This is the second part of the fourth part of our four(ish) part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) look at the context between the Roman military system based on the manipular legion and the Hellenistic military system structured around the Macedonian sarisa phalanx in the third and second century BC. Last time we discussed the first major clash of these systems outside of Italy, the Second Macedonian War (200-197), concluding that while the Roman system of fighting does seem to have provided a tactical edge, the larger operational and strategic advantages provided by Rome’s broader military system also contributed to victory.
This week, we’re continuing Rome’s spectacular run of military success in the Hellenistic East with the Roman-Seleucid War (192-188, also called the ‘Syrian War’). Of Rome’s wars against the great powers of the Hellenistic East, this ought to have been the largest and most difficult: the Seleucid Empire under Antiochus III was, by 192, a resurgent power, having reasserted control over its vast territories. It was a state possessed of a massive population and enormous revenues – at least four times more of both than Rome. And yet this is perhaps the most stunning example of the Hellenistic ‘glass jaw’ of the lot. The Antigonids will go three rounds with Rome (the First (214-205), Second (200-196) and Third (172-168) Macedonian wars), plus a fourth war with a usurper (150-148). Heck, in the first century, Mithridates VI of Pontus will also manage three rounds with the Romans (88-85, 83-81, 75-63) before having his kingdom destroyed.
By contrast, the massive Seleucid Empire fights the Romans once, loses catastrophically and then begins a long but not particularly slow, slide into terminal decline, a startling change from the apparently strong, expanding and resurgent Seleucid Empire immediately before. Now we shouldn’t be too monocausal about that decline: Seleucid internal dynastic wars play a part, as does the rise of Parthia (where the Arsacids will take any moment of Seleucid weakness as an opportunity to break free and begin building their own empire at Seleucid expense). On the other hand, the trajectory shift as a result of defeat against Rome is obvious and the role of both the crushing Roman indemnity after the war and Roman meddling subsequently in encouraging those dynastic wars is also a notable consequence of Roman success.
So how is it that the Roman Republic, with a core population of perhaps 3.5-4m people and state revenues equivalent to roughly 12m Attic drachmae is going to knockout the Seleucid Empire, with something on the order of eighteen million people and state revenues of around 50m drachmae in just about one solid punch?1
But first, if you want to help the ACOUP republic reach revenues equivalent to roughly 12m Attic drachmae (so about 51,720kg of silver, which today comes to ::checks notes:: about $45m) you can support me, my research and this project on Patreon! If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
Background
Once again, we have to step back and consider the background of the conflict for a moment. The immediate cause of the war builds on the causes of the Second Macedonian War and its outcome. On the one hand, Antiochus III, the Seleucid king (r. 223-187), was, of course, the other half of the rumored ‘pact of kings’ with Philip V to divide the Hellenistic world and thus the other predator that inspired concern among Rome’s new friends in the Aegean. On the other hand, of course, Rome’s stunning defeat of Philip V might have initially seemed like a strategic boon for Antiochus III as now not only was Egypt out of the picture due to a young and weak king, but the other major Hellenistic power, Antigonid Macedon, was also crippled. Alexander’s legacy seemed to be up for the taking.
And here we have to take another step back to get a sense of Antiochus’ reign in how he comes to this moment. Antiochus III came to power at a difficult moment for the Seleucid Empire: the Parthian and Bactrian satrapies had broken away a decade earlier and not been reclaimed and the satraps and Media and Persia had now also taken advantage of the succession to revolt, leaving the East deeply unsettled. In the West, Antiochus will have to entrust command in Asia Minor to his cousin Achaeus (who is also going to revolt and need to be fought) and there was always the matter of the long Seleucid-Ptolemaic Rivalry over Syria.
What we tend to remember about Antiochus III’s early reign is his great defeat at Raphia (217) against the Ptolemies, which we’ve discussed already in this series. But what I want to stress is that while Raphia was certainly a setback, Antiochus actually spent most of his reign winning.2 By 220, Antiochus III has defeated Molon’s revolt in Persia and Media, then rushed west to deal with Achaeus’ rebellion and the war against the Ptolemies (the Fourth Syrian War, begin in 221). Achaeus is defeated in 213 and a peace with the Ptoelmies negotiated in 217 (albeit from a position of weakness after Raphia), freeing Antiochus III to move East in 211, subjugating both Parthia and Bactria. Then, while Philip V is busy with Romans, Antiochus III restarts his war with Egypt and by late 200 has effectively won (peace won’t be made until 196), securing control of Coele-Syria (and leaving Ptolemaic power crippled). And to top it off, Antiochus had managed to extend his influence in Asia Minor as well (threatening Pergamum).
In short, from 223 to 197, Antiochus III had taken the Seleucid Empire from an ailing state seemingly at the beginning of decline to a resurgent empire, commanding a huge territory – clearly and obviously the most dominant of the Hellenistic great powers. From a dynastic standpoint then, his next move – to project power into the Aegean and towards the Greek mainland – made perfect sense. This was, after all, the dream of all of the Hellenistic monarchies, to reconstitute Alexander’s empire. All that was in the way were some pesky Roman ‘barbarians.’
Meanwhile, of course, Rome’s victory over Philip V in 197 had left Rome, at least for the moment, as the dominant power in mainland Greece and over much of the Aegean, with the victorious Titus Quinctius Flamininus spending the period from 197 to 194 settling affairs in Greece, declaring the Greeks ‘free’ at the Isthmian Games in 196 (but of course the Roman understanding here is ‘free, but under Roman protection’ which is not the Greek understanding of ‘free’ – libertas and eleutheria (ἐλευθερία) are not quite perfect synonyms). With Antiochus thus projecting influence through Anatolia into the Aegean from the East and the Romans doing so through Greece from the West (and the buffer state of the Antigonids, for the moment, neutralized), this leads to something of a few years of what has been described (by Ernest Badian) as a ‘cold war’ style stand-off.3
As is so often the case with these sorts of stand-offs, conflict came not because Rome or Antiochus necessarily wanted it, but through the actions of their proxies. Greece was dominated by two federal leagues of Greek cities, the Aetolian and Achaeans leagues, you will recall. In this case, it is the Aetolian League, worried that the Achaeans were prospering under Roman influence, which then appealed to Antiochus III to intervene to free the Greeks from Roman control. Politically, it would have been hard for Antiochus III to refuse: the ‘freedom’ of the Greek poleis – for a polis was supposed to be, almost by definition, free and autonomous – was a powerful and resonant political value in any Hellenistic court. In any case, Antiochus opts to back the Aetolians who proceed to move against their own local enemies, drawing the great powers into conflict.
The Fight in Greece (Thermopylae)
The war that resulted from this decision proceeds in effectively three stages. In the first stage (from 192 to 191), Antiochus III brings a small expeditionary force to Greece, which will open hostilities; his hope is that this will induce many of the Greek cities to swing over to his side against the Romans, providing him with sufficient local force in Greece to hold off the almost inevitable Roman response. The second phase (191 to 190) is a series of naval engagements as the Romans (with a much larger fleet) seek to neutralize the smaller Seleucid navy and, after some setbacks, succeed. That in turn sets the stage for the final phase in 190, the Roman advance into Anatolia, leading to the decisive final engagement at Magnesia late that year, setting the stage for final peace negotiations.
The balance of naval power sets the conditions for these first two stages and it clearly favored the Romans. At the start, Antiochus’ navy consisted of some forty heavy warships and sixty lighter warships; the distinction here isn’t precise because Livy (35.43.3) simply describes the ships as ‘covered’ (tectum) and ‘open’ (apertus), which is almost certainly a him translating to Latin a usage from Polybius (this part of Polybius’ histories is lost) dividing ships between those which were ‘covered’ (‘cataphract’ κατάφρακτος) and ‘uncovered’ (‘aphract’ ἄφρακτος). The distinction is if the decks for the rowers were covered over with a top-deck (cataphract), which provided a fighting platform for the marines and protected the rowers, or not (so the rowers were open to the sky, aphract). Main heavy warships were generally cataphract and indeed Polybius uses ‘decked ships’ to simply mean ‘warships’ in some places in his history. So Antiochus III has forty proper heavy warships and sixty more light warships.
This is, to put it mildly, not enough to seriously contest the sea with the Romans. By this point, the Romans are in the habit of maintaining a standing navy. Indeed, they respond to the news that Antiochus might be on the war path by constituting a fleet of 130 quinqueremes (here, Livy is explicit on the ship type; Livy 35.20-21), with another fifty new quinqueremes to be built later in the year by Marcus Fulvius (Livy 35.24.8). This was hardly the limit of Roman naval resources – as Polybius famously notes, Rome had lost some seven-hundred warships during the First Punic War (264-241) with Carthage and still won the war (Polyb. 1.63.6). Indeed, over the course of that war, Rome probably built more than 800 warships, Carthage built just short of 500 and both states each fed, paid, repaired and maintained around 3,200 warship-years (that is adding together the number of ships active each year to capture things like pay).4
And indeed, the operations of this war are going to be defined by this central fact: the Romans achieving ‘command of the sea’ (in the Mahanian sense, drink!) in the Aegean and indeed the broader Eastern Mediterranean was a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ and the ‘when’ wasn’t likely to be very far off. Meanwhile, the Seleucid navy, such as it was, had no realistic chance of threatening Roman control of the Adriatic or the broader Western Mediterranean. That limited Antiochus’ options and the overall playing field.
Antiochus III seems to know this. He surely ought to, as the famed Hannibal Barca, now living in exile, was serving as an advisor in his court; Hannibal had spent the entire Second Punic War (218-201) hobbled in part because Carthage couldn’t break the iron grip the Romans had on the seas the second time around (and didn’t really try). As a result, Antiochus’ force going to Greece was not his main field army but a small expeditionary force of just 10,000 infantry and 500 cavalry – easy to spirit across before the Romans could react. His hope seems quite clearly to have been that the Greeks might then flock to his banner and fill out that small army.
Antiochus III’s small army arrives in Thessaly (at Demetrias) in 192 and he immediately begins a mix of diplomacy and military activity to try to bring the Greeks over to his side before the Romans almost inevitably show up. Antiochus brings over the Aetolian League by diplomacy, seizes Chalkis by force (when diplomacy failed) and secured most of Thessaly except for the largest city, Larissa. But most of the Greeks were unmoved. Quick Roman action was able to ensure that the pro-Roman faction in Athens won the political (and street violence) contest, keeping Athens out of the fight.
