My hero!

While reading about the Punic wars I kept following the story as if it was a movie. I could picture how Rome was getting stronger by acquiring knowledge from the war. How they learned to make war at sea, how they made their war tools more effective by improving their technology and how these things helped them to conduct war in a massive scale. Rome seemed to be unstoppable until a “hero” showed up. Hannibal was truly amazing for me, just like a legendary hero in a movie would be. He began by taking the after Hamilcar’s (his father) death, and took the Carthaginian war to another level. His brilliant plan was to get Rome’s allies on his side because he knew they were unhappy. He wanted to show them that he could protect and take care of them as long as they stood by his side. Hannibal’s army was very small; invading Italy seemed to be an impossible task. The Romans thought that they could contain Hannibal in Spain, and because of their enormous power they didn’t feel a threat. But Hannibal proved them wrong. When he escaped from Spain he surprised the Roman armies by slipping northward, crossing the river by pontoons and swimming. They crossed using elephants as their transportation. He defeated the Roman army on Gaul. Now his biggest challenge came across, he needed to cross The Alps, and of course he did. But it wasn’t easy, the crossing cost him the death of most of the elephants and many men. When he arrived to Italy the task of convincing the allies to join him began. When the Roman senate realized this, they targeted the same objective. The following battles were with the purpose of proving to the allies who could take better care of them, whoever would achieve having the allies on their side would become the most powerful. Another amazing victory, totally movie hero like, was the Battle of Cannae. The Roman’s army outnumbered Hannibal’s army by a large amount, but Hannibal had the perfect plan to defeat them. “Out of the 70,000 Romans that took the field, only 10,000 survived” (The Punic Wars, Battle of Cannae). Hannibal was unbeatable, he was becoming a legend and everyone fear and respected him. But like every hero, his victories had to come to an end. He faced an enemy that was as clever and tricky as him, Scipio, who defeated him and his army in the battle of Zama. Hannibal surrender and advised Carthage to surrender as well. Hannibal died before his time, it was very possible that he was poisoned. But like a hero he remained in history, his memory brought fear to the Romans even after his death.
Learning about these legendary heroes brought up the following question for me: Why don’t we have this type of heroes nowadays? How big of a change in our society and government a hero like Hannibal would make?