This is the first part of the fourth part of our four(ish) part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) look at why the thing to use to beat a Macedonian sarisa phalanx is, in fact, a Roman legion in the third and second century BC. Last time, we finished our look at the third-century successes of the phalanx with the career of Pyrrhus of Epirus, concluding that even when handled very well with a very capable body of troops, Hellenistic armies struggled to achieve the kind of decisive victories they needed against the Romans to achieve strategic objectives. Instead, Pyrrhus was able to achieve a set of indecisive victories (and a draw), which was simply not anywhere close to enough in view of the tremendous strategic depth of Rome.
Well, I hope you got you fill of Hellenistic armies winning battles because it is all downhill from here (even when we’re fighting uphill). For the first half of the second century, from 200 to 168, the Romans achieve an astounding series of lopsided victories against both (Antigonid) Macedonian and Seleucid Hellenistic armies, while simultaneously reducing several other major players (Pergamon, Egypt) to client states. And unlike Pyrrhus, the Romans are in a position to ‘convert’ on each victory, successfully achieving their strategic objectives. It was this string of victories, so shocking in the Greek world, that prompted Polybius to write his own history, covering the period from 264 to 146 to try to explain what the heck happened (much of that history is lost, but Polybius opens by suggesting that anyone paying attention to the First Punic War (264-241) ought to have seen this coming).
That said, this series of victories is complex. Of the five major engagements (The River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna) Rome commandingly wins all of them, but each battle is strange in its own way. So we’re going to look at each battle and also take a chance to lay out a bit of the broader campaigns, asking at each stage why does Rome win here? Both in the tactical sense (why do they win the battle) and also in the strategic sense (why do they win the war).
We’re going to start with the war that brought Rome truly into the political battle royale of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Second Macedonian War (200-196). Rome was acting, in essence, as an interloper in long-running conflicts between the various successor dynasties of Alexander the Great as well as smaller Greek states caught in the middle of these larger brawling empires. Briefly, the major players are the Ptolemaic Dynasty, in Egypt (the richest state), the Seleucid Dynasty out of Syria and Mesopotamia (the largest state) and the Antigonid Kingdom in Macedonia (the smallest and weakest state, but punching above its weight with the best man-for-man army). The minor but significant players are the Attalid dynasty in Pegamon, a mid-sized Hellenistic power trapped between the ambitions of the big players, two broad alliances of Greek poleis in the Greek mainland the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, and finally a few freewheeling poleis, notably Athens and Rhodes. The large states are trying to dominate the system, the small states trying to retain their independence and everyone is about to get rolled by the Romans.
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The Background
Before diving into the course of the campaign of the Second Macedonian War, it is worth laying out the background geostrategic context the war occurs in. For the Romans, affairs to their East had been distinctly on the back-burner for two decades: in 218, a dispute between Rome and Carthage over the Spanish community of Saguntum had blown up into the Second Punic War (218-201), Rome’s second massive, all-consuming war with Carthage. The Romans had won the war, but at a tremendous cost in lives, money and also service time, as Rome had been forced to keep very large armies under arms for nearly two decades in order to win.
During that war, the Kingdom of Macedon had opportunistically backed Hannibal, leading to the First Macedonian War (214-205), essentially a sub-theater of the larger Second Punic War. Rome had, beginning in 229, begun projecting power directly across the Adriatic into Illyria, the coastal region of the Balkans. The region was restive generally (see Polyb. 2.2.-2.8) and the Romans intervened against Teuta, queen of the Ardiaei1 whose wars were disrupting trade through piracy. Rome was successful and gains control of a handful of key ports (Greek colonial foundations) in the region as well as making clients out of several local rulers.
That was not great for the Kingdom of Macedon, for whom the Illyrians might sometimes be foes but might also be allies (especially against their restive Greek neighbors/subjects). And so, when Rome appeared to be on the back foot and wholly distracted with Hannibal and the Second Punic War, Philip V, the Antigonid king of Macedon – he was the grandson of Antigonus II Gonatas – tried to take advantage by joining the war, perhaps even aiming (as Polybius imagines) to try a repeat of Pyrrhus’ venture of forming a trans-Adriatic empire (Polyb. 5.101-102, at the advice of Demetrius of Pharos). The result is the First Macedonian War (214-205).
The resulting war was inconclusive, never more than a secondary theater for the Romans who were focused on Hannibal who was actively campaigning in Italy the whole time. Roman operational advantages almost immediately present themselves: Rome had a powerful fleet (a legacy of the First Punic War (264-241) maintained since and Philip V did not (a consequence of the relative poverty of the Antigonid kingdom) and so despite Philip’s efforts to build a fleet, Rome owned the Adriatic and Philip could not move to Italy. Instead, the war consisted of a host of minor actions in Illyria and Greece, with the Roman strategy being to deny Philip the sea with their fleet and incite the poleis of Greece (now organized into a handful of larger federal leagues) to oppose Philip and keep him busy, with land operations in Greece mostly handled by the allied Aetolian League (later buttressed by the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon, until they ran into their own problems), while Rome handled naval operations and smaller-scale efforts Illyria. This broadly worked, though Rome effectively expended its allies in the region doing so, leading to a ‘status quo’ peace in 205 that left Philip V still clearly the dominant power in Greece.
The following year, 204, the Ptolemaic Pharaoh of Egypt and the victor of Raphia (217), Ptolemy IV Philopator, died, leaving the throne to his six-year-old son, Ptolemy V Epiphanes. Philip V and Antiochus III (yes, we get a lot of this guy in this series) spotted their opportunity and made a pact to essentially divide Ptolemaic holdings (the Ptolemies held an exciting collection of port cities around the Eastern Mediterranean in addition to Egypt) between themselves. This in turn produced panic among many of the smaller, independent Greek states, particularly Athens, Rhodes and Pergamon, who lived in the fracture zone between the Antigonids and Seleucids and have been able to do so precisely because both kingdoms had been weak. Now they both seemed strong and so the Rhodians and Attalus of Pergamon began shopping for friends – and they found the Romans.
To be fair, Rome was the obvious choice by virtue of being the only remaining choice, with the added benefit that the First Macedonian War had left the Romans with unfinished business with Philip V, in particular a desire to punish him for jumping in with Hannibal. Whereas the First Macedonian War had seen fairly desultory Roman involvement, a renewed war would certainly be premised on major land operations in Greece and Macedonia proper and the Romans knew it. Indeed, while the Senate swiftly concluded that going to war in 200 was going to be strategically necessary, the Roman citizenry actually voted the war declaration down cold in the first vote (Livy 31.6) – fearing, presumably, a grinding war of the sort they had just finished with Carthage and quite exhausted. The Senate only persuaded the Romans to go to war with a promise that veterans of the Second Punic War would not be drafted (Livy 31.8.6).
And so Rome now entered the Greek world in earnest.
On the River Aous
Immediately, we see some of the Roman strategic and operational advantages kick into action. First, the still-very-powerful Roman fleet functionally ensured the war would be fought in Greece and Macedonia, not Italy. Philip V was dangerous, but he was essentially a chained bear, forced to play defense because he had no feasible way of contesting the seas. Meanwhile, the Roman machine of logistical coordination snapped into gear. Additional grain supplies from Carthage (reduced to the status of a friendly client state at the end of the Second Punic War), Numidia, Sicily and Sardinia (Livy 31.19.2-4, 32.27.2) were sent with the Senate handling the coordination. The Numidians also sent a thousand cavalry and later another set of reinforcements consisting of two hundred cavalry and ten North African elephants. Those supplies do not free Roman commanders of local logistical concerns, as we’ll see, but they sure help.
The initial few years of the war were indecisive and we may briefly summarize them. The command of the war is given to one of the consuls of 200, Publius Sulpicius Galba, who lands his army at Apollonia that year. It is not a massive force – two legions, supplemented by recruiting some volunteers from Scipio Africanus’ now disbanding army (the victors at Zama), to be shortly supplemented by a thousand Numidian cavalry. One thing the Romans seem fairly consistent with is that they tend to meet any new or unknown force with a fairly standard consular army of two legions with the normal supplement of the allies. In part this is because Rome is often juggling many problems: in 200, Rome deploys two legions to the Second Macedonian War, but also two legion-sized alae of socii were deployed in Gaul and Bruttium, two more legions held in Italy (in addition to the two two-legion consular armies; Sulpicius’ co-consul, Gaius Aurelius Cotta is going to spend the year fighting Gauls), with additional Roman forces in Sicily, Sardinia (Livy 31.8); Livy leaves out any forces in Spain but we generally assume each of the Hispaniae had their normal legion as we know that there were at least three Roman promagistrates evidently in Spain during the year: Gaius Cornelius Cethegus (cos. 197), Lucius Cornelius Lentulus (cos. 199) and Lucius Manlius Acidinus (praet. 210). So Rome probably has something around 100,000 men under arms in this year, but only perhaps 20-25,000 of them are employed against Philip V.
I won’t go into that kind of detail every year (honestly, if you want that, just read Livy and then peruse Broughton, Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951)), but I wanted to lay out one ‘typical’ year here to give a sense of how Rome is going to approach all of these wars. Unlike Pyrrhus, the Hellenistic monarchs of the second century – Philip V, Antigonus III and Perseus in particular – will never have Rome’s undivided attention, though they are generally Rome’s highest military priority. But of course you can immediately see the problem that creates for them: any victory they achieve on the defensive is ephemeral, for Rome has many armies. But they cannot win any victory on the offensive, because Rome’s navy is too strong to be seriously opposed.
That said, the terrain and the defensive favored Philip. This is a campaign (and subsequent battle) substantially shaped by the topography, so it is convenient that there has now been a good study of the topography of this war, J.N. Morton, “Shifting Landscapes, Policies and Morals: A Topographically Driven Analysis of the Roman Wars in Greece from 200 BC to 168 BC” (PhD Diss, 2017) which one can find online with a bit of googling (it has pictures of what I am going to describe with words). In particular, Morton walks the ground and does a really good study of sightlines – what could you see from any given position.
The Romans had landed on the Adriatic coast, but separating them from the Macedonian heartland were the Pindus Mountains: rough terrain and thinly peopled, with relatively few reliable routes through, making offensive operations difficult (though Perseus will use this terrain, perhaps somewhat more adroitly than his father Philip V). Sulpicius cements his coastal position in 200 and then in 199 tries to push through into Macedon, though in the end what he accomplishes was little more than a jumbo-sized raid punctuated by a series of small skirmishes: a small cavalry indecisive engagement (Livy 31.33.9-11), then the armies encamped opposite each other and skirmished, with the Romans generally getting the better of it (Livy 31.35-38), after which Philip V withdraws, his army still quite intact, makes an effort to hold the pass at Eordaea which the Romans force, neither side taking major losses (Livy 39.12-15).
Philip V, however, has many problems at once: Roman involvement has spurred nearly all of his potential enemies to align against him and unlike the Romans he has only the one field army, forcing him to dash from one trouble-spot to another. Once it becomes clear that Sulpicius wasn’t an existential threat, Philip rushes off to deal with the Aetolians. The next consul, Publius Villius Tappulus arrives in 199 and accomplishes little though Livy notes his own sources are confused on exactly what he did do. It seems clear part of the problem for both Villius and Sulpicius is that they struggle to get a first grasp at various points as to where Philip V actually is and he likewise has problems locating them. This is a product of the terrain – these armies are moving through the valleys of the Pindus Mountains, which means their sight-lines are really limited and information moves slowly, with the result that it is hard for either army to know where the other is with any confidence and so hard for the usually quite aggressive Romans to actually bring Philip V to battle on even terms.
By 198, the new consul in charge is Titus Quinctius Flamininus; he finds Philip V encamped on the river Aous (the modern Aoös or Vjosa) in a strong blocking position, leading at last to a significant battle. Plutarch and Livy both offer reports of this battle (Plut. Flam. 4-5; Livy 32.10-13). The basics of the battle are the same in both, but the details differ slightly; Livy’s account – better planned and less sensational than Plutarch’s – is to be preferred.
What Philip V does is pick a narrow position on the river where it is flanked by sharp heights and split his troops on to both sides of it, fortifying the banks and then covering the approach with catapults mounted on the heights (Livy 32.5.11-13). On the southern bank is his main defensive position with is heavy troops, while a detachment of his light troops encamp directly on the other side. The position forces an attacker to basically follow the river into a sharp blind turn straight into Philip’s prepared defenses, with any effort to cross the river and bypass his position foiled by the light infantry camp on the far side. In short, this is a really good defensive position.