This was a problem because as mentioned, Antiochus III’s expeditionary force was small and hadn’t gotten much larger, whereas by this point (early 191) Roman troops under the command of Manius Acilius Glabrio were beginning to arrive at Apollonia; Glabrio had 20,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and 15 war elephants (Livy 36.14.1; Appian (App. Syr. 17) reports the same, for what it is worth). Pleasantly for them, they find that Philip V has opted to back Rome in this conflict (hoping both to get concessions from them, but also to get the Romans to win quickly and go home so he can get back to rebuilding his shattered kingdom), so while Antiochus had struggled to find new friends, the Romans have few problems (and also could hope for support from Pergamum and Rhodes as well). The Roman campaign will also get logistical support, delivered by sea, from Rome’s broader empire, with food shipped from Carthage and Numidia (Livy 36.3).
Antiochus, now in some trouble, falls back on the one plausible remaining option. As you can see on the map, the Roman arrival point at Apollonia puts them in the north, from where they can move over the mountains (no Philip V with blocking forces this time!) into Thessaly. But to sweep south into Greece proper from there, they need to take the pass at Thermopylae, the same as Xerxes had nearly three centuries earlier. So Antiochus, unwilling to risk a pitched battle in the open in Thessaly, moves south to hold the pass, setting up for another Battle of Thermopylae.5 The terrain was ideal for defense, with Mt. Callidromos (modern Kallidromo) leaving, in antiquity, just a few hundred meters of passable space between the cliffs and the sea (centuries of silting have meant that the space is a lot more open today).
The tricky part of the terrain was that there were paths (used by local shepherds), through the mountains around the pass and so long as one could get the help of some local guides these paths could allow an attacker to flank a defender trying to hold the pass. And by this point, because precisely such a maneuver was central to Xerxes’ famous defeat of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans (and c. 7,000 other Greeks) at Thermopylae (480), everyone knew that. Still, better defensive terrain was not to be had in Greece, so Antiochus III settled in with 10,000 Seleucid infantry, 4,000 Aetolians and his small detachment of 500 cavalry. The Aetolians he deployed to cover the passes through the mountains, while in the pass he stationed his heavy infantry behind a palisade, with his light infantry deployed to skirmish before it and on the heights to his left (the slopes of Callidromos), to try to catch the Romans in a crossfire as they advanced. Livy reports a fairly formidable defense, with a double-palisade, a defensive ditch and a stone rampart (Livy 36.16.1-3).
Glabrio’s plan was essentially to attempt to replay Xerxes’ role in this ancient tale. He picked two of his military tribunes – Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Porcius Cato (the Elder; the ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ guy) – and assigned each a picked deatchment of 2,000 infantry with orders to move through the shepherd’s path and flank Antiochus, while Glabrio would put pressure on the king’s front. I should note, while most military tribunes were generally younger aristocrats, these two were very senior, experienced men; Roman generals in this period had a habit of picking a couple of their military tribunes from such experienced former-praetors and consuls. In the event, Flaccus gets lost trying to navigate the route by night – a testament to how hard it could be to pull this maneuver – but Cato’s troops emerge, as planned, into the Aetolians and quickly scatter them.
Meanwhile, Glabrio has, at daylight, launched his pinning attack. Here the Romans push through the light infantry handily (Livy 36.18.5-6) but Glabrio couldn’t manage to push the rampart and a stalemate began to develop; from Livy’s description, it seems that the defenses were designed so that the defenders could still use their sarisae (Livy 36.18.7-8). That said, Roman armor is clearly going to tell here too: the Romans can’t get through, but despite evidently fierce fighting, Roman casualties are low – only some 200 Romans (and socii) fall in the entire battle, 150 at the wall and another 50 dispersing the Aetolians (Livy 36.19.12; note that Livy rejects Valerius Antias’ inflated numbers of Seleucid casualties in favor of Polybius’ more reasonable figure, as he should).
In the event, Glabrio might well have been stopped at the wall with modest losses (had he retreated, Antiochus III’s tiny cavalry detachment surely could not have exploited in pursuit, given the substantial Roman superiority in cavalry), but Cato’s force, having routed the Aetolians, moves down from the heights into Antiochus’ rear and his army collapsed. For his part, Antiochus III seems to have realized the moment Cato shows up that the jig was up, grabbed whatever troops he could get out and bailed, which was wise, in the event (Livy 36.19.9). Polybius apparently (so Livy tells us) indicated that only some 500 men of the initial 10,500 man Seleucid expedition escaped (surely mostly only the cavalry); the core of Antiochus III’s infantry force was lost.
Why Roman victory at Thermopylae? In a way, this is a re-run of the River Aous, with a fortified position being effectively flanked to render it vulnerable, although whereas the Romans seem to have been making progress in their frontal attack on the Aous, Livy is clear at Thermopylae that Glabrio was not making progress in the pass itself (in part because Antiochus’ field fortifications seem to have been better designed). But the more immediate cause for victory was, to my mind, not tactical, but operational. The Seleucid Empire had a large army, as we’ll see in a moment. The problem is Antiochus III can’t get that army to Greece, because he lacks both the transport fleet and the command of the sea to do so. That leaves Antiochus III trying to pull the inside straight of holding Greece with just 10,000 phalangites and hoping Greek support will get him the army he needs, which was frankly never going to work. If Glabrio hadn’t forced that pass, Antiochus would have found an endless succession of Roman generals with an endless succession of double-legion consular armies ready to try (assuming the Romans didn’t simply land an army behind him!).
Contesting the Sea
All of this brings us neatly to the naval aspect of the war. Now on the one hand, it is reasonable that the Seleucids didn’t have a powerful navy. Their primary enemies were all on land and they had no overseas posessions, so unlike the Ptolemies, they had little cause to build a powerful navy. On the other hand, that was also true for Rome in 264 and when the Romans were confronted with a problem (Sicily and Carthage) that required a navy they built a navy and relentlessly kept building ships until they could contest naval dominance. On the one hand, Antiochus III does build a navy and try to contest at least the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, but on the other hand his efforts are well short of what would have been required to seize the initiative on the seas.
That said, Antiochus III does make some effort to contest the seas against the Romans, which is more than the Antigonids did. Antiochus’s main fleet was under the command of Polyxenidas, a Rhodian mercenary who had been with Antiochus since the eastern campaign. At the same time, following his defeat in Greece, Antiochus also put together a second, smaller fleet in Seleucia Pieria, the port-town of Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey). This second fleet he places under the command of Hannibal Barca (who, as mentioned, was an advisor in his court in exile from Carthage), perhaps hoping for a bit of the Carthaginian naval excellence, despite the fact that Hannibal had never commanded a fleet before.
The Romans meanwhile had their own fleet, under the command of the praetor Gaius Livius Salinator, with some eighty-one ‘decked’ ships (certainly quinqueremes) and a large number of smaller ships Livy doesn’t enumerate (Livy 36.42.8). These were then joined to the fleet of Pergamum under the command of Eumenes, the king of Pergamum; the total combined force, Livy notes was 105 decked ships and 50 more lighter open ones (Livy 36.43.13), the Roman force being thus quite heavy. Appian suggests that Polyxenidas had by this point around 200 ships, but much lighter than the Romans (App. Syr. 22). Salinator meets Polyxenidas off Corycus near the town of Cissus (the battle is known by both names). An initial skirmish of leading ships – a pair of Roman-allied Carthaginian ships against three of Polyxenidas’ ships – goes the Seleucid way, but when the main line of Roman ships comes up, the battle devolved into a series of boarding actions that advantaged the heavier Roman ships and Polyxenidas was forced to flee, losing 23 ships (10 sunk, thirteen captured) and was forced to shelter in the harbor of Ephesus, where Salinator promptly bottled him up (though Polyxenidas does get cute ambushing a few Rhodian ships at one point).
Meanwhile, as mentioned, Hannibal is put in command a freshly kitted-out fleet in Syria: thirty quinqueremes, three hepteremes (‘sevens’ to a quinqueremes’ ‘five’ or a triremes’ ‘three’), and four hexremes (‘sixes’), along with ten lighter triremes. Hannibal sets out with this fleet to try to break Polyxenidas out of his blockade but is intercepted and engaged by the fleet of Rhodes (acting as a Roman ally) at Side on the southern coast of Anatolia. The Rhodians had some thirty-two quadriremes (‘fours’) and four triremes, and so have the smaller and lighter fleet, but Rhodes was a long-standing naval power (being an island polis) and that experience and enthusiasm tells (Livy 37.24.1). In particular, the Rhodians engaged quite differently from the Romans, with rapid maneuver, crippling Hannibal’s ships and leading him to withdraw, with his handful of undamaged ships having to tow the crippled ones out of the battle (Livy 37.24.6). Hannibal escapes by virtue of the coastline being Seleucid territory, limiting the Rhodian pursuit, but his fleet and he will play no further meaningful part in the war.
Meanwhile on the Roman side, a new year (190) brings a new commander, the new praetor Lucius Aemilius Regillus, who has been ordered to build and fit out even more ships, thirty new quinqueremes and twenty triremes in addition to Salinator’s existing fleet, which he takes over from him. Aemilius moves the fleet to Teos, which was supposed to be neutral but had been supplying Antiochus’ forces, which in turn allows Polyxenidas to at last slip out of Ephesus. Polyxenidas then takes his fleet towards Teos as well, hoping to ambush the Romans (whose fleet now had merged with the Rhodians), but doesn’t achieve surprise, leading to the Battle of Myonessus. Livy notes (one assumes from Polybius) that the Romans had the best marines and the Rhodians the best sailors, which is rather bad news for Polyxenidas who had the best of neither.6 In the event, the Romans broke the center of Polyxenidas’ fleet with their heavier ships, while the Rhodians secured the vulnerable right flank. The result was another Roman victory, with Polyxenidas losing forty-two ships (thirteen captured, the rest sunk, Livy 37.30.7; or perhaps 29 according to Appian, Syr. 27) and the combined Roman-Rhodian fleet losing…one (and some others somewhat damaged).
