This is the second part of the third part of our four(ish) part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) look at the performance of the Roman army and its legions in the third and second century BC against the Hellenistic armies of the heirs of Alexander. Last time, we sought to assess some of the assumed weaknesses of the Hellenistic phalanx in facing rough terrain and horse archer-centered armies and concluded, fundamentally, that the Hellenistic military system was one that fundamentally worked in a wide variety of environments and against a wide range of opponents.
This week, we’re going to look at Rome’s first experience of that military system, delivered at the hands of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (r. 297-272). The Pyrrhic Wars (280-275) are always a sticking point in these discussions, because they fit so incongruously with the rest. From 214 to 148, Rome will fight four ‘Macedonian Wars’ and one ‘Syrian War’ and utterly demolish every major Hellenistic army it encounters, winning every single major pitched battle and most of them profoundly lopsidedly. Yet Pyrrhus, fighting the Romans some 65 years earlier manages to defeat Roman armies twice and fight a third to a messy draw, a remarkably better battle record than any other Hellenistic monarch will come anywhere close to achieving. At the same time, Pyrrhus, quite famously, fails to get anywhere with his victories, taking losses he can ill-afford each time (thus the notion of a ‘Pyrrhic victory’), while the Roman armies he fights are never entirely destroyed either.
So we’re going to take a more in-depth look at the Pyrrhic Wars, going year-by-year through the campaigns and the three major battles at Heraclea (280), Ausculum (279) and Beneventum (275) and try to see both how Pyrrhus gets a much better result than effectively everyone else with a Hellenistic army and also why it isn’t enough to actually defeat the Romans (or the Carthaginians, who he also fights). As I noted last time, I am going to lean a bit in this reconstruction on P.A. Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020), which does an admirable job of untangling our deeply tangled and honestly quite rubbish sources for this important conflict.
Believe it or not, we are actually going to believe Plutarch in a fair bit of this. So, you know, brace yourself for that.
Now, Pyrrhus’ campaigns wouldn’t have been possible, as we’ll note, without financial support from Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Antigonus II Gonatas and Ptolemy Keraunos. So, as always, if you want to help me raise an Epirote army to invade Italy (NATO really complicates this plan, as compared to the third century, I’ll admit), you can support this project on Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
Crossing the Adriatic
We should start with some background on Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Roman situation leading up to his campaign.
For the Romans, the immediate background is the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC), which as the name implies was the third Roman war against the Samnites, the hill peoples of Southern Italy. This war, however, had expanded beyond that initial scope as the Etruscans and some of the Cisalpine Gauls had entered the war in 296. Essentially this was a ‘containment war:’ Rome had been securing firm control over much of central Italy, which of course imperiled both the Samnites to their south and the Etruscans and Gauls to their north, leading to a combined effort to stop them. The Romans, however, had the advantage of being more unified and won a major victory at the Battle of Sentinum (295) – though it was a near-run thing – and were able over the next several years to break the coalition.
That had a few effects when we get to 281. First, Rome is still clearly engaged in mopping-up efforts even as late as 281 – there are Roman armies active in Etruria, for instance, even in 280 (when the Romans are also fighting Pyrrhus). Second, it means that while Rome in theory controls Samnium (the territory of the Samnites), that control is only an inch deep and the Samnites might look for any opportunity to break free again. Finally, subduing the Samnites means that the Greek communities of Apulia suddenly found themselves directly exposed to expanding Roman power. These communities had held themselves largely aloof from the Samnite wars – the Samnites were their enemies too, generally – but now realized their danger. The largest and most important of these communities was Taras – which the Romans called Tarentum and we call Taranto – and it was the Tarantines that appealed to Pyrrhus.
So who the hell is Pyrrhus?
Pyrrhus was the king of Epirus, a Greek-speaking kingdom nevertheless often regarded by the polis-Greeks to the South as barbarians (e.g. Strabo 7.7.1), much like the Macedonians sometimes were. By Pyrrhus’ day, the Macedonian and Epirote royalty were intermarried – Pyrrhus was Alexander III’s (the Great) second cousin – and at some point (likely during the lifetime of Alexander) the Epirote army was organized along broadly Macedonian lines. Being thus adjacent to Macedonia proper and Macedonian-controlled Thessaly, it should come as little that Macedonian politics had a lot of influence on Epirote politics. When the unity of Alexander III’s empire shattered, Pyrrhus’ father Aeacides got involved in the internecine struggle and Pyrrhus continues that involvement. That’s important to know because Pyrrhus is going to fight in Italy and Sicily seemingly with one eye always on Macedon and one can argue1 that Macedonia was always the real prize, for which the Italian expedition was merely meant to provide the resources.
That said, Epirus, as a kingdom, lacked the resources to match a united Macedonian kingdom (much less any of the more powerful successors to the East), so Pyrrhus would either need more resources or to exploit moments of confusion and disunity. By the time he decides to go west, Pyrrhus had tried the latter twice. In 292 he attempted to grab Thessaly out from under Demetrius Poliorcetes (r. 294-288) while the latter was busy dealing with revolting Greeks further south but Pyrrhus got Demetrius’ full attention and had to retreat. Then in 286 he tried to seize the apparently vacant throne of Macedon in an absurdly complex five-way scramble for the Macedonian throne between Pyrrhus, Lysimachus (one of the successors, ruling Thrace), Antigonus II Gonatas (Demetrius’ son), Seleucus I Nicator (the founder of the Seleucid Kingdom) and Ptolemy Keraunos (son of Ptolemy I Soter, first Hellenistic Pharaoh of Egypt).
Just to give a fun sense of how wild these years were, in brief what happens is: Pyrrhus gets hard shut out by Lysimachus’ much larger army in 286, retreating back to Epirus with his tail between his legs, but then in 282, Lysimachus gets utterly crushed and killed by Seleucis I Nicator, who is almost immediately assassinated by Ptolemy Keraunos, who had been in his army (because Ptolemy I Soter, his father, was allied with Seleucus, but almost certainly plotting against him) and Ptolemy Keraunos then seized the throne, fended off one effort by Antigonus II Gonatas to seize the throne by military force, before Ptolemy Keraunos is bulldozed and killed by an army of Gauls – some of whom are going to become the Galatians – and Antigonus is able to defeat some of those Gauls and finally, durably claim the throne in 277.
Seriously, HBO – this is some Game of Thrones nonsense, but real. Why don’t we have this as a prestige miniseries?
The upshot is that, in all of the chaos, Epirus is just not a big enough power to hold its own offensively. But if Pyrrhus could perhaps unite under him all of the Greek communities of Sicily and southern Italy – what was called Magna Graecia or ‘Greater Greece’ – that would be enough of a powerbase, combined with Epirus, to be a truly major player in Hellenistic politics. It’s unclear if Pyrrhus ever really intended to also gain control of central Italy (read: Rome) or North Africa (read: Carthage). Our sources think he did, but he never really seems to actually try to do that, though to be fair he also never really has much of a chance to. Instead, all of Pyrrhus’ actions are consistent with supposing an intent merely to consolidate Magna Graecia.
It is in this context that, in 281, the Tarantines, fearing the expanding power of Rome, called across the Adriatic to Epirus for help.
Of course Pyrrhus answered. He drew not just from Epirus, but had financial support from Ptolemy II Philadelphus (by this point, Ptolemaic Pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy I Soter having died in 282) who hoped he would cripple Antigonus and/or Ptolemy Keraunos in Macedonia. Meanwhile, both Antigonus and Ptolemy Keraunos gave Pyrrhus even more money and troops to please go away while they settled their feud with each other. Consequently, Pyrrhus crosses over to Italy with a scouting force of 3,000 troops, followed by the main force with 20,000 infantry, 2,000 archers, 500 slingers, 20 elephants and 3,000 cavalry. I don’t think we should understand that full infantry force of 20,000 to be all phalanx infantry – there are probably some ‘medium’ mercenary troops mixed in – but this is nevertheless a serious army along identifiable Hellenistic lines, with a large and quite powerful Hellenistic phalanx – for Pyrrhus’ phalangites are Epirotes, not Macedonians – at its core.
Round One: Heraclea
The Roman response to Pyrrhus’ initial arrival was hardly panic. Military operations in Etruria for 280, under the consul Tiberius Corucanius, continued for the year, while the other consul, Publius Valerius Laevinius, went south to fight Pyrrhus and shore up Rome’s position in Southern Italy. We don’t have clear numbers for the size of the armies at Heraclea – Plutarch stresses that they were big (Plut. Pyrrh. 16.3) – but I think it is fair to suppose that Lavinius probably has a regular consular army with two legions and attached socii, roughly 20,000 men. It has sometimes been supposed this might have been a double-strength army (so 40,000 men) on the basis of some of our sources (including Plutarch) suggesting somewhat nebulously that it was of great size.
There are a few reasons I think this is unlikely. First, sources enlarging armies to fit the narrative magnitude of battles is a very common thing. But more to the point, Pyrrhus has crossed to Italy with 28,500 men total and – as Plutarch notes – hasn’t had a chance to link any of his allies up to his army. That may mean he hasn’t even reabsorbed his scouting force of 3,000 and he may well have also had to drop troops off to hold settlements, secure supplies and so on. Pyrrhus’ initial reluctance to engage (reported by Plutarch) is inconsistent with him wildly outnumbering the Romans, but his decision to wait for reinforcements within reach of the Romans is also inconsistent with the Romans wildly outnumbering him. So a battle in which Pyrrhus has perhaps 20-25,000 men and the Romans a standard two-legion, two-alae army of 20,000 give or take, seems the most plausible.2
The two forces met along the River Siris at Heraclea on the coastal edge of Lucania, Laevinius having pushed deep into southern Italy to engage Pyrrhus. As usual for these battles, we have descriptions or partial descriptions from a host of sources (in this case, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Zonaras, Florus) which don’t always agree, leaving the modern historian in a bit of a pickle. Generally, we assume that a lot of the later Roman narratives of a famous defeat are likely to have been tailored to try and minimize the embarrassment, either by implying the battle was closer than it was or that Pyrrhus was a very impressive foe (or both) or other ‘face-saving’ inventions. Worse yet, all of our sources are writing at substantial chronological distance, the Romans not really having started to record their own history until decades later (though there would have been Greek sources for later historians to work with). Generally, Patrick Kent tends to conclude that – somewhat unusually – Plutarch’s moralizing focus renders him more reliable here: Plutarch feels no need to cover for embarrassing Roman defeats or to embellish battle narratives (which he’d rather keep short, generally) because his focus is on the character of Pyrrhus. Broadly speaking, I think that’s right and so I too am going to generally prefer Plutarch’s narratives here.
The battle was defined by Pyrrhus’ use of terrain – Pyrrhus thought delay might be wiser (to link up with his allies) but left a blocking force on the river (the Romans being on the other side). The Romans responded by forcing the river – typical Roman aggression – but Plutarch at least thinks it caught Pyrrhus by surprise (he hadn’t fought Romans before) and so it leaves him in a scramble. He charges his cavalry (Plut. Pyrrh. 16.5) to give his main phalanx time to form up for battle resulting in what seems like a cavalry engagement near the river. Pyrrhus nearly gets himself killed in the fighting, but survives and falls back to his main infantry force, which then met the Romans in an infantry clash. The infantry fighting was fierce according to Plutarch and Pyrrhus, still shaken from being almost killed, had to come out and rally his troops. In the end, the Romans are described as hemmed in by Pyrrhus’ infantry and elephants before some of his Greek cavalry – from Thessaly, the best horse-country in Greece – delivers the decisive blow, routing the Roman force.
It is, on the one hand, a good example of the Hellenistic army ‘kit’ using almost all of its tactical elements: an initial – presumably light infantry – screen holding the river, followed by a cavalry screen to enable the phalanx to deploy, then a fierce and even infantry fight, finally decided by what seems to be flanking actions by cavalry and elephants. Plutarch (Pyrrh. 17.4) gives two sets of casualty figures, one from Dionysius and another from Hieronymus; the former says that the Romans lost 15,000 to Pyrrhus’ 13,000 killed, the latter that the Romans lost 7,000 to Pyrrhus’ just a bit less than 4,000 killed. The latter seems almost certainly more accurate. In either case, the Roman losses were heavier, but Pyrrhus’ losses were significant and as Plutarch notes, his losses were among his best troops.
Even in the best case, in victory, Pyrrhus had lost around 15% of his force (~4,000 out of 28,000), a heavy set of losses. Indeed, normally if an army loses 15% of its total number in a battle, we might well assume they lost. Roman losses, as noted, were heavier still, but as we’ve discussed, the Romans have strategic depth (in both geography, political will and military reserves) – Pyrrhus does not. By contrast, Alexander III reportedly wins at Issus (333) with just 150 dead (and another 4,802 wounded or missing; out of c. 37,000) and at Gaugamela (331) with roughly 1,500 losses (out of c. 47,000). The Romans will win at Cynoscephelae (197) with just 700 killed.
This isn’t, I think, a product of Pyrrhus failing at all, but rather a product of the attritional nature of Roman armies: even in defeat they draw blood. Even Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae (216) costs him 5,700 men, according to Polybius (more, according to Livy). But the problem for Pyrrhus is that his relatively fragile Hellenistic army isn’t built to repeatedly take those kinds of hits: Pyrrhus instead really needs big blow-out victories where he takes few losses and destroys or demoralizes his enemy. And the Roman military system does not offer such one-sided battles often.
Nevertheless, Pyrrhus shows that a Hellenistic army, capable handled, could beat a third-century Roman army, albeit not cleanly, and that is well worth noting.
The Road to Asculum
What comes next, of course, is that Pyrrhus seemingly fails to capitalize on his victory – but I think in reality the opportunity to capitalize in the way that most folks imagine wasn’t really there.
On Pyrrhus’ side, his army had been bloodied, but was mostly intact and was almost immediately bolstered by the arrival of his Italian allies, including the Lucanians and Samnites, along with the Tarantines. On the Roman side, Laevinius’ army was battered, but still extant; he fell back to Roman-controlled Campania, eventually taking up a position at Capua, the chief city of that region. Pyrrhus then marched north, entering Campania, bypassing the Roman force at Capua (which had been reinforced with two legions pulled from Etruria) and entering Latium, apparently getting within about 60 kilometers (c. 37 miles) of Rome (Plut. Pyrrh 17.5). And here the question students as is why not take Rome?
And there is an easy answer: because he couldn’t.
The first thing to remember here is the natural of the human-created terrain Pyrrhus has to operate in: functionally all of the cities of any significant size in third-century Italy were likely to be fortified and their populations – thanks to Rome’s recruitment system – experienced and armed. Consequently, if the locals didn’t voluntarily switch sides, Pyrrhus would have been forced to take their settlements either by siege or storm. Pyrrhus might well have hoped that the Campanians would go over to him, but here the problem is the human geography of Italy: his army is full of Samnites, whose emnity with the Campanians is what started the Samnite wars. This is a feature of Rome’s alliance system noted by M.P. Fronda in Between Rome and Carthage (2010): because Rome extended its alliance system by intervening in local rivalries, both sets of new ‘allies’ had long-standing grudges against the other, which makes it hard to dismantle Rome’s alliance network, since any allies you peel away will push others closer to Rome.
In the case of Campania, Capua might have felt strong enough to try their luck without Rome, but that’s why Laevinius was sitting on it with a large army. But the other Campanian cities (of which there were about a dozen) might well fear exposure to Samnite raiding without Rome’s protection. Meanwhile, the Latins – the people of Latium, the region immediately to Rome’s south (technically Rome is in Latium, on its edge) – seem to have been pretty profoundly uninterested in siding against Rome either at this juncture or later when Hannibal tries to dismantle Rome’s alliance system.
So after Heraclea, Pyrrhus has fairly limited options: he can start the slow process of reducing the cities of Campania one by one to open the logistics necessary to permit him to operate long-term in Latium or he can conduct a lightning raid through Roman territory to try to maximize the psychological effect of his victory and perhaps get a favorable peace. He opts for the second choice and when the Romans opt not to take the deal – though they do consider it – he has to pull back to southern Italy (where he focuses on consolidating control, pushing out the last few Roman positions there).