Flamininus, understandable, initially hesitates to attack the position and the two armies sit opposite each other for a while (Livy says 40 days, suggesting both armies had secure supply-lines reaching back to their operational bases and could thus sit in these positions indefinitely). Flamininus (or his troops) try a series of skirmishes over the plains in front of Philip’s camp but achieve little: Livy notes the Romans had the advantage of discipline and better armor (Livy 32.10.11) but that the Macedonians had the advantage of, “the terrain and also catapults and ballistae placed on the cliff almost as a wall.” Unsurprisingly then, the Romans make no headway.
At this point, Flamininus is approached by a local shepherd who knows a path around the back of Philip’s position (because his army is sitting in that shepherd’s pasture; note that Philip is not on his home territory so the locals are not friendly) and Flamininus decides to risk it, aggressively skirmishing over two days to keep Philip’s attention while a detachment of his troops, 4000 infantry and 300 cavalry, wound their way down the paths. Philip’s camp was fortified on the level-ground, but he had used the heights essentially as his back wall – a practice Polybius notes is common among Greeks (and Macedonians) and is deeply critical of (Polyb. 18.18) – so the Romans are going to show up behind Philip’s front defenses, essentially inside of his fortifications by coming down from the heights that serve as his back wall. Once in position, those troops are to raise a smoke-signal, leading to a general engagement.
Flamininus’ plan works almost perfectly. When Flamininus sees the smoke signal, he throws his entire army against the front of Philip V’s camp (Livy 32.12.1). His attack struggles to punch through initially – that isn’t its intended purpose – but then the expected arrival of his detachment in the rear of Philip’s troops panic and collapse them. That said, Philip V gets away again and so does most of his army; the difficult terrain prevents effective pursuit and so Philip is able to recollect his army after the defeat and prepare for the next year’s campaigns. Philip reportedly lost 2,000 men, a sting, but not a fatal one; Roman losses are unreported, but presumably much lighter (Livy 32.12.9).
Why Roman victory on the Aous? On the one hand, Philip V is just plain out-generaled here by Flamininus, who makes adroit use of local guides to circumvent Philip’s defensive position. That said, Philip had successfully stalled two Roman commanders already. In a way, this is an advantage of Roman distributed command: Philip does need to outsmart one Roman general, but a succession of different generals who are bound to try different approaches and tactics.
But in the broader campaign, I think, distributed command clearly matters even more. Both the Romans and Philip are balancing multiple theaters simultaneously, but whereas Philip has to dash from one to the next, the Romans can split their much larger military over multiple commanders facing multiple problems. Consequently, while Philip was putting out Aetolian fires, Sulpicius and Villius had been able to secure the western coast and the edges of the Pindus Mountains, a task which was almost certainly necessary for Flamininus to have been able to spend forty days sitting on the Aous (which is, it seems, in turn what spurred the local shepherds to do whatever it took to get all these damn Romans and Macedonians off of their pastures).
Finally, we see the beginning of what is going to end up being a trend, which is that Roman heavy infantry perform better fighting over fortifications than Hellenistic armies. When you think about it, this isn’t actually all that shocking: Macedonian heavy infantry cannot fight in their deep pike-phalanx when standing in defense of a palisade. They’ll have to ditch the sarisae and instead resort to a sword or perhaps the dory (the Greek version of the Mediterranean Omni-Spear), at which point they’ve become somewhat lightly armored hoplites with a slightly smaller aspis. By contrast, the Roman kit – scutum, gladius and pila – all work just fine in this context. Up close, the Roman is probably, on average, more heavily armored (many, by this point, wearing the mail lorica hamata), with a larger shield. Moreover, the Roman’s training and concept of battle is focused intensely on this sort of close-in fighting with swords – the kind of high-lethality fighting the attritional Roman system is built for – whereas for the Macedonian phalangite, the sword is a back-up weapon for when something has gone wrong. Doubtless they’re still quite good with them, but it is no surprise that the Romans will eventually win every fight at a palisade.
Cynoscephalae (197)
The battle at the River Aous did not end the war. Philip V fell back into Thessaly and immediately began a scorched earth campaign, destroying towns and moving the population so as to deny any advancing enemy army (the Romans or, in the event, their allies the Aetolians) supplies (Livy 32.13.5-9). Still, the victory and the advance of Aetolian allies got Flamininus through the passes into Thessaly on the far side where he could link up with his naval supply, unhindered by Philip V who had moved north out of the region (Livy 32.15.5-7). If this seems like a minor thing, just wait until we get to the Third Macedonian War and you’ll see how hard this gets from a logistics perspective if the Macedonian army is guarding the passes over the mountains.
The Senate opts to extend Flamininus’ command for another year (Livy 32.28), which at last sets the stage for Cynoscephalae, as until he was sure he’d have another year, Flamininus had kept the option of negotiations open so he could conclude the war under his own auspices if his command wasn’t extended. Extending Flamininus’ command wasn’t entirely unreasonable either: Rome had more local problems with the Boi and the Insubres, Gallic peoples in Cisalpine Gaul (Livy 32.31) and of course Flamininus appeared to be winning, so why not let him finish the job? Once again, the Roman ability to manage multiple conflicts at once proves a substantial advantage.
Philip V, when it was clear that negotiations weren’t going anywhere, raised as many troops as he could get – Livy says he recruited as young as 16 and aged veterans as well (Livy 33.2.4)2 – and ends up with an army with 16,000 heavy infantry in the phalanx, two thousand cavalry, around 4,000 Thracian and Illyrian mercenaries (probably ‘medium’ infantry armed as thureophoroi), another 1500 assorted mercenary infantry and 2,000 caetratorum, quos peltastas appellant, “caetra-carriers whom they call peltasts.” You will see these fellows carelessly confused for earlier Greek light-infantry peltasts, but this is, in fact, the elite infantry of the Antigonid army who fought in the phalanx – a picked regiment of royal guard, as it were. They may be called peltasts because that term was sometimes used for smaller variants of the standard Macedonian shield (the normal size being more commonly called an aspis), but these fellows fight in formation with sarisae (or perhaps dorata) on the battlefield.
The Roman army is almost exactly the same size. Plutarch reports a Roman army of roughly 26,000, with 6,000 infantry and 400 cavalry consisting of Aetolian allies (Plut. Flam. 7.2), so you’ve got a fairly standard two-legion, two-alae army with some Greeks bolted on the side. It’s also clear from our sources Flamininus still has those war elephants the Numidians sent, 20 of them. The Romans have the edge in cavalry (and elephantry), which is a touch ironic, because the actual battle is going to be decided almost entirely by an infantry action.
Flamininus moves into Thessaly again, initially unsure of where Philip was; he ends up encamped near Pherae (a town in Thessaly) looking for Philip. Philip, conveniently enough, learning that the Romans were there, moved south to meet them and so both armies end up a few miles apart around Pherae, but neither army figures the terrain there is favorable to them. There’s some brief skirmishing that amounts to little and so both commanders break camp and begin marching to try to out-maneuver the other and in the process both lose contact as a result of the terrain and a rainstorm. Once again, the armies are maneuvering in the dark (Livy 33.6). This is the sort of thing I meant when I talk about generalship ‘by reports‘ – often these generals are working with only very imperfect information. In this case it will matter because the battle, when it comes, will be an ‘encounter’ battle – both armies blundering into each other.
The battle is precipitated when a Roman scouting party – in quite a bit of force – encounters a defensive screen Philip had posted on a hill (the Cynocephalae – “Dog’s Head” Hill of the battle’s name). Both forces immediately send messengers back in a panic calling for reinforcements and the developing skirmish, with cavalry and lighter troops poured in leads Philip and Flamininus into a major engagement, deploying their main force – the heavy infantry – without, it seems, full knowledge of the situation (Livy 33.8.1-2). War is often like that.
Once again, we have both Livy (33.7-11) and Plutarch (Flam. 8) for this battle, but also – rejoice! – Polybius (Polyb. 18.18-27), who the other two clearly (and for Livy, openly) use as a source. Polybius’ narrative is thus to be preferred, although Livy also provides useful details.
Initially the Roman (Aetolian, mostly) skirmishing force is driven back, with Flamininus drawing up his battle line and letting his skirmishers drop back through it. He gives – according to Polybius – a very brief speech (time was not on his side) and then advanced up the hill, with his elephants deployed on his right in front of his infantry, but with Flamininus himself ‘driving’ his left-most legion. Philip V, only having the report that his skirmishers were winning, likewise has deployed his army and begun moving up the far side of the hill. Philip’s right wing passed over the crest of the hill first and so met the Romans moving downhill and immediately began pushing them back, albeit evidently not routing them (Polybius says they were ‘retreating slowly,’ perhaps the standard hastati-to-principes-to-triarii retrograde the legion does under stress).
Flamininus concludes that he’s not going to win on the left and so dashes to try to make something happen on the right, where Philip’s army was still struggling to get into formation. He thus leads his right-legion forward with the elephants in the lead, catching the Macedonians on that side not yet fully arrayed. Livy dryly notes that, non dubia res fuit, “the matter was never in doubt” – the Macedonian left-wing, not yet fully in formation, falls apart from the elephants before the legion can even really get to them. Now at this point the battle is in a familiar condition: both sides are winning handily on their rights and losing on their lefts.
What decides the battle is actually a Roman military tribune. An unnamed military tribune, somewhat frustratingly.3 While Flamininus responds to the collapsing Macedonian left by pressing the attack there, this fellow realizes that, with the Roman left falling back and the Roman right moving forward, a gap has opened up between the two halves of Philip V’s army. He then grabs some twenty maniples, turns them around and drives them through the gap and then down the hill into the back of Philip’s victorious-but-still-engaged-in-the-front phalanx ( Polyb. 18.26.1-3; Livy 33.9.7-8, but it is very clear Livy here is working from Polybius, practically just translating him. Plutarch, Flam. 8.4 notes the maneuver but not the tribune).
And here Polybius (and Livy and Plutarch, copying his homework) note that, while this would be a sore test for any army, this is a challenge the Macedonian phalanx is really bad at. Polybius puts it as, “It is the nature of the phalanx that it cannot wheel nor fight man-to-man” (Polyb. 18.26.4). It’s possible to over-read that sentence – a Macedonian phalanx can wheel (heck, we’re going to see one form square under pressure), so it isn’t that they are categorically incapable of it. However, one of the interesting results of Peter Connolly’s tests with the sarisa is that once the points are down, it is no longer possible for the formation to turn or indeed do anything but plow forward (or stand still).4 And this, I think, is the crucial point: Philip’s phalanx cannot turn to face the new attack because it is engaged in the front and thus cannot raise the sarisa in order to wheel.
Now to be fair, Roman armies struggle more often than not to wheel about part of their force to face an unexpected attack like this too, though I will note that they do sometimes manage it – Caesar at Bibracte (58) being the famous example where Caesar flips around his rear line (remember that triplex acies formation) to attack in two opposite directions at once.
Philip’s line collapsed. Some of his Macedonian troops attempted to signal surrender by raising their sarisae (a custom one can imagine in Hellenistic warfare where all of the dynasts would prefer not to waste valuable ethnic-Macedonian manpower), but while Flamininus got the message, his troops evidently did not charging in and killing or scattering the bunch (Polyb. 18.27; Livy 33.10). And here the Romans got the sort of victory Pyrrhus so dearly needed: a lopsided one. Livy reports three sets of casualty figures: Valerius Antias (a first century Roman source) reports 40,000 Macedonians killed, 5,700 captured, while Claudius Quadrigarius (another first century Roman source) says it was just 32,000 killed and 4,300 captured. These fellows are figures in what we call the ‘Late Annalistic tradition’ – a tradition of Latin-language history Livy draws on frequently, but rightly distrusts. In this case, Livy treats both estimates with thinly veiled contempt, quipping that Valerius Antias, in particular omnium rerum inmodice numerum augenti, “in all matters increases numbers beyond measure” (Livy 33.10.8). I derive considerable joy from the moments in which Livy makes clear that he kind of hates having to rely on some of his sources – I sure know how that feels, Plutarch.