The result of these three naval battles was to leave both Seleucid fleets mauled and back in port; neither would have much more of an impact on the war and any chance of closing off the seas to the Romans, who were now preparing to advance into Anatolia, was gone. It’s clear that Rome’s allies played a substantial role in this success, but I find it hard not to conclude, especially given the scale of Roman naval commitments in the First and Second Punic Wars, that even without Rhodes and Pergamum, Antiochus III’s navy wasn’t going to cut it, especially if it could be put effectively out of commission in just a handful of relative small engagements.
The Armies at Magnesia
Rome’s successes at sea in turn set conditions for the Roman invasion of Anatolia, which will lead to the decisive battle at Magnesia, but of course in the midst of our naval narrative, we rolled over into a new year, which means new consuls. The Senate extended Glabrio’s command in Greece to finish the war with the Aetolians, but the war against Antiochus was assigned to Lucius Cornelius Scipio, one of the year’s consuls and brother of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the victor over Hannibal at Zama (202). There’s an exciting bit of politics behind Scipio getting the assignment (including his famous brother promising to serve as one of his military tribunes), but in a sense that’s neither here nor there. As we’ve seen, Rome has no shortage of capable generals. From here on, if I say ‘Scipio,’ I mean Lucius Cornelius Scipio; if I want his brother, I’ll say ‘Scipio Africanus.’
Scipio also brought fresh troops with him. The Senate authorized him to raise a supplementum (recruitment to fill out an army) of 3,000 Roman infantry, 100 Roman cavalry, 5,000 socii infantry and 200 socii cavalry (Livy 37.2.1) as well as authorizing him to carry the war into Asia (meaning Anatolia or Asia Minor) if he thought it wise – which of course he will. In addition to this, the two Scipios also called for volunteers from Scipio Africanus’ veterans and got 5,000 of them, a mix of Romans and socii (Livy 37.4.3), so all told Lucius Cornelius Scipio is crossing to Greece with reinforcements of some 13,000 infantry (including some battle-hardened veterans), 300 cavalry and one Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.7 That said, a significant portion of this force is going to end up left in Greece to handle garrison duty and the Aetolians. Antiochus III, for his part, spends this time raising forces for a major battle, while dispatching his son Seleucus (the future Seleucus IV, r. 187-175) to try to raid Pergamum, Rome’s key ally in the region.
Once the Romans arrive (and join up with Eumenes’ army), both sides maneuvered to try and get a battle on favorable terms. Antiochus III’s army was massive with lots of cavalry – 62,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, an army on the same general order of magnitude as the one that fought at Raphia – so he sought an open area, setting up his fortified camp near Magnesia, with fairly formidable defenses – a ditch with a double-rampart (Livy 37.37.9-11). Unsurprisingly, the Romans, with a significant, but smaller force, preferred a fight in more confined quarters and for several days the armies sat opposite each other with minor skirmishes (Livy 37.38).
The problem Scipio faced was a simple one: the year was coming to a close, which meant that soon new consuls would be elected and he could hardly count on his command being extended. Consequently, Scipio calls together his war council – what the Romans call a consilium – to ask what he should do if Antiochus III couldn’t be lured into battle on favorable terms. The answer he got back was to force a battle and so force a battle Scipio did, advancing forward onto the ground of Antiochus’ choosing, leading to the Battle of Magnesia.
We have two accounts of this battle which mostly match up, one in Livy (Livy 37.39-44) and another in Appian’s Syrian Wars (App. Syr. 30-36). Livy here is generally the better source and chances are both authors are relying substantially on Polybius (who would be an even better source), whose account of the battle is lost.
Antiochus III’s army was enormous, with a substantial superiority in cavalry. From left to right, according to Livy (Livy 37.40), Antiochus III deployed: Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000), then a unit of caetrati (4,000; probably light infantry peltasts), then the contingent of Tralli (1,500; light infantry auxiliaries from Anatolia), then Carian and Cilicians equipped like Cretans (1,500; light archer infantry), then the Neo-Cretans (1,000; light archer infantry), then the Galatian cavalry (2,500; mailed shock cavalry), then a unit of Tarantine cavalry (number unclear, probably 500; Greek light cavalry), a part of the ‘royal squadron’ of cavalry (1,000; Macedonian shock cavalry), then the ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry (3,000), supported by a mixed component of auxiliaries (2,700; medium thureophoroi infantry?) along with his scythed chariots and Arab camel troops.
That gets us to the central component of the line (still reading left to right): Cappadocians (2,000) who Livy notes were similarly armed to the Galatian infantry (1,500, unarmored, La Tène infantry kit, so ‘mediums’) who come next. Then the main force of the phalanx, 16,000 strong with 22 elephants. The phalanx was formed 32 ranks deep, with the intervals between the regiments covered by the elephants deployed in pairs, creating an articulated or enallax phalanx like Pyrrhus had, but using elephants rather than infantry to cover the ‘hinges.’ This may in fact, rather than being a single phalanx 32 men deep be a ‘double’ phalanx (one deployed behind the other) like we saw at Sellasia. Then on the right of the phalanx was another force of 1,500 Galatian infantry. Oddly missing here is the main contingent of the elite Silver Shields (the Argyraspides); some scholars8 note that a contingent of them 10,000 strong would make Livy’s total strength numbers and component numbers match up and he has just forgotten them in the main line. We might expect them to be deployed to the right of the main phalanx (where Livy will put the infantry Royal Cohort (regia cohors), confusing a subunit of the argyraspides with the larger whole unit. Michael Taylor in a forthcoming work9 has suggested they may also have been deployed behind the cavalry we’re about to get to or otherwise to their right.
That gets us now to the right wing (still moving left to right; you begin to realize how damn big this army is), we have more cataphracts (3,000, armored shock cavalry), the elite cavalry agema (1,000; elite Mede/Persian cavalry, probably shock), then Dahae horse archers (1,200; Steppe horse archers), then Cretan and Trallian light infantry (3,000), then some Mysian Archers (2,500) and finally another contingent of Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000).
This is, obviously, a really big army. But notice that a lot of its strength is in light infantry: combining the various archers, slingers and general light infantry (excluding troops we suspect to be ‘mediums’) we come to something like 21,500 lights, plus another 7,700 ‘medium’ infantry and then 26,000 heavy infantry (accounting for the missing argyraspides). That’s 55,200 total, but Livy reports a total strength for the army of 62,000; it’s possible the missing remainder were troops kept back to defend the camp, in which case they too are likely light infantry. A Roman army’s infantry contingent is around 28% ‘lights’ (the velites), who do not occupy any space in the main battle line. Antiochus’ infantry contingent, while massive, is 39% ‘lights’ (and another 14% ‘mediums’), some of which do seem to occupy actual space in the battle line.
Of course Antiochus also has a massive amount of cavalry ranging from ultra-heavy cataphracts to light but highly skilled horse archers and massive cavalry superiority covereth a multitude of sins.
But the second problem with this gigantic army is one that – again, in a forthcoming work – Michael Taylor has pointed out. The physical space of the battlefield at Magnesia is not big enough to deploy the whole thing:
Now Livy specifies that the flanks of Antiochus’ army curve foward, describing them as ‘horns’ (cornu) rather than ‘wings’ (alae) and noting they were ‘a little bit advanced’ (paulum producto), which may be an effort to get more of this massive army actually into the fight (and you can see that in the map above). So while this army is large, it’s also unwieldy and difficult to bring properly into action and it’s not at all clear from either Livy or Appian that the whole army actually engaged – substantial portions of that gigantic mass of light infantry on the wings just seem to dissolve away once the battle begins, perhaps never getting into the fight in the first place.
The Roman force was deployed in its typical formation, with the three lines of the triplex acies and the socii flanking the legions (Livy 37.39.7-8), with the combined Roman and socii force being roughly 20,000 strong (the legions and alae being somewhat over-strength). In addition Eumenes, King of Pergamum was present and the Romans put his force on their right to cover the open flank, while he anchored his left flank on the Phrygios River. Eumenes’ wing consisted of 3,000 Achaeans (of the Achaean League) that Livy describes as caetrati and Appian describes as peltasts (so, lights), plus nearly all of Scipio’s cavalry: Eumenes’ cavalry guard of 800, plus another 2,200 Roman and socii cavalry, and than some auxiliary Cretan and Trallian light infantry, 500 each. Thinking his left wing, anchored on the river, relatively safe, Scipio posted only four turmae of cavalry there (120 cavalry). He also had a force of Macedonians and Thracians mixed together – so these are probably ‘medium’ infantry – who had come as volunteers, who he posts to guard the camp rather than in the main battleline. I always find this striking, because I think a Hellenistic army would have put these guys in the front line, but a Roman commander looks at them and thinks ‘camp guards.’ The Romans also had some war elephants, sixteen of them, but Scipio assesses that North African elephants won’t stand up to the larger Indian elephants of the Seleucids (which is true, they won’t) and so he puts them in reserve behind his lines rather than out front where they’d just be driven back into him. All told then, the Roman force is around 26,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry – badly outnumbered by Antiochus, but of a relatively higher average quality and a bit more capable of actually fitting its entire combat power into the space.
The Battle
Because the armies are so large, much like as happened at Raphia, the battle that results is almost three battles running in parallel: the two wings and the center. Antiochus III commanded from his right wing, where – contrary to the expectations of Scipio who thought the river would secure his flank there – he intended his main attack. His son Seleucus commanded the left. Livy reports a light rain which interfered with both with visibility and some of Antiochus’ light troops’ weapons, as their bows and slings reacted poorly to the moisture (as composite bows will sometimes do; Livy 37.41.3-4, note also App. Syr. 33).
Antiochus opens the battle on his left with his scythed chariots, a novel ‘gimmick’ weapon (heavy chariots with blades all over them, used to shock infantry out of position). This may have been a nasty surprise for the Romans, but given the dispositions of the army, it was Eumenes, not Scipio who faces the chariots and as Livy notes, Eumenes was well aware how to fight them (Livy 37.41.9), using his light troops – those Cretans archers and Trallian javelin-troops. Deployed in loose order, they were able to move aside to avoid the chariots better than heavy infantry in close-order (similar tactics are used against elephants) and could with their missiles strike at chariot drivers and horses at range (Livy 37.41.10-12). Turning back this initial attack seems to have badly undermined the morale of the Seleucid left-wing, parts of which fled, creating a gap between the extreme left-wing and the heavy cavalry contingent. Eumenes then, with the Roman cavalry, promptly hammered the disordered line, hitting first the camel troops, then in the confusion quickly overwhelming the rest of the cavalry, including the cataphracts, leading Antiochus’ left wing to almost totally collapse, isolating the phalanx in the center. It’s not clear what the large mass of light infantry on the extreme edge of the battlefield was doing.