Why not attack Rome directly? Well, Rome itself was fortified, of course. Moreover, the Romans had raised a fresh levy of troops for its defense (Plut. Pyrrh. 18.1), while dispatching Tiberius Corucanius with his army to reinforce Laevinius in Capua. So as Pyrrhus enters Latium, he has a well-defended fortified city in front of him and a Roman army of, conservatively, 30,000 men (Corucanius’ 20,000 men, plus whatever was left of Laevinius’ army) behind him. I don’t usually quote movie tactics, but Ridley Scott’s Saladin has the right wisdom for this problem: “One cannot maintain a siege with the enemy behind.” Had Pyrrhus stopped to besiege Rome, his supply situation would have quickly become hopeless as the Roman army behind him could have easily prevented him from foraging to feed his army during the long process setting up for an assault on the city, which might then simply fail, since the city was well-fortified and defended.
If Plutarch (Pyrrh. 18.4-5) is correct about the terms Pyrrhus offered – an alliance with Rome, a recognition of their hegemony over Italy outside of his new clients in southern Italy (who would of course, fall under Pyrrhus’ control now) – Pyrrhus may have hoped at this juncture to consolidate southern Italy and turn back towards the East or perhaps head on to Sicily. But the Romans refused the deal and so Pyrrhus seems to have set above clearing out the last Roman strongholds (Venusia and Luceria) in Apulia to consolidate his hold. The Romans responded in the following year by sending a new army, under the command of Publius Sulpicius Saverrio and Publius Decius Mus to challenge him and they met at Asculum, in northern Apulia.
Asculum and the Articulated Phalanx
Once again, we have a mess of sources for the battle, with one version recording a two-day fight the Romans lose presented by Plutarch (Pyrrh 21) and a version with a one-day fight presented by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (20.1-3) and Cassius Dio (and Zonaras, who wrote an epitome of Dio; Dio 40.43-46; Zon. 8.5), resulting in a draw; Dio is almost certainly summarizing Dionysius. Plutarch is, interestingly, aware of Dionysius’ version, but has clearly preferred another tradition and once again Kent (op. cit.) sides with Plutarch and once again I think he is probably right to do so. Dionysius’ version includes all sorts of odd elements ancient authors love to add as embellishments, including unlikely war-engines (anti-elephant battle-wagons), armies of unlikely size (70,000 on each side, according to Dionysius; not impossible, but not likely in my view), a late-arriving group of Roman allies sacking Pyrrhus’ camp and Pyrrhus being wounded (thus turning the draw into a symbolic victory). It all smacks of patriotic fabrications meant to make a victory – or at least a heroic draw – out of what had, in fact, been a defeat. Plutarch’s account is more embarrassing to the Romans, and thus in my view, more likely to be true.
In Plutarch’s version, the battle is fought in two engagements. In the first, Pyrrhus attacked the Romans but the terrain was in their favor, preventing him from deploying not his phalanx, but his cavalry and elephants, resulting in the failure of Pyrrhus’ attack, with fighting halted by nightfall (Plut. Pyrrh. 21.5). That fighting would be halted by night doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. It’s unlikely the battle ran all day, but this might have either been an encounter battle started in the afternoon or alternately Pyrrhus, recognizing his attack was risky, may have launched it late in the day to limit his losses if things went badly, a fairly common pre-industrial tactic. On the following day, Pyrrhus was more careful, pre-positioning some of his troops (probably light troops) to occupy the rougher ground and thus force the Romans to engage on open ground. The Roman attack was fierce – an effort to dislodge the phalanx before the strength of Pyrrhus’ elephants (and presumably cavalry, but Plutarch says only elephants) could tell – but this failed and the Romans were driven back to their camp.
We have one more interesting nugget about Pyrrhus’ tactics, this time from Polybius, who comments (Polyb. 28.10-11), “As for Pyrrhus, not only Italian arms but also Italian soldiers he made use of, alternately [ἐναλλάξ] placing a maniple [of Italians] and a speira of the phalanx in his contest against the Romans. But this did not enable him to win, but instead the result of the battles was always somehow doubtful.” This is the articulated or enallax (‘alternating’) phalanx and Pyrrhus isn’t the only Hellenistic commander who uses it. Indeed, we see efforts at creating an articulated phalanx, it seems, at Sellasia (alternating lines of chalkaspides and Illyrians) and later at Magnesia (190) with elephants used to cover the pivot-points between each phalanx block. One wonders, in the case of the Seleucid Army, since no such articulated phalanx is visible at Raphia, if this is a trick Antiochus III perhaps developed to deal with the rough terrain and difficult tactics of the Parthians and Bactrians and then tries to use against the Romans. As we’ll see, while Antiochus is going to lose at Magnesia, his phalanx sure seems to have been capable of complex maneuvers.
In theory an articulated phalanx ought to be more flexible, able to bend to deal with both rough terrain but also situations in which one part of the line is able to advance but others are not. In practice, it is oddly striking that this setup never comes standard or common. Antigonus III Doson’s line seems partially articulated at Sellasia in 222, but his successor and grand-nephew Philip V’s line is clearly not articulated at Cynoscephalae in 197 and his son and successor’s phalanx is also clearly not articulated at Pydna in 168. Given how limited our evidence is an how many other battles lack clear descriptions, we may never really know why, but I would propose three reasons why the articulated phalanx doesn’t necessarily catch on.
First, it may not have been that useful (or even helpful at all) when facing another Hellenistic phalanx and for most of these military systems for most of their history, they imagined their most likely and most dangerous competitor to be a symmetrical one. Hellenistic monarchs mostly fight each other from 323 to 200 BC – the Roman bulldozer was comparatively sudden, running basically just about 30 years from 197 to 168 (during which Hellenistic monarchs were still fighting each other too).
Second, it may have been difficult to get the ideal sort of troops for this role in quantity. Here Pyrrhus has the advantage: the Samnites and Lucanians who – by this point – fight a lot like the Romans do, are almost perfect for this role. They’re heavy enough to withstand pressure in the gaps between the blocks of the phalanx, but able to fight fluidly enough to handle the articulation. But other kinds of troops may have been less suitable, either too light for the role or too rigid.
Third: It’s simply too damn complex for most generals. One thing Pyrrhus, Antigonus III Doson and Antiochus III all have in common is that they are capable, experienced commanders with veteran armies they’ve had in the field for a while. Managing the ad hoc creation of an alternating line of medium infantry (or elephants) and phalanx infantry would have been a tall order from a coordination and training standpoint and it is possible that this was the sort of thing only skilled commanders attempted successfully. The Roman legion’s flexibility, by contrast, is built in and normalized, so no individual Roman commander needs to be a tactical savant to employ it: it works that way because it has always worked that way. To put in modern terms: the legion’s triplex acies was doctrine, whereas the articulated phalanx always remained a complex innovation and so ended up only being used by skilled and confident generals.
In any case, it is striking that the articulated or enallax phalanx does not seem to become standard at any point, though it is an idea that resurfaces agian and again in the hands of more capable generals. Though, as Polybius notes, even this tactical innovation wasn’t enough to get Pyrrhus a clear and decisive victory: merely ‘uncertain’ outcomes.
Plutarch notes that Hieronymus reports the Romans took 6,000 losses and Pyrrhus 3,505, while Dionysius reports 15,000 on each side; once again I think Hieronymus is probably to be preferred here. This is the battle where Pyrrhus is supposed to have remarked, “If we conquer the Romans in one more battle, we will be entirely ruined” and you can see the reasoning, especially if – as seems likely from Plutarch’s description – Pyrrhus’ casualties have been concentrated in his shrinking Epirote core.
Sicilian Vacation
It is at this point the Pyrrhus decides to refocus his efforts on Sicily. I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I do think a few details are illustrative. First, some quick background on Sicily. The island was – and had been, at this point, for quite some time – split between Greek settlement on the eastern half of the island and Punic settlements on the western half (with the native Sicel population smashed into the middle uplands). The largest Greek settlement was Syracuse, an absolutely massive Greek polis which provided the central rallying point of the other Greek poleis against Carthaginian influence, as Carthage had come to control the western part of the island.
Carthage and Syracuse had in turn been waging a series of wars to control the island since 480 BC: seven ‘Sicilian Wars‘ in total (with the Pyrrhic War as the eighth); the repeated nature of the wars should hint at their indecisiveness, though fortunes often varied wildly, with either Carthage or Syracuse (and their Greek allies) seeming on the verge of victory. The situation in the 280s, however was robustly bad for Syracuse. Agathocles, the tyrant (read: dictator) of Syracuse from 317 to 289 had died in 289, leading to political chaos that Carthage could exploit. This was, in fact, a pretty normal Carthaginian strategy, to ‘wait out’ periods of Greek unity and effective leadership and then strike back hard in periods of disunity and political problems.
So in 279, some of the leading Syracusans call out to Pyrrhus for help, while the Romans and Carthaginians respond by making a loose ‘anti-Pyrrhus’ alliance (in the end, little will come of it) and Pyrrhus goes to Sicily; Pyrrhus decides to take the offer and arrives in 278. He hasn’t wholly abandoned Italy, I should note – we’re told that Pyrrhus takes only his elephants and 8,000 men, presumably of his (much diminished!) Epirote core with him (App. Samn, 11.2), leaving much of the rest of his army behind, presumably trusting the Tarantines and his lieutenants to hold their own against Rome in his absence. But Pyrrhus is able to quickly produce some political unity in Syracuse and then gain more troops from the other leading settlements – Leontini and Acragas (Diod. Sic. 22.8) – to field a capable army of around 35,000 men, mostly made of Sicilian Greeks.
The Carthaginians seem to have gone back to a pretty standard playbook. Carthaginian control on Sicily was anchored by a number of key fortified port settlements and so rather than seeking to defeat Pyrrhus in open battle, the Carthaginians set down to forcing Pyrrhus to seize these settlements one after another. Pyrrhus is able to storm Eryx (and its attendant port at Drepana) and Panormus, leaving the key Carthaginian fortress at Lilybaeum, though the effort of first unifying the Sicilian Greeks and then storming these key fortresses burns up 278 and 277.
However, as the Romans will learn a decade later, taking Lilybaeum without being able to blockade the port and prevent reinforcement and resupply is nearly impossible, no matter how determined a siege one lays. And then the thing which always happens to the Sicilian Greeks happens: unity begins to fracture, with some of Pyrrhus’ key supporters beginning to drift away from him, while the Carthaginians reinforced and struck back. This isn’t exactly surprising: if you are a Greek community trying to retain independence, having Pyrrhus show up in 279 is welcome: the greatest threat to you is Carthage. But by 276, the greatest threat to your independence is Pyrrhus, on the verge of consolidating the island. Moreover, Pyrrhus seems to have started naval construction, building a fleet of more than two hundred ships – perhaps intending to complete the siege of Lilybaeum (our sources imagine he wants to invade Africa, but he never really takes clear steps towards this goal) – which may have put financial strain in the endeavor too (and caused resentment from the required taxes).
In any case, because Pyrrhus’ army in Sicily is mostly Sicilian (Greek), as his support collapses, so does his army. Unable to reinforce or to stop the decay of his coalition, Pyrrhus retreats in 276, heading back to Italy (where the Romans had been rapidly peeling back his gains) to set the stage for a final battle with the Romans. The Carthaginians maul his fleet on the way out, though it is hard to know from our sources how badly.
Good Winds
We have a short version of Pyrrhus’ return in Plutarch (Pyrrh. 24) and a longer version in Zonaras (8.6). It seems pretty clear from both that things were not going great for Pyrrhus at this stage. Pyrrhus seems to have tried, once landing in Rhegium (the toe of the boot of Italy) to secure it, but was unable to do so in the face of resistance from a Roman garrison and the Mamertines, a group of Italic mercenaries who are going to show up in the First Punic War as well. Finances were evidently a problem too, because Pyrrhus famously loots a temple to pay his soldiers, something skipped by Plutarch but attested by Dionysius, Diodorus, Appian, Dio and Zonaras (Dion. Hal. Ant Rom. 20.9; Diod. Sic. 27.4, App. Samn 12, Dio 40.48, Zon. 8.6).
Meanwhile the Romans had spent the time reestablishing control in Southern Italy – Pyrrhus’ garrisons, allies and lieutenants not having been up to the job – and beating the stuffing out of the Samnites again (Plut. Pyrrh. 25.1). And so Pyrrhus now needed a big victory to get momentum back on his side and buy breathing room to piece back together his holdings in Italy. Rome deploys both consuls – Manius Curius Dentatus and Lucius Lentulus Caudinus – to the south to deal with Pyrrhus, each leading a standard double-legion force (so around 20,000 men). Pyrrhus decides on aggression, aiming to strike one of the consular armies (under Curius) while tying down the other with a smaller detachment in Lucania. Pyrrhus meets the Roman army outside of the Samnite town of Maleventum (‘bad wind’ – soon to be Beneventum, ‘good wind’).
Once again, the sources are a mess. We have Plutarch (Pyrrh 25) who is extremely brief, but only small fragments of Dionysius, along with embroidered accounts from Zonaras, Orosius and Florus on which little faith may be reposed. But we can say a few things. First, the terrain in this area is hilly and Curius Dentatus was already encamped in the position, occupying what was presumably a good defensive position; Lentulus was almost certainly not far off3 so Pyrrhus has to move quickly. Pyrrhus decides on a repositioning a detachment by night – the trick he’d used with success at Asculum – but can’t quite pull it off and so is still in transit when light breaks, at which point Curius attacks the detachment, pushing it into the more open terrain of the valley. At this point, Pyrrhus seems apparently to recover and in turn pushes the over-extended Curius back, with the battlefield breaking down into disorder. Finally, the Romans are able to drive Pyrrhus’ elephants from the field with javelins, which seems to have largely ended the engagement.
Notably, we do not hear of Pyrrhus’ army routing or being destroyed. Instead, he still has 8,000 infantry and 500 cavalry with him when he abandons Italy later that year and returns to Epirus (Plut. Pyrrh 26.2), which couldn’t include any of the Smanite, Lucanian and Tarantine allies he was in the process of abandoning. Consequently, the Roman victory at Maleventum – which they would rename Beneventum after the victory – was also a ‘doubtful’ one, to use Polybius’ phrasing.
Our shoddy sources make it hard to tell, but I wonder if Pyrrhus’ ability to salvage the battle had something to do with his use of a more flexible articulated phalanx. He may have avoided the sort of sudden collapse we’ll see happen to Macedonian phalanxes in Rome’s later wars because Roman success at one point in the line wouldn’t compromise the whole thing as the interspersed Italian infantry could function as flood-breaks against general collapse. But to be frank, teasing out the details of this battle is beyond the quality of our sources. Likewise, the casualty figures we’re given for Beneventum – 23,000 by Eutropius (2.14) and 33,000 killed and 33,000 captured by Orosius (4.2.6) – do not seem immediately credible. As noted, Pyrrhus’ core force seems diminished, but intact after this battle.
A Pyrrhic Verdict
So what can we learn from all of this about how the legion interacts with the phalanx? Well, the first thing we can learn is that our sources for the Pyrrhic Wars are a mess, which makes it difficult to draw other conclusions.
Beyond that, however, we have the observed fact that Pyrrhus was the only general who seems to have been able to regularly beat a legion – or indeed, to beat a legion at all – with a Hellenistic army. The staggeringly lopsided Roman battle-record – which we’ll get to in the next part of this series – against Hellenistic armies in the second century means that Pyrrhus stands out, even though his victories were always only ever partial, as Polybius notes. That makes it pretty natural to look for things that might be different between the Pyrrhic Wars (280-275) and Rome’s later Macedonian and Syrian Wars (214-148).
On the one hand, there are things we know are changing about the Roman army in this period that might matter. The Romans shift from local Italian variants of the La Tène sword to adopting the Spanish variant which becomes the gladius Hispaniensis during the Second Punic War (218-201), though to be fair the difference between those sword-types is modest and I don’t think we should expect radical shifts in Roman capabilities as a result. Perhaps more crucial, the Romans adopt (chain)mail armor in between these wars, probably in the 220s and rapidly deploy it widely. Mail, more than the gladius, seems a good candidate for an equipment edge, as I’ve argued elsewhere4 but such a large swing seems hard to attribute to just a new kind of armor, even is mail is really good armor. There’s also a tactical shift: the velites – as distinct from other, earlier forms of Roman light infantry – seem to be introduced in 212, though beyond this our sense is that the Roman legion as a tactical system isn’t very different between 280 and 190. Still, it seems reasonable to suppose the Roman military system is modestly but significantly more capable by the second century than it was in the early third.