Instead, Livy trusts Polybius and so should we. Polybius (and thus Livy) reports that the Macedonians lost some 8,000 killed and ‘no fewer than 5,000 captured’ while the Romans suffered only 700 losses (Polyb. 18.27.6).
The victory functionally ends the war on terms very favorable to Rome as Philip V couldn’t really raise another army. Rome leaves Philip V in place in the peace settlement, though they certainly didn’t have to. Polybius (and Livy) reflect this decision in part as a product of Roman magnanimity – that Rome would not destroy a state after just one war without attempting reconciliation – but also in part as a desire for the Romans, having cut down one potential hegemon in Greece (Philip) not to immediately create another (their victorious Aetolian allies), but rather to leave the region balanced. Notably at no point does anyone seem to have seriously considered a permanent Roman military presence – Rome had no desire to be forever resolving the quarrels of the Greeks, though in the end Roman desires will matter little for this. In the event, Philip’s kingdom was largely pruned back to Macedonia proper, but Philip himself was left in power.
Why Roman victory at Cynocephalae? This is a pretty clear case where one of the key Roman tactical ‘edges’ – the greater flexibility of the legion, with its smaller and more tactically responsive maneuver units (the maniples) – wins the battle. Both in the sense that Flamininus is able to get his whole army into fighting formation evidently faster than Philip V is able to do so (Philip’s left wing still forming up when Flamininus’ right wing hits it) and in the sense that an unnamed tribune is able to grab twenty maniples – two thirds of a legion – and drive them through a gap and into the enemy’s rear. That means this tribune needed to be able to spot the gap and then get each maniple to turn left and then wheel down the hill to end up behind Philip V’s line. One assumes the way that worked is this tribune riding up and down the rear two lines of the triplex acies ordering each maniple’s pair of centurions in turn to make the maneuver, with the centurions then driving their maniples – each of which has its own standard to facilitate maneuvers and keep the men together – into the gap and down the hill. Such a maneuver would have been very hard for a Macedonian phalanx and indeed it is worth remembering that Philip’s phalanx had the opportunity to try exactly the same trick but doesn’t.
Added to this, we see a factor we already saw at the Aous: once the pikes are out of the equation, Roman infantry have a very strong advantage in close-combat against Macedonian heavy infantry. We’ve been over the reasons (heavier armor, larger shield, attritional sword-based fighting style, though note that both sides have swords) but it is worth noting how significant the gap is. After all, Philip pushed the Roman left all the way down the hill, evidently pushing them for some time and yet the Romans in the whole battle – the skirmish phase, being pushed back on the left flank, and the final victorious clash – take just 700 losses. This is going to keep happening: even in battles where the fighting is described as sharp or fierce, if the Romans aren’t routed, they tend to take shockingly low casualties (e.g. Livy 37.44.2 and 44.42.8), both because Roman armor is better (mail!) but also because Macedonian armies aren’t designed to inflict attrition with their infantry. The sarisa-phalanx is a pinning force, not a killing force.
Why Roman Victory in the Second Macedonian War?
To those tactical factors, we also have to zoom out to the operational and strategic factors which made the tactical successes decisive. Roman naval logistics play a key role here, ensuring that the war would be fought in Philip’s backyard so that any setback he suffered was likely to be fatal (whereas Roman setbacks would be, at most, delays). Even more specifically, Roman operations Epirus and Thessaly were made substantially possible by naval supply which, among other things, seems to have removed Philip’s ability to block Roman advances with a scorched earth policy. It is striking that while Philip V is never really fighting the Romans in this war more than 80 or so miles (as the bird flies) from the Macedonian heartland, the Romans, operating more than 500 miles from Rome, are able to operate under conditions of logistical parity with Philip (most notably with the long standoff at the Aous).
And then there is the question of force resiliency, as a component of strategic depth. Philip V has a lot of geographic depth, as he’s able, when stung to fall back from one good geographic position to another. But his force is incredibly brittle. Livy notes that, at the start of 197, Philip V has effectively reached the limit of his recruitment ability due to all the war he has been doing – but the Romans are waging several wars on the same scale as this one and are coming straight off of a war that was almost an order of magnitude larger than this one.
It isn’t that Italy is just so full of people! Roman-controlled Italy probably has around 3-3.5m people in it in this period, whereas the core Macedonian heartland probably has a population of 1-1.5m, plus additional holdings in Greece and Thrace (e.g. Thessaly as well as some Greek allied states) with probably another 1-2m people in them – so a total population under his control of around 2-3.5m. Less than Rome’s, almost certainly, but not wildly less. Yet the loss of just around 15,000 men – 2,000 lost at the Aous and 13,000 (killed and captured) at Cynocephalae (along with some number more in the various minor skirmishes, but Philip doesn’t always lose those!) – is enough to cripple him and force him to seek peace. In 196, the year after this war is over, the Romans will have an estimated 125,000 men under arms.5 Similar total population, similarly urbanized and developed societies, but the Romans can pull something like ten times the military power out of Italy that Philip V can develop from Macedon.
And if you want to know how they heck the Romans do that – well, you’ll just have to wait for my book (I really should have timed these posts much closer to publication!).
- Our sources are really hostile to Teuta, as they generally are to ruling queens, making it hard to get a real sense of her skill. On the one hand, it seems like when the Romans intervene, she was well on her way towards successfully consolidating power in the region. On the other hand, at least in as much as the narrative survives to us, her imperious attitude towards the roman ambassadors functionally guaranteed a war she could not win. How much of the later we should trust given the hostility of the sources is unclear.
- Note that this is the kind of report we would generally trust – it lessens the prestige of Roman victory by suggesting Philip is, in fact, at the end of his resources after one too many wars. Consequently, it isn’t something patriotic Livy would make up, making it more likely that it is true.
- This seems to me almost certainly a result of Livy’s reliance on Polybius for this battle, as Livy notes elsewhere that he considers – correctly, I’d wager – Polybius to be the most reliable source for events in the Greek East. A source in the Latin tradition would be far more likely to name that tribune, but for Polybius that detail is unimportant and so left out. Livy normally gives names for these sorts of junior officers when they crop up in the story, but since he’s working from Polybius, he doesn’t have a name to give.
- Connolly, “Experiments with the sarissa – the Macedonian pike and cavalry lance – a functional view,” JRMES 11 (2000): 103-112.
- Following Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020).
Regarding how all of the major Roman victories against Diadochi armies are deviations from the “standard” battle and something strange happens; how often is that the case in Diadochi vs Diadochi battles? I have to admit, I’m not all that well versed on the Hellenistic fighting that happened after Alexander died, but earlier in this series we get the mention that our one solid description of a battle order is at Raphia, and Raphia is described as “odd”. I get that not all variations from some sense of normality are equally large, but it does seem like oddities develop fairly frequently. And I guess that if something strange is actually reasonably likely to happen, then that flexibility really, really matters.
I assume that if Bret had battle orders for the battles he discussed earlier (or had battle order for battles he could have discussed instead), he would have included them.
Still, over those posts, he discussed the following set-ups of Diadochi armies:
The classic, open-field battle line (Raphia): Phalanx block in the middle, medium infantry at center-left and center-right, cavalry at left and right flank, all connected via light infantry to prevent gaps from forming.
Doubled lane (Sellasia): The phalangites defend the high ground, with the light infantry and cavalry screening the lower ground in between.
Cleared pass (Alborz Mts.): The light infantry advances over the slopes to flank the pass defenders, while the phalanx advances up the main path.
So it’s not that the Diadochi army in total lack adaptability or the ability to deal with unusual circumstances.
I think what’s notable about Diadochi vs Diadochi matches is that it’s not just a mirror match in terms of capabilities, but will also become mirrored in terms of setup: As the only force capable of standing up to the sarissa phalanx heavy infantry is other heavy infantry (meaning the own sarissa phalanx), both parties will attempt to deploy their heavy infantry such that it meets the opposing heavy infantry. This is a very stable Nash equillibrium, since not doing that will mean their heavy infantry punches a hole into your battle line as the same time as yours punches one into theirs, which means more casualties and chaos for no clear advantage. Thus, we see this development of battle line conventions.
As for flexibility, the Diadochi theory of warfare was that the cavalry, followed by the light infantry, are the flexible elements of the battle, and the ones who should exploit/fix gaps and weaknesses in the battle line (see Sellasia, and everything that Alexander did). And that cavalry and light infantry are a large part of the army (in area, if not in manpower).
So the Legion’s advantage here is another one of those 5% better things that adds up: The Roman army has the capability to re-deploy its heavy infantry more flexibly than the Diadochi army can. This did not matter often (because the basic issue of having to meet heavy infantry with heavy infantry still applied), but when it did matter, it gave the Romans the edge to win the battle.
I’m curious–what were the differences in fortifications between the two cultures? Fundamentally the point of war was to deliver the siege, and battles happen when one army tries to stop the other from doing so (“fundamentally” is doing a lot of work here, obviously). The phalanx seems to presuppose that if the army gets to the city it’s a foregone conclusion that the city is lost–their armies don’t appear to be as adept at handling battles at the wall. The Roman army, in contrast, appears to assume that a siege is not merely going to happen, but will be contested–and their combat is built to handle dealing with someone trying to stop them from sacking the city. To be clear, I’m sure that the phalanx system was perfectly adequate at laying siege (otherwise it wouldn’t be used); it’s more a question of emphasis. And that emphasis is in part going to be driven by the nature of the fortifications.
I also think the role of the navy may be downplayed here. Just being able to fight a battle “over there” is a powerful tactical advantage–at worst you’ve lost men and equipment, which can be more easily replaced than farmable land. Philip was doing the same thing to an extent, but he’s still in his home peninsula and it’s his power-base that’s under threat; Rome wasn’t in this case. That will affect the population’s psychological ability to continue combat. Naval superiority also gives you the option of pulling greater resources both in terms of supplies and people. Philip couldn’t reach out to anyone his messengers couldn’t walk to, whereas Rome had all their holdings in the Med. Sea to pull from.
I think you’re overstating it a bit, well, a lot. First off, it’s not like the phalanx is completely useless in city fighting. Prof Taylor downthread mentions the siege of Atrax, which you can read about in Livy, book 32, chapters 15-18. But there we do very much see a phalanx repelling a Roman attempt to storm a breach in the wall, by simply wedging the phalanxes into the gap in the foritfication, and the frontal attack failing dismally.
Even in absence of breaches to plug like that, a city is going to feature streets that can be blocked up in similar fashions. And the offense works similarly to the defense, pushing into a breach in the wall or pushing down a street if it’s the Macedonians attacking a city. And of course, don’t forget the beginning of this series; phalanxes never fought unsupported. There would also be lighter troops more suitable for closer quarters fighting for things like struggling on top of the walls or burrowing underneath them.
Like I said: I’m sure that the phalanx system was perfectly adequate at laying siege (otherwise it wouldn’t be used). I take it as a given that the phalanx (and–and this is where I err–the armies that utilize it heavily) is fully capable of handling itself in a siege. It’s a question of which is better at it, and part of that equation (which we don’t see in these engagements as far as I can tell, which admittedly isn’t far) is going to be defenses.
(I should note that having troops specialized in getting your army TO the siege is far from a stupid idea and if that’s a major part of this strategy it’s going to be a good one. But that gets back to my point–without a full understanding of how these cultures conceptualized warfare, including defenses of cities, it’s difficult to fully appreciate why they were behaving the way they do. An army that exploits a conceptual weakness is going to have a tactical advantage.)
And frontal attacks are notorious for failing. We called them “kill pockets” in the SCA–you’re running in, spreading out your formation, which necessarily temporarily disorganizes it. I, on the other hand, as the defending army, have a really good notion of where this is going to happen, probably have built some quick fortifications (even moving a wagon or two would be sufficient here), and now have a bunch of pointy sticks aiming at you. As I said down-thread, the main issue with a spear in an attack against a walled city is going to be that it’s long, and thus in close quarters you get in your own way (and the way of the four to six guys near you). By breaching the wall you’ve made that an advantage again. Add some archers or sling troops (to cause confusion and keep your formation disrupted) and the breech is really only going to put you in a worse position. It’s fiction of course, but you see this in “Kingdom of Heaven”. Not much the Romans can do about that–better armor helps, but being stabbed while wearing maille can still cause significant damage (I’ve some limited experience with that myself), and a rock with sufficient mass or velocity is going to put you out of the fight even through a helm.