Meanwhile on the other side of the battle, where Scipio had figured a light screen of 120 equites would be enough to hold the end of the line, Antiochus delivered is cavalry hammer-blow successfully. Obnoxiously, both of our sources are a lot less interested in describing how he does this (Livy 37.42.7-8 and App. Syr. 34), which is frustrating because it is a bit hard to make sense of how it turns out. On the one hand, the constricted battlefield will have meant that, regardless of how they were positioned, those argyraspides are going to end up following Antiochus’ big cavalry hammer on the (Seleucid) right. They then overwhelm the cavalry and put them to flight and then push the infantry of that wing (left ala of socii and evidently a good portion of the legion next to it) back to the Roman camp.
On the other hand, the Roman infantry line reaches its camp apparently in good order or something close to it. Marcus Aemilius, the tribune put in charge of the camp is able to rush out, reconstitute the infantry force and, along with the camp-guard, halt Antiochus’ advance. The thing is, infantry when broken by cavalry usually cannot reform like that, but the distance covered, while relatively short, also seems a bit too long for the standard legionary hastati-to-principes-to-triarii retrograde. Our sources (also including a passage of Justin, a much later source, 31.8.6) vary on exactly how precipitous the flight was and it is possible that it proceeded differently at different points, with some maniples collapsing and others making an orderly retrograde. In any case, it’s clear that the Roman left wing stabilized itself outside of the Roman camp, much to Antiochus’ dismay. Eumenes, having at this point realized both that he was winning on his flank and that the other flank was in trouble dispatched his brother Attalus with 200 cavalry to go aid the ailing Roman left wing; the arrival of these fellows seem to have caused panic and Antiochus at this point begins retreating.
Meanwhile, of course, there is the heavy infantry engagement at the center. Pressured and without flanking support, Appian reports that the Seleucid phalanx first admitted what light infantry remained and then formed square, presenting their pikes tetragonos, ‘on all four sides’ (App. Syr. 35), a formation known as a plinthion in some Greek tactical manuals. Forming this way under pressure on a chaotic battlefield is frankly impressive (though if they were formed as a double-phalanx rather than a double-thick single-phalanx, that would have made it easier) and a reminder that the core of Antiochus’ army was quite capable. Unable in this formation to charge, the phalanx was showered with Roman pila and skirmished by Eumenes’ lighter cavalry; the Romans seem to have disposed of Antiochus’ elephants with relative ease – the Punic Wars had left the Romans very experienced at dealing with elephants (Livy 37.42.4-5). Appian notes that some of the elephants, driven back by the legion and maddened disrupted the Seleucid square, at which point the phalanx at last collapsed (App. Syr. 35); Livy has the collapse happen much faster, but Appian’s narrative here seems more plausible.
What was left of Antiochus’ army now fled to their camp – not far off, just like the Roman one – leading to a sharp battle at the camp which Livy describes as ingens et maior prope quam in acie cades, “a huge slaughter, almost greater than that in the battle” (Livy 37.43.10), with stiff resistance at the camp’s gates and walls holding up the Romans before they eventually broke through and butchered the survivors. Livy reports that of Antiochus’ forces, 50,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were killed, another 1,500 captured; these seem really high as figures go, but Appian reports almost the exact same. Interesting, Livy doesn’t report the figure in his own right or attribute it to Polybius but instead simply notes “it is said that,” suggesting he may not be fully confident of the number either. Taylor supposes, reasonably I think, that this oversized figure may also count men who fled from the battlefield, reflecting instead that once Antiochus III could actually reconstitute his army, he had about 19,000 men, most of the rest having fled.10 Either way, the resulting peace makes clear that the Seleucid army was shattered beyond immediate repair.
Roman losses, by contrast, were shockingly light. Livy reports 300 infantry lost, 24 Roman cavalry and 25 out of Eumenes’ force; Appian adds that the 300 infantry were ‘from the city’ – meaning Roman citizens – so some socii casualties have evidently been left out (but he trims Eumenes’ losses down to just fifteen cavalry) (Livy 37.44.2-3; App. Syr. 36). Livy in addition notes that many Romans were wounded in addition to the 300 killed. This is an odd quirk of Livy’s casualty reports for Roman armies against Hellenistic armies and I suspect it reflects the relatively high effectiveness of Roman body armor, by this point increasingly dominated by the mail lorica hamata: good armor converts lethal blows into survivable wounds.11 It also fits into a broader pattern we’ve seen: Hellenistic armies that face Roman armies always take heavy casualties, winning or losing, but when Roman armies win they tend to win lopsidedly. It is a trend that will continue.
So why Roman victory at Magnesia? It is certainly not the case that the Romans had the advantage of rough terrain in the battle: the battlefield here is flat and fairly open. It should have been ideal terrain for a Hellenistic army.
A good deal of the credit has to go to Eumenes, which makes the battle a bit hard to extrapolate from. It certainly seems like Eumenes’ quick thinking to disperse the Seleucid chariots and then immediately follow up with his own charge was decisive on his flank, though not quite battle winning. Eumenes’ forces, after all, lacked the punch to disperse the heavier phalanx, which did not panic when its wing collapsed. Instead, the Seleucid phalanx, pinned into a stationary, defensive position by Eumenes’ encircling cavalry, appears to have been disassembled primary by the Roman heavy infantry, peppering it with pila before inducing panic into the elephants. It turns out that Samnites make better ‘glue’ for an articulated phalanx than elephants, because they are less likely to panic.
Meanwhile on the Seleucid right (the Roman left), the flexible and modular nature of the legion seems to have been a major factor. Antiochus clearly broke through the Roman line at points, but with the Roman legion’s plethora of officers (centurions, military tribunes, praefecti) and with each maniple having its own set of standards to rally around, it seems like the legion and its socii ala managed to hold together and eventually drive Antiochus off, despite being pressured. That, in and of itself, is impressive: it is the thing the Seleucid center fails to do, after all.
The War Ends
Zooming out even further, why Roman victory in the Roman-Seleucid War? I think there are a few clear factors here.
Ironically for a post covering land battles, the most important factor may be naval: Rome’s superior naval resources (and better naval allies), which gave the Romans an enormous operational advantage against Antiochus. In the initial phase, the Romans could get more troops to Greece than the king could, while further on, Roman naval supremacy allowed Roman armies to operate in Anatolia in force (while Antiochus, even had he won in Greece, had no hope of operating in Italy). Neutralizing Antiochus’ navy both opened up options for the Romans and closed down options for Antiochus, setting the conditions for Roman victory. It would have also neutered any Roman defeat. If Antiochus wins at Magnesia, he cannot then immediately go on the offensive, after all: he has merely bought perhaps a year or two of time to rebuild his navy and try to contest the Aegean again. Given the astounding naval mobilizations Rome had shown itself capable of in the third century, one cannot imagine Antiochus was likely to win that contest.
Meanwhile, the Romans had better allies, in part as a consequence of the Romans being better at getting allies. The Romans benefit substantially from allied Achaean, Pergamese and Rhodian ships and troops, as well as support from the now-humbled Philip V of Macedon and even supplies and auxiliaries from Numidia and Carthage. Alliance-management is a fairly consistent Roman strength and it shows here. It certainly seems to help that Roman protestations that they had little interest in a permanent presence in Greece seem to have been somewhat true; Rome won’t set up a permanent provincia in Macedonia until 146 (though the Romans do expect their influence to predominate before then). By contrast, Antiochus III, clearly bent on rebuilding Alexander’s empire, was a more obvious threat to the long-term independence and autonomy of Greek states like the Pergamum or Rhodes.
Finally, there is the remarkable Seleucid glass jaw. The Romans, after all, sustained a defeat very much like Magnesia against Hannibal in 216 (the Battle of Cannae) and kept fighting. By contrast, Antiochus is forced into a humiliating peace after Magnesia, in which he cedes all of Anatolia, gives up any kind of navy and is forced to pay a crippling financial indemnity which will fatally undermine the reign of his successor and son Seleucus IV (leading to his assassination in 175, leading to yet further Seleucid weakness). Part of this glass jaw may have been political: after Magnesia, Antiochus’ own aristocrats seem pretty well done with their king’s adventurism against Rome.
But at the same time, some of it was clearly military. Antiochus didn’t have a second army to fall back on and Magnesia represented essentially a peak ‘all-call’ Seleucid mobilization. A similar defeat at Raphia had forced a similarly unfavorable peace earlier in his reign, after all. Part of the problem, I would argue, is that the Seleucids needed their army for more than just war: they needed it to enforce taxation and tribute on their own recalcitrant subjects. As a result, no Seleucid king could afford to ‘go for broke’ the way the Roman Republic could, nor could the Seleucids ever fully mobilize the massive population of their realm. The very nature of the Hellenistic kingdom’s ethnic heirarchy made fully tapping the potential resources of the kingdom impossible.
As a result, while Antiochus III was not an incompetent general, he ruled a deceptively weak giant. Massive revenues were offset by equally massive security obligations and the Seleucids seem to have been perenially cash strapped (with a nasty habit of looting temples to make up for it). The very nature of the Seleucid Empire – like the Ptolemaic one – as an ethnic empire where Macedonians ruled and non-Macedonians were ruled kept Antiochus from being able to fully mobilize his subjects. It may also explain why so many of those light infantry auxiliaries seem to have run off without much of a fight. Eumenes and his Pergamese troops fought for their independence, the Romans for the greater glory of Rome and the socii for their own status and loot within the Roman system, but what could Antiochus offer a subjected Carian or Cilician except a paycheck and a future of continued subjugation? That’s not much to die for.
- I should note here at the outset I’ve leaned fairly heavily here on two works by Michael Taylor. First, Antiochus the Great (2013), which despite the Pen&Sword imprint, is a very solid biography of the king and second, a chapter in a forthcoming volume, “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” to appear in The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles (forthcoming in 2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic. In particular, I follow his reconstruction of the battle, no small thing given how confusing the sources for it can be.