Alternately, Roman armies are really battle hardened at the start of the second century, having just pushed through the First Macedonian and Second Punic Wars – but then the Third Samnite War (298-290) was also a big war and so the Romans of 280 were hardly green or inexperienced. On the flipside, Pyrrhus is presenting the Romans a new challenge, whereas by 214 and the start of the First Macedonian War, for the Romans the sarisa, war elephants and the whole Hellenistic system had become to some degree ‘old hat.’ That may also have mattered.
What about on Pyrrhus’ side? Well, I’ve already noted, I think his articulated phalanx probably plays a role. Pyrrhus is experimenting, at least so says Polybius, with a more sophisticated version of this sarisa-phalanx and in his Italians (especially the Samnites) has really good raw material to plug the gaps between the individual speira of the phalanx. That in turn may have made it a lot more resilient to the way that Roman forces will disrupt Macedonian phalanxes later on. Pyrrhus’ army may have been much to small to rumble in the Hellenistic East, but man-for-man, it was evidently of quite high quality: tactically sophisticated and highly motivated.
And then there is Pyrrhus. Now, given my emphasis on strategic outcomes, you may be surprised to hear me say this, but I think we ought to give Pyrrhus some credit here. The ancient judgment on Pyrrhus was that he was the finest general of his generation; Hannibal supposedly listed the three great captains as Pyrrhus, Scipio Africanus and then himself, in that order, while Antigonus Gonatas quipped that the best general would be “Pyrrhus, if he lives to be old” (Plut. Pyrrh. 8.2).
Pyrrhus functionally never manages to achieve a favorable strategic outcome. His early efforts to seize Macedonia failed, his effort in Southern Italy failed, his effort in Sicily failed. He then goes on to try again to conquer Macedonia, comes close to succeeding – defeating Antigonus II Gonatas at the Aous in 274 – but fumbles the occupation and loses his gains. He invades the Peloponnese unsuccessfully in 272 and ends up dead in a confused scrum of a battle in Argos later that year. He is, to borrow my previous phrasing, ‘bad at war.’
But one can be ‘bad at war’ but ‘good at battles,’ and that’s where I think Pyrrhus falls. His overall strategic decision-making and diplomatic capabilities were unequal to the task of actually realizing strategic objectives, but Pyrrhus was clearly very good at handling armies, able to use complex Hellenistic armies to their fullest and of motivating his soldiers with inspired personal leadership on the battlefield. A good general, but a bad king, if you will. And so I think part of the reason Pyrrhus’ army achieved uncommon tactical results against the Romans is that Pyrrhus was an uncommon tactical commander.
At the same time, he is foiled by some of the clear operational and strategic advantages the Romans possessed, in particular their various forms of strategic depth (Carthaginian strategic depth is also clearly a problem for him). Rome fields multiple armies annually, so a single big victory never leaves Pyrrhus in a position to run the table. Moreover, Italy is filled with Roman allies sitting in well-fortified towns which must be taken, one by one, giving Rome time to recover. In short, not only is the Roman army built for tactical attrition, the Roman state is built for strategic attrition. The Roman state is durable and for all of his flashy victories, Pyrrhus never gets particularly close to overturning it or even setting up durable control of Southern Italy, as Rome’s quick comeback the moment Pyrrhus himself leaves for Sicily demonstrates.
And here we come to what I think is the damning verdict on Pyrrhus: one of the most capable Hellenistic commanders, leading one of the most capable Hellenistic armies, never quite manages to decisively defeat the Romans, even though he is catching them at a time when they are entirely unfamiliar with the Hellenistic military system. Badly handled against a capable commander, the Roman legion still always inflicts higher casualties on victorious Hellenistic armies than they can afford in the long-run. It isn’t merely that the Romans could replace one lost army after another – although note that Pyrrhus never manages to actually destroy a Roman army either (Hannibal will, though not with a Hellenistic army) – but that every Roman army draws blood. I think this goes back to the attritional nature of this system and the fact that this kind of attrition is something the strategically brittle Hellenistic army simply cannot tolerate.
It took the Romans three nasty, somewhat inconclusive engagements to wear down Pyrrhus’ army through attrition. The next time they meet Hellenistic armies, however, the attrition is going to run much faster. And that’s where we’ll turn to next, as the Romans run the table in the first half of the second century, seemingly casually demolishing the Hellenistic military system Alexander built.
- And, indeed, Kent, op. cit. does argue!
- I should note, this is Kent’s assessment as well.
- As Kent op. cit. notes, he’s going to celebrate a triumph for the capture of a Samnite town just 12 miles to the south for this year.
- “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022)
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I wonder if it is possible to argue that Pyrrhus was simply never in a position to win strategically. It wasn’t that he made bad strategic choices, it was that there were never good strategic choices on the table for him, and he had to take longshots and simply never got lucky.
He could have pursued more modest goals instead; if he redefines victory to state survival instead of great power status he could just hold his territory and play the great powers off each other, maintaining a powerful enough army to deter conquest. He also had the strategic option of throwing in his lot with someone else and becoming a tributary state; that might not get you in the history books but it can work out reasonably well on a personal basis.
To quote some author or other… “as a rule, if ‘don’t have a war’ isn’t an option, you are not actually doing strategy”
He did not fail at “avoiding state extinction”, and even if, it wasn’t his failure in Italy that we would have to lay that blame on – it was his attempt at Sparta, which got him killed with only a daughter to succeed him, who was not up to the task of statecraft. And this ended merely his dynasty, while the Epirus region would remain independent for almost two centuries more until the Romans would come by and mop them up on their way to Macedonia.
The strategic goal of becoming a Great Power that would survive in what was clearly a time of rising empires wasn’t a bad one, but the issue was that he didn’t have good strategic means of getting there – his attempts at carving out bits of the Greek heartland had failed, the political situation in Greater Greece, the last Hellenic area not yet absorbed by the successor states, turned out to be unsuitable for kingdom building in the way the Hellenes envisioned it, and to his north were people who had no interest in becoming subjects of a Greek state.
If this were a Paradox game, starting as Epirus would probably be one of those high-skill challenges that people would record for clickbaity youtube videos.
Additionally he actually suffered from success in a couple cases where his allies abandoned him in fear he was becoming too powerful.
It is notable that the things Pyrhhus fails at are things everyone else fails at, and he gets closer than most of them did. He doesn’t unify Sicily, but neither does anyone else. He doesn’t unify Greece (greater or lesser), but neither does anyone else. He doesn’t snake Macedonia away from the Antigonids, but neither does anyone else. He doesn’t get a favourable peace out of the Romans, but neither does anyone else. It takes the full might of the later Romans to do most of the things Pyrrhus failed to do.
I also feel like staying out of the power games wasn’t much of an option for Epirus – they’re too involved, both by blood and by geography, with everything going on around them. If you’re going to be dragged in anyway, might as well be on your terms.
I’m not saying he failed at state survival, but that if he’d just made that his more modest goal he could have succeeded at it without spending a ton of money and getting a lot of his subjects killed in failed wars.
In retrospect, maybe. But the Hellenistic world was very much a dog-eat-dog one, in which larger states generally tried to swallow up smaller ones as far as they were able, and not trying to do so was taken as a sign of weakness.
“the Epirus region would remain independent for almost two centuries more”
I would count that as pretty successful. After all, the USA is only a little older than that as an independent country, many other nations have lasted much less time, and the ones that have are generally much changed over that time.
I actually don’t think this is an option. You are either strong enough militarily to prevent the neighboring empires from conquering you, or they will conquer you.
Interstate anarchy if you will
I’m reminded of a key statement Bret made in his “Two Towers” article series –– specifically, that the first and most important strategic question is “should we go to war or not?”
With that strategic question in mind, we should ask ourselves this: would the consequence of Pyrrhus not going to war with Rome have been worse than the consequences of the war he did fight?
Well the consequence of Pyrrhus deciding to go to war with Rome is that he is one of the most famous rulers and generals of all time who was held in immense esteem by his contemporaries as well as those who followed closely after, like Hannibal, as well as being an enormously popular topic of discussion within history generally even 2200 years later.
I guess he could have died an old man full of regrets with minimal respect and no legacy instead, with maybe 100 people in the current era who would even know his name?
Strategy that makes you an interesting case study in failure is not really accomplishing the purposes of strategy.
If the goal is to make a name for yourself, if a person is ambitious, then taking risks like he did makes sense,
While we know he lost in the end, the risks do make sense when you look at them closely.
-Epirus isn’t too much smaller than Macedon, so getting involved in civil wars while it isn’t unified is plausible on the surface.
-Rome is powerful in Italy, but not beyond that. A big group of Magna Graecia city states can conceivably provide enough resources for a successful war.
-Sicily also isn’t unified, so fighting one by one can conceivably let a small army do well.
Also the military culture of y=the time effects things.
-People of the time seem much more ready to fight, and there are plenty of cases where a seemingly weaker combatant does better then expected against a larger one (Greek-Persian wars, Alexander conquests, Syracuse fighting a stalemate against Carthage with its big empire.). It seems the culture of the time encourages militaries to take risks and be aggressive.
-After Alexander and likely other conflicts, the big divisive battle may be a part of cultural expectation.
So Pyrrhus the ambitious, skilled battlefield commander, would be taking bigger risks then his peers but not something out of the ordinary, with perhaps an expectation (conscious of instinctive) that a decisive battle will get results. Turns out he didn’t judge this right and took on enemies that were too powerful, but the thought process of these decisions does make sense.
It does sound like if Pyrrhus had controlled Macedon, or maybe some Italian areas if that were possible, in other words was from a somewhat stronger /more resourced political entity than Epirus, we might have a different history with a successful conqueror.
Pyrrhus would disagree with you about this. Glory was worth more than life itself to the ancient Greeks, and as a cousin of Alexander, Pyrrhus would have felt its demands quite acutely.
You are not in a position to dictate the purposes of strategy.
Setting aside any question of whether “glory was worth more than life” is more than exotification/romanticism, it would appear that Pyrrhus valued his life enough to continuously attempt to withdraw from glorious situations that come too close to killing him. That and how his endeavours seem to have been trying to work towards an actually tangible goal in his own lifetime.
Setting aside any question of whether “glory was worth more than life” is more than exotification/romanticism, it would appear that Pyrrhus valued his life enough to continuously attempt to withdraw from glorious situations that come too close to killing him. That and how his endeavours seem to have been trying to work towards an actually tangible goal in his own lifetime.
Glory wasn’t the *only* thing that mattered, but Greek culture did value it very highly.
Heck, even today, if you told a general “People will still be studying and talking about your campaigns two thousand years in the future,” I reckon he’d be pretty pleased, even if those campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful.
As Bertold Brecht remarks, that might be nice for him, but not so good for a lot of ordinary folk.
I think Herr Brecht would get disappeared in hellenistic kingdoms. Just saying.
Possibly. Pyrrhus doesn’t know that Epirus will be fine whether he does anything or not. As far as he knows, one of the Hellenistic states will decide Epirus should be theirs and take it by sheer numbers. Pyrrhus makes the call that Epirus needs more military power to defend itself and goes looking for it. He’s making longshots, sure, but it’s not an unreasonable call AFAICT.
There is also the point that these people don’t have maps, or statistics, or treatises of the internal politics of their neighbours. It is not like they can read the Encyclopedia Britannica to get an overview of their eventual opponents, check the map and see the locations of the strategic resources nicely laid out, or the check the OECD statistics and Sipri’s numbers for an good overview of the production and military capacity. An early 20th century schoolboy’s atlas would have been invaluable intelligence source.
These are people working on rumours, stories by travelling merchants, and Herodotus’ Histories.
To add to this point — Rome was very resilient compared to the states of the Eastern Mediterranean, so it wouldn’t be too suprising if Pyrrhus went to Italy expecting to be able to fight one big battle and then impose advantageous peace terms, as normally happened in wars between the Successors. Of course, we know that wasn’t going to happen, but in a world where, as you say, reliable information about foreign countries wasn’t available, and where no Greek state had fought a big war against the Romans before, I think it’s understandable if Pyrrhus underestimated how big an effort it would require to defeat Rome.
They have international relations sophisticated to a level where Greek colonies in Italy can call upon potential allies overseas, Epirus can receive aid in funding from two large empires far away from it, and Rome can respond by forming stronger diplomatic ties with far away Carthage. I think you’re drastically underestimating them.
They have international relations sophisticated to a level where Greek colonies in Italy can call upon potential allies overseas, Epirus can receive aid in funding from two large empires far away from it, and Rome can respond by forming stronger diplomatic ties with far away Carthage. I think you’re drastically underestimating them.
Obviously they weren’t isolated or ignorant of each other. But given the limits of state capacity at the time, most rulers would have had only a rough idea of their own (potential) resources, let alone those of other countries.
Obviously they weren’t isolated or ignorant of each other. But given the limits of state capacity at the time, most rulers would have had only a rough idea of their own (potential) resources, let alone those of other countries.
Of course, some states, including the Romans, did conduct censuses of their own people, although I doubt the results would have been obtainable by other countries.
Rome was very resilient compared to the states of the Eastern Mediterranean
This is pretty ludicrous considering that Pyrrhus already attempted several times to test the resilience of the states of the Eastern Mediterranean and found them completely out of his league.
The Romans proved to be much bigger and more powerful than desirable — the desirable level of resilience being that of wet cardboard — but that in no capacity suggests that they were yet as powerful as the giants over in the east covering sizable fractions of Earth’s surface area.
The Epirotes took their chances with a western unknown quantity over the big eastern empires and ended up facing a smaller and less intimidating nouveau riche empire that nonetheless posed a real pain in the ass for his marine expeditionary force. Of course, judging by history, there are few things that don’t pose severe issues for a marine expeditionary force attempting to achieve durable consolidation; it’s a very disadvantageous position to be in, even if — as Caesar learned in his britannic adventure — there is a massive power disparity in favour of the aggressor. That Rome was strategically victorious really should not be particularly surprising, nor should it be taken as a unique sign of Roman strategic excellence.
This is pretty ludicrous considering that Pyrrhus already attempted several times to test the resilience of the states of the Eastern Mediterranean and found them completely out of his league.
The Hellenistic monarchies all folder after a single big defeat by Rome. The Romans managed to keep coming back for more, not only against Pyrrhus, but against Carthage as well. The Romans were absolutely more resilient than the Hellenistic monarchies.
“The Hellenistic monarchies all folder after a single big defeat by Rome.”
To be fair, we don’t know how well the Romans of 280 BC would have responded to big defeats. We may speculate in a semi-informed manner by the response of the Romans to the defeats inflicted by Hannibal in 218-209 BC, so you’re well within your rights to suggest they would have been more resilient.
However, the Rome of 218 BC is quite a different place to the Rome of 280 BC. They’ve had 3 generations of the Roman system embedding itself across Italy inbetween the two, rather than Rome still being in its infancy (or if not infancy then at least early childhood).
If Pyrrhus had pulled off two stunning victories for his first two battles, rather than two Pyrrhic ones, I don’t know what damage that would have done to Roman hegemony in Italy. Perhaps it would have shaken it more than Hannibal’s, given its less mature state at the time. Perhaps not…
To be fair, we don’t know how well the Romans of 280 BC would have responded to big defeats. We may speculate in a semi-informed manner by the response of the Romans to the defeats inflicted by Hannibal in 218-209 BC, so you’re well within your rights to suggest they would have been more resilient.
However, the Rome of 218 BC is quite a different place to the Rome of 280 BC. They’ve had 3 generations of the Roman system embedding itself across Italy inbetween the two, rather than Rome still being in its infancy (or if not infancy then at least early childhood).
The Romans were able to absorb large casualties in the First Punic War, which started only 16 years after Pyrrhus’ arrival in Italy.
