When I was young, maybe 12 or so, I was fascinated by Hannibal and his amazing march across the Alps and his descent into Italy where he destroyed several Roman armies. As time went by, I began to see that the real remarkable story was that the Romans were able to survive those calamaties and eventually grind the Carthaginians down as they did all their foes.
Yup. He won the battle”s” but lost the war.
He absolutely ran circles around the Romans and then quit.
I've always thought that perhaps the Battle of the Milvian Bridge had huge future implications because one bit of eventual fallout was the Christianizing of the Empire. The other one that always strikes me as huge, though it was the Eastern Empire, was Manzikert. World might be a very different place if the Byzantines had won rather than the Turks. No subsequent civil war, etc..
I’ve known about Cannae for a long time. And, frankly, I’m not sure I trust the ancient historians.
On the one hand, in Greek hoplite warfare (I’ll get to Rome in a minute), things were like the opposite of a tug of war with a rope (two groups pulling away from each other, hoping to make the other team fall forward). Instead, two shield walls would crash together and push and push and push. Eventually, one shield wall would collapse and the men would fall apart and lose formation and then run and get speared in the back. It was all a question of who would break first.
Rome didn’t use hoplites, and didn’t depend on shield walls. But they weren’t dumb. At Cannae, the Carthaginians were greatly outnumbered by the Romans, yet the Carthaginians managed to surround the Romans, and squeeze them in the middle, pushing and pushing until the Romans had no where to go and just fell apart and were slaughtered.
That’s what they say. I think it would not have been difficult for the Romans to break out of the encirclement at one point or another and make the whole thing fall apart.
Maybe it happened just as they say — but history is full of lies. To read an ancient source and just accept it as the truth is, I think, a bad practice. The earliest source for this battle is Polybius (50 years after the battle) and most people think Polybius used a good bit of dramatic license. Livy wrote about it 200 years later (so how reliable can he be?).
But Hannibal never took Rome...
and Rome destroyed Cathage....
PING
Mark
Anyone really interested in a great podcast about the entirety of Roman history should check out Mike Duncan’s podcast from about 12 years ago. You can find it on youtube (who I don’t like recommending to as they are part of the communist cabal) under the channel -Timaues- (the dashes are the channel name). You can listen, not much visual, but a great recounting from the mythological origins of Romulus and Remus to Augustus Romulus holed up in Ravenna and the sack of Rome. Or, do the right thing if you can afford it and pay for it.
Rome’s darkest day, was when they crucified Jesus.
Truly a military masterpiece by Hannibal. One of several examples in which he utterly destroyed a Roman army that on paper was at least as strong or in this case stronger, than his own. He deserves his reputation as one of the foremost military geniuses in history. Without Hannibal, the Carthaginians lose the 2nd Punic War much much faster and without inflicting nearly as much damage on the Romans.