without the Roman Empire, languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese would never have existed; Gaul and Iberia would have continued to speak Celtic languages, perhaps later replaced by Germanic ones. There would have been no Roman, and little Greek, influence on the cultures of Western Europe. Likewise, without imperial sanction, Christianity may never have gained its dominant position. With no Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian influence, the barbarian tribes of Europe would have evolved in a completely different direction than the one known to us. These would have been the consequences if Rome had fallen in 216 BC.

Or something else entirely.

This kind of thought experiment is what we call counterfactual history. Counterfactual does not mean “wrong”, as it is often used; being a hypothetical it cannot be right or wrong (only its premises may). Nor, though it is a hypothetical, is it the same as a scientific hypothesis. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking writes of a particle accelerator capable of accelerating particles to the level of grand unification energy. Such a machine, Hawking writes, would have to be the size of the Solar System, adding with resignation that such a project “…would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”[3] And yet, there is no theoretical impediment to such an experiment being carried out, only practical ones. An historical counterfactual, on the other hand, can never be tested. What happened happened, and cannot be undone or redone. The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on.

Still, the temptation of imagining how things might have been is too great, and stories of alternative pasts are therefore popular in the world of literature. Speculative by its very nature, counterfactuals have a particular appeal within genres known as speculative fiction, science fiction in particular. This trend has been spurred on by the fact that, since the turn of the twentieth century, science has opened up at least theoretical paths to other realities. The possibility of time travel raises the question of whether history can be altered retrospectively; chaos theory describes how the most minute changes can have monumental effects; and the multiverse theory postulates that a virtually infinite number of universes exist, representing every possible variation of the reality we know. Bestsellers within the field include Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), a novel about a Europe where Nazi Germany won World War II, and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (2011), where a time traveller is given a chance to prevent the murder of President Kennedy. But beyond the world of entertainment literature, even Nobel laureates and nominees have dabbled in the genre. In the 1931 essay collection If It Had Happened Otherwise, Winston Churchill imagines a world where the Confederacy won the Battle of Gettysburg, while Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004) is set in an America under the antisemitic rule of President Charles Lindbergh.

Yet for academic historians, counterfactuals were for a long time considered an inappropriate pursuit. Thought experiments like the ones in the essay collections mentioned above were tolerated as amusing diversions, but most respectable historians did not waste their time on such frivolous games. This all changed in 1997, with the publication of the book Virtual History: Alternatives And Counterfactuals. In its introduction, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, who edited the collaborative work, set out certain rules that would prevent the contributions from becoming pointless speculation, and instead help illuminate central historical controversies. Foremost among these rules, the changes imagined had to be within the realm of the plausible, which Ferguson defined as paths of actions contemplated by contemporaries.[4]

The book led to a profusion of publishing within the field. “What if” now became a perfectly legitimate path of enquiry for historians, and academic historians were no doubt spurred on by the commercial appeal the genre carried with it. Not everyone was convinced, however, and among the fiercest critics was Richard J. Evans. Evans and Ferguson have enjoyed quite similar careers: both were educated at Oxford, and did their graduate research in Germany. Both have since published critically acclaimed bestselling books, primarily on modern European history. In their theoretical and political outlook, on the other hand, the two historians differ significantly, which became clear in the subsequent debate.

In 2014, Evans published the book Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. Here he argues that the majority of counterfactual history published serves as little more than conservative wish-fulfilment. Ferguson has never been shy about declaring his conservative convictions while Evans, though less explicit about his politics, is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and must be said to belong further to the left. This type of history, according to Evans, tends to centre around military and political issues and – as far as the UK is concerned – betray a deep Euroskepticism. Ferguson, for instance, argues that, had Britain stayed out of World War I, she might have kept her empire.[5] The German Empire is here in reality only a stand-in for the European Union, and history is used to advance contemporary political positions. Another issue Evans raises with counterfactual writing is how it almost inevitably leans towards a “great men” view of history, in that it over-emphasises the impact single individuals can have on broader, socio-political developments. Finally, the role of contingency renders counterfactuals meaningless in the long run. Alterations to the course of events at any given point in history will lead to unforeseen changes at a later point, and this effect will only be compounded by the passage of time. Contingency, as Evans points out in a quote in his book, “is not a train one can get on or off at will”.[6]

So is counterfactual history really no more than a waste of time? Is there nothing we can gain from it other than padding the ego and fulfilling the political fantasies of biased historians? It can certainly be grating to read the seemingly endless stream of publications where armchair generals reenact Waterloo, Gettysburg, Stalingrad. “What could have been” is often little more than a thinly veiled rewriting of “had it been me”.

And yet, there is a use of the counterfactual that has less to do with our understanding of specific historical events, and more to do with how we understand history itself. It is all too easy to view the past with the wisdom of hindsight, forgetting how very different it must have appeared to those who lived it. Outcomes that seem self-evident to us were often entirely unpredictable to contemporaries. Today, we think of the history of Rome as one of endless, unstoppable expansion, but to the men and women huddling within the walls of the capital during the Punic invasion, life must have been frightening, their complete destruction threatening at any moment. What is easy to forget is that Rome – at least until the late Republic – expanded more often a response to perceived threats than for its own sake. It is difficult to fully grasp this fact without also fully recognising that things could have turned out differently.

Only by freeing ourselves from determinism can we imagine different outcomes to history. It was in the 18^th century Age of Enlightenment that man truly started to believe in the perfectibility of the world through his own efforts. Once it was possible to imagine different futures, it was not a great leap to also imagine different pasts.

The Romans were as uncertain as us about the future, but once it had come to pass they regarded it as the inevitable will of the gods, or the Fates.[7] Hence, the Punic Wars, and their outcome, were determined already before the nation was founded. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas flees the city of Troy and is rescued from a shipwreck by the Carthaginian queen Dido. Their ensuing love affair is cut short when Aeneas decides he must fulfil his destiny to be the founder of Rome. As Dido falls on her sword, she prays: “Let there be war between the nations and between their sons for ever.”[8] On her side was the goddess Juno, who was “…intending to give [Carthage] sovereignty over the peoples of the earth…”. But even Juno, queen of the gods, had her limitations, as Virgil adds: “…if only the Fates would allow it.”[9]

As the readers of the Aeneid would have known, some 130 years after the end of the Punic Wars, they did not.

[1] Shean, John F., ‘Hannibal’s Mules: The Logistical Limitations of Hannibal’s Army and the Battle of Cannae, 216 B.C.’, Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 45 (1996): 174–75.

[2] Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile Books, 2016), 175–84.

[3] Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 98.

[4] Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997), 83–87.

[5] Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (London: Little, Brown, 2014), 68–70.

[6] Evans, 84.

[7] One exception to this rule can be found in the Roman historian Livy’s speculations on how Alexander the Great would have fared against Rome: Ruth Morello, ‘Livy’s Alexander Digression (9.17–19): Counterfactuals and Apologetics’, Journal of Roman Studies 92 (November 2002): 62–85.

[8] Virg, Aen. 4.629. This translation: Virgil and David West, The Aeneid, Penguin Classics (London, England ; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 1990), 101.

[9] Virg. Aen. 1.18-19.