I don’t think we can say it takes only one big defeat for the Hellenistic kingdoms to fail: Antigonid Macedon folds relatively quickly to Rome, but the Cynoscephalae/Pydna duo isn’t the first time the Antigonids copped a big loss (they lost at Ipsus for instance).
The Seleucid kingdom is notoriously on the wrong end at Magnesia, but it had both taken big losses before (e.g. at Raphia) and will still hang around for, what, 120 years after the loss? If anything, dynastic instability was a bigger problem than military defeats.
As for Ptolemaic Egypt, it both took quite a few losses along the way (Cos, Andros, Panium…) but hung around for quite some time after them, if in a diminished stature. And could potentially have staged comebacks if the Lagid dynasty wasn’t hilariously incompetent.
It seems to me that Epirus, even with a general of Pyrrhus’ caliber, could have maybe either driven Rome from the southernmost portions of Italy OR driven Carthage from Sicily, and that accomplishing either would have dramatically strengthened the state.
But trying to do both at once was folly.
I wonder what would have happened had he decided to pursue a defensive approach to consolidate his allies in Southern Italy, rather than wasting two years in Sicily. Might Rome, perhaps, have reconsidered his offer?
Kind of a tangential point to the main thrust of the article, but I’ve never understood how ancient polities put these fleets together. Assuming that planned 200 ship fleet was triremes and crewed at 200 men apiece the way Thucydides said was normal, that’s a 40,000 man force that needs to be raised from somewhere.
Now I get that the wealth requirements to be able to buy equipment leaves manpower reserves that can’t be tapped for lack of ability to buy necessary equipment, and a trireme tower only needs to be able to buy an oar and a seat cushion. But it still seems strange to me that a Pyrrhus who struggles to put an army of 30,000 together then contemplates summoning a group of people bigger than his entire army to crew this fleet he wants to build. Where is it all coming from?
Remember that he’s got the Sicilians potentially available for the navy but not for Italian adventurism. He’s got the poor from there, and going by the article on Polis governance 50%-66% are too poor to fight in the phalanx.
The one thing subsistence level agricultural settlements reliably produce a surplus of is poor young people.
Even if they were triremes by hull type, trieres used as troop transports had much smaller crews. They removed the zygitai and thalamitai, so they’d only have 60-62 thranitai instead of 170 rowers. A troop transport might also have gone without epibatai, since marines are less necessary on a ship with that role. The crew could easily be as small as 80 men for a troop transport of that type, rather than 200.
But if he’s planning this for a blockade of Lilybaeum, he needs real fighting ships that can intercept blockade runners or fight off a force that is going to try to resupply in a larger more open fashion, not troop transports.
Naval rowing paid well, and the Med had a large maritime population. Only cash needed – as the Spartans found when the Persians opened their coffers.
Does Pyrrhus really struggle to raise more then 30,000 soldiers? He never seem to have problems to raise new soldiers from his allies in Italy. At the same time the “standard” roman army was also about the same size.
My guess would be, that the army size was more due to the carrying capacity of the land, then to availability of men.
Typo hunt
it should come as little that Macedonian politics
surprise?
Pyrrhus gets hard shut out
sounds a bit odd, but I’m Australian via England.
retreating abck to Epirus
Ptolemy Keraunos then seized the throne
seizes to match tense with rest of sentence
remember here is the natural of the human-created terrain
nature
pushing out the last few Roman positions there
sounds odd. Push out people, take positions?
idea that resurfaces agian and again
couldn’t include any of the Smanite
Not a typo, but Lilybaeum does not appear on the map of Sicily, making the text harder to follow unless you’ve read the map caption carefully. Suggest repeating in main text that “Motya” is where Lilybaeum is.
Also: “even is mail is really good armor” should be “even *if* mail is really good armor”.
Also: “the question students as” (ask)
This made me stumble when reading, because I remembered it differently. Apparently there are two versions. 1. Pyrrhus, 2. Scipio Africanus, 3. Hannibal is what Hannibal is reported as saying in Plutarch’s Pyrrhus, while in Plutarch’s Flaminius and Livy Book 35 the order he names is 1. Alexander, 2. Pyrrhus, 3. Hannibal (“and if you, Scipio, hadn’t defeated me at Zama I would be first”). In the latter Pyrrhus is particularly praised as the one “who taught us how to built a camp; until now, no one has ever chosen better positions or built better fortifications”. Maybe some of the details in these battles that we are missing are skillful use of battlefield fortifications and terrain.
(I think Hannibal was being too humble. The top three battlefield commanders in antiquity are IMO 1. Caesar, 2. Hannibal, 3. Alexander.)
Of course, Hannibal wouldn’t know about Caesar.
Of course. And I do understand why he places himself after Alexander-who-never-lost-a-battle-and-achieved-his-strategic-goal. But Pyrrhus? Maybe the sources Hannibal had access to show some absolute brillance that is lost now – or maybe Hannibal is poetically following the rule-of-three.
Well maybe Hannibal simply looked at the power base he himself had to draw from, and obviously he knew how much of his own tactics and strategy were based on the actions/example of Pyrrhus, and gave Pyrrhus his ranking for that reason.
And of course he would potentially have been aware of information sources we don’t have 2200 years later, since the blog host goes to great lengths to specify how little detail, and how little objectivity, our current sources provide. Especially the troop numbers would be something we’d expect Hannibal to have more knowledge of than we do.
Many people in modern times, and particularly the blog host in not only his classical but also pre-modern and modern commentary, attribute great value to how things *did* go, and have no concern for how they *could have gone*. Now do they appreciate the starting point from which various generals began.
History is contingent, not deterministic.
Choosing a battle site and building a camp are very big, very underestimated factors in ancient warfare. If Hannibal says Pyrrhus was the best at them, I am prepared to believe Hannibal.
..Or maybe Hannbial could sense the future somewhat, and did know about Caesar. Also a useful battlefield skill as we see. Might have been scared of this amazing conquerer in Rome coming to power and attacking Carthage, without realizing he was creating a stable time loop and creating the very conditions for large Roman conquests that would lead to Caesar’s existence. (didn’t sense it exactly, or he would have fought the war differently or not started it.)
This is obviously a completely serious theory that historians should investigate, Hannibal with some clairvoyance. /s
So besides Agamemnon, Hannibal was also an ancestor of Paul “Muad’Dib” Atredies?
Quite the spicy take.
Paul was the result of a multi-eon long breeding program orchestrated by people who were aware of and seeking to harness an ability to use genetic-ancestral memory; it’s quite likely that every historical personage as significant as Hannibal is an ancestor.
He had really long-range clairvoyance, and knew that he would have his revenge when his descendant Septimius Severus, Emperor of Rome, had his grave-site cleared and refurbished.
How do Hannibal’s African pikemen compare to this Hellenistic army system? Carthage clearly has experience against Greek armies, but besides built around a core of pikemen, I don’t know much about his armies. Hannibal does much better against the Romans than even Pyrrhus does (though not well enough).
They mostly don’t, Hannibal uses them as pinning forces for his cavalry, in a way vaguely reminiscent of the Hellenistic system, but every other detail is deifferent upon examination, they are equipped differently move differently, and fight differently.
There’s no indication that Carthage ever used a Hellenistic-style pike phalanx. Carthaginian citizen infantry seem to have fought, at least early on, like hoplites. Hannibal reportedly re-equips all of his African troops in Roman fashion after entering Italy.
Most of Carthaginian armies in the Second Punic War are Gallic or Iberian mercenaries, fighting in their style with their equipment.
I was going to post a separate comment, but this seems a good place to put it.
Pretty please can you do a similar post on how the Carthaginian army functioned! I understand that they made heavy use of Iberian and Gallic mercenaries, the famous Numidian cavalry, and elephants. But that’s leaving a whole lot of tactical complexity on the table.
For example, I knew that Hellenistic armies featured a core of phalangites, light infantry and flanks of cavalry. However, I had no idea that the cavalry weren’t actually on the extreme of the flanks and instead tried to punch through just slightly off centre, with linking ligaments of light infantry to prevent the cavalry themselves being cut off. Or that the light infantry weren’t really used as a screen ahead of the heavy infantry like the Velites were.
We’re told that Hannibal re-equips his African troops in the Roman fashion, but do they actually fight like Romans do (e.g. 3 layers of increasingly tough attritional infantry), or do they fight like Carthaginians do (however that is) using Roman equipment?
On re-equipping, they’d fight like Carthaginians with some Roman equipment.
Picking up a new mailshirt, shield, or sword is going to be fairly easy because these are weapons most warriors / soldiers already know how to use. The scutum with its single hand grip might actually be the most difficult for someone used to a hoplite style strapped arm shield, but then there are a lot of Gauls and Iberians in Hannibal’s army who won’t have a problem. But I doubt that they re-equipped with captured pila in any significant numbers: “What in the name of $DEITY kind of spear is this? It bends way too easily!”
Re-training your infantry into drilled formations with more open spacing and multiple ranks that exchange places is the kind of thing that would take months if not years to achieve. And Hannibal is winning with his existing tactical formations, so why change?
(https://acoup.blog/2023/12/15/collections-shield-walls-and-spacing-hollywood-mobs-and-ancient-tactics/)
He’s getting the equipment essentially from socii outfitters, not conjuring it up out of the bare earth; none of the officers will have any misunderstandings as to how it’s used, and the men on the line will have likely seen it in action themselves anyway.
“…if you want to help me raise an Epirote army to invade Italy (NATO really complicates this plan”
There is actually a relevant gaming crossover here. The board game Twilight Struggle is a 2-player card-driven Cold War simulator. Despite being the #1 game on BGG for a few years, it actually kinda got to be as balanced as it was by sheer luck – the designers clearly had no idea what they were doing on some cards. Notably, NATO, despite being a really iconic event in the Cold War, just… sucks. It doesn’t actually do anything AND it requires setup to even happen. But mostly it just doesn’t do anything.
When they made an expansion, they included a card that specifically gets a boost when NATO is in play, and they also just flat errata’d one card from the First Edition to play differently with NATO: Brush War. Brush War is a Mid-War card (1960s-70s) playable by either side that lets you invade a 1 or 2 stability country with the cover of deniability, so you don’t start a nuclear war. Notably, Italy is a 2 stability country. So you can have mysterious Soviet pirates conquer Italy without LBJ understanding what is going on, or alternatively have freedom-loving Operation Gladio partisans take back Italy if it’s fallen to the commies. BUT! In the later printings, they errata’d NATO to make it also prevent the use of the Brush War card in Western Europe, if it’s in effect. So… NATO really does stop bizarre, ahistorical invasions of Italy! At least by communists.
For background for those curious:
https://twilightstrategy.com/2012/03/12/nato/
https://twilightstrategy.com/2012/09/04/brush-war/
I don’t know if it was ever proven, but there were plenty of allegations that both the CIA and KGB were involved on the opposite sides of the Years of Lead, so I’d say a covert invasion of Italy like it describes isn’t entirely historically implausible.
CIA involvement is quite extensively documented, yes. About the best you can say in their defense is that they may have given guns, bombs, and suitcases of cash to men they knew were violent fascist paramilitary leaders in the hopes that those men would save the guns and bombs for later, and the CIA might not have intended them to be used right away, and might just possibly have been foolish enough not to predict what actually happened. (PROTIP: don’t give guns or bombs to violent fascist paramilitary leaders, because they will use them to do fascist violence right away.)
Even that is a stretch: there’s also a lot of documentation that the Years of Lead were in part a result of a deliberate “strategy of tension” originating with the US political warfare establishment, intended to keep the PCI out of power by creating excuses for crackdowns by the Italian security forces.
There’s also some evidence that the Soviet Union did try to counter CIA political bribery in Italy with (quite pitiful) counterfinancing (IIRC that was a Comintern thing, not KGB as such). You know, things like secretly covering part of the PCI’s printing bill, at a time when the CIA was raking off 5% of the Marshall Plan’s funding, to the tune of 60m (771m in today-money) in Italy alone.
I’m not aware of any direct support of a more military nature from the East. I’m sure that you could trace a kind of six-degrees-of-Andreas-Baader path where the Soviets trained some guys, and then a splinter group trained by those guys went off and sold some guns to the Red Brigades or something. But that’s not really the same as “well, the CIA says their fashy stay-behind network needs some more guns and bombs because the ones we gave them to fight a Soviet occupation ‘fell in the mud,’ and they definitely didn’t blow up the Piazza Fontana with them, no sir, definitely not that.”
Of course, it’s harder to tell, both because so much of the “left-wing” violence of the Years of Lead was carried out with CIA-surplus gear by right-wing ex-fascists, and because much of the genuinely left-originating violence was smaller-scale, things like kidnappings, assassinations, and arson that don’t really need gear so much as they need planning. Is it possible that some of those actions were planned with a KGB guy in the room helping them plot alternate routes? Sure, absolutely. I doubt it, myself: I think the six-degrees-of-Baader scenario is more likely. But it’s impossible to disprove, and it’s also very possible that *indirect* Soviet involvement could still have been quite deliberate.
The first question is how this Epirus entity comes into existence, since its territory is today covered by two NATO members, Greece and Albania. If the process — however it happens — doesn’t already run afoul of NATO, it is relatively reasonable to assume that Epirus would itself be a NATO member, even if not immediately. (For that matter, if it’s a rump Epirus that separated out of Greece, it may even be an EU member as well.) This would likely make the Epirote operation not an outside invasion, but a much less clear-cut situation — that of a NATO-internal scuffle.
As a rule, NATO does not involve itself in its member nations’ internal conflicts, beyond occasional “viewing with alarm”. You *might* get a NATO response to an armed uprising, but, frankly, we all know how fun those are, *especially* when you’re an outsider/foreigner trying to impose a solution.
So, yeah, you could totally have simultaneous armed uprisings in Greece and Albania, forming Epirus 2.0.
Epirus, however, would *not* be a member of the EU. Or of NATO.
This did come up around the issue of the Scottish independence referendum, and both EU and NATO made it clear that independent Scotland would have to apply to join, just like, say, Serbia or Ukraine, and go through the accession process.
To what extent could Pyrrhus’ success have stemmed from the fact that his Italic allies could provide supporting infantry equipped on Roman lines and familiar with fighting the Romans, compared to the levied light infantry of other Hellenistic monarchs
It seems quite remarkable how Pyrrhus (and later Mithridates) was able to both consolidate and lose power so quickly. In just two years Pyrrhus was able to get the Magna Grecians and Sicilians supporting him or his ostensible subjects without a single decisive victory. Then in just two years he is able to lose all of those new subjects and allies without a single decisive defeat.
Is it tho? From what I’ve heard, playing bigger powers against each other and being willing to flip sides when the wind turns was a popular MO for many small states or non-state polities.
Perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps it’s the powers that build durable alliances that are unusual.
Partially it’s his successes that cause his supporters to drift away. Remember, the city-states of Magna Grecia don’t want to be controlled by anyone, Roman or Greek. When Rome seems the biggest threat they flock to Phyrrus, but once he seems more likely to succeed they leave him all alone.
The Greek cities were notoriously bad at co-operating or accepting the leadership of another state; that they should have all agreed to follow Pyrrhus and then deserted him a couple of years later was actually perfectly in character for them.
That he forged those alliances, won a showy victory.. then packed up his army and sailed off to sicily leaving Magna Grecia hanging in the wind while Rome was clearly preparing for another go probably didn’t help.
Wait, I thought Hannibal ranked them as Alexander, Pyrrhus, and himself, supposedly when asked my Scipio at a banquet while both were at the Seleucid court…
Also, how is this version of the “articulated phalanx” different than the previous blog posts mentioning how the Hellenstic system used light infantry in the gaps like joints/knuckles?
The standard hellenistic system had a single large phalanx, with lighter infantry filling the gaps between that phalanx and the cavalry. The articulated phalanx divides the phalangites into several smaller blocks with light infantry between those mini-phalanxes
The point that Pyrrhus’s ultimate failure had less to do with his battle losses being too high and more to do with Roman strategic depth reminds me of Borodino– sometimes presented as a Pyrrhic victory for Napoleon, but ultimately, the Grand Armee had already taken appalling losses long before reaching Borodino (& the Russians probably had the strategic depth to win even if Napoleon had annihilated, instead of merely beaten, their army there).