- Fortunately, there is a good recent biography of the fellow, M. Taylor, Antiochus the Great (2013)
- E. Badian, “Rome and Antiochus the Great: A Study in Cold War” CP 54.2 (1959).
- On all of these details see, uh, me, “Strategy and Cost: Carthaginian Naval Strategy in the First Punic War Reappraised” Historia 69.4 (2020).
- I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but M. Cole and M. Livingston have a book recently out on all the battles of Thermopylae – some twenty-seven of them in The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae (2024).
- We ought to be a little cautious of our sources here in Livy’s repeated stress on the valor of the marines over the skill of the rowers. This is a trope in Roman literature, related to the important social role of the sort of men who fought on the deck as marines (Roman heavy infantrymen) as compared to the sort of men who fought as rowers (poor Romans of the capite censi). Christa Steinby has argued, persuasively in my view, that in fact reading between the lines, the Romans aren’t quite so boarding-centric as Livy and Polybius might have us believe, see C. Steinby, The Roman Republican Navy (2007), though – alas – this is quite a difficult book to get a copy of.
- I enjoy this joke because the idea of bringing Scipio Africanus along as a junior officer is amusing, but I should note that in the event, he doesn’t seem to have had much of a role in the campaign.
- E.g. Bar Kockva, The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (1979)
- “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” to appear in The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles (forthcoming in 2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic.
- Taylor, Antiochus the Great (2013), 143.
- On this, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
I know we haven’t gotten to Pydna yet, but one thing that’s been bugging me all throughout this series. Early on, you mentioned how the hammer-blow of a Hellenistic army was meant to be delivered by its cavalry, usually held on the extreme flank. That’s where the King usually commanded from, and it certainly seemed to work well enough when not fighting the Romans.
In none of these battles do we see that happening. Magnesia is the best showing of the Hellenistic horsemen, and even here it’s an indecisive advance. And it’s hardly like the Romans are immune to being outflanked by horsemen they saw their share of being beaten by skillfully employed cavalry in the Punic Wars. And I don’t think you can really say that the Hellenistic polities didn’t know how to do cavalry tactics. So something seems to be missing, but I can’t figure out why the Romans were so consistently able to maneuver themselves in ways that the Hellenistic shock cavalry didn’t make more of an impact.
Maybe Hellenistic cavalry were just as shockingly bad at fighting at their infantry seem to have been, unless all the Roman casualties were isolated solely to their cavalry.
Then how did those same cavalry under Alexander conquer the precursor to all these states?
Because they’re not the same the cavalry, and they’re fighting different opponents. And in none of these battles are they led by Alexander.
The precusors has even worse cavalry?
Well no. We know that the Achaemenids had quite good cavalry, but the thing to note is they were beat by Alexander and his cavlary, which no longer exist at this point.
The Hellenistic system superficially resembles the military of Phillip and Alexander, they carry the same weapons and wear the same armor, but they’re all essentially part time soldiers more meant for garrisons than for war. Meanwhile the army of Alexander was full of long term campaigners that were used to victory. Brett covers something like this in his essays about why Saruman is a loser.
But these guys just spent the last thirty years reconquering territory to the point of doubling the size of the Empire. And the phalanx manages to go from articulated with elephants to forming square in the middle of a battle and hold together under fire until trampled by elephants.
Maybe Hellenistic cavalry were just as shockingly bad at fighting at their infantry seem to have been, unless all the Roman casualties were isolated solely to their cavalry.
Most Hellenistic states fought regular wars against a variety of opponents, which in the normal course of things should result in good armies, not shockingly bad ones.
I think it’s a mistake to read the casualties of a winning side as meaning that the losers were “shockingly bad at fighting”. Most warfare prior to the introduction of decent firearms and artillery tends to have lopsided casualties, because it is ultimately hard to cause a lot of deadly injuries to people wearing armour when your own weaponry requires close range and muscle power. The casualties aren’t being primarily inflicted by the personal fighting prowess of the infantry up against a cohesive formation, but the kind of slaughter that can be inflicted once an opposing army has dissolved under pressure.
Because of Roman military discipline and flexibility. Cavalry advances generally fail against infantry in good order and prepared positions. They need disordered infantry, and the Roman system both has well ordered heavy infantry, significant redundancy to prevent overruns, and enough flexibility for individual officers to rally a resistance.
We consistently see that every time a shock force tries to overrun the Romans some enterprising Tribune rallies a force and pulls off an upset; the few exceptions are under Hannibal, where *every* section of the force is commanded by several coordinating geniuses.
Seriously, Hannibal is a genius, Mago is a genius, Maharbal was a genius, Hanno Bomblicar was at least competent when we see him, and Hasdrubal was a genius running his own campaign in Iberia with a couple workmanlike generals. The strength of Hannibal wasn’t merely him having good plans, it was that he could subdivide his force into three or four contingents and expect every single one of them to do literally the best possible thing at the best possible time, consistently. His officers deserve an astounding amount of credit for what he pulled off.
That’s the force that could actually use cavalry against the Romans-a force where you had multiple self maneuvering arms capable of not only executing a plan but also changing the plan when needed. In contrast, we don’t see the Successors do that. We see them try to hammer through a flank of the Roman army and get consistently suprised when the Roman Tribunes wheel off half the legion, or organize a controlled retreat, or when a Roman ally sends off a detachment, etc.
I imagine Alexander would have been able to send Pamenion or Hephaestion off with a detachment to turn aside the Pergamon detachment that routed the Cavalry, assuming that they weren’t commanding the left themselves and simply kept the light troops from disintegrating 30 minutes into the battle. The only person Antiochus has was his son, whom evidently was not up to that task, but then again his army was so damn big he really needed a half dozen competent commanders-something Alexander had when he went into Persia, which Antiochus did not centuries later.
That’s what broke after Alexander. The resulting society did not produce a coherent set of officers who coordinated in combat and all had initiative, because the ones Alexander and Phillip had nurtured all took their men and tried to become petty Kings in their own right. Because of the Hierarchical and ethnic nature of Macedonian kingship the successors weren’t able to foster their own officer corps to the same degree among populations not Macedonian.
Given the success of the Roman left at conducting a fighting retreat while under attack by cataphracts, I have to wonder what let them do that. It can’t have been simply a matter of leaders, can it? I wonder if the constant use of the triplex acies made the legions especially good at slow withdrawals while in contact with the enemy, in a way that phalanxes could not duplicate.
It’s almost certainly a combination of the triplex acies, leadership, and the nearby fortified camp.
In the context of this battle Rome had three fallback positions for the initial troops running-one and two were their own lines, and three was the camp. Within their units they had lots of officers, and Roman military cohesion and morale were generally high-Rome and had proven history of winning, the citizen soldiers were highly motivated by rewards both physical and cultural, and they were smartly organized and drilled.
So the units retreated in what was likely coherent units, to their fallback positions, and fought once rallied.
Meanwhile half of Antiochus’s army was gone. Just gone. His infantry on the extreme left fled the battle at some point and was never heard from again.
Recall that leadership in resisting an advance and / or after a partial rout goes down all the way to optios and centurions. It isn’t just a Tribune doing this, the lower officers do their part.
And they don’t need to be geniuses to do it. Just competent fighters, respected by the men, who refuse to panic and prefer death to dishonour, constantly yelling “Rally, you dogs”.
Many, probably most, centurions were such men.
What you said:
What I heard:
If they delivered the cavalry hammer-blow, they wouldn’t have lost. If you’re asking why that didn’t happen, you’re basically asking why the Romans won, which is what this series is about.
If you’re asking the more limited question of “Why didn’t the Hellenistic kings use their super move to win the battle?”, well, cavalry charges are a bit more situational than your average fighting game super move. (And even in fighting games, you usually can’t just ↓↘→✊ to win. In both battle and well-designed games, game-winning super moves are situational.)
I know we haven’t gotten to Pydna yet, but one thing that’s been bugging me all throughout this series. Early on, you mentioned how the hammer-blow of a Hellenistic army was meant to be delivered by its cavalry, usually held on the extreme flank. That’s where the King usually commanded from, and it certainly seemed to work well enough when not fighting the Romans.
In none of these battles do we see that happening. Magnesia is the best showing of the Hellenistic horsemen, and even here it’s an indecisive advance. And it’s hardly like the Romans are immune to being outflanked by horsemen they saw their share of being beaten by skillfully employed cavalry in the Punic Wars. And I don’t think you can really say that the Hellenistic polities didn’t know how to do cavalry tactics. So something seems to be missing, but I can’t figure out why the Romans were so consistently able to maneuver themselves in ways that the Hellenistic shock cavalry didn’t make more of an impact.
Maybe Roman cavalry was just plain better than we give it credit for. They tend to get a bad rep in modern sources, but AFAICT that’s mostly based on their defeats against Hannibal, and Hannibal was a military genius. Other than that, Roman cavalry seem to have done pretty well both before and after Hannibal’s rampage.
I think this comes down to biases in how we assign what can only be described as glory. We ignore the Roman cavalry because it’s role is to guard the flanks and screen. And 90% of the time it does that and Roman infantry wins. A much smaller percentage of the time it unexpectedly carries a battle or gets routed, but we foolishly compare Cannae and Magnesia as though they are equivalencies; behind Magnesia are a hundred battles where the cavalry just delivered the legion as its mission profile required. That’s also excellence, just understated excellence. Behind Cannae are may a half dozen disasters, flashy but rare.
One
One lesson I keep seeing reading various parts of history, from the ancient to the modern, is that caste systems are outrageously bad for a polity. Whether it’s military, economic, or pointless brutality (see: 20th century ethnofascism), they come back to bite the ruling class sooner rather than later.
It makes me curious what India was doing that made it sustainable for so long. Natural fortress of the subcontinent meaning they never had to fight anyone else?
Worth noting that foreign conquerors do successfully invade parts of india and set up shop there, like the delhi sultanate and the mughal empire.
India repeatedly defeated. by various Sultanate, by Mughal, etc. but cultural demand is stronger than military demands. Thats why they still use elephant and chariot that abandoned anywhere else.
To be fair, the Mughals were falling apart at the end, under pressure from Afghans on one side and Marathas on the other, as well as under pressure from ambitious regional governors. For the last 100 years or so they existed mostly on paper.
I agree that cultural demands are going to be stronger than military demands, of course.