The issue is more the number of breaches that can be made, and the number of people left to defend the city. If you make one breach you’re going to have a very bad day. If you make 30 breaches, you’re going to overwhelm my capacity to respond. And if I’ve only got 30 people to respond to the breaches (because the rest of my army is out trying to stop you from getting to my city, and I have a limited number of soldiers to draw from) that number goes down quickly. And if I know you’re going to accept “Well, we tried, you won, fair’s fair, here’s our tribute” in place of sacking my city and slaughtering my people, I’m probably going to send emissaries to meet you before you even get there. If you know that, it makes more sense for you to focus on winning in the field rather than attacking cities.
Kill Pockets appears to be the main focus of Japanese fortification, where the object was not to hold an enemy outside impregnable walls but to funnel them into kill zones. You even see this on as small a scale as a fortified village in “The Seven Samurai”.
Well, separate from their infantry’s specific fighting characteristics in hand to hand combat, the Romans definitely cultivated a solid “military engineering” tradition for things like (famously) road building and field fortifications.
I’m not exactly sure what the timeline of evolution of Roman siegecraft is, but I imagine the Romans by this period were also pretty good at forcing breaches (or building ramps up to) city defenses by this point.
Someone in a MilHist thread noted that the Romans seem to get better as siegecraft AS they get more Greek slaves and advisers.
Take that for what you will.
Greatly enjoying this series.
Some minor typos:
– Of the five major engagements (The River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna) Rome commanding wins all of them > should be “Rome obtains commanding wins in all of them”
– Rome had a powerful fleet (a legacy of the First Punic War (264-241) maintained since and Philip V did not > should be “(a legacy of the First Punic War (264-241) and maintained since)”
– with land operations in Greece mostly handled by the allied Aetolian League (later buttressed by the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon, until they ran into their own problems), until while Rome handled naval operations and smaller-scale efforts Illyria. > remove the last “until”
– Philip does need to outsmart one Roman general, but a succession of different generals who are bound to try different approaches and tactics. > should be “Philip does not need to outsmart just one Roman general…”
– Roman operations Epirus and Thessaly > should be “Roman operations in Epirus and Thessaly”
Found that Ph D thesis immediately, top Google result for me. Also, it’s 300 pages!!! Is that what is involved with a dissertation? Goodness me, that’s a chunk of work.
Yeah, 250-300 pages seems fairly normal. But it is the result of a few years of work. That’s one page every several days.
In Ancient Near Eastern literature this is a suspicious figure, with “40 days” or “40 years” being the usual shorthand for “a long time”. Is this not the case in Greek literature of the period? Or are you just using this Livy passage for a rough “at least a couple of weeks” sense of time?
Bret will know better but I can’t recall encountering that trope in any Roman/Greek material I’ve ever read.
‘Quadraginta’ (forty) occurs quite often in Livy, but not, so far as a quick scan tells me, with reference to a number of days, and no more often than, say ‘triginta’ (thirty). So in this case I think they really did sit in the pass for forty days (or maybe 39, or 41).
And yet in all those empty days it never once occurred to Philip to round up a few local shepherds and ask them if there were any paths that could lead an attacker round to the rear of his position. Or to go out for a ride and find out for himself. Or to send out a Friend or two for the same purpose. Or some of his spare Thracians. He just sat there, with his entire army concentrated in one blob in the pass, and no scouts, or lookouts, or intelligence-gatherers or anybody venturing beyond line of sight of the camp. And this despite one of the great foundational mythic histories of Greek culture, the defence of Thermopylae against the barbarian, involving a defending army’s position being turned in exactly this way.
History is very odd sometimes. I can only conclude that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, or words to that effect.
Maybe Philip did, but his men just didn’t notice the pass because it was small or hidden by vegetation or whatever.
Or all the local shepherds were mad at him for some reason. Possibly preexisting, possibly due to his strategic decision being directly responsible for two armies sitting on top of their pastures.
I’m surprised it isn’t made obvious that probably the Macedonian army’s foragers requisitioned the shepherd’s entire flock of sheep. Because that’s the sort of thing that needs to happen for an army to sit stationary for 40 days.
I wonder how many flocks of sheep you can buy with the money you get paid for giving an army the path to victory.
Depends on how many there are to buy. Every one of those sheep mean an ewe bred, a lamb born and survived to be sold.
I imagine you could buy several, Airy. The thing is, if I’m a shepherd and the Macedonian army just ate all my sheep as part of their grand plan to have a six-week staring contest with the Roman army, I’m going to be asking myself:
“So yeah, selling out a powerful army to its enemies in exchange for cash to buy new sheep with sounds pretty sweet right now. Would I rather buy my new sheep with Macedonian drachma or Roman denarii?”
And you know, I’d probably go for the denarii.
> Would I rather buy my new sheep with Macedonian drachma or Roman denarii?
Or it might have come down to which army was using hills to guard their rear.
Hegel: “We learn from history that we don’t learn from history.”
Except Hegel didn’t say that, and the version you give means something entirely different from what he did say: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/w7gv5q/what_does_hegel_mean_by_the_only_thing_that_we/
It seems like an obvious ploy, but it has its dangers. What if the enemy notices that half your force is missing and attacks, defeating you in detail? Or your detachment gets lost, or is lured into a trap (can you trust the shepherd?) I am sure this has happened.
It’s not impossible, but it’s more likely to happen from the enemy coincidentally attacking at the wrong time than the enemy noticing that you seem to have a smaller army today. Especially since you wouldn’t need to (and probably couldn’t) send literally half of the army around…
More likely yet is some factor making “attack from another angle” impossible. Like if you don’t trust the local guides, or if you do but shouldn’t have, or if no paths known to local guides exist, or if you’re in a relatively flat area without any way to sneak up on your enemy.
An enjoyable read, which provokes a few more pedantic comments from me (does our host ever read these comments? I get the impression not, but here goes anyway):
“[Apollo] – I admit I have a hard time reading that figure as male, given the nodus hairstyle”
Indeed. That and the man-boobs…
“This is a product of the terrain – these armies are moving through the valleys of the Pindus Mountains, which means their sight-lines are really limited”
Meh. As you say further on, much intelligence is ‘by reports’ and autopsy was, at the least, never the sole source of information. There are few places anywhere in Greece you could see an army from more thna a few miles away.
Aous
Could we have a drink for every time an army defending a pass gets its posiiton turned by an enemy army being led round by secret paths pointed out to them by a shepherd?
“which is that Roman heavy infantry perform better fighting over fortifications than Hellenistic armies.”
Atrax? Thermopylae?
“They’ll have to ditch the sarisae and instead resort to a sword or perhaps the dory”
Atrax? Thermopylae? In fact I think sarisai are rather good used from fortifications (on account of their length).
“Livy says he recruited as young as 16 and aged veterans as well (Livy 33.2.4)”
Tiny typo – should be Livy 33.3.4
Caetrati/Peltasts – “but these fellows fight in formation with sarisae (or perhaps dorata) on the battlefield.”
Surely sarisai – see Pydna and the fate of the Paeligni.
“However, one of the interesting results of Peter Connolly’s tests with the sarisa is that once the points are down, it is no longer possible for the formation to turn or indeed do anything but plow forward (or stand still).”
While I’m sure such tests are highly useful, this is also something that Asclepiodotus told us two thousand years earlier!
“And this, I think, is the crucial point: Philip’s phalanx cannot turn to face the new attack because it is engaged in the front and thus cannot raise the sarisa in order to wheel.”
I think you are being over-mechanical here. Also I’m not sure if every time you say ‘wheel’ you really mean ‘wheel’ (rather than ‘turn’). It’s simple for, say, the back ranks (remember the phalanx was at double depth) to raise sarisai, face about, and lower them again. I think the picture of an attack in the rear being made against men who resolutely keep facing forward and so get stabbed in the back is always erroneous – turning round just isn’t that hard. Formations attacked in the rear routinely (though not invariably) fall apart – but the reason must be other than because they are incapable of turning around. As usual, the psychology of the situation must outweight the physical circumstances.
“This is a pretty clear case where one of the key Roman tactical ‘edges’ – the greater flexibility of the legion, with its smaller and more tactically responsive maneuver units (the maniples) – wins the battle.”
Yes – but up to a point. In theory, a speira (semeia, syntagma) is just as responsive as a maniple. I see two differences – i. Macedonian tactical doctrine didn’t generally allow speirai to operate independently, and ii. the Roman triplex acies means they always have one third (or even two thirds) of their force available for such independent actions. The Macedonian army is in a single line, with no reserves. If something unexpected happens (whch it usually does) there is no plan B.
“Flamininus is able to get his whole army into fighting formation evidently faster than Philip V is able to do so (Philip’s left wing still forming up when Flamininus’ right wing hits it)”
Philip’s left wing had been sent out foraging and was late getting back when the call came. I don’t think you can take this as evidence for greater Roman speed.
“but also because Macedonian armies aren’t designed to inflict attrition with their infantry. The sarisa-phalanx is a pinning force, not a killing force.”
I’d have to disagree with this conclusion. I think the lesson for Cynoscephalai (and the other battles) is that the Romans, on the whole, didn’t try to fight the phalanx face to face – they fell back before it. Although people on the internet love to speculate about swords and pila and such, the evidence is pretty clear that, usually, Romans just didn’t get into a fight they couldn’t win – they ran (or walked) away – something their tactical system allowed them to do. Not to the total exclusion of fighting of course – they still lost 700 men – but they don’t get sucked into a full frontal encounter if they can avoid it.
I’m at work and don’t have my copy of Livy at hand, so please pardon this basic question. Is Atrax the one where the Romans make a small breach in the walls but the Macedonian garrison just forms up to plug that breach and the Romans can’t make headway? I remember that sequence of events, but there are a lot of sieges mentioned and the city names all blur together for me.
“In fact I think sarisai are rather good used from fortifications (on account of their length).”
As I said above, I doubt it’s a matter of either of them being bad–if they couldn’t function in battlefield conditions they wouldn’t be used, and cities were the main targets of warfare in the past. So it’s hardly surprising to see any real-world army win sieges. The question is, which will win when these armies face each other under siege conditions? It doesn’t really matter how well this sort of army does against other types of enemies; being great at basketball doesn’t do you much good if you’re on a football field.
As for spears, they’re great for preventing the enemy from getting to your wall. The problem arises once they’re close. Length suddenly becomes a detriment, because the fight is now in a relatively (often VERY) narrow area, and you simply don’t have room to use your spear. Plus, you have nowhere to retreat to from which to re-establish spear superiority. Swords allow you to attack regardless of how close the enemy is (though daggers work better if they’re REALLY close).
“It’s simple for, say, the back ranks (remember the phalanx was at double depth) to raise sarisai, face about, and lower them again.”
In formation? At speed? In battlefield conditions (which are necessarily chaotic)? It sounds simple, everyone just turn and point your spears, but the reality is that it’s more complicated than people think. For mechanical things it’s simple; for people it’s hard.
It can be done. I’ve done it as part of a shield wall. But it requires coordination, training in that specific maneuver, and officers capable of independent command (both in the sense of “He’s allowed to order this” and in the sense of “He can actually pull this off”). Get it wrong and you clobber your own people, trip them up (which breaks up your formation), and you get run over. Everyone’s got to turn the same amount, everyone has to be comfortable with their new position in the line, and everyone has to trust their fellow soldiers to do the same. All while nearly overdosing on adrenaline and fear.
“…the Romans, on the whole, didn’t try to fight the phalanx face to face – they fell back before it.”
A force that tries to pin you without being able to damage you isn’t going to pin you. This is one reason why modern recreational swordplay is a bad analog for ancient warfare–I’m going to be MUCH more willing to charge a shield wall in the SCA than on a real battlefield, because I’m vastly more likely to come out undamaged (bruises don’t count) in the former than in the latter. If the phalanx wasn’t effective at killing people in front of them it wouldn’t pin anyone either.
Of course, if your enemy just goes around the unit you were relying on to pin them, or retreats until they find terrain that’s favorable to them instead of you, or otherwise finds a way around your main tactic, your tactics are bad and you will lose. It’s basic occupational safety–the best way to mitigate a hazard (in this case the spears from the phalanx front) is to remove the hazard (in this case, don’t be where the spears are).