Are there any examples of “pure” Pyrrhic victories– where the heavy losses of the winning side *as such* transforms a tactical/operation victory into a strategic loss?
There is the battle of Kadesh (as thin and conflicting as the sources are) as another of those “You just didn’t bring the right army to achieve strategic success” situations to add to the pile: Ramesses was capable of winning a pitched battle against the Hittites (although honestly, compared to the Romans vs. Pyrrhus examples, one that involves a lot of childlike flailing around, on both sides), but is incapable of *delivering a siege* on the fortified town of Kadesh.
Ramesses the Great, everyone: Forgot to bring an army capable of the *one thing* an army needs to be able to do for strategic successes in his system of war.
The Battle of the Coral Sea might be one (not an ancient battle though).
The IJN sunk more USN ships in terms of number of ships and total tonnages, so that’s a tactical victory. But the IJN also lost so much of their air cover that they needed to cancel the Port Moresby invasion – which was the intended Japanese strategic goal of the entire campaign.
In addition, the massive aircraft losses of IJN in this battle significantly impact the balance between Japanese and American losses in the following Battle of Midway.
I thought of Jutland – the Royal Navy arguably win strategically in that the status quo favourable to them is preserved, and the Germans certainly fail to achieve any strategic aims – but the RN suffer some spectacular material losses (which aren’t crippling because the RN is huge and so has strategic depth, but which can’t be replaced quickly).
Perhaps modern naval warfare is susceptible to this kind of thing because it’s possible to suffer total losses even in a tactically advantageous position.
I was also thinking of Jutland.
It’s arguable that the Germans won a tactical
victory (I disagree but it’s arguable) and the Royal Navy lost more ships that the Germans but so many German ships were out of action after the battle that the numerical situation had improved for the Royal Navy.
There’s a sound argument that Jutland was a Pyrrhic draw on both sides, I think: the losses, and the nature of those losses, were sufficiently disturbing to both navies to deter either from fighting any major fleet actions in the second half of the war.
to Devin – the Germans tried to fight a major fleet action (the High Seas Fleet against some portion – not all – of the Grand Fleet) after Jutland.
There’s a sound argument that Jutland was a Pyrrhic draw on both sides, I think: the losses, and the nature of those losses, were sufficiently disturbing to both navies to deter either from fighting any major fleet actions in the second half of the war.
It wasn’t really Pyrrhic from the British perspective: the status quo already favoured them, and their navy was big enough to absorb the losses from Jutland, so strategically speaking it was a pretty clear victory. The reason the British didn’t seek major fleet actions wasn’t that they were deterred by previous losses, but because the German navy didn’t come out to fight one, and the German naval base at Wilhemshaven was too heavily mined to be attacked from the sea.
Russia’s recent efforts at Adviika seem like they might become the new gold standard in Pyrrhic victories.
Well, the British losses at Bunker Hill were such that George Washington replicated the effort, with a few improvements that were not put to the test because the British took one look, realized that they would have to do it again, and evacuated Boston instead.
The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The Japanese successfully secured control of the seas around the Solomons, but only through suffering losses so heavy that they crippled their naval air arm for the rest of the war. Also, their sealift capabilities were so weak they couldn’t make use of their control of the seas, either.
Most of the Japanese operations in China from 1937-1941 fall into this category.
The Japanese usually win. They usually inflict something like 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 casualties….
The problem is that the Japanese want from China what the British have in India.
The British are in control of 350 million Indians with only 50,000 British soldiers on the ground. The colony is self managing with local bureaucrats and the the armed forces are mostly local. It is a captive market for the British empire that exports raw materials and buys finished goods.
The Japanese spend the 1920’s and 1930’s gradually seizing more control in China (not as a grand plan, but rather as opportunistic actions by local commanders in pursuit of a shared national idea of Japanese hegemony).
The seizure of the Manchuria in 1931, the Shanghai Incident in 1932, the Great Wall campaing of 1933-1934, all of these are quick, relatively low cost victories that leave the Japanese with a bit more control and able to make money from the newly conquered territory.
In 1937, this all changes.
The Chinese fight and lose and lose and lose again. The problem for Japan is that they never intended or expected for the war to last more than a few months. Japan isn’t making money from the Chinese possessions because it has to keep hundreds of thousands of troops on the mainland.
What they need for a “victory” is to have an intact Chinese state surrender and agree to administer China for the benefit of the Japanese.
The Chinese do not do this.
The Chinese fight and lose, but they take longer and inflict casualties. The Japanese are now faced with a strategic problem of needing to conquer and occupy all of China and destroy the Chinese state. This is a massively expensive proposition that they can’t afford to do. By 1939, the Japanese government admit that they can’t solve the China incident by military means and shift to trying to blockade and starve China into submission.
I still don’t understand how the British could do that. It’s maybe the biggest conquest in history ever, before maybe Cortes destroying Aztec starting from only hundreds of troops. If the British never get out of their islands, could any other colonial power ever achieved the same thing?
It’s not like India was unified when the British showed up. Expansion was piecemeal and gradual, starting with the Mughals simply letting them in, then expansion as the Mughals were weakened by warfare elsewhere.
It’s not like China was united either when Japan comes in. Although other colonizer claim large swath of lands like Russia or Netherlands, India has noticably much more people. And British holds more of India than anyone before and after (not even Modern India holds all of them).
Although that rule doesn’t last more than two or even one century. So maybe they’re a barbarian horde like Mongol all along.
I think you laid out the case for why Pyrrhus couldn’t attack Rome quite well, but the more of these blog posts we get on the Roman Republic the more it seems like it’s impossible to defeat the Roman Republic without taking the city itself. The alliance system, the endless manpower, the ability to always raise another army… it all depends on the actual physical city of Rome and its buildings and civic institutions to organize things. The Senate can’t just relocate to another city in Latium and operate from there. Without the city of Rome and its assemblies they can’t elect consuls or even vote on a dictator or anything.
Bernard Montgomery believed that Hannibal should have besieged Rome after Cannae— not because he was especially likely to win such a siege, but because it was his *best chance* to knock out the Roman Republic (the best of a bad set of options, as it were)
If you’re best option for military victory is still unlikely to succeed, then it’s probably time to give “try to negotiate a peace agreement” some serious thought.
Yup, problem is that Rome is in the middle of said alliance network, so you have to go through it anyway.
But do Pyrrhus and later Hannibal know they is how they can win from Rome? The way Hannibal elected to go around Italy forcing cities to surrender and turn on Rome (only for them to open the gates as soon as the Roman army approaches) seems to imply he thought the Roman allies were quite unhappy with Roman rule. And in a classic empire (where you extract tax from your subjects and treat them like inferiors) that strategy might’ve worked. But with the Roman system the allies have bought into being Roman’s subject and therefore wont easily turn on Rome itself.
Pyrrhus might think “Ill just defeat these barbarians in a pitched battle or two, then offer to leave them by in return for getting southern Italy”, Hannibal might think “I’ll destroy the Romans until they’re are too weak to inspire submission in their allies, then convince them to turn on Rome and watch their manpower dry up as they in-fight”
A good point– also noteworthy that Hannibal’s tactical system largely relied on outmaneuvering his enemies in the field, só it wasn’t necessarily well suited to sieges. Which fits into Bret’s point about how “one can be ‘bad at war’ but ‘good at battles,’” though I’d argue Hannibal was better at war in general than Pyrrhus
It’s important to note that Hannibal’s strategy clearly worked… at first. Indeed northern and southern Italy pretty much entirely side with him, with the exception of very loyal cities aka Roman colonies.
In Latium though it doesn’t work at all, I guess because at this point the Latins are as much Roman as they’re Latin, and they have had some time to intermarry somewhat with the Romans.
The other problem isn’t that the Roman model produces faithfull allies, it’s that, as our host notes is the case for Pyhrrus and will be the case for Hannibal, trying to dismantle it creates polites which would in fact prefer a return to Roman domination. For Pyhrrus it’s the Samnites, for Hannibal it will be that the newly freed big cities begin to turn on the newly freed little neighbouring cities which may reconsider Roman rule as a better alternative, especially considering that the rights they get under Rome isn’t that bad.
Hannibal of course suffered other problems : he let way too much liberties to cities he was liberating, which worked great to entices cities to join him but didn’t allow him to use them to strengthen his position, his own country became unwilling to let him win (always a great way to win a war, for sure), and of course Rome refusing to recognize that they were defeated and going “Ancient total war” on him which was hard for him to know would happen as recognizing defeat would surely have spared many Roman life and the city itself and was something most polites would do when their armies get destroyed.
I don’t think Rome was absolutely unique in the Ancient world for going all in in a war, but I don’t know of another polites which went all in in a war that clearly wasn’t existential.
“he let way too much liberties to cities he was liberating”
I’m guessing he didn’t have a choice. Less freedom would have meant larger garrisons, which was one thing he could not afford.
I’m pretty confident “take Rome, win war” occurred to competent commanders like Pyrrhus and Hannibal. It’s certainly an approach that was proven to work with other city-states.
As with so many things, that is far, far easier said than done.
Rome’s physical defences are significant. Rome has a large population, a significant percentage of which is of military age . . . and while Rome may quibble about wealth requirements for recruitment normally, at need, they’re perfectly willing to recruit the poor and issue them with kit. They do it more than once.
So, we propose to besiege a large city, with good defences and a large citizen garrison. This requires a large army (Pyrrhus and Hannibal arguably have that), good siegecraft (ditto) and good logistics for the next several months while we conduct said siege. The 30,000+ soldiers, thousands of horses and other animals need to be fed while they fill in defensive ditches, undermine walls, build assault ramps, and so forth.
This is not a trivial undertaking at the best of times.
If you assume that the Latin socii, even if left to their own devices, will generate an army to attempt to relieve Rome, and you should, you’re pretty much screwed. The socii armies may not be able to defeat your army, but they don’t have to. They just need to hang around in the vicinity, and prevent you from receiving adequate food supplies.
So, judging that they lack the capacity to successfully besiege Rome, Pyrrhus and Hannibal decide not to. They may have understood that they were betting their war on a pair of eights, to use a poker analogy, but when that’s the hand you have . . .
The problem is that the people making the choice not to siege are all coming from cultural circumstances where the big victory before the siege followed by some rampaging around the countryside would have been enough to delegitimize the alliance network and possibly even see the government of the alliance linchpin overthrown by internal revolt. Hannibal’s Carthage would have immediately sold off colonies and paid tribute if faced with a Cannae-sized disaster in Africa, and the Epiriote alliance network was on a short clock even when winning so it would have folded to a fairly minor embarrassment in the Balkans.
They couldn’t know they had to siege to win (Hannibal with 2000 hours of Europa Universalis IV playtime would have conquered all the way to Britain).
No “foreign” enemy actually captured Rome between Brennus (387 BC) and Alarich (410 AD)… but some Romans did:
Sulla, First march on Rome, 88 BC
Cinna and Marius, civil war against Octavius, 87 BC
Sulla, civil war, 82 BC
Caesar, 49 BC
Octavianus, 43 BC
Of the 5 listed occasions, only 1 included an attempt to defend Rome and Servian Walls militarily – Octavius against Cinna and Marius – and it failed. Note that Cinna and Marius successfully besieged Rome while Octavius had armies outside the walls trying to relieve the city.
Sulla managed to keep fighting and come back despite losing Rome to Cinna. Pompey hoped to follow the example but failed.
This is the list of actual captures of Rome. Add one serious attempt: Battle of Colline Gate. The Samnites reached the walls – like Hannibal did not – but were there only a few hours before engaging the relief army. Had they beaten Crassus, how long would Rome have stood?
The example of 1st century BC – of 6 serious attempts at Rome, 1 was relieved because of adequate relief army being within hours´ distance, 1 was held off some time but succeeded, the other 4 took Rome on the march – how defensible were Servian Walls really? In case of successfully dealing with field army, would the walls of Rome have held Pyrrhus, or Hannibal? Would Romans have been able to fight on if the City had fallen to Pyrrhus or Hannibal, or Pontius Telesinus or Spartacus?
Interestingly, that sort of supports the notion that Hannibal and Pyrrhus lacked the conceptual schema of how best to defeat Rome. Aside from Brennus (who predates its odd societal changes), all of those sieges were brought by people who understood that the power of Rome lies within Rome itself as the symbolic heart of the polity.
Even Alaric, who at first glance is an outsider, existed in a far more Romanised world than Hannibal or Pyrrhus where the default concept of ‘The Empire’ in Western Europe was the Roman model. He himself even served in Roman armies under Theodosius.
> for which the Italian expedition was merely meant to provide the resources.
Thucydides: “That trick never works!”
Pyrrhus: “This time for sure!”
Belisarius: “Third time’s the charm!”
Wrt the attritional nature of roman warfare:
Where do they get the men? I apologise if this was answered in the Roman Organisation series, but in any state, the army is usually the drain on prime working manpower. He who fights does not farm, and he who smiths armour does not Smith a plow.
Roman Italy, especially around this time frame, also does not seem to be that much better than Asian Minorian, or Egyptian. And while I understand that the successor states were loath to mobilize their manpower potential (as discussed in the previous parts), I don’t really see where the Roman bodies come from.
From a naive outside perspective, this almost seems a 40k-ish “throw bodies at the problem until problem solved”, but without the infinite manpower of a hiveworld.
Was Roman fertility really this high? Were Romans culturally predisposed to accept death in battle more than their greek(iphied) counterparts?
I meant “that much better at agriculture “. The high-equilibrium situation our Prof describes comes much later, no?
IIRC from the ancient demographics posts, Italy had a significantly bigger population than Greece + Macedonia, and of course Pyrrhus only controlled a small part of Greece. (Of course, the Romans only controlled a part of Italy, but it was a bigger part.)
But also — The attritional aspect of Roman warfare was focused on wearing down enemy morale, not just throwing people into the meatgrinder and hoping the enemy runs out first . The Roman triplex acies formation meant they could cycle fresh troops into the front line, whereas their opposite numbers would be getting more and more physically and mentally exhausted until they finally snapped. This wouldn’t need to involve inflicting massive casualties — all the evidence agrees that most losses took place during the rout/pursuit phase of the battle — so the Roman army, assuming it is actually victorious, wouldn’t necessarily lose that many men, whilst in the event of defeat, the triarii would be available and intact to help cover the retreat of the rest of the army (which I suspect is a big part of the reason why the Roman defeats against Pyrrhus don’t involve the massive losses found in Hellenistic battles).
The Romans at least seemed to have hit a decent idea of which parts of their society to draw upon in order to limit the effect on work force. The middle aged men stay home and farm (with their slaves, which success in war helps to keep pouring into this society), the man in their late teens and early twenties form the bulk of the armies.
That in combination with their distinct approach to defeated neighbouring polities to expand their soldier reserves and the general cultural context of republics composed of independent farmer citizenry that can form those types of militias.
It’s less “quantity has a quality of it’s own” and more “quality has a quantity of it’s own”. If even the poorest soldiers are armored more then your opponents, fewer of them die and you can have them as battle hardened troops in future battles. And because soldiers dont like to die and do like to survive to get spoils, you get a lot more volunteers if it looks like you are going to keep your troops alive.
Like consider the Socii+Roman troops recruited to fight in 280 or 279, two notably bad years for them. Out of 80k of them, 13k are lost in the two big battles and let’s say another 2k lost in the victory in Etruria. That’s a 19% chance of death and a 81% chance of being alive and a 19% chance of spending several years eating three square meals a day, saving up a little money and getting some plunder from Rhegium or various small Samnite and Etruscan towns. So even when things are going pretty badly, things aren’t that bad for the survivors.
Most soldiers in the losing army are going to survive but the survivors on the losing side are going to usually be returning with little money to a home that might have been devastated. In the Pyrrhic war, his surviving recruits from southern Italy would have been worse off, things would have been a mixed bag for his Sicilians and only a third of his Epirotes returned home with their spoils of war. That’s not a great prospect!
The argument our blog author makes (which is found scattered around a few places) is that smaller property owning farmers tend to have bigger families than the optimum number if you wanted some kind of maximum productivity. (Mentioned in the peasants section of the “how farming works” series.) So a good number of people can join the military and farming stays productive, the big issue is the organization, equipment, etc. that allows these people to be useful soldiers.