Natively, the Indian subcontinent was usually lots of different polities, fighting each other, occasionally unified or overrun by outsiders.
Not sure their ‘caste systems’ are the same as the Macedonian one.
And, the disadvantages of having such a system come up if you face someone who doesn’t, like the Romans, or perhaps Revolutionary France. But you can go centuries without that happening. How long did aristocracies last in Europe, from the fall of Rome on? Or in Japan?
An aristocracy isn’t the same as a caste system. In a caste system, mobility between castes is literally impossible, whereas in an aristocracy, it is possible (albeit, usually, rare) for a commoner to become an aristocrat.
Rome, incidentally, had both a kind of caste system (the patricians) and also an aristocracy (the nobiles).
Aristocracy is a caste system. In both cases, changing class is only possible by re-imagining a genealogy, or by turning a group of people into an entirely new class via relocation (conquest).
Historically India may have had fewer structures where a leader could decree “this person was always a [category-member] without anyone realizing it,” compared with other places, but even there it was always notionally possible for an enterprising young man to rob a priest and flee a thousand miles.
India’s caste-system tends to be a bit overstated (and in any case describes two related but distinct things, varna and jati) Especially early on. We see indian kings coming from all sorts of caste-backgrounds, not just the expected ones. (most seem to indicate that the fairly rigid caste-system the british encounter was at least partially a response to the chaos of the collapse of the mughal empire)
It’s something that clearly existed and was a feature of indian politics, but one has to be a bit careful with applying it as a lens depending on time-period and such.
@ Endymionologist:
Aristocracy is a caste system. In both cases, changing class is only possible by re-imagining a genealogy, or by turning a group of people into an entirely new class via relocation (conquest).
Maybe this was true of some places, but it wasn’t true of medieval and early-modern Europe, nor of ancient Rome, nor of Imperial China, nor…
@ Arilou:
(most seem to indicate that the fairly rigid caste-system the british encounter was at least partially a response to the chaos of the collapse of the mughal empire)
That’s one view, but AIUI the genetic evidence suggests otherwise.
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/indias-caste-system-goes-back-2-000-years-genetic-study-6C10874609
We see indian kings coming from all sorts of caste-backgrounds, not just the expected ones
Though to be fair, Shivaji had to cook up a probably fake aristocratic genealogy in order to be officially crowned, and his descendants eventually got sidelined by conniving Brahmin prime ministers anyway, so he’s as much a tragic story about the barriers to mobility as anything else.
If you read the study NBC is referencing the conclusion is that after the golden age of India the caste system ossified. Given that the Macedonian aristocracy also ossified after they basically “won” and then devolved into civil wars instead of meaningful peer conflicts, what we’re actually seeing is that aristocratic nations will compromise their internal castes for power when existentially threatened, but won’t when the threat is internal.
Which makes a lot of sense. Aristocrats competing to be top dog have no reason to tolerate upstart peasants getting ideas, so they’ll invent reasons to prevent that from happening. Aristocrats trying to rally support against an external power threatening to kill their entire extended family will accept that this crazy peasant who showed up one day and rallied the militia is worth keeping around.
That they can’t do this instantly when threatened is part of why we see a cycle of empires, to the degree this thing is real.
China and Rome being exceptions isn’t surprising, given that they both maintained complex ally systems, had unique political systems, and were significantly more successful than any peer or neighbor. The Chinese and Roman systems were *exceptional*.
As a European, I’d like to disagree. Europe had a strong aristocracy, but in most countries, and during most eras it was possible to both become an aristocrst and to lose that status.
Becoming an aristocrat usually required a grant of nobility. Those were possible to come by either by military prowess or by civilian excellence. For example, Swedish kjngs and Russian emperors routinely granted nobility to good officers and civil servants, and it was also possible to become a nobleman by being astonishingly successful in business. None of these were easy, but they were definitely possible. (Russian system actually granted nobility automatically when certain predetermined rank was achieved.)
French kings notororiously sold nobilities rather cheaply, resulting in the financial woes of the country, and Spanish concept of nobility was a bit unclear, because ten percent of the population could claim it, and the boundaries were vague, to say the least.
On the other hand, you could lose the noble status simply by being unable to live in noble manner, i.e by taking up a craft or becoming a common labourer.
The European aristocracy loved to consider themselves an ancient warrior caste, but in reality, in all states that had somewhat lively military and civil service, the rate of new families being introduced to nobility was at least ten per cent or so, per generation.
Today, everyone in India has DNA from both groups. “It’s just the proportion of ancestry that you have that varies across India,” Moorjani told LiveScience.
The subcontinental population (ignoring the fringes) is descended from three population groups in varying proportions, not two (with some ancestry from a fourth group in the east), and there are definitely some groups- the Irulas in the south, for example- with near-zero indo european ancestry.
If you read the study NBC is referencing the conclusion is that after the golden age of India the caste system ossified.
Depends on when you’re placing the “golden age of India” (which is a term i haven’t heard before). but the peak of flowering of mathematics in the subcontinent, for example, seems to be around late antiquity / very early medieval period, and caste was already ossified by then.
@ demorinmorinmorin:
If you read the study NBC is referencing the conclusion is that after the golden age of India the caste system ossified. Given that the Macedonian aristocracy also ossified after they basically “won” and then devolved into civil wars instead of meaningful peer conflicts, what we’re actually seeing is that aristocratic nations will compromise their internal castes for power when existentially threatened, but won’t when the threat is internal.
You’re conflating polities with culture groups here. The Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Seleucids might all have been Macedonian dynasties, but they were still separate polities and still posed an existential threat to each other. Ditto the various Indian states.
@ Finnish reader:
By the 1880s in Britain, the practice of rewarding successful generals with noble rank was sufficiently established for the press to refer to Frederick Roberts’ march to relieve Kandahar as “the race for the peerage”.
Even political organizations which have clear regional differences engage in less violence and less transgressive violence against each other than they do against other cultures. The exact reasons are going to vary, but it’s an identifiable trend.
Hector, there are helpfully two defined in the literature. The earlier is ~350-150 bc, the second 400-600 ad. The earlier one is the one I meant.
Even political organizations which have clear regional differences engage in less violence and less transgressive violence against each other than they do against other cultures
The peoples of the Indian subcontinent aren’t just “regional differences” within a single culture- they are different from each other ethnoracially, linguistically, religiously, you name it. India isn’t a “nation”, it’s much more comparable to something like Europe. There are four *language families* in the Indian subcontinent (not languages, language families): at the level of language, a Punjabi has much more in common with the Afghan Muslims raiding his country than he does with a Tamil or a Santali.
@ dcmorinmorinmorin:
Even political organizations which have clear regional differences engage in less violence and less transgressive violence against each other than they do against other cultures. The exact reasons are going to vary, but it’s an identifiable trend.
If the neighbouring king intends to overthrow you and conquer your land, it doesn’t really make much difference to you personally whether his armies engage in slightly less pillaging and massacre in the process: you’re still going to end up being overthrown, so you still have every incentive to find competent people to command your armies.
@ Hector_St_Clare:
at the level of language, a Punjabi has much more in common with the Afghan Muslims raiding his country than he does with a Tamil or a Santali.
Heck, at the level of language, a Punjabi has more in common with a Spaniard or a Scotsman.
Not the same as the Macedonians; a much stricter caste system. But it has all the same drawbacks and then significantly more others.
Aristocracy is a different thing – you could earn or marry your way up the class hierarchy by distinguishing yourself along axes they cared about, usually war.
Having an elite that shits on the bulk of the population is bad for a polity because having the vast majority of the population not give a shit if the polity they live in loses a war is pretty obviously bad for military performance.
On the other hand the people running the show tend to really really want to be an elite that shit on the bulk of the population. And what the people running the show want, the people running the show very often get.
A lot of history is the tension between the elite wanting more and more of the pie and the fact that if the elite take too much of a slice of the pie that really hurts the polity they’re running in some pretty profound ways.
Often what’s needed is for the elite to have a metaphorical knife to their throats in order to keep them from getting too greedy, either a fear of internal revolt or a strong enough need to keep the polity strong that you have to avoid stomping on the faces of the people you need to man your armies. A common trend is for really successful polities to weaken militarily later on because that very success makes the elite feel secure enough to grab a bigger and bigger share of the pie.
The kernel of truth in the Fremen Mirage that Bret talks about in that series is that more egalitarian societies tend to punch above their weight militarily (although, of course, they can still be crushed by larger neighbors) because having most everyone in your polity really really give a shit about whether the polity they live in wins a war a not is a big asset militarily.
I think the most telling conclusion of this blog for me is that the Roman Senate, an institution with precisely zero interest in progressive social reform or any cultural motive towards equality, nonetheless created a (very) relatively equal society *by accident* as a result of its purely utilitarian drive for more military power. No one sane can accuse the Roman Senate of being benevolent for the sake of it, yet their major strategic decisions still ended up favoring a strong middle class of landowning farmers and a support network of politically empowered allies.
To reply to your comment very late, yes this is exactly what I was talking about. The reason they did this is that the Senate had a gun to their head in terms of such huge security threats that they NEEDED to prioritize a “purely utilitarian drive for more military power” instead of purely focusing on “I’d really like a bigger estate and more slaves, fuck the needs of the state.”
“One lesson I keep seeing reading various parts of history, from the ancient to the modern, is that caste systems are outrageously bad for a polity.”
Is it? Maybe in the long run, but by that token you can also say that democracy is bad for a polity–there are fairly standardized ways democracies fail, and they usually are horrible for the people.
The Roman caste system endured for a thousand years (more or less, and I get that I’m glossing over a lot of complexity here). Its successor, the feudal/manorial/whatever system, endured for another thousand. Both the ruling classes and the ruled seemed to do no worse under such systems than any other.
I think we underestimate the value of the industrial revolution in evaluating past societies. The reason our society isn’t brutal isn’t that we’ve evolved past the systems of the past, or that our systems are inherently better (remember, republics with checks and balances are ancient); it’s that we’ve switched from manual labor to chemical potential energy for the majority of our work. You no longer need 90% of the population living as subsistence farmers just to keep your civilization from starving. This has had profound impacts on how wars are fought (it’s no longer profitable to invade other countries, as you destroy everything of value during the invasion) and social structures (modern society can’t sustain a supermajority as illiterate farmers, nor does such a caste provide any value to anyone).