I think the issue with the phalanx is that it’s just really bad at chasing down enemies. Faced with Romans kiting them, they probably can’t run that fast and they really want to stay in formation. Conversely, Roman legionaries are absolutely willing to jump out of formation to stab people in the back, and don’t mind that much if a fleeing opponent (or a small group) turns around to fight with sword in hand, since that’s exactly the fight they are equipped for. Further, these legionaries are quite good at turning back, running, and turning around again.
If the retreating Romans were pinned against a wall, they’d get killed alright, but they could retreat just fine.
In the case of the Macedonian phalanx, we know precisely what drill commands would be given to achieve this. Also NB that all the ranks behind the first five wouldn’t have their sarisai lowered anyway.
But I think you are agreeing with me – getting attacked from behind really messes with your plans and is bad news – but NOT because it is physically difficult to turn round.
It’s easy for a person to turn around. Turning around a bunch of people holding bulky shields, long poles, and swords–in unison, able to get into proper position quickly–is something else entirely. It’s possible–again, I’ve done it, so I know it’s possible–but there’s a world of difference between “possible” and “not difficult”. I chipped a tooth learning that maneuver, and enough people got bruises to convince me that in a combat scenario actual damage would result if it was improperly done.
The sarissa extends some minor length behind it’s soldier as well as the extensive part in front of the soldier. Possibly, the back ranks could lower their spears at exactly the opposite facing of the front ranks without tripping the front ranks, but probably not even that; an angled spear-lowering would be fatal. To turn and lower is not enough, you have to move some portion of the back ranks out of their current formation and make a new formation out of them with at least a little distance between.
Upwards of half a Macedonian army is troops whose only real job is keeping people from getting to the sides and back of the phalanx, so the phalanx won’t be trained for maneuvers that only matter in situations where surrender is already the only way to survive.
Asclepiodotus (Tactics, x.13.16 – the other tacticians have similar details) lists three different drill manoeuvres by which the phalanx can face an attack from the rear, as well as the ‘amphistomos’ formation which allows the phalanx to face in two directions at once.
“Many other formations are in use, not merely in battle, but also on the march to guard against the sudden attacks of the enemy; for the entire army is broken up into its parts, sometimes large and sometimes small, such as wings and half-wings, so that when the parts are combined the army may face the enemy with inner-fronts or with outer-fronts [amphistomos], and at other times with same-fronts or opposite-fronts. For the enemy is descried either on one side, or on two, or on three, or on all sides. Each of these situations has been discussed in order.” (Asclep x.22).
Ancient history is so much more fruitful when based on the evidence, rather than on what we imagine must have been the case.
That the maneuver exists is attested and was not in dispute, as I understand it.
What is in dispute is how feasible it was for any given Hellenistic army to carry out the maneuver under combat conditions. That answer might vary wildly based on the details of leadership, training, soldiers’ experience, and other factors specific to a given battlefield.
“Asclepiodotus (Tactics, x.13.16 – the other tacticians have similar details) lists three different drill manoeuvres by which the phalanx can face an attack from the rear, as well as the ‘amphistomos’ formation which allows the phalanx to face in two directions at once.”
I never said it didn’t exist. I’ve said I’ve done it (or at least maneuvers very similar). I also said it’s not simple, and that there are serious dangers to attempting it which often render it far from practical (this is war, exceptions always exist).
How fast do you think these maneuvers will take? I’ve done them. They can be quick, but NOT instant. And those few seconds can be quite painful for the people on the front lines if you’re actively engaged with the enemy. Remember, it only takes a disruption of a second or to for a prepared unit to break your formation–and by definition a unit where the guys are turning is disrupted. And they’re all carrying long poles, so any error in how far you spin (remember, humans don’t come with built-in GPS or navigation grids) is going to be magnified. The difference between “spear in position” and “spear whacking your own guys in the head” is five degrees or so for the guys in the back (remember how stout those spear hafts were!). You also have the shields and the back of the spear to consider, neither of which is fun to be hit with (it’s worth noting that shield-bashing is banned from SCA combat because of how dangerous it is).
(To dismiss these objections as imagination is merely an insult, unsuited to serious discussion. We’re talking geometry and physics, and concepts of human motion that any high school band geek can attest to. Unless you are postulating that the phalanx functioned via aliens with more dimensions at their disposal than we humans have, these factors necessarily MUST come into play. They absolutely did when my unit was drilling in these and similar tactics–which is why we drilled.)
This sort of tactic has its uses, to be sure. Mostly when the enemy is far enough away that you have time to engage in complex choreography–to get everyone in position, spears in line, that sort of thing. Before, in other words, your flanks are actually engaged. Once they are, spears become a hinderance, precisely because of the factors that made them advantageous when the enemy was further off. They are effective, in other words, in PRE-combat conditions–in preventing combat conditions from arising.
Reply to Dinwar (incidentally this commenting system is very difficult to use – the reply button disappears a few replies in, but then nobody reads the comments so I guess it doesn’t matter).
To be clear, my quote from Asclepiodotus was not directed to you, it was directed to ‘Endymionologist’, who said “the phalanx won’t be trained for maneuvers that only matter in situations where surrender is already the only way to survive [ie attacks from behind].” While in fact we can see that the phalanx was trained for manoeuvres to deal with attacks from behind and for fighting on two fronts.
Of course, in practice, in actual battlefield conditions, these manoeuvres may very well have been both difficult to perform and ineffective – self-evidently so, since the Macedonian right, attacked in the rear at Cynoscephalai, fell apart. Clearly, whatever manoeuvres it might have attempted, they didn’t work. This point is not in dispute, and will I think surprise nobody.
The initial point at issue that raised this mini-storm-in-a-teacup is that my belief is that attacks from behind were effective not because the attackees were physically unable to turn to face their attackers, but for other, mostly psychological, reasons (including but not limited to the difficulty of coolly performing manoeuvres to face about while under unexpected attack). I think ‘inability to turn round’ arguments are overly mechanical, as I originally said. I suspect that we might even all agree on this, no?
> This is one reason why modern recreational swordplay is a bad analog for ancient warfare–I’m going to be MUCH more willing to charge a shield wall in the SCA than on a real battlefield, because I’m vastly more likely to come out undamaged (bruises don’t count) in the former than in the latter.
This is also why LARP battles often have battle lines of 1 and 2 men deep instead of historical amounts. No phychological stiffening needed, and everyone wants to do the actual fighting because that is why they are here.
Yes, and even character death is unlikely, with how healing works in LARPs (or in tabletops). In LARPs, usually you fall down at 0 hit points, but to be actually killed, an enemy has to hover over you and announce a death strike, which your allies can and will interrupt. D&D these days doesn’t kill you at 0 hit points either (which was not true in the oldest editions). The upshot is that the winning side of a battle can be guaranteed to take zero casualties, which changes the individual fighters’ morale dramatically – it makes naturally behave the way the army needs them to.
And this should affect how high fantasy portrays armies and soldiery in general.
SCA standards are 3-4 men deep–shields in front, polearms behind that, spears behind that (1-2 ranks of spears, depending on length). Sometimes there’s a rear line of skirmishers, who take advantage of any opportunities that may arise. It has more to do with how the weapons function than psychological advantage, though. As you say, in this sort of thing you want to be where the action is.
In contrast, in a real battle I can very much see myself opting to participate in the vital but unglamorous role of “Pin this enemy here, don’t let them move”, resulting in a four-hour standoff where no one does much! Especially as the guy in the middle to back, where there’s the least actual danger. You get the glory of being part of the army, but you also get to go home after the war!
I’m not entirely sure if that is just because the psychological part but also because the unit sizes involved are a lot lower, being in the vicinity of 100 vs 100. With such groups you cannot really anchor the line which means Total War style flankings are possible and it is valuable to thin out your line to make sure you are as wide as possible.
On that note, maybe I should read up on how small battles were fought historically although I would not be surprised most of the time those would become sieges.
Not sure about SCA, but LARPs tend to be fought in pretty constrained areas, like scouting camps, so that the PCs can fill the entire field with two figure line width. (There are a lot more PCs than NPCs, so the NPC side of the battle either recycles or has higher stats, e.g. taking more hits to fall down.)
“Atrax? Thermopylae? In fact I think sarisai are rather good used from fortifications (on account of their length).”
I’m not familiar with Atrax, but Thermopylae was fought by old style Greek hoplites, with shorter spears and shields, rather than long pikes.
I think he’s referring to (one of) the later battle at Thermopylae. I think it’s Romans Vs Seleucids? As a good site for a defensive battle, it’s seen many battles fought over it!
Correct – Thermopylae (191) not Thermopylae (480) (or 323 or 279 or 254 – there have been a lot of fights in that place).
Its a bit like The Battle of Chaeronea? There have been at least SIX!
Or indeed 1941!
Myke Cole and Michael Livingstone counted twenty-seven recorded “Actions” around Thermopylae including sixteen recorded battles in their recent book “Killing Ground”. Interestingly, in a clear majority of the “Actions” the defender did NOT successfully hold the pass. They think this is probably due to reporting bias: cases where an attacker showed up, saw the defenders lined up in the pass and simply abandoned the attack are presumably less likely to be recorded.
The most famous examples of this is probably Adrianople, so many battles of Adrianople….
I think he’s referring to the less famous Battle of Thermopylae between Antiochus and the Romans (which turned out much the same as the original — IIRC the Romans even used the same goat-path that Xerxes’ troops had come along).
(Having written that last sentence, it strikes me that the second battle is the sort of thing that would get dismissed as a doublet if it happened in a less securely-documented era of history.)
This issue depends mainly on whether you have a background in literary criticism and folkolorism, or in military history. In the former research tradition, you are trained to find doublings and patterns, in the latter, the point is that military history is driven by geography. Thus, you have battles repeating in the same places, because they are in the routes where armies need to march through to get somewhere. A doublet is then quite credible, because it just represents the unchanging geography.
I know, I was just poking fun at modern scholars who treat primary sources almost entirely as literary works, and assume that any parallels or doublets are there for literary effect rather than because sometimes in real life two or more things are actually similar to each other (looking at you, Francois Hartog!).
To Mr. X:
It’s not literary effect, or not just literary effect: I have seen doublets get invented in real life, as different versions of the same events are told by different observers. There’s no literary intent here, just one person hearing two stories with differing details and not realizing that they aren’t hearing about two different events, they’re hearing different stories about one event. (And then that listener goes on to tell other people about how this thing happened TWICE last week!) And this is just people who all work on the same block talking about events in the last month on that block! Nevermind things happening a generation ago and hundreds of miles away…
Atrax is one of the sieges during this campaign in the Second Macedonian war, a success for the Macedonians on the defensive. Roman siege equipment seems to be having some trouble (One of their towers just topples over on the approach to the wall, among other difficulties) but they do succeed in making a small breach in the walls. However, the Macedonians simply form up a phalanx in the gap created and the Romans are unable to win the battle for the narrow breach and are repulsed with an unstated amount of losses.
Also, I think Prof. Taylor is referring to this battle of Thermopylae, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae_(191_BC) not the more famous one from the Greco-Persian wars.
Yes, as others have already noted, the Thermopylae I meant is that of 191, not 480. There were a lot of battles at Thermopylae – enough to fill a book!