The argument is then that politics got citizens more invested (Greek city states and Carthage have similar with citizen armies.), the competitiveness of Italy forces military and political decisions and institutions that run this military well, the high population of Italy means more people can be brought into service, the fact that it has lots of smaller scale independent farmers means they can equip themselves, and the overall result is that a big fraction of a decent sized population is willing to fight. Other political entities controlling a similar population weren’t as able to incorporate that population into a military for various reasons.
(Its what our blog author’s upcoming book will be describing, approximately. At least that’s what I can tell from bits and pieces.)
Rome is highly militarized and makes sure that the socii are as well: They’re basically cutting back on a lot of other things they can extract both from their allies and from roman citizens themselves in favour of getting a large number of heavily armored soldiers.
This is answered in IIb of this series. In short:
-Rome demands soldiers as tribute from their subjects (that the romans call “allies”), not taxes. Allies get a part of the plunder. This has little overhead (no need for a garrison or administration) and makes the allies eager to fight.
-Instead of the elites claiming all conquered land for their own, they give it to Roman colonists. This means you have a really large group of landholding farmers, instead of a lot of poor people with a few aristocrats. Since soldiers have to buy their own kit, they need to have a certain amount of wealth, and landholding farmers have that wealth
-All young men have to fight, their families want them home alive, and therefore are willing to splurge on good armor
-Not only do they have a larger farmer class to draw upon, those men are also willing to fight for Rome, and have no wish to overthrow the government. Therefore Rome can raise a massive army without having to fear that army.
Basically, their demographic pyramid is optimized to generate as many men rich enough to serve, while also having a system of subjugation that makes their allies extremely motivated to fight with them without force.
Furthermore, the settled Roman colonists and their families spend into local economies, as opposed to elite landowners who generally extract wealth from their subjects.
Wrt the attritional nature of roman warfare:
Where do they get the men?
“Attritional” is basically a misnomer. The Romans did not pursue a doctrine of strategic attrition in the sense which you are assuming. Nor did they have some exotic technology for producing tons of fighters — they just had lots of soldiers because they had a large and decently unified state, just as was the case with Carthage, Macedon, and the Seleucids, each of which also outnumbered Pyrrhus.
What Devereaux has mainly been using the word “attritional” to refer to in this series is not strategic attrition, but rather the Roman battlefield habit of dividing their infantry into three thin lines and smashing each of them sequentially into the enemy force.
While the Romans didn’t actually have that explicit doctrine, “by coincidence” they acted almost as if they did.
First, largely as a consequence of being a republic rather than a monarchy, they were unusually unwilling to accept peace treaties that weren’t at least symbolically “a victory”. (It wouldn’t play well politically to “give away” anything, where the alternative is that even if you can’t do anything about it, you leave the headache to next year’s consuls.)
Second, it was basically taken for granted (corresponding to doctrine-level) that Rome raises at least one field army every year. What tasking does that army receive? Whatever problem is most burning. Putting this together with the first, we get actions resembling a doctrine of strategic attrition. See the first punic war and the second punic war. Rome doesn’t concede defeat but fights until it gets to achieve something that counts as victory.
Third, the differences between the Roman and Hellenistic tactical system reveal differences in assumptions as well as cause effects that are both relatively consistent with a notional doctrine of strategic attrition. Partly because their social systems are “closed”, thus recruitment into unfortunately vacated cavalry/elephantry/phalangite billets is difficult, Hellenistic armies have a maneuver-based theory of victory, and indeed the winning side usually takes only light casualties to these arms. In contrast, the Roman tactical system is, one the one hand, clearly much more willing to tolerate casualties in the course of achieving victory, and on the other hand, inflicts casualties on the other side whether or not it achieves tactical victory.
First, largely as a consequence of being a republic rather than a monarchy, they were unusually unwilling to accept peace treaties that weren’t at least symbolically “a victory”. (It wouldn’t play well politically to “give away” anything, where the alternative is that even if you can’t do anything about it, you leave the headache to next year’s consuls.)
Ex-consuls would all sit in the senate, which in this period was responsible for directing Rome’s overall military and foreign policy, so if the war was going badly you couldn’t just wash your hands of it at the end of your term.
Also, I don’t think “largely as a consequence of being a republic” really holds water. There are plenty of examples of monarchs prolonging wars to try and get more advantageous peace terms that they can then portray as a victory to their subjects, and plenty of examples of republics folding in war.
I think a better point is that between how easily replaced the “important military caste” is (and to some extent how that dovetails with politics) If you’re relying on expensive hard-to-replace (and as a consequence, potentially politically influential?) groups for your army you’re going to be quite sensitive to casualties among that group. You actually kinda see something similar with british politics in the early 20th century when the navy is so important that the admiralty becomes fairly casualty-averse: The consequence of *losing* those expensive ships (and the difficulty of replacing them, etc.) becomes a big deal.
About casualities tolerance, I’m not sure Hellenic societies weren’t about as tolerant as Rome. Ancient societies by large all seem quite tolerant to manpower losses. And it’s not quite limited to Antiquity even, as the World Wars, Iran-Irak War or even Russia-Ukraine War all show how even modern societies can be very casualities tolerant.
The problem for Pyhrrus was double : one, the manpower gap was immense as even by counting Magna Graecia to the side of Pyhrrus, Rome had ample human reserves and of course Magna Graecia wasn’t as ready to serve Pyhrrus as he hoped. Second, as the Roman and Hellenic tactical “theories of victory” were different, so were their strategic “theories of victory”. Pyhrrus hoped to wage a limited war of containement against Rome, to inflict heavy defeats so that Rome would have to consider the high cost to continue to wage war and be willing to accept peace. Rome though fought to win, and fougth to win in basically every war when Rome is threatened (I’m thinking of the 2nd Punic War and the Social War). So when you are outmatched and fighting what you’re hoping is a limited war against an opponent which is willing to go all in… Yeah Pyhrrus chances were quite slim.
I think that can very much depend on *what* Hellenic (or hellenistic) society: Sparta was famously casualty-averse *among the Spartiates* to the point where Athens taking a few hundred captives almost won them the war. For the hellenistic states the problem was similar: They had a relatively small pool to draw their Important Military Dudes from (although admittedly, many many times larger than that of Sparta) and so losses *among that group* (not to mention the political elites) could be disastrous.
Rome had a much wider pool to draw from (both as a proportion of roman society-at-large and in absolute numbers) so they could take more casualties.
This gets double when you have political and military important castes doubling up: Lose a couple of thousand peasants isn’t *great* but losing a couple of hundred of your elite knights who are both hard as nails to replace *and* important politically is a much bigger problem.
Though with Rome, the military and political castes were still fairly aligned, but much bigger in both cases. The smallholders who filled the legions weren’t becoming consuls but they still had collective political power as voters.
About casualities tolerance, I’m not sure Hellenic societies weren’t about as tolerant as Rome. Ancient societies by large all seem quite tolerant to manpower losses. And it’s not quite limited to Antiquity even, as the World Wars, Iran-Irak War or even Russia-Ukraine War all show how even modern societies can be very casualities tolerant.
Macedon and the Seleucids sought peace with Rome after a single big defeat. Compare that to Rome raising army after army to fight Hannibal.
“Partly because their social systems are “closed”, thus recruitment into unfortunately vacated cavalry/elephantry/phalangite billets is difficult…”
I think this is the main point. It isn’t that Romans are more “tolerant” of casualties than the Macedonians are, it’s that there simply are more middle class Romans to draw upon than there are elite Macedonians. And importantly, not just for any one battle, but over strategically significant periods of time. Romans could sustain a casualty rate that other polities couldn’t.
And it’s not just phalanxes, IIUC every troop type comes from some specific ethnic group/region of origin, so there are soft demographic limits to replacing these soldiers, that the Romans don’t have to the same degree.
At least, that’s my understanding.
With regard to Roman manpower it’s less a case of just having more people but rather having a bigger percentage of the population that can trusted to show up an fight hard. The average Roman smallholder has a good reason to want to fight for Rome while the average Egyptian peasant doesn’t have much of a reason to want to fight for the Ptolemies. Serfs make shitty soldiers and their rulers know that, which causes manpower problems in societies with lots of serfs.
Really the problem was that serfs can make fine soldiers, and it was absolutely crucial that they never did, because then you don’t have serfs anymore.
Imperial Russia might disagree. The army was conscripted serfs (and it performed at least as well as most European armies of the time up to the mid C19), and those who returned to their villages after their 25 years service were serfs still.
That didn’t work out so well for them in the 20th century.
They’d also abolished serfdom by the 20th century, and most of the revolutionist foot soldiers were industrial workers.
What I’m taking from this series is that the Roman social structure was a big contributor. During this period, Rome had a very large middle class, and so a large proportion of their population was eligible to be drafted into the legions. In comparison, the narrower social pyramid of the Greeks meant that a much smaller proportion of the population could be drawn from to replace the heavily-armed phalangites.
The Greeks could still produce raw numbers of soldiers, but they couldn’t easily replenish the core of the army – and the Roman style of battle produced heavy casualties to that core even in defeat.
I should be the last person to correct someones spelling, but:
> even is mail is really good armor.
“even if mal is really good armor”?
15% casualties usually being a defeat always makes me want to bring up the Battle of Lund, which famously had around 50% casualties for the winning swedish side, and something like 75% for the danish side. (it was a confused battle where both sides had points where they broke but then managed to rally and have another go, which to some extent explains the massive casualty rate)
To be fair, post-gunpowder battles generally involved higher casualties than pre-gunpowder. 50/75% was exceptionally high, but it wouldn’t be unusual for the winners to lose 15% or more of their army.
Possibly that’s due to the greater range over which the winning side can inflict casualties on the side that’s running away. If you have a sword and shield on foot, once the other guy’s out of arm’s length you have to chase him or give up. Cavalry means you move faster, which is why it was usually the horse boys who killed routing units.
If you have guns, and especially rifles, then that range becomes a lot longer.
They had higher casualties among the winners, too, so it’s not just a matter of it being easier to shoot fleeing enemies in the back. Instead, I think it’s a combination of (1) even quite primitive firearms are just much more deadly than bows, and (2) casualties inflicted from a distance are less damaging to morale than casualties inflicted in close combat, so units would hold out longer (and hence take higher casualties) before finally breaking.
Actually, well trained longbowmen could shoot faster, at longer range, and more accurately than firearms for quite a long period after the introduction of firearms. The problem was that becoming an expert archer took many years of practice, whereas you could train someone to adequately use a firelock or musket in a few weeks, especially for volley firing, where no precise aiming was necessary.
At the same time, he is foiled by some of the clear operational and strategic advantages the Romans possessed, in particular their various forms of strategic depth (Carthaginian strategic depth is also clearly a problem for him). Rome fields multiple armies annually, so a single big victory never leaves Pyrrhus in a position to run the table. Moreover, Italy is filled with Roman allies sitting in well-fortified towns which must be taken, one by one, giving Rome time to recover. In short, not only is the Roman army built for tactical attrition, the Roman state is built for strategic attrition. The Roman state is durable and for all of his flashy victories, Pyrrhus never gets particularly close to overturning it or even setting up durable control of Southern Italy, as Rome’s quick comeback the moment Pyrrhus himself leaves for Sicily demonstrates.
That is one way of saying that Pyrrhus was fighting a much larger state with significantly greater manpower. To suggest that this is some special advantage of Roman military institutions seems to be rather exoticizing, though, when the context offers the dead-simple alternative of Rome simply having a geographic and demographic size advantage irrespective of any fine-grained sociopolitical considerations.
Not neccessarily: The Achamenids (or even the greek successors themselves against the romans) face the same type of losses and collapse entirely: The Romans at the time clearly have any advantage (politically if nothing else) that lets them absorb losses in a way some other states don’t.
To be fair, the Achaemenids were quite resilient: they managed to raise multiple armies to fight Alexander, after all. Their problem was that their subjects don’t seem to have been invested in their system as the Roman allies were in theirs, so in between battles Alexander was able to take vast swathes of territory with comparatively little trouble.
“That is one way of saying that Pyrrhus was fighting a much larger state ”
But Rome was smaller then Epirius+Magna Grecia and half of Rome’s territory was Samnite territory that was providing troops to Pyrrhus not Rome!
The thing about “greater manpower” is that the amount of manpower a state is able to draw upon is a function of its institutions. There are historical states with larger populations than the Roman Republic in the early third century that don’t seem to draw upon such numbers for soldiers (or don’t use those soldiers to make such heavily armed armies), because things like tactical doctrine and general mustering process don’t favour the numbers, leaving many at home to farm or labour.
It takes something like the diolectus and the cursus honorum to be able to both draw upon numbers from within the demographics to create multiple field armies and have numerous generals with a common state loyalty to independently command them.
It’s not exotifying when the actual details are analysed rather than just falling back on a rubric of “they succeeded because they were cool”. That and when the analysis takes pains to point out that such institutions develop out of a combination of ad hoc decisions and selection pressure rather than some unique genius or innate national quality.
Pyrrhus is not fighting a much bigger state. But the Roman system allows them far greater access to their population. Similar to the war of 1870/71 when the German armies weren’t that much bigger than the French army, but mobilisation was a lot quicker. Allowing the Germans decicive early victories,
As this series veers more and more into the strategical, I’m starting to think that we just don’t know how the battles against the phalanx played out. I understand that manpower and strategic depth are more important than having some incredible military technology (unless you’re the mongols). But I was hoping to understand how an actual roman maniple behaves when faced with an actual kilometer-wide wall of spears.
Do they moonwalk while waiting for their allies to flank? Seems like the answer is a clear “NO”, with the Roman focus on winning through the center. Do they lever the spears out of position with their shields and try to cut them? Seems like phalanxes would never have taken off if that is all it took. Or perhaps nobody else was capable of fielding infantry that was sufficiently heavily armored to fight in this way?
I think it’s a very interesting question because reenactment consensus seems clear that swords are a ceremonial weapon that is just less practical than a spear as a primary weapon, short or long, in a rigid formation or not. And yet the gladius was the primary weapon of the Romans. I don’t doubt that logistics trump tactics etc, but the Romans could’ve had those logistic advantages using phalanx-based armies as well. They preferred guys with swords in triplex acies presumably for a reason, it feels like a cop-out to talk about manpower without looking at how a small group of Roman soldiers will actually behave in battle. Do they throw their pila into the forest of spears, have them get tangled up in there, and then charge in while swatting the points away with their superior armored gauntlets? Do they wait for the superior Roman cavalry? Do they stall while counting on the phalanx to unravel itself on a terrain feature? How are these battles actually playing out on the human level and why are they good for the guys with the big shields and small swords?
Well, if the casualties in a winning battle for the Hellenistics are roughly even and manage to be concentrated among the Eporite core, that would seem to imply the Roman infantry did manage to make a big dent in the phalanx. The fact that other people go to the effort of rearming in the Roman style would also seem to imply they made for better heavy infantry than the phalanx.
We can probably draw some conclusions from the fact that articulating the phalanx was considered a good idea against the Romans. I think the implication of that is that gaps formed in the phalanx to disastrous effect, hence wanting more flexible formations to fill said gaps. Considering that we’re talking about a highly-experienced army under a guy who gets regarded as a great general, that’s probably not an unforced error on his part; the Romans create the gaps. But the average performance along the line must have been good or he’d have put unbroken blocks of allied infantry in the center as his anchor instead of going to the complicated effort of intermixing troops who may not even speak the same language.
My uninformed guess would be it’s the pila doing exactly what they’re supposed to, disrupting formations, except usually this doesn’t work well enough to create a breach, but when it does the breach spreads like wildfire.
That, exactly. The Romans are walking into battle each with a pair of armor piercing javelins. I don’t think we know exactly what they did in face to face combat, but what I imagine is something like this: March, throw, throw, push forward, enemy breaks or they don’t. If break, pursue and exterminate; if not, bring up the next line of legionaries. Rinse and repeat.
See, reenactors need to start throwing javelins at each other, just for science.
“Increasing strategic focus” is just an accident of post order, late battles are better documented so we’ll likely get ibattlefield information in those.