Simply put, take away our tractors and semi trucks and we’d be treating farmers the same way the Romans did, just with a slightly different form of government.
I also think we tend to under-value the contributions of the ruling class. It’s a reaction to previous over-valuation, but it’s still an error. The peasants needed the nobles as much as the nobles needed the peasants–if nothing else, they needed that core of trained military men to protect them and a stronghold to retreat to in times of need. (I am leaving slaves out of this; slavery is inherently dehumanizing and brutal, without any rational justification in any society.)
I think there’s a lot of whiggishness in these sorts of debates: the defaut state of humanity is current-year technological liberalism, and so when any society isn’t like that, it must be because some malign force (the aristocracy, religion, foreign conquerors…) is holding it back.
Personally, though, the main lesson I’ve taken from history is that peace, prosperity, and civilisation in general are *hard*. It’s taken hundreds of generations and thousands of years for us to get to a state where we can take our basic physical comforts for granted. If we’re richer than our ancestors, that’s because we have more accumulated technological, economic, etc. knowledge than them, not because we’re inherent smarter or better or fairer. We should feel respect and gratitude towards our ancestors — as well as circumspection regarding our own situation, because civilised society is something we have to work at over generations, and if we don’t, we could majorly screw things up for a very long time to come.
“we’d be treating farmers the same way the Romans did”
Maximizing the number of middle class farmers wealthy enough to buy body armor? Republican farmers largely *weren’t* peasants.
Republican ones weren’t; imperial ones were, and late imperial ones very much so.
Part of the issue is defining “farmer”.
The records I’ve read–and pretty basic logic–show that the Roman “farmer” was really the manager of the farm. Sure, they did some of the work–planting and harvesting were an all-hands situation, and young kids of every class were used to do certain chores in agrarian situations as late as the 1900s–but we’re not talking about 40 acre homesteads with red barns and maybe a small vegetable garden where Maw and Paw and the youngun’s are doing the work here. We’re talking about rich land owners in a slave society.
Second, I think you’re downplaying the role of horizontal and vertical social ties when it comes to equipping a Roman soldier. Sure, a lot of them probably bought their armor. A lot also almost certainly inherited it. A lot were also almost certainly gifted it–either from a patron or a client.
This illustrates part of what Mr. X is talking about. In our modern world money is something we deal with every day, so we tend to assume that that’s just how things work. But it wasn’t in the past. It’s not that people didn’t have money back then (even slaves in Rome could own property, as evidenced by the fact that at least some bought themselves from their masters), but it wasn’t the only, or even the most common, way to get things. Barter and gift economies continued well into the modern era among certain social groups (and in fact still exist today). And this would frequently result in situations where fairly poor people could do things that would be remarkably expensive. The reason is that the pool of resources the family can draw from isn’t limited to what they own (though again, we’re talking about a group that OWNED PEOPLE), it’s the community at large.
You actually see examples of this concept today, in youth athletics. Sure, a family can buy the gear necessary to outfit their kid. But it’s also not uncommon for businesses to donate money or stuff to the teams (at least in the small towns where I grew up). It was considered part of the social obligation of being a businessman, and as such it was good for business–it was common for a family to shop at this store and not that one because this store donated to X, Y, and Z, and I saw more than a few businesses that forgot that go under.
“Part of the issue is defining “farmer”. ”
Which very conveniently we have the best census data of antiquity at our disposal to do so. And the image of “farmer” as some sort of wealthy manager of farm workers like in the modern world does not remotely line up with the data. The size of the farm land plots was way too small, the number of farmers was way too high. The adsidui couldn’t all just be living off slave labor when there were more asidui then there were slaves!
Yeah, the Roman farmers were both farm owners and the primary laborers on the farms. There are societies with clear distinctions between owning farm property and actually working on it, but Rome wasn’t one.
(Late Imperial Rome changed, as noted earlier. That said, Imperial Rome wasn’t there yet, partially because the Imperial reforms directly aimed at making it not so; Roman society wasn’t incapable of reform).
That said there actually is a fantastic message here-ownership of productive property by the majority of citizens is good for society. With Rome was see that precisely, because in that time farmland was the primary productive property.
In modern society it’s a combination of land and various forms of capital, but that lesson actually precisely translates to public policy now; we need more people who own meaningful amounts of capital, and less people either owning mega-estates of various forms of wealth or virtually nothing. Our Democracy worked best when wealth and capital were relatively equitably distributed, and has struggled at every point inequity was institutionalized or grew. So did the Roman Republic.
Slavery is brutal and dehumanizing by its nature, but it clearly has rational justification given that it was close to universal. The two big ones are:
1) From the point of view of a militarily successful raider (but not conqueror), you have the opportunity to carry away some stuff. Obviously you will try to make off with the most valuable collection of items that you can fit within your capacity to remove. In appropriate circumstances, the …some accounting here: net present value of the future extractable labor, minus food costs, of a captured able-bodied adult will be higher than the value of e.g. the cattle you could rustle instead. In which case, your primary objective will be to round up some humans — driving away a herd of nonhuman livestock will be a second-best option that you settle for if you can’t do the first-best thing.
An alternative (less accurate) description of the same: by enslaving and leading off some locals, you are stealing the food&stuff their parents invested into raising them (plus some number of dead siblings).
2) Given the character of most preindustrial work, the total productive capacity of a society with a fixed headcount can be increased by forcing a sizeable fraction to work harder than they would have under alternative social arrangements. A directionally similar effect may be achieved in other ways (e.g. manorial sharecropping), but the magnitudes of the effects are a question I’m unable to answer.
2b) This fact is particularly interesting, since in some subsistence systems this can compound by increasing food production and hence the headcount that can be sustained on the territory of the polity.
1×2) It is worth restating the intersection of the above two points: even assuming a fixed headcount, the (age-cohort) demographic composition of the polity can be reshaped advantageously by importing slaves. Namely, if not all laboring-age adults have to be raised locally, they can constitute a modestly increased share of the total population, thereby increasing total output even in the absence of the compounding in 2b).
While it is worth saying that things can be good for people but not societies, this is basically correct. Slavery made economic sense for entire societies, whereas today it only makes sense for individuals.
That said, there is evidence that slavery was bad for Rome in the long term. While it made the elites fantastically wealthy it eventually destroyed the economic conditions that enabled Rome to exercise military power in the first place, while also letting those elites expend more effort jockeying for relative power and prestige (because they had less economic reliance on the middle class farmers).
This eventually led to the demographic collapse of the empire, the dissolution of the civil codes that let Roman farmers see success, and the devolution of the empire into civil war after civil war.
In that “Creation of Inequality” book that I link to in another comment in this thread, the authors suggest that slavery originated for social reasons rather than economic ones (as a means to punish debtors), and only developed economic rationales later on.
Er, is there a difference? If I’m a neolithic magnate/gangster/loanshark, presumably I’m interested in getting something of value out of said debt. Thus, unless there is a legal/moral/social system that draws a boundary somewhere, there is no hard edge between:
– you come to me and pay;
– I keep the collateral you pledged;
(-I go to you after you should have paid and belatedly collect random stuff as collateral, to be returned if you pay within a short time);
– I go to you and take as payment stuff you have (but maybe you can buy it back from me later);
– I go to you and seeing that you have no stuff I can take, beat you up to …encourage you to have some next time;
– I repeat this not on a monthly but hourly basis, naturally treating progressive completion of large items as acceptable, if that progress is fast enough;
– at some point along this process, I helpfully advise you on what specific good (or service) to make in order to pay off your debt in the shortest time;
– eventually the practicalities dictate that it’s easier and more lucrative if you don’t have to spend time/money/favor on seeking food and shelter yourself but instead I arrange for these to be provided to you.
Because ordinary debt is transferable, debt-slaves are transferable. Partly because accounting hasn’t been invented yet, partly because interest rates are a thing and indeed consistently very high but (almost) nobody will understand them for the next several millennia, partly because I’m and asshole and I can, I start declaring sufficiently large debts to be infinite. (Or I can forgive the debt and cease collection, i.e. free the slave.)
There are only two wacky steps.(!!!) The first is that actually, parents own their children, which is why they can sell them (equivalently: offer them as collateral for their debt, or have them taken as payment), and in the case of a slave, “oh you made another thing, excellent, I’ll take it as payment, too” (and then in most cases promptly decide that food is too expensive to waste it on an infant debtor that won’t start being economically useful for ten-ish more years, and whose current resale value is therefore zero or outright negative).
The second is that at some point in the gradient the legal/moral/social system starts tolerating the lender/owner beating the debtor/slave for the heck of it. There is an interesting point here, in fact: anciently, courts tended to treat everything as torts and thus punished everything with fines. Thus at the point of “I go to you and seeing that you have no stuff I can take, beat you up”, assuming that I’m not above the law, I have to pay a fine to you for having beaten you — at which point you have something and are able to pay me. As such, the beating stands in lieu of payment in goods. Legal, but consequential and not arbitrary.
“Simply put, take away our tractors and semi trucks and we’d be treating farmers the same way the Romans did, just with a slightly different form of government.”
IIRC, those things became common in the 1930s, so we would be treating farmers as in the days of FDR and Neville Chamberlain.
Put another way: There was a negligible number of slaves in preindustrial England, so it must have been possible to have a preindustrial society without slavery. (Although the society that came up with the Industrial Revolution must have been pretty unusual in some aspects, so it may not have been usual in being able to do without slavery.)
When it comes to farmers specifically, arguably the Agricultural Revolution is more important than the Industrial, since it largely did away with the constant threat of starvation and gave farmers generally enough surplus to sell for cash. Before the 1700s, c. 90% of most most societies were subsistence farmers (free or unfree), simply because agriculture wasn’t productive enough to support any more surplus population.
Just a quick note, if you’re going to talk about “caste” either positively or negatively you should bear in mind that the English term covers two overlapping but separate concepts, *varna* and *jati*. A *jati* is one of the hundreds of almost entirely endogamous groups across the subcontinent, usually associated with particular professions, that marry and procreate almost entirely within themselves and have particular cultures and origin stories. The *varna* term refers to the 4-5 levels of the caste hierarchy, and is often more hazy and vague (people can always tell you what *jati* they are but often there’s dispute about how they would be classified within the varna system).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%c4%81ti
The two concepts are kind of separate- on the fringes of the indian subcontinent for example, in the far northeast, there are tribal groups that seem to have one without the other. They’re divided into subgroups with strict rules about who they can marry, what gods they can worship, which ancestors they venerate, etc., which all maps pretty well onto the idea of “jati”, but there isn’t really a sense that the subgroups are ranked relative to each other (see this book for more details: https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Inequality-Prehistoric-Ancestors-Monarchy/dp/06740646900.