Atrax was the Roman siege and defeat described in Livy 33.17. I quoted the passage before and will do so again since it’s such a good, detailed account of legion v. phalanx (in, perhaps, somewhat unusual circumstances, but then, most circumstances are), and is better than a ton of speculation about what would happen when they meet:
“Meanwhile the consul was finding the siege of Atrax longer and more difficult than anyone had expected, and the enemy resisted in a way that he had not in the least anticipated. For he had believed that the whole task would be to batter down the wall; and that if he had opened a way into the city for the soldiers, the flight and slaughter of the enemy would follow, as usually happens in captured towns; but when a section of the wall was thrown down by the battering-rams and the soldiers had entered the city over the ruins, that was, so to speak, the beginning of new and fresh toil. For the Macedonians who formed the garrison, numerous and picked men, thinking that it would be a most noble exploit to defend the city with arms and valour rather than with walls, in close array, strengthening their formation by increasing the number of ranks within it, when they saw the Romans scaling the ruins, thrust them out over ground that was rough and admitted no easy retreat. The consul was enraged, and thought that this disgrace not merely meant a delay in capturing this one city, but affected the final issue of the war as a whole, which generally turns on the influence of little things; clearing out the place which was heaped up with the debris of the fallen wall, he moved up a tower of great height, carrying a large number of men in its numerous galleries, and sent out cohorts, one after the other, under their standards, to pierce, if possible, with their attack the formation of the Macedonians — they themselves call it the phalanx. But in addition to the limits of space, only a little of the wall having been destroyed, the enemy had the advantage in character of weapons and in tactics. When the Macedonians in close order held before them spears of great length, and when the Romans, hurling their javelins to no purpose, had drawn their swords against this sort of testudo, closely-fashioned as if with shields, they could neither approach near enough to engage hand to hand nor cut off the ends of the spears, and if they did cut off or break any of them, the spearshaft, the broken part being itself sharp, helped, along with the points of the undamaged pikes, to make a sort of wall. Moreover, the parts of the rampart that still stood protected the two flanks, nor was it possible either to retire or to charge from a distance, a manoeuvre which usually throws the ranks into disorder.” Livy 33.17
“either to retire or to charge from a distance” – whatever does Livy mean? Compare Plutarch’s account (yes, Plutarch) of Asculum, recently discussed:
“So the Romans, having no opportunity for sidelong shifts and counter-movements, as on the previous day, were obliged to engage on level ground and front to front; and being anxious to repulse the enemy’s hoplites before their elephants came up, they fought fiercely with their swords against the Macedonian spears, reckless of their lives and thinking only of wounding and slaying, while caring naught for what they suffered.” Plut. Pyrrhus 21.6
We don’t really understand how Roman tactics work, but it looks very much as if Romans (and Socii) standing in toe to toe sword and spear combat with the Macedonians is not what usually happened (unless their furor overcame their sapientia, which sometimes it did – see Paeligni, Pydna, next instalment).
Livy (or just the translator) is using the word translated as “charge” as a synecdoche for the Roman method of attack and so he means ‘to throw missiles.’ “Retire” similarly; a Roman soldier doesn’t simply take himself out of danger when he retreats, he moves his opponent towards him and thus either sideways or forward but in either case potentially out of formation.
It’s seems clear that a phalanx could be good at defending a city. For holding a breach in the wall or narrow streets it’s probably even better than at defending mountain passes.
But how well would work at attacking a city? I feel you wouldn’t let the phalanx to be first through the breach. In streets it would probably be quite effective, any enemy in front of it would have not much other option than to retreat. Attacking from roof tops would be more useful, a phalanx would probably have difficulties raising their shields over their heads. But the sides would again seem like the greatest weakness. When the phalanx comes across a side street or just a gap between buildings it would seem to be practically defenceless. They would probably have to use skirmishers to slip between the phalanx and buildings as soon as the spear points pass the corner.
If the Romans don’t engage the phalanx from the front, that leads to the question of where all of Pyrrhus’s phalanx casualties come from. Of course, it’s possible they learned not to do it from fighting Pyrrhus.
It might also come down to individual commanders and battlefield conditions. With Pyrrhus, the Romans were strategically more on the back foot, and thus the tribunes leading the legions facing the phalanx were willing to risk the heavy casualties of engaging the hedge of spears. In Cynophelae, being caught with the pants halfway down and trying to fight up a hill, with no pressing reason not to retreat when things go badly and being far from Rome and any reinforcements, the tribunes on the left flanks might just have decided to take things slow, and not wear out their troops, or at least stall things until back down the hill to have a fairer engagement on flat ground. Or even really been that rattled that they didn’t think they could force this one. After all, they couldn’t see where their right flank had wandered off to, and if it was still alive.
The Romans may not be directly trying to push their way into the phalanx, and may be giving way before it, but they probably aren’t shy about chucking javelins into the formation. That’d have some effect. Or there could be a local breakdown in the phalanx that didn’t translate into a total collapse all along the line.
The “Shepherd tunrs up and offers a way around” is just something that happens in greek warfare huh? It’s one of those things that obviously has an actual reasoning for happening, but also feels really folkloric, and a bit of aliterary trope.
“Farmer/Forester leads army on back road” would be the equivalent in other terrain. I can see it happening more in Greece because:
-You need a limited choke point that an army would plausibly be able to hold, but also need the option for hidden paths. Which means mountains, flatter terrain would have more obvious paths through, something like a peninsula/isthmus has no land alternatives.
-Mountains mean herdsmen as the most likely people in the area who would know these routes, vs farmers in flatter/better terrain. If sheep are the main livestock in an area…
-Armies need to be evenly matched enough that holding a pass is plausible, otherwise the attacker forces their way through, or defender is strong enough to fight a battle and win instead of waiting.
-Close combat infantry might need to be important as a fighting style for the defenders, otherwise harassment might be more important.
Greece at the time has all of these, other places may not.
To add to the choke point bit after thinking about it some:
You need a choke point that improves defenses quite a lot, otherwise the attacker can just fight a more or less normal battle. (Like Hastings, where the main road created a battle site, but it wasn’t an extremely well defended one, just a sloping hill.). This still suggests rough terrain, as flatter terrain would allow a more normal battle.
Shepherds are the folks who are working up there. It seems weird to us because we don’t automatically think “oh, the hills, that’s where the shepherds are,” but it’s about as surprising as if you got lost in the warehouse district and got directions from a trucker, or if you were looking for a particular office in an office building and a secretary told you how to find it.
(I think also it’s because, while there are other people going up in the hills on the regular, hunters or bandits or herb-gatherers don’t need good paths the way both shepherds and armies do. If it’s just me and my sling looking for something to eat, I’ll just pick my way across that rocky slope, no problem. But trying to get sheep or several hundred dudes across it is a little more of a problem, y’know?)
I think they were less surprised that it was a shepherd doing the guiding, and more that there was a secret pass round the back of the army…again.
Was Thermopylae (the one against the Persians) as famous back then as it is now? If so, you’d think commanders would do a better job of interrogating the local shepherds about gaps in their defences…
“In part this is because Rome is often juggling many problems: in 200, Rome deploys two legions to the Second Macedonian War, but also two legion-sized alae of socii were deployed in Gaul and Bruttium, two more legions held in Italy (in addition to the two two-legion consular armies; Sulpicius’ co-consul, Gaius Aurelius Cotta is going to spend the year fighting Gauls), ”
I’m having a little trouble parsing this part. Read one way it sounds like Cotta has two alae and two legions in Gaul plus there are more alae in Bruttium and two legions in Italy. Read another way it sounds like there are two alae split between Gaul and Brutium and Cotta has one or two legions in Gaul.
I always appreciate when Bret talks about his process for gauging the trustworthiness of sources!
On that note, you mention that we should trust Livy’s statement that Phillip was scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel because it’s unflattering to the Romans, making their victory less impressive. Is the reverse true? For instance, when the ancient writers say that 2/3 of the Roman soldiers at Cannae were inexperienced new conscripts, should we view that as an attempt to soften the blow to Roman prestige?
Also, happy Ides of March to our favorite Roman historian!!
“Et tu, (regular blog commenter)?!”
Kai su, teknon?
You mention Roman armies east of the Adriatic in several subsequent years. Would I be right to assume that a consular army stays in place after the end of the consul’s term, and the commanding consul keeps commanding it until his replacement consul arrives?
I believe that’s how it generally works. After all, it would rather hurt the campaign if the army had to go back to Rome for the election.
Thank you!
For the first half of the second century, from 200 to 168, the Romans achieve an astounding series of lopsided victories against both (Antigonid) Macedonian and Seleucid Hellenistic armies, while simultaneously reducing several other major players (Pergamon, Egypt) to client states.
Macedonia and the Seleucids yes, but I don’t think the other two belong here: Pergamon was “major” compared to a city-state like Athens or Sparta, but never a top-tier power (and indeed they initially allied with Rome because otherwise the Seleucids would have clientised them), whilst Egypt’s decline was due to political instability rather than anything the Romans did.
The estimate of a population of 3-3.5 million for Philip’s state seems to me a bit exaggerated? I understand Macedon itself has about 700,000 to 1 million, going by Hammond here who may be dated I suppose, but the higher figure works out to a population density of about 25 people per square km which appears to me quite high, Greek Macedonia in 1920 had a population of 1,09 million or 32 people per square km by comparison. Where does Philip V gets another 2 million in Greek holdings? Outside Macedonia proper he is holding Thessaly with a likely population in the 300-400,000 range (by comparison 438,000 in 1920, 299,000 in 1881) plus Chalkis and Corinth the so called fetters of Greece. Shall we call it another 100-200,000 people outside Thessaly?
So overall shouldn’t his population base be closer to between 1,1 and 1.6 million people? Yes right before the start of the 2nd Macedonian war Philip has conquered a bit of land in Thrace and Caria but this is likely a drain, if memory serves Philip had over 5,000 men fighting there at the very time of Cynos Cephalae?
Which brings me to the second question. Philip has 23,500 men with the field army at Cynos Cephalae. Doesn’t he also have something in the order of another 20,000 men or so with the army in Caria and the garrisons of Corinth, Chalkis and Demetrias? And doesn’t he raise another 5,500 men in Macedonia immediately after the defeat at Cynos Cephalae to meet invasion by the Dardanians? If you put all these together he’s mobilizing about 49,000 men out of a population of about 1.1-1.6 million. Still not up to the potential Roman levels of mobilization but not wildly less that the Roman forces actually mobilized? Rome’s 125,000 men represent ~3.6-4.2% of the population, Philip’s 49,000 ~3.1-4.5%. Or if you don’t count the levy against the Dardanians after all Rome CAN mobilize more than 125,000 and Philip can’t, his levy against the Dardanians is an extraordinary measure, you have ~43,500 from a population in the 1.1-1.6 million range hence is mobilizing about 2.7-4% of the population. 2.7% to 3.1% isn’t extraordinarily different?
125,000 was Rome taking things easy while recovering from the 2nd Punic War. They had raised many times that when they were the ones getting invaded a couple decades previous. So Rome at low readiness is matching Phillip in crisis mode.
They had raised at the time of maximum effort at the time of the 2nd Punic war 200,000 men in the army and 125 warships in the navy. Assuming the latter are all quinqueremes with the Polybius claimed crews of 420 per ship, that makes a mobilized force of about 250,000 men. For a population of 3.5 million that’s about 7% of the population.
Now of course we are not counting the population of outlying Roman provinces in this, by the time of the 2nd Punic war Roman Italy may have 3-4 million people but the Roman state is not just Roman Italy, it also holds Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, has a foothold in Illyria along with Corfu and is expanding north of the Apennines. Which adds what to the calculation, about 2 million more people?
But those quarter million troops are being raised after having two armies wiped out. Ancient logistical constraints means that there is only so much manpower you can put in the field at once. The Romans continue to put that much manpower into the field after devastating losses.
Correction. Forgot to include Philip’s cavalry at Cynos Cephalae it seems. So make that 25,500 with the total mobilized army 45,500. So 2.85-4.15% of the population rather.
Yeah, Bret is rather underselling Macedonia here. It was no Rome, but it actually mobilized a rather large share of its population by pre-modern standards. It was a bit of a problem for the Greek successor states given their ethnocentrism that by far the smallest successor state was the one dominating actual Greece.
This is a real throwback but this article feels like the missing half of a previous article:
https://acoup.blog/2021/05/07/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-universalis-iv-part-ii-red-queens/
Yes, the returns on capital investment were very low pre industrial revolution but… Rome is able to get several times more soldiers per capita and equip them better to boot.
Yes getting more land was a way to get more resources and make state survival more secure but… mo’ money mo’ problems. Rome can only send 25% of it’s army against Macedon and Phillip has to abandon his successes in the south to rush back to face Rome’s invasion. The military obligations expanded to fill the military power available and unlike an EU IV player, Rome can’t wait a few years then attack Phillip with all their force.
To me, EU IV feels like a flight simulator that ignores the existence of the ground because airplane crashes are very rare. Crashes aren’t intrinsically rare, they are kept rare by the pilot activities being simulated. An interstate anarchy simulator that makes blobs secure is omitting something like airplane crashes, sure the big blob will (usually) keep the small neighbors at bay but it takes effort to do so. P’dox games in general punish you for (realistically) diluting your efforts.
Paradox games are in no way realistic as far as military goes, especially but not limited to EU4. And that’s *before* you start the eternal debate about the lack of internal politics.
EU4’s not without internal politics, but the mana system makes them too easy… I miss EU3 when a stability loss was punishing.
(I miss many things about EU3, for that matter. I’d dust it off but I don’t want to go back to that map… hope Paradox takes the best of it for EU5.)
My limited understanding is that many people claim, both happily and sadly, that EU5 seems, so far, more like a continuation of EU3 than EU4.
Me too. As it is now, EU4 is the game I prefer to play (although that took a good dozen or more expansions), mainly on account of more content (especially for non-Europeans) and UX. However, in terms of general style of mechanics/design paradigm, I find EU3 much more enjoyable.
Regarding Roman initial incursions in Illyrica against Teuta and the claim that they were due to her arrogance toward the Roman ambassadors (and claimed attempt to assassinate one). My own suspicion is that Teuta was going to be claimed to have been excessively arrogant toward the Roman ambassadors if she was anything but utterly submissive (or victorious or at least fought to a draw, winning can get a woman some respect from historians).
Romans had more tolerance for women of authority than Greeks, but our primary account is from Polybius, who is Greek and quite insulting toward her ability (“with a woman’s natural shortness of view” from Histories 2.4.8 and there’s also 2.8.12 “Giving way to her temper like a woman and heedless of the consequences”).
There’s not really that much about her, lack of forethought is and arrogance are what we’ve got, but if she’s so incompetent and incapable of foresight that leaves some question why she was successful till the Romans showed up in force.
It could be luck and good subordinates, or it could be that the narative is heavily biased against her.
I have a strong feeling that any woman who is driven enough to hang onto a throne in that place and time would have to be forceful enough to supply no end of stories of doing things that sound vindictive but are actually reasonable actions to maintain security against pretenders whose main argument would be that they’re not a woman. If she’s trying to maintain a relatively independent polity on top of that, she might have made quite a few enemies doing perfectly normal international politics.
It could also be that repeated success had made her over-confident, which would have plenty of parallels amongst male leaders as well.
I’m wondering… We see the phalanx being able to form squares mid-battle at Magnesia but not at Cynoscephalae. Could it be that at Cynoscephalae the phalanx did not understand the Romans yet and as such surrender seemed like an appropriate action, like in the Diadochi battles? While at Magnesia, the phalanx was under no such impression and therefore decided to keep fighting by forming squares?
Perhaps Cynoscephalae was a case of “not understanding the Roman way of fighting” and less “the phalanx is inflexible”? Also didn’t most of the casualties in the phalanx occur after the phalanx surrendered?
As for Macedonians and sieges, Alexander showed that phalangites could undertake and carry a siege just as well as the Romans.
> Philip does need to outsmart one Roman general, but a succession of different generals who are bound to try different approaches and tactics.
Doesn’t need to
> but while Flamininus got the message, his troops did evidently did not
troops evidently
Regarding our mystery hero of Cynoscephalae, has there been any serious scholarly effort to come up with a list of possible candidates? I don’t know how complete our list of quaestores is for the subsequent years, but I feel like the guy who pulled off such a key action would have been a shoo-in.
Regarding how the Romans choose to leave Phillip V in place after defeating him, one thing I hope subsequent entries in this series can address is why the Romans more generally did not implement the socii-system in the aftermath of overseas victories like these or the Punic wars.
Sadly, your term for that system, the Goku model of imperialism, has suddenly gone and become rather poignant!
One problem with implementing the socii system abroad is exactly what the socii is designed to do — provide soldiers in a reasonable time frame to assemble near Rome (or its borders). With the lag of travel time involved, both the time of the message leaving Rome and the time of the socii soldiers marching to wherever the legions were assembling, Rome decided it wasn’t feasible to push for recruitment outside of Italy.
Not sure the lag would have amounted to anything significant, considering that although the message would take longer to get there the foreign socii would naturally be closer to a border than the Roman heartland (provided they send a message to a socii closer to where the conflict was happening, which is obviously sensible).
A ‘socii abroad’ approach seems a lot like the Theme system of the Byzantines. Local army for local problems, backed up by forces from the Imperial centre.
The list of quaestors is basically always awful. There are too many; the majority of them never really make much of themselves.
The tribune might well have been a former quaestor. To quote Brett’s series on the Cursus Honorum,
“[the office of millitary tribune] served both as a good first stepping stone into political prominence as well as something more established Roman politicians did between major office-holding, perhaps as a way of remaining prominent or to curry favor with the more senior politicians they served under or simply because military exigency meant that more experienced hands were wanted to lead the army.”
and
“Roman society is one in which the social codes whereby deference is owed to individuals of higher status (a function of age, influence and offices held) is strongly felt – few young tribunes would boldly speak out in a room full of more senior Romans, but likewise a military tribune who was an ex-praetor or ex-consul would expect to be heard and his opinion weighed heavily.”
A few scattered thoughts:
While I don’t know if Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna will bear this out, it really is starting to sound like the answer to “How would you even defeat this?” is “for the love of God, don’t face it head on, figure out a way to take it from behind!”
One thing I wonder about Cynoscephalae: if the Hellenistic “theory of victory” relied on cavalry to be decisive, what the heck were Philip V’s 2,000 cavalry doing this battle? Was the terrain too rough for them? Did the Romans just have really good not-getting-outflanked-by-cavalry tactics? What?
Finally, this post reinforces my preexisting sense that Rome’s navy is under discussed. We always hear about the legions but aside from Gaul the Mediterranean is basically *the* thing that defines Roman territory. But aside from Actium I basically never hear the Roman navy discussed, not even in the context of the Punic wars where the enemy was on the other side of a huge sea! It’s also kind of weird that in all the post-Augustus civil wars, we never really seem to get another Actium-like naval battle between two Roman generals.
Navies are under discussed generally: listening to a couple of podcasts from the blog author plus some First Punic War videos made a lot clearer how ancient navies work.First Punic war is probably the best for this thanks to the “Rome takes on the most powerful navy in the Mediterranean in huge battles” factor. Might be because there’s less variety than the large array of different types of land forces, plus navies being more intermittent use in warfare. (Almost all involve land battles, not so many involve naval combat.) Or maybe its just living on land.
There was some naval action against the Seleucids in one of these wars, and navies had to be considered in some other post Caesar assassination fighting, though no large battles I know of.
Does seem ripe for a post on the blog. I’ve recommended a “how they did it: water/boat stuff” series a few times, and other navy topics have been requested here and there.
US Naval podcast
Drachinifel podcast
Podcasts about First Punic war navies, for anyone who hasn’t seen them yet.
I wonder if part of the reason navies are underdiscussed is that they don’t lend themselves to dramatic personal heroics as well as land armies. Granted boarding has always been a part of naval warfare, but ancient navies generally relied on ramming, and more recent ones on gunnery, both of which are team efforts and not as cool as facing off against an individual enemy soldier and dispaching him by valour and skill at arms.
There’s also the point that for most polities the navy is a supporting arm: Something that’s nice to have, even critical at times, but mostly in that it can get the army where it needs to be/stop the enemy army from going where it wants to go. There are exceptions to this, but they’re relatively rare.
True. If the army in second-system warfare is intended to deliver the siege, the navy is intended to deliver the army.
Jackie Fisher (Adm. Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher,) architect of Britain’s dreadnought building program prior to WWI, said that the Army is a projectile to be launched by the Navy.
Seems like the Roman navy in particular is suffering from success – it’s so effective at projecting naval power nobody attempts to challenge them, leaving them without any notable battles to be commemorated. Nobody builds a statue to the guys who made sure the supply chain never got disrupted (maybe we should, though).
While I don’t know if Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna will bear this out, it really is starting to sound like the answer to “How would you even defeat this?” is “for the love of God, don’t face it head on, figure out a way to take it from behind!”
At Thermopylae, the Romans managed to go along a narrow track to outflank the Seleucids. At Magnesia, the Seleucid war elephants panicked and stampeded through the phalanx, enabling the Romans to defeat it. And at Pydna, the Romans were pushed back onto rough ground, whereupon the Macedonian formation started to fall apart and the Romans managed to get to sword-length. So I think the answer is “Find a way to either outflank or disrupt it.”
I’ve also wondered about the cavalry for some time but then I remembered that Romans (as far as I understand) still had 1200 (or so) Numidians on their side, who are both very good cavalry and, even if outmatched, very hard-to-defeat cavalry, since they are light skirmishers and so are able to retreat from enemy cavalry charge and then return, effectively “pinning” enemy cavalry. And since Romans also had 400 Aetolian cavalry plus some socii and proper Roman cavalry, Macedonian cavalry surely had a hard time fighting all of them and was unable to help the phalanx.
Personally, it was not at all clear to me that the Romans at Cynoscephalae still had all the Numidian cavalry they had at Aous. I am just going of Bret’s description of the battle mind you, perhaps he was simply unclear. I guess this would explain why he says the Romans had an advantage in cavalry.
I haven’t found any mentions of Numidian cavalry participating in this battle (or in any other battle of that war) in our sources, but since the Romans still had Numidian elephants I doubt they for some reasons sent back Numidian cavalry.
Interestingly enough, both Polybius and Livy praised Aetolian cavalry, which is considered by Polybius “superior to the rest of the Greeks … for fighting in skirmishing order” and by Livy “the greatest safeguard”. Since Roman tactics required from the cavalry to skirmish and pin enemy cavalry while the infantry was deciding battle in the center, I think that an additional contingent of such good light skirmishing cavalry was very helpful.
It is also notable that the Macedonian camp after the battle of Cynoscephalae was looted by the Aetolians (probably by the Aetolian cavalry), who, therefore, were victorious in their part of the battle.
The other day I saw someone say that Rome had a bad navy. I think a lot of that comes from a sort of “video game thinking” that if Rome is good on land, they must have disadvantages somewhere else. Rome’s navy isn’t that well known, but after developing during the First Punic War, they were pretty much undefeated until… I guess until the Vandals arrive in the Mediterranean?
They had a fair bit of difficulty trying to stamp out piracy in the decades after 100 BC, although that might have been a matter of organisation/political will rather than quality (notably, when Pompey’s give charge of the problem he manages to solve it within a couple of years).
I recall something to the effect that to stop piracy you have to get rid of the pirate friendly ports. Chasing down and sinking pirate ships is necessary, but there will always be more if you don’t deny them bases.
Very true. Cutting off their supply works better.
My impression is that it’s less that and more that after Rome beats Carthage there really isn’t a naval power left to challenge them. Certainly not after they also mop up the Successors. So for the entire empire the roman navy is a logistic/anti-piracy force.
Don’t forget the occasional civil relief mission. The most famous Roman naval casualty, Plinius Senior, died when leading a mission to relieve a couple of coastal towns during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The Roman Navy resembled the US Sixth Fleet in mid-1990’s.
The tie-in of this series to your upcoming book is making me think, are you going to do a similar series about why the Romans beat Carthage? Because it’s notable that an enemy of Rome can produce a once-in-a-century military leader, figure out the exact counter to the legion, kill more than 100,000 Roman soldiers in three successive years, peel off a third of the socii including Capua, and still lose the war decisively.
You know, I was thinking because this series is so poorly timed, coming out at least a year, if not more, before my book would actually be out in print, that I’ll loop back and do the Punic Wars for when the book comes out as a promotion.
Yes, please!
What I think is especially interesting is not just the battle history of the Punic Wars but also the social background to Carthage. The basic social and political structure of Rome is fairly well-known in popular histories and you’ve gone over it in your How to SQPR series; so is the basic structure of the Hellenistic states, with absolute monarchy and frequent succession wars, and you’ve also gone over the lesser-known feature of apartheid rule by ethnic Greeks over Egyptians and native Middle Easterners. But what was Carthage like? We know it was polyarchal like the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy, but was that construed differently enough from the Roman model that it couldn’t field multiple five-figure armies at once?
This is from the Soldiers and silver book, and presumably other historical knowledge of the time.
Carthage could field large numbers of soldiers in large numbers of armies, the historical description says a bit less then Rome on average through the second Punic war, descriptions of the first war suggest similar. (These armies are what Rome’s large numbers were fighting in the second war.)
The differences that would be described/explained are
-Why the numbers are that little bit less
-The armies are structured very differently (Petting zoo of mercenaries, citizen armies, other conscription for Carthage vs. big citizen armies + citizen armies of subjects for Rome)
-Carthaginian armies seem lower quality on average, aside from Hannibal. Same might go for the navy, Carthage started as the big power but lost a lot of the battles.
-The method of handling conquered territory was different.
A big factor is probably that Carthage’s armies were mostly mercenaries, meaning that, unlike the Hellenistic monarchies, they weren’t as limited by population size. Basically, it didn’t matter if there were fewer Carthaginian citizens than Roman citizens (+ socii), as long as Carthage still had enough wealth to hire foreign troops.
This would also explain why Carthaginian armies were lower quality: if you’re recruiting mercenaries from all different parts of the Mediterranean, it’s harder to make sure they’re trained, equipped, etc. to a uniform standard, and also perhaps harder to make the different troop types work together effectively.
Also maybe leaving the city more nervous about a general using mercenaries to take over Carthage. Though the main quirk I know about is the habit of executing generals who lost battles.
Article on the Carthaginian constitution: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/libyan-studies/article/generals-and-judges-command-constitution-and-the-fate-of-carthage/757F46BAE0CA1A08373A15D1E497198F
Also maybe leaving the city more nervous about a general using mercenaries to take over Carthage. Though the main quirk I know about is the habit of executing generals who lost battles.
TBH I’m surprised Carthage didn’t have more rebellions, given their tendency to execute failed generals.
“What is the penalty for losing a battle? Execution. And what is the penalty for trying to overthrow the state? Execution. Well then…”
“This would also explain why Carthaginian armies were lower quality…”
I would think it would be the opposite. Mercenaries were professionals, after all, and in general a professional will do a better job than someone who’s just here for the one job and then goes home. (Rome gets around this by making sure all males are in the army, which would have passed a lot of the training down to the family.) Up-thread we’re discussing complicated maneuvers, and that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a mercenary unit to excel at. They have the time, training, and incentive to pull stuff like that off. A citizen levy, on the other hand, only has the third part of that equation.
Where it’s really going to tell is when the units break, I’d think. If I’m fighting for my country and my family, surrounded by folks I’m going to see for the rest of my life, it’s going to take something significant to get me to turn and run. Death isn’t as scary as humiliation (especially in a culture that indoctrinates you with this idea from the cradle). On the other hand, if I’m just there for the paycheck I’m going to cut out way earlier. I can’t spend money after I’m dead, so I’m going to make sure I’ve got a reasonable chance of surviving any battle. Part of that is training, part of that is equipment, part of that is which contracts I take–and part of that is me going “Nope, screw this, not worth the money” if things get too hairy.
There’s also the fact that if I’m paying you to fight, it’s always a possibility that my enemy will pay you more. In a world where the fastest communication system is “man on horse” and intel is limited to scouting reports, it’d be pretty easy for you to send a messenger along known routes with the message “If you get bogged down in a swamp for three days there’ll be a chest of gold waiting for you on the fourth day.” This isn’t a hypothetical threat, either; there are ample historical examples. Sparta, while not precisely mercenaries, does exactly this numerous times. And the Ottoman Empire rather infamously converted a Norse army from a threat to an ally this way (as an aside, check out the Viking Home Companion; I’d imagine most people commenting on a history blog would find it amusing!).
I guess at the end of the day, it’s a question of which failure mode your population is willing to accept. No army is perfect, but some operate better in certain cultures than others.
I would think it would be the opposite. Mercenaries were professionals, after all, and in general a professional will do a better job than someone who’s just here for the one job and then goes home. (Rome gets around this by making sure all males are in the army, which would have passed a lot of the training down to the family.)
The comment I was replying to was explicitly comparing Carthage with Rome, who, as you say, managed to get around this problem.
Up-thread we’re discussing complicated maneuvers, and that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a mercenary unit to excel at. They have the time, training, and incentive to pull stuff like that off. A citizen levy, on the other hand, only has the third part of that equation.
An individual mercenary unit, yes, but for an army to be effective the various units need to be able to work together. By the time of the Punic Wars Roman legions and socii alae fought using the same tactics and equipment, making it easier for them to co-operate on the battlefield. Making an infantry force that’s 1/3 hoplites, 1/3 Gallic warbands, and 1/3 light buckler-men work together efficiently is going to be a little harder, even if each individual company is already well-trained when you hire them.
“Making an infantry force that’s 1/3 hoplites, 1/3 Gallic warbands, and 1/3 light buckler-men work together efficiently is going to be a little harder, even if each individual company is already well-trained when you hire them.”
There’s something to this–different units fight differently, after all. However, there’s an obvious argument against it as well. If I know you’re bringing an infantry force that’s 3/3 hoplites, I’m going to fight you with something that your hoplites are weak against. The Norse in the Ottoman Empire illustrate that point: at least apocryphally, the Ottomans trapped them on a hill and surrounded them with archers, eliminating any advantage the Norse had. (To be clear, I’m aware of Norse archery; it’s just that THIS group, having been eroded by war, was weak against these archers in this situation.) If you’ve got a variety of troop types they can cover each other’s weaknesses. Your Gallic war bands can harass the enemy from the flanks (smaller units operating more independently can be harder to predict) while your phalanx keeps the main body pinned, and your light buckler-men can act as reserves, running to wherever they’re needed.
Communication and cohesion are going to be the issue, I think. The Roman units you mention have a variety of troop types built into their formations; they’re built to work together, they train together, they build fortified camps every night together. In contrast, mercenaries are something you’re bringing in from the outside, more or less by definition. You’re together for this campaign, maybe even this fight, and that’s it. You may be enemies in the next battle. This necessarily will breed a certain amount of distrust. Differences in language, customs, and other factors may also come into play, meaning that they may not understand what you’re asking them to do even if everyone likes each other.
Ooo, things to look forward to!
On the one hand, yay Carthage series!
On the other hand, it’s a year away…
I think I’m leaning towards the side of ‘yay Carthage’ 😉
You write, “…so Philip is able to recollect his army after the defeat…”
The word ‘recollect’ here should probably be ‘collect’. I thought you might have intended to say ‘re-collect,’ but you don’t mention a prior collecting of the troops.
If you were speaking instead of writing I would know you started saying ‘recall’ and switched to saying ‘collect’ mid-word, because professors do that sort of thing all the time at parties.
After the defeats most pre modern armies scatter so when the army was all in one space, collected to be at the general’s command, it has to be recollected to get the army back together.
Another idle thought. If Rome is having 250,000 men under arms in 212 and 125,000 out of a population of 3-3.5 million this means it is mobilizing 7% of its total population if we go by the higher figure of 3.5 million and 3.5% in peacetime. Even worse we are talking 8.3% and 4.15% of the population if we go by the lower figure of 3 million.
How in creation is a pre-industrial society like Rome managing to keep 3.5% of its population under arms on a permanent base year in and year out without… well economic collapse and famine? After all every soldier in the legions is a pair of hands not tilling a field. The PEACETIME figure is comparable to the French levee en masse in 1794 and slightly larger than Prussia at the start of the 7 years war. The wartime figure during the 2nd Punic war is comparing to WW1 European mobilization levels and outright exceeding these of some of the participants.
Aren’t such numbers a strong indicator of a higher overall Roman population?
“Pre-industrial” covers a wide range of societies and social structures, and some are more productive with higher standards of living and more capacity for specialists than others. This is discussed in the “Bread, How Did They Make It?” series and in particular part IV.
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/
Unless someone is willing to make the argument that 3rd century BC Rome is more productive per capita than late 18th century France, the basic problem remains. If 3.5% of the population of the entirety of Roman Italy is permanently under arms, which works to what roughly 10% of the adult male population? then who is working their farms? Because in their grand majority the serving soldiers are not just farmers, they are smallholders. And they are away from their farms for the entire year, often enough for multiple years.
AIUI the farms would be small family farms, so there are potentially fathers, brothers, wives, slaves to work it, plus maybe neighbors to help out. And with everyone liable to conscription, neighbors trading such favors would make sense. So even though you’re losing some labor, doesn’t mean the farm is totally idle.
I think information on the dilectus is supposed to bear out that the Romans are strategic about where they’re pulling the soldiers from. If a family can’t yield up any men and still have them work the farm, that family won’t be called up on this occasion.
Your supposition is completely incorrect. A nation could have productivity far below 18th century France and still not be starving. The omni-present theme in pre-industrial economies is widespread underemployment of farmers. This is why land is the overwhelming motivation for war throughout pre-industrial history.
First my argument is that if Rome is supposed to have permanently under arms 3.5% of its population in peacetime, more than about anyone else at the same or for that matter a vastly higher level of development, 1914 France under the 3 year law was barely at 2% for example then there is a hole in the model. You can’t seriously argue Rome is keeping 3.5% of its population under arms in peacetime and 7% in wartime when the French levee en masse gets you to just below 4%. Rome has the ability to mobilize 75% more of its population than revolutionary France and the 3rd republic? Where are the other historical examples of someone managing similar mobilization levels?
If you don’t have any what is the more likely explanation that Rome is somehow unique in its mobilization capabilities or that well it’s not mobilizing so high a percentage of its population compared to everyone else? And in the second case the option is that either Roman numbers are lower, not likely since they are well attested, or that the population of the Roman state is… well higher than 3-3.5 million?
” If 3.5% of the population of the entirety of Roman Italy is permanently under arms, which works to what roughly 10% of the adult male population? then who is working their farms?”
According to these figures, 90% of the male population and 100% of the female population would still be available.
These weren’t permanent standing armies; much of this mobilization is for a specific campaign period, designed to happen when there’s less demand for labor.
Then there’s a bit of the war feeding itself when Rome is fielding an army away from home, with the soldiers equipped with scythes to harvest the food in enemy territory and eat that. So the answer is partly that there is famine, just not in Rome.
There are two problems with this, the following three.
1. Rome is doing campaigns every year. The 125,000 men mentioned are a rough dozen legions and socii alae. Further these are not short campaigns, you have not mobilized this dozen legions just for a month or two after harvest was over.
2. Many of the deployments are overseas over multiyear periods. For example the legions under Flamininus that win Cynos Cephalae are fighting in Greece, since before his consulship and have not been rotated back to Italy. This applies even more for the legions out in Spain one would expect.
3. By definition the campaign season coincides with periods of high labor demand not the reverse. What is the maximum labor demand period? Harvest time. When is that around the Mediterranean? June for wheat hence the traditional Greek name of “theristis” with threshing following in July and grapes and then olives harvests following in autumn.
In addition to what others have said, Rome was gaining a large overseas empire at this time, and whilst the socii in Italy didn’t have to pay regular tribute (except in the form of soldiers during war), the foreign provinces did, so that would compensate for taking so many men away from the fields.
But also… Rome’s high mobilisation rates did kind of cause an economic collapse, at least among the middle classes. By the late second century BC, the number of “middle-class” farmers (i.e., not large landowners, but large enough that they weren’t subsistence farmers) was in decline, partly due to competition from large slave-run estates, but also because so many of their workers were being taken away for years at a time to serve in the army (remember this is the class of people who provided most of Rome’s soldiery). Hence the Gracchi and their programme of land redistribution, and hence the switch to raising legions from among the landless poor (which seems to have been a real trend in this period, even if it wasn’t as sudden and official as the “Marian Reforms” idea suggests). Rome’s high mobilisation rate wasn’t too bad when the campaigns were all in Italy and mostly over by harvest time, but it ultimately proved unsustainable for ruling over a pan-Mediterranean empire.
The empire yielded a lot of valuable things – artwork, slaves, precious metals and so on. That does not necessarily replace farmworkers – grain is much less portable than statues. Money is fungible, goods are often not.
IIRC from undergrad class ‘extra’ sons not set to inherit land were a major provider of manpower in all sorts of agrarian societies, in the case of the roman system they definitely made use of these young men with the foundation of veteran’s colonies over conquered territories in Italy especially in the Po valley (the Gauls there promptly joined with Hannibal and provided a lot of his own manpower for Trasimene and Cannae).
I think this loops into something our host brought up in the venerable farming series, that there were a lot more people in the countryside than was needed to keep it functioning. People lived there not to optimize production, but rather because that’s where their families lived! But armies on the move could force them to flee and therefore the lands going untended were much more likely to be those currently being foraged, if not intentionally ravaged.
I would be very interested to read after this how those that managed to defeat the legion did so then. Such as the Germans and Bar Kokba.