To a degree we can never know this, short of getting in a time machine and going back to watch the battles (or arming tens of thousands of human-like robots with the appropriate weapons) because it’s impractical and unethical to attempt to recreate these battles. Small scale stuff in HEMA and LARP is not a realistic recreation of battles where thousands of people were killing and dying.
However, there seems to be two main ways Roman legions beat phalanxes. One is by not beating them, or more precisely by going after the supporting troops. A Macedonian army is not all phalanx; there’s plenty of lighter, supporting infantry types intermixed with the blocks of phalanxes. And the Romans *can* decisively beat those, man to man, because they’re more heavily armored and their pila can disorganize the lighter lines enough for a charging maniple to rout them. That leaves the phalanxes getting flanked and taken apart piecemeal.
The other way Romans beat phalanxes is by being more flexible. A toss of pila will, across the entire face of an army, create some places where there are gaps and confusion in the phalanx. Roman maniples, used to operating on their own in a tactical space, can advance or retreat flexibly. If a maniple manages to disorganize part of a phalanx and push into it, that either allows them to start cutting into the flank of the phalanx next to them or else forces the entire enemy army to fall back. And a fighting retreat is maybe the most difficult tactic in the world to pull off, especially when you’re in a tightly packed unit and all you can see is the back of the guy in front of you and the shoulders of the guy to either side of him. Walking backwards while keeping your pike leveled in that situation would be horrifically difficult, and it only takes a couple of men tripping over themselves and falling down to create commotion in such a tightly-packed formation. And once the centurions leading the maniples see that commotion, they charge and create *another* breach in the lines. Rinse and repeat.
The other way Romans beat phalanxes is by being more flexible. A toss of pila will, across the entire face of an army, create some places where there are gaps and confusion in the phalanx. Roman maniples, used to operating on their own in a tactical space, can advance or retreat flexibly.
There’s no known example of Roman infantry beating a formed phalanx from the front, so I think you’re overestimating how much confusion the pila would cause.
As far as I understood, there usually aren’t plenty of lighter infantry between the blocks of phalanx. That was a special thing Pyrrhus did, and if it helped the Romans, then maybe Pyrrhus was a unique fool in phalanx history..
The usual place for the light troops was between the phalanx and the heavy cavalry. Exploiting that gap would look a lot like the usual phalanx vs phalanx strategy of going to the flank and winning the cavalry battle.
>there’s plenty of lighter, supporting infantry types intermixed with the blocks of phalanxes.
The question is, what came first. Did Pyrrhus articulate his phalanx because he was uniquely bad at this, creating holes for the Romans to exploit? Or were the Romans already successfully exploiting the phalanx for some other reason, forcing Pyrrhus to articulate it so that problems are less likely to be disastrous (see guy’s second paragraph)?
Do they moonwalk while waiting for their allies to flank? Seems like the answer is a clear “NO”, with the Roman focus on winning through the center. Do they lever the spears out of position with their shields and try to cut them? Seems like phalanxes would never have taken off if that is all it took. Or perhaps nobody else was capable of fielding infantry that was sufficiently heavily armored to fight in this way?
The Roman pila are almost certainly the main way they’d be able to harm a (formed) phalanx. Macedonian phalangites only have small shields which are strapped to their arms (and hence close to their bodies), so a volley of pila would cause quite a few casualties — not enough to seriously disrupt the phalanx (there are no examples of the Romans defeating a formed phalanx from the front), but over several hours of fighting, the casualties would add up, even if the Romans are eventually defeated.
Not what I’d expect. Sure, the pila will cause issues, but once those are thrown, I would expect the milites to close, pushing the sarissae out of their path, until they get to gladius range and start removing body parts and/or stab phalangites.
The sarissa is huge; six metres long. So, just crouch under the tips, angle the shield a bit (it’s telling that the scutum’s grip is parallel to the ground during this time), so they glance up, then just keep walking (actually, rush them, a three to five step charge/sprint).
I don’t care how elite the phalangite is, compared to the miles, a lever of several metres’ length means there genuinely isn’t any contest of strength here.
And once the miles is past that iron tip, the sarissa isn’t much use to the phalangite. Trust me on this; I’ve chased down people with 9-foot spears. They’re dangerous enough as long as they can keep at range, but once you start closing? They either back up, to get back to their range, or they die.
And a phalangite *cannot* back away; there are half a dozen other phalangites behind him.
So, the miles gets into range while the phalangite is still trying to transition from sarissa to xyphos, rams that shield forward to discombobulate, then follows up with the gladius.
Not what I’d expect. Sure, the pila will cause issues, but once those are thrown, I would expect the milites to close, pushing the sarissae out of their path, until they get to gladius range and start removing body parts and/or stab phalangites.
That’s not what happened in the actual battles, where Hellenistic phalanxes were consistently able to hold their own against legionaries unless their formation was disrupted by terrain or rampaging elephants.
> The sarissa is huge; six metres long. So, just crouch under the tips, angle the shield a bit (it’s telling that the scutum’s grip is parallel to the ground during this time), so they glance up, then just keep walking (actually, rush them, a three to five step charge/sprint).
I’m sorry but what? Do you believe phalanx and legion fight were some kinds of parallel duels occuring only roughly at the same time and at the same location?
Because trying to do what you’re proposing is in my view close to suicide. First get close to the spears and try not to get stabbed by one of them. Note that while you deflect one of them, the ennemy neighbour may have a great opportunity to stab you as your shield is in the wrong direction to his spear. If you’ve not been killed or wounded getting close to the spears, then you crouch in front of the ennemy, angle the shield and?… Present your back to the other guys neighbours, with no shield of yours to protect against their spears? I’m not sure you realize what the most probable consequence of your proposal is…
Of course you could try to stay crouched with your shield over your head and then get to the first ennemy line… so that the guy just has to drop his spear and get his backup sword, stab you as you’re kinda trapped over multiple spears (not only his, that he just dropped of course, but the ones of the ranks behind him).
Of course you could also try to get the people of your formation to try to rush the ennemy formation all at the same time and try to lift the ennemies spears so that you can all rush them and stab them… but then some of your comrades may froze before going under the very clearly dangerous wall of spears and then they fail to cover the back of their neighbours, who get killed and then the battle end in a disaster.
The battle plan of “Try to not get killed and tire out the phalanx so that breachs appear in the formation that you can then try to exploit and if it fails it’s pretty bloody to both sides” aka “moonwalk” seem to me way more reasonnable.
“Note that while you deflect one of them, the ennemy neighbour may have a great opportunity to stab you as your shield is in the wrong direction to his spear”
An opportunity that they appear to not actually be able to exploit in any way.
https://i0.wp.com/acoup.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sarissa-Phalanx-Depth.png?resize=1024%2C1005&ssl=1
They can’t swing their spears to another file and their spearheads only reach one rank. There are six meters where you are threatened by a spear head but you are only threatened by one spearhead at a time. And on top of that the visibility for the back ranks is going to be atrocious and aiming with a long pike seems like an exercise in futility.
The pike ranks look more like a tool for restricting movement then dealing damage. And that definitely squares up with the fact that romans fought these things for an extended period of time with shockingly low casualties.
The “How a Legion Fights” post is explicitly about this, and next post will be an examination of the Macedonian Wars battles, for which we have much better sources.
That post explained the generic Roman approach, but more work is needed to explain how that stuff is applied specifically against a phalanx. For example, it is certainly a virtue that the maniple is able to move 50m to the left or right, and it’s good that the triplex acies allows fatigued soldiers to swap out. But the former seems fairly unimportant against a traditional phalanx center presenting a dense spear wall infront of you, and 50m to the left of you, and 50m to the right of you, and 500m to the right of you too for that matter.
I mean, I can imagine multiple maniples using their maneuverability to pick the weakest spot and throw all their pila there; the point is that Brett has not talked about this beyond mentioning that a wall of spears would deflect the pila to some extent (presumably because we don’t know?). Without considering how Roman tactical doctrine was specifically applied against the phalanx, the triplex acies is just a neat trick, not a decisive advantage. It lets you use a different guy to moonwalk in front of the spears, it lets you choose whether to moonwalk against the spears in front of you or the ones 50m to the left, but you’re still moonwalking, not cutting anyone.
Pushing a 5 metre sarissa away with the scutum is trivial. Seriously, try it. Hold a stick that long, however securely, then have someone else move the far end.
Remember, the tip end of any weapon is where it is *weak*, that is, easily moved by the opponent.
No, it won’t matter that there are six sarissas, as long as I can walk under those spearpoints and lift them out of the way.
If this process was this easy, the result of Romans fighting a Hellenistic pike phalanx would be that they easily scythe through that phalanx from the front. And indeed, that would hardly be exclusive to Romans either – nearly anyone with shorter weapons + shields should be able to do basically the same thing.
But that’s not what happens, ever. Romans defeat a pike phalanx through slow grinding until some opportunity comes up to allow flanking, like the destruction of supporting troops. This very much suggests that the standard Roman kit could _not_ trivially blow through a pike phalanx from the front.
“If this process was this easy…”
It is. I’ve done it often enough, and the physics demand it be so. You’re dealing with the long arm of a lever who’s fulcrum is the hand wielding the spear; your force is magnified and theirs is diminished (when it comes to lateral movement).
The issue is, in a battle line it’s not the spear in front of you that you have to worry about. It’s all the spears around that one. Pushing one spear aside is trivial; however, it necessarily opens you up to attack from another direction. And if you block that, you’ve got another spear coming at you. And another. And another. And another. And it doesn’t help that you have a battle line of your own, since spears have a longer reach than your sword and more of the enemy ranks are engaged–you’re not just fighting the guy in front, but (depending on the formation and specific spears) the first 3-5 guys in front.
Oh, and that leverage thing works against shields as well. As a spearman, I don’t necessarily have to hit you. All I have to do is move your shield out of the way–either by making you move it, or by snagging it and pulling. Once your shield is down, the enemy spearmen have a wide variety of targets to select from on your body. It’s one reason I’m surprised by the scutum, it appears uniquely bad at dealing with spears (but per my discussion below, I imagine it’s ignorance on my part).
This would make it seem like spear walls are impossible to penetrate. And that’s more or less as it should be. Battlefields notoriously are unkind to formations that are ineffective; any formation that lasts past two battles is one that’s really hard to overcome given the technology of the day. Every formation should seem unstoppable–that’s why they were used!
(The trick to overcoming a spear wall is to either, as you say, wait for an opportunity to flank (phalanxes are notoriously vulnerable on the sides) or cause sufficient disruption that you’re no longer dealing with the first 3-5 ranks of spearmen and which allows you to punch through the middle (which gives you a VERY brief window). Bull-rushing up the middle can work, but you’ll take heavy casualties. And one use of the reserves is to flank people who try to flank your unit–remember, sword units are notoriously weak on the sides as well! Everything has a counter; there are no perfect tactics.)
You really can’t scale from single combat to even small-unit combat, much less army-vs-army combat. The addition of a few hundred people to the mix changings things quite dramatically.
Did you or your reenactor friends attempt to lift the rear of the Sarissa above your head, thus gaining the ability to pivot the spear at a point far down the shaft? This should, in theory, provide enough of an angle to stab a guy three feet to the left or right of the spear head.
Serious question, I’m curious about this.
“reenactment consensus seems clear that swords are a ceremonial weapon that is just less practical than a spear as a primary weapon”
I don’t know where you found that consensus but it is obviously wrong. Swords were used in warfare for thousands of years and definitely weren’t “ceremonial weapons”. Swords generally were secondary/backup weapons, and in case of Romans this is also true, since their primary (=used first in battle) weapon was _pilum_, heavy javelin, while gladius was carried in a scabbard and used for melee later.
“How are these battles actually playing out on the human level”
As far as I understand, the goal of the Romans was to break phalanx formation and go into close combat, since in that situation the Romans with better armor, bigger shields and better sword-fighting skills would be superior. To break the formation Romans throwed pila, charged, retreated, fought on difficult terrain, tried to rout enemy elephants and so on. If the phalanx held its formation, then it was nearly invulnerable to Romans, but sooner or later at some point of the battle line for some reason the formation might break and Romans would break through there and win. And since the Romans themselves also weren’t that vulnerable to the phalanx sarissas (because they had good armor and big shields, and also the phalanx wasn’t the main damage-dealer of the Hellenistic armies – it was cavalry), the Roman battle line could hold long enough for that break-through to happen (and in case it wouldn’t the Romans had two extra battle lines in reserve).
“…reenactment consensus seems clear that swords are a ceremonial weapon…”
Which is a lie. Swords were used in war for 5,000 years (maybe longer, depends on how you interpret a few stone weapons); you’d have to assume that everyone in the past was a moron to hold this view. When we see something endure longer than entire civilizations our assumption needs to be that it was effective at what it was used for, and that any failure to identify an effective use is a failure of our knowledge. Further, we have ceremonial swords–they are obviously ceremonial because there’s no way to use them in combat (too big, made of soft metals, or otherwise not useful). So we know what general trends swords would follow as they fall out of use. We do not see such trends in things like the cruciform swords of the Middle Ages (they had ceremonial use, but were weapons first and foremost), or the gladius of Rome, or the other swords that we see on battlefields.
The benefit of spears is distance, coupled with simplicity. It’s easy to be brave at 7-10 feet (or more if you’re chucking it) surrounded by your shield-brothers. And if you can kill them before they can even reach you, you win. Plus, “Stick pointy thing in squishy thing that screams and bleeds” is hardly the most complicated task. And spears are cheap. A bit of metal at each end, a bit of wood, and you’re good. Any village blacksmith can make these–and in fact does, spears being used for a variety of tasks in any agrarian society.
That said, spears are not perfect. Get within 2-3 feet of most spearmen (which is easy enough to do, you can learn the trick in an afternoon) and you can more or less do whatever you want with them. Unless they have a backup weapon they’re hosed–their main weapon is sticking out past your shoulder somewhere, and they’re gripping it wrong to do any damage anyway. (There are specialized tactics to avoid this, obviously, but they require more training. NO weapon is perfect, just as NO widely-used weapon is ineffective.) The problem with swords is that you’ve got to be up close, they’re more complicated to learn to use, and they’re expensive, requiring specialized manufacturers.
A sword isn’t perfect, but it’s a fairly good all-around weapon. It can chop, it can slice, it can find gaps in armor–not as well as other tools, but few if any other tools do them all as well as a sword. And once you’re within 2-3 feet of me, and my spear is out of line, your sword is going to cause me to have a very, very bad (and almost certainly brief) day.
Armor changes this but not as much as people think. You can still break bones with a sword when the other guy’s wearing a hauberk (or Roman equivalent). There are still gaps to exploit. A sword can stab deep enough to cause damage as well. Textile armor does even less against a sword. Against plate a sword is limited to finding gaps (and we see swords evolve once plate becomes more common), but that’s still useful–I can’t punch through your breastplate, but if my buddy cuts your straps I can punch through your belly fairly easily.
Ultimately it’s a question of use. Spears are more useful tactically than swords, in that spear-based units are easier to build, easier to train, easier to hold together, cheaper, and effective. Swords are better for one-on-one confrontations most of the time, as they are reasonably good at everything and thus give you more options.
I think a big part of why I got the impression of swords being futile was watching some lindybeige videos where LARPers skirmish a bit, stopping at first hit. But thinking on it, those rules might favor attacks that you would not make in real life for fear of retaliation. Similar tradeoff to the one between rapiers and normal swords. Easy to get a hit in and that’s all that matters in competition, but maybe you lose the arm if you try that in war.
I still have the impression that even ignoring their two heavy javelins, the Romans had a very unusual kit in choosing to go with mass formations of infantry using swords as their primary weapon, and actually conquering the world that way. The Greek empires before them were heavily invested in the phalanx, the Romans tried some spear stuff in their early history and just discarded it. Spear walls favored by professionals and levies the world over, in every historical period? No thanks, put them next to the elephants.
Brett wrote about the maneuverability of the maniples and the javelins and the heavy armor and the topic still feels underexplored, because..they beat the spear wall! In its most professional and extreme incarnation! With swords, not a cavalry flank! They didn’t even find it good enough to emulate!
