Mago

Mago Barca was the youngest brother of Hannibal and Hasdrubal and an important Carthaginian commander during the Second Punic War. He fought at Cannae, carried news of victory to Carthage and later commanded in Iberia. After the loss of Spain he landed in Liguria to open a new front in northern Italy, but was badly wounded in battle. He died while returning to Africa shortly before the final confrontation at Zama.

Mago appears in Ben Kane’s Hannibal trilogy and in other novels about the Barca family. Fiction can use him to connect campaigns separated across Italy, Spain and North Africa and to show that Hannibal’s war depended on a family command network. He is often less individually developed than his brothers because the sources preserve fewer personal details.