I think jati is almost certainly going to be more important and long-lasting in the long run than the *varna* hierarchy- the effect of modern day affirmative action policies is to attempt to do away with caste hierarchy and ensure that people are on a level playing field, rather than to eliminate caste identities themselves, which most people in India, at any rate outside the South, really don’t want to do.
I wrote a reply but it seems to have gotten swallowed up, so I’ll try again.
I wanted to say, that if one is going to comment on caste in India, either positively or negatively, then you should bear in mind that the English word can refer to either of two partly overlapping but separate concepts. There is the concept of jati which refers to the hundreds of strictly endogamous groups across the subcontinent, that are broadly associated with particular professions, that intermarry and procreate almost entirely within themselves (and are therefore more or less reproductively and genetically separate), that have particular origin stories and cultures, etc.. And then there’s the concept of varna, referring to the 4-5 levels in a social hierarchy, from Brahmins at the top to Scheduled Castes at the bottom, which is the concept that Americans are probably going to be more familiar with. The “varna” concept is often kind of hazy- people can always tell you what jati their ancestors are, but it’s often unclear and/or controversial what “varna” that corresponds to.
These are, again, overlapping but still separate concepts, and it’s possible to have one without the other. There are tribal groups on the fringes of the subcontinent today, in the far northeast, for example, which are divided into clans that have strict rules about who they can marry, what ancestors they venerate, which gods they can worship, what foods they can eat, etc., all of which seems to map fairly well onto the “jati” concept. but, there’s no sense that the clans are ranked relative to each other.
The extensive affirmative-action policies in India today are meant to do away with the caste hierarchy, and with inequalities between castes, not to do away with caste identity itself (which most Indians, at any rate outside the South, strongly don’t want to do). I have no idea what the future holds, but I would guess that jati is going to be a much longer lasting and more permanent and deeply rooted feature of society, especially at the level of marriage and reproduction, than the ‘varna’ hierarchy is.
What had become of the Phoenician fleets on which the Persian kings relied?
Most likely absorbed into the Successor states? The Achaemenid empire ruled lightly enough that the Phoenician city-states still had some independence. Sure, if Darius asks for a fleet they’re going to turn up or else, but it would be recognisably as the fleet of Tyre or wherever.
Under the rule of the successor states the shipyards and sailors are still probably based in Phoenician cities, but under tighter control and with enough cultural assimilation that they’re now “Hellenistic” rather than “Phoenician”.
My understanding (Bret can correct me here) is that the Phoenician fleet specifically ended up mostly with the Ptolemies, hence their little Aegean empire in their early good years, but it gets gradually run down by time and Syrian Wars.
Which brings up a really interesting question, namely why it got run down and never got rebuilt. Was it because the Seleucids held Phoenicia rather than the Ptolemies, was it general neglect, or a little bit of both, or something entirely different?
The Ptolemies fought a lot of wars against the Seleucids over who got to control Syria, so it might just be that they didn’t have enough money for both a strong army and a strong fleet and chose to priorities their land forces.
typos:
the satraps and Media and Persia — of Media?
Antiochus delivered is cavalry — his
‘Media’ is a consistently used name for the Mede land, weird as it looks.
My point was I think he meant “the satraps of Media and Persia”
Oh wow, I read that six times without catching it. Sorry
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like a more egalitarian army structure, where the commanders feel like they all work together, leads to a tactical advantage in terms of both a more reliable and a more flexible battle setup – and that the ways of Roman diplomacy were a lot better at creating that.
From the battles described, the Romans could could figure out more complex battle plans, and also adapt to changing battlefield conditions, because they could trust their commanders more, while *especially* the big, multi-ethnic racist empires of the Seleucids and Ptolemies seems to have trouble with it. Both Raphia and now Magnesia has the cavarly charging recklessly forward and losing the contact to the infantry. Then here we also have the light infantry going “bugger this for a game of soldiers” and apparently just never advancing. And besides Sellasia (notably a Greek-on-Greek battle involving fewer foreigners), the Diadochi don’t seem to do the “let’s detach parts of our army and see if they can help another wing” thing that carried the day both here and against Philip V – likely because a detachment commander was less likely to take the initiative with their king having been around (of course, it’s possible it happened more but our writers never knew about it because they couldn’t get reports about what the other side was doing).
It also seems like it would be more difficult, in a purely practical sense, to effectively detach an portion of the infantry under the phalanx system.
Also, based on earlier parts of this series, the infantry in the phalanx system seems less likely to think of themselves as the arm that improvises reactions to battlefield situations. That’s the job of the CAVALRY.
Remember that a lot of the Macedonian infantry wasn’t necessarily a Phalanx though. If we study Alexanders victories we see that his subordinates were commanding foot companions and cavalry detachments, and routinely show initiative commanding both, although is is far less common for the Phalanx to do something unexpected than the Hypaspists or the cavalry. We still know Alexander put competent men in charge of the Phalanx, but they tend to simply hold it together and keep it where it’s supposed to be, versus the Hypaspists suddenly charging or turning a flank or the perennial brilliance of his Macedonian Cavalry.
It’s worth noting that basically every general remembered as a genius had a sequence of at least competent sub-commanders. Alexander had Pamenion and Hephaestion, Hannibal had a whole suite including Mago and Maharbal, etc.
While we obviously never see Alexander lead a force against the Romans, we do see what Hannibal does in similar situations-he detaches Mago or Maharbal, who in turn have their own officer corps, to rout Roman allies and then engage in hyper-competent maneuver ending with either a routing Roman legion or one surrounded on all sides. And given that Alexander basically does the same thing to his enemies, multiple times, I can only conclude that this is the key to his success too.
The hierarchical system of the Diadochi, where not only is there a single leader but no one actually has a clear claim on legitimacy except via power and no reason to even *like* each other, means that they simply cannot foster that kind of command. Alexander would almost certainly have had Parmenion in charge of his left and could have detached Hephaestion from his cavalry to engage the roman allies if they still won, the only guys Antiochus had was his son and himself. We even see him engaging in a civil war with a competent subordinate elsewhere in the story, it’s clear what’s happening here.
The genius of the Roman system stands in contrast here; to foster this kind of competence in a monarchy like Macedon you needed a combination of metaphorical lightning strikes. Phillip V was a great statemen and Alexander was legitimately loved by his generals, at least the ones he took with him. Carthage was closer to Rome in many ways, but even then the core of Hannibal’s officer corps were his brothers. Rome didn’t have to produce a uniquely charismatic social leader or some complex friend relationship between geniuses to get a bunch of competent officers capable of initiative-their entire society was designed to pump them out every year along with a flexible infantry for them to command.
I think it’s actually a bit more than just that. Not just that the Republic could produce such leaders internally, but also that they could allow foreign leaders with good generalship to shine – note how here at Magnesia it’s Attalos, at the command of his brother, who does the detaching. Baseless speculation, but I suspect this is both a product of Roman diplomacy and the atmosphere at the council of war in the general’s tent directly before the battle. For the Seleucids, that council will be just like a court session: King on top, advisors being suffered to advise, but still the king being the decision-maker. With the Romans, on the other hand, you have a sort of more egalitarian mess: The consul or imperium-holder is in charge, but there’ll be people among the tribunes (like Scipio Africanus here) who have higher auctoritas and have no qualms speaking up. Plus the socii leaders, who while by treaty have to position themselves under the consul, will insist on not being treated lesser than a tribune, and of course coming with their own titles. If you’re introduced to this mess as a Greek ally like Eumenes and Attalos here, you’ll also feel a lot more free to use your own judgment both at the council and in battle.
Side note: The Romans going “You Pergamon guys are good at cavalry right? Great, here’s almost three times the amount of cavalry you brought to command for you.” to Eumenes is kind of funny.
Having a single, clear decision-maker is generally a good thing in war.
“It is better to have one bad general than two good ones.” — Napoleon
Yes – but a clear line of final decision does not preclude being open to advice. A good meeting is one where everyone departs confident they know the plan, are trusted to carry out their part and also trusted to improvise if needed, and that the plan has been adjusted following input so that no-one is asked to do the impossible.
Yes – but a clear line of final decision does not preclude being open to advice. A good meeting is one where everyone departs confident they know the plan, are trusted to carry out their part and also trusted to improvise if needed, and that the plan has been adjusted following input so that no-one is asked to do the impossible.
But Hellenistic kings were expected to be open to advice, at least from their senior advisers. Sure, not every king was, but then not every Roman magistrate was, either. “King/general] on top, advisors being suffered to advise, but still the [king/general] being the decision-maker” describes how the process was supposed to work among both the Hellenistic monarchies and the Romans.
On the other hand Napoleon had a clear and identifiable bias towards authority, as evidenced by him seizing it by force.
That is probably true in *battle* regardless, but not necessarily for war on the operational or strategic level. As long as a decision is reached it’s not necessarily important or beneficial that it come from one mind; there is time for consensus.
On the other hand Napoleon had a clear and identifiable bias towards authority, as evidenced by him seizing it by force.
Napoleon was one of the best generals in history; I don’t think we can just dismiss his views on military topics with “Well, he was obviously biased.”
That is probably true in *battle* regardless, but not necessarily for war on the operational or strategic level. As long as a decision is reached it’s not necessarily important or beneficial that it come from one mind; there is time for consensus.
Roman generals were given pretty much complete control over how they chose to run a campaign. The Senate would give him command of the army in X region, and what he chose to do with it was pretty much up to him. Of course, a general might choose to take advice from subordinates and allies on what to do, but so might a king.
Napoleon also had competent subordinates, which he could afford having, because none of those subordinates could depose him.
The same is true of Roman consuls and proconsuls. Scorpio can afford to have Scipio Africanus as a subordinate, because Africanus cannot seize command – though Africanus could take over if Scipio is rendered hors de combat.
It’s not just that these people have clear lines of authority; their authority is *unassailable* by