The thing about a sword is that to use it, you have to get really up close and personal to the person you are using it on. I imagine that, while this would be no problem at all to lots of people in antiquity, it would also be quite offputting to many more. A spear lets you keep a bit of separation, and chucking a spear (along with some well-chosen insults) lets you keep even more. Keeping your distance from the enemy (while still looking good to your peers) seems to be quite a desirable outcome in many cultures. Swords are common, but sword-first specialists, as the Romans were (pila were just an hors d’ouevre), are less so, and I suspect this is at least as much to do with the psychology of the person holding the sword as it is with reach, ease or otherwise of use, blacksmithing skills etc.
Your first mistake is getting your information from Lindybeige about pretty much anything to do with history.
The second mistake is that “small skirmishes with no armour and first hit” do not really translate effectively to the mechanics of large battles. One hit defeat + any hit is good is a very strong incentive to maximise reach, and in a play fighting context where there’s no real threat to failure beyond sitting out for five minutes, you end up with something quite inaccurate. The open skirmish order also allows the fighter with the spear to maximise their ability to “kite” opponents, vs line fighting where they need to actually hold position.
Once people have armour and weapons need to do actual damage, the outcome of any individual hit is a lot less certain. Once you’re fighting in a formation where you have to hold position to a reasonable extent, not just sprint away while taking occasional potshots, you have less tools to address someone closing into distance under cover of a shield. Once maiming or death are real consequences of getting it wrong, people become less willing to take risks.
Organised formed infantry are almost always a problem that takes time. If it was just as simple as “run in with your swords” or “hold your spears out and they’ll bounce off” battles would end nearly immediately and with very high casualty rates – instead, they go on for hours and we usually see relatively low casualties (particularly for the winners). This suggests an extended process of probing, pressing, pushing. Slowly introducing disarray and damage into the opposing formation, pinning it in place while your cavalry can come round to the flank, pushing a wing back until there’s a juicy flank you can exploit. And then once you finally create a collapse by one of these means, the battle can turn in an instant.
Notice how the specific weapons don’t really play into most of these methods. You can push them back with a clash of spears, or with a systematic press of pikes – or with a shower of javelins and a charge, then holding your ground while they step back to take a breather and re-dress the lines.
I’m not a huge fan of lindybeige. He sounds intelligent and reasonable and knowledgeable, but quite often gets a lot wrong. There’s a LOT of misinformation on YouTube about Medieval and ancient combat. One of the reasons I stopped watching it.
Also, LARP is very, very different from real combat (which leads to the misinformation). One-hit KOs aren’t usually a thing in combat, for example. Remember, you’re literally fighting to stay alive in a battle; if you can rotate out after being injured, sure, you’re going to (and there’s always points in the battle where that can happen), but if you can’t you’re not going to go “Oh, my arm is disabled, guess I’ll die now.” Further, LARP (and the SCA, and HEMA) have rules to ensure the safety of the competitors. That’s more or less the opposite of actual combat conditions, where the point is to inflict damage on the competitor. This fundamentally changes the nature of the fight. For example, you CAN’T exploit gaps in armor in modern recreational swordplay the way you would with a real sword in battle, precisely because it’s too effective.
Of the recreational swordplay I’ve seen, I think the SCA is closest to how actual battles would go, in that they acknowledge that hits to various parts of the body will have various effects. A blow to the head can put you out of commission, whereas a blow to the arm would allow you to keep fighting. But I’m pretty heavily biased here.
As much as I love modern recreational swordplay, and as much as I think it can provide useful information about how battles were done in the past, it’s a tool with some pretty major limitations.
As for Rome’s formations, I get the sense that it’s less about the swords and more about the maneuverability. A phalanx falls apart if you disrupt it–it can (obviously) handle a certain amount of disruption, but it can only handle so much. Rome’s tactics seem designed to maximize disruption to the enemy unit (well, everyone’s tactics did) while managing disruption of their own units much more effectively (which is the unique part). And as far as distance goes, I’d be curious to see how far a pilum could go vs spears on a phalanx. If they threw them just before they charged, it could create a temporary disruption–just long enough to get inside the spears, within sword range. You have a second or two, but if you’re prepared to take advantage it’s enough. But that’s all speculation. You’re right, I don’t think this is adequately explored.
“Similar tradeoff to the one between rapiers and normal swords.”
A rapier is a normal sword. It’s just optimized for set combat without shields and taking advantage of better metallurgy.
I am duty bound to inform you that rapiers, sir, are extraordinary swords.
You are very correct that military swords were indeed intended for work, and not as “ceremonial” weapons at least through World War One, and even beyond. Metallurgy and forging techniques had improved enough by the 19th Century that one of the tests used when proofing British officers’ swords was pushing the point of the blade through a 1/8” steel plate. A sword is also an excellent defensive weapon, whereas a spear can be a liability in close combat. That having been said, I’m not sure I would want to defend myself with a gladius that way, without a shield, unless the other guy only had a gladius, too.
Pike phalanxes have depth in their formations so that the density of spearpoints at the front can be greater than one-per-human-width. Consequently, casualties in a pike phalanx don’t only result in men from back rows moving forward, they also result in men scrunching up sideways; if that scrunching up fails to happen for some random reason, you have a gap big enough to put an armored man through and the pikes can’t turn to face him, everything goes to disaster from there.
We think the Romans just tried to press on the spear wall and throw in pila and javelins along as wide a front as they could safely manage, understanding that that kind of opening should never happen but might, and that eventually the actual edges of the phalanx might become unguarded. We also think that they were trained to put themselves in danger for limited periods of time and trained to pull themselves out of the front as small groups before they got tired/bloodied enough that tiredness made it easier for them to make fatal mistakes.
In all infantry clashes, the goal of both sides is to keep the other guys occupied with the task of trying to kill (but not succeeding at killing). The Romans on the actual spear face did that better than their opponents, they may never have actually just lumberjacked their way through an enemy front.
Really enjoyed this post, just want to mention a quick typo – for the map of Sicily that’s in French, you mention previously that the Greeks are on the east of the island and the Carthaginians on the west side, which matches the map itself, but in the description you say the Carthaginians are on the east side.
i.e. ‘as well as marking the area of Punic settlement in the East’ should be ‘as well as marking the area of Punic settlement in the West’
Fixed! Thanks.
Interesting as usual, thanks!
Typos:
even is mail is
a repositioning a detachment
much to small
The Roman insistence that Pyrrhus’ losses were always ‘his best men’ always struck me as exactly the same kind of face-saving Bret is otherwise identifying in their accounts, to be honest.
One argument that Bret doesn’t explore that I think is interesting is that the Roman performance improves in the later battles against the successors precisely because the armies are getting larger. If the essential rule of the matchup is that a pike formation that never opens an exploitable gap will inevitably roll back whoever stands in front of it with shorter weapons, but an attack into an exploitable gap can cause the collapse of the formation, simply increasing the width of the formation should increase the opportunities for such a gap to open in a given period of battle.
I sometimes perceive that there’s a resistance to characterizing the Roman success this way from some ‘Rome fans’ – that sword-armed soldiers must passively wait for pike, which in good order can advance without hope of being resisted, to err, rather than creating the victory by manfully throwing themselves onto the spearpoints – even when the argument acknowledges that the Roman resilience creates so many opportunities for the phalanx to err that the occurrence and Roman victory become the most probable outcome.
In any case I’ve certainly read others giving the opposite of Bret’s argument: that the small number of battles in which the successors lost their empires to Rome were exceptionally poorly generaled and that Pyrrhus’ results should be understood as the expected outcome of a clash between the two formations.
The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the number of battles available to argue from is very small. With so few examples I personally find it very easy to ascribe any particular result to circumstance rather than the characteristics of the systems.
I think the notion that Pyrrhus’ casualties end up concentrated among is Epirote cavalry and infantry fit the battle narratives, which is why I find the suggestion that he is losing troops among his best plausible. In every battle his cavalry and phalanx are heavily engaged and often one or both is described as hard-pressed or pushed back. Those formations would be where Pyrrhus’ best troops were.
“The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the number of battles available to argue from is very small. With so few examples I personally find it very easy to ascribe any particular result to circumstance rather than the characteristics of the systems.”
Yes, absolutely. And circumstance doesn’t mean chance, it just means that things happened as they did on the day because that’s the way they happened. I’m as suspicious of tactical determinism as I am of technological determinism.
But at the same time:
“the Roman resilience creates so many opportunities for the phalanx to err that the occurrence and Roman victory become the most probable outcome”
Yes to that too. Roman armies were certainly not fragile, so the opportunities for things to go right, or to survive a few things going wrong, are greatly increased.
As to why they are not fragile, I don’t think we’ve entirely got to the bottom of that yet – it’s not quite the same as attrition. Of course, ‘line replacement’ (whatever that is) etc probably had something to do with it, though the accounts of the Big Three (Cynoscephalai, Magnesia, Pydna) do not suggest there is a lot of line replacement going on, unless it can be assumed to be happening behind the scenes. There is in fact no Roman battle, to my knowledge, where there is a clear description of line replacement going on – it seems to have happened silently if at all. Plutarch’s account of Asculum perhaps contains some echo of what was going on in a Roman army at the low tactical level.
> In any case I’ve certainly read others giving the opposite of Bret’s argument: that the small number of battles in which the successors lost their empires to Rome were exceptionally poorly generaled and that Pyrrhus’ results should be understood as the expected outcome of a clash between the two formations.
At the very least, Pyrrhus seem to have understand how to beef up the phalanx : the sarissa phalanx is fine, just try to have a lot of it ; the cavalry is fine, when it works it’s great ; it’s the joint that you need to beef up a lot, and the legion kit aka “heavy skirmisher” seems great to that as it allows fluid movement along the phalanx corps and yet they’re able to press on and exploit ennemies disorganization.
I guess archers can fit in this battle order, it’s elephants I’m not sure that they should make the cut (I tend to be on the Roman side on those : they’re one-trick-pony, very costly to maintain and go easily wrong in battle).
The problem of course is how to get to this army model and of it’s possible to build your empire such that it’s possible to recruit many armies following this model…
Building an empire on those lines is not rocket science, you just have to relentlessly undermine wealth inequality at every turn with land redistribution, continually expanding enfranchisement, and the promotion of inter-ethnic and inter-class marriage. Maybe throw in an inexhaustibly syncretic public religion to keep things together if there’s a crisis.
> But the other Campanian cities (of which there were about a dozen) might well fear exposure to Samnite raiding without Rome’s protection
Pax Romana really at work, huh, if only as “you’re both in our gang now, no more infighting”
Not really unusual in history. The USA has a few cases of this–“The” Civil War being only the most famous. For example, Ohio and Michigan lined up to start shooting each other once, until the federal government came in and made them stop.
To paraphrase (I think) Penn and Teller, peace just means not swinging the axe. And not infrequently in human affairs, the reason you don’t swing the axe is because someone else is sitting there with a much, much larger group of people with axes going “No no, let’s play nice, everyone.”
“Seriously, HBO – this is some Game of Thrones nonsense, but real. Why don’t we have this as a prestige miniseries?”
Because you haven’t written a treatment.
I am still waiting for somebody to turn Procopius’s Secret History into a novel featuring Theodora as the protagonist and heroine.
Over at TV Tropes, whenever someone expresses frustration with the cliched “Fantasy Europe” setting that nearly every fantasy novel is set it, I recommend the early Roman/Late Greek Mediterranean. So far, no one has taken me up on it…
Could it be argued that the Roman system avoids the problem of “good at battle but bad at politics” by having their battle leaders be distinct from their overall leaders? Or did their consuls do a similar amount of the politics around their campaigns as a king would?
I’m not sure who you mean by the Republic’s “overall leaders”. If the consuls, they were military commanders as well. If the senate, it was made up of military commanders.
While you’re correct that Roman politcal and battlefield leaders were generally the same (though p-magistrates are a thing), said consuls served for a year, not for life, as kings did. I’d argue that consuls being able to draw on the experience of other leaders (senators) and knowing that their actions could be judged after leaving office did make a difference.
Also, arguably, it makes a difference that Roman leaders didn’t need to worry about being deposed while they’re off fighting a war. Or handle administrative tasks of a lower level (that’s what the more junior magistrates are for).
I think it’s more complicated than a simple delineation between options of “consuls at war are distinct from consuls as domestic leaders” and “consuls continued doing politics during war as a king would”.
I’d say understanding a distinction between Rome and a Hellenistic kingdom needs to take into account elements like how Rome has two consuls, multiple praetors who can also be assigned military command at need, a willingness to prorogue officials to continue their military functions past their end of their elected terms, and the fact that each elected term is only for a year (so compared to a king who might be constantly concerned with maintaining primacy over nobles and regional years, you know and are okay with the fact that your personal authority has a time limit).
That plus the fact that a major driving force of policy making and state strategic direction consists of a council of former magistrates that remains in the city, that ostensibly exists only to advise the likes of the consuls but functionally concentrates significant authority, and consists of multiple people who can act as the next candidate for consul during a period of extended war where one or both of the current consuls is abroad.
Really, I think it comes down to how they’re all both political and military leaders (in an earlier series, Bret pointed out how the Roman concept of imperium means that they draw no distinction between these things, seeing them as functionally intertwined and equivalent), but there’s a collaborative element to a large number of them who are nominally equals, and are continuously shuffling the actual positions of command between them.
History seems to bear out the idea that the complex moving parts create a pretty flexible and resilient system through the centuries in which Romans have good state cohesion (where even if there are disagreements about what to do and who to do it, they’re basically polite and predicated on a willingness to commonly carry out what the consensus arrives at), and becomes an absolute disaster once Romans start really getting at each other’s throats.
The Roman form of governance is fascinating, and so far as I know, unique. I think the critical component is that it gives the working class a symbolic voice in Imperial policy, while still concentrating practical day to day power in the hands of an elite.
I keep wondering how one would modernize it.
Broadly speaking, every modern democracy is some twist on modernizing that. Big decisions are made by an elected elite or their appointees (legislatures, president (if any), bureaucrats answerable to same), working class picks which team gets to be the functioning elite.
Switzerland is much closer to the Roman model in a couple of ways. A collegiate executive in the Federal Council, but more importantly the ready and frequent use of referenda and initiatives. Any law _can_ be challenged and put before the voters (and this actually happens like 12-16 times a year), and I think major things like treaties are put to vote automatically. So, rather more than a symbolic voice, even if the elite is still making most of the fine decisions.
What I’ve tried and failed to imagine is how one would modernize the cursus honorum, and Senate as an ‘advisory’ body of ex-elected officials. Part of the problem is that Rome was wedded to the idea that you held most offices once for a year, and moved on, so there was a steady pipeline. We are equally wedded to the idea of re-elections, and that you should get to continue in your position if you’re doing an acceptable job, so even an idea of US governors forming a ‘Senate’ yields an irregular pipeline.
Another problem is that by design or accident, Rome was geared toward producing lots of decently competent military leaders and soldiers, as that was their most important problem. It’s _not_ for us, and we have a more complex society. That said, the US has had something like an informal cursus: mayor (maybe), governor or (less obviously) Senator, President.
I guess a thing about Senators is that just organizing and running a state-wide election campaign, which they and governors have to do, suggests some executive competence (especially in larger states), even if _being_ a Senator doesn’t. That said, I suspect there are many counterexamples, and being able to pick a good campaign manager isn’t the same as being able to pick a good Cabinet or judges…
“What I’ve tried and failed to imagine is how one would modernize the cursus honorum, and Senate as an ‘advisory’ body of ex-elected officials.”
Sounds not entirely dissimilar to the House of Lords in the UK, though there are some major points of difference.
This really makes me want a prestige TV miniseries about the life of Pyrrhus — brilliant, charismatic, always in the thick of things, and standing against the tide of history as those Romans KEEP ON FUCKING COMING, ATHENA HELP ME, WHY DON’T THESE STUPID ITALIAN HILLMEN EVER QUIT?
Could it be argued that the Roman system avoids the problem of “good at battle but bad at politics”
I wouldn’t word it so strongly as ‘avoids’ (Caesar used his ‘good at battle’ skills to lever political changes that get him stabbed by half a dozen of his former friends). ‘Mitigates against’ I would certainly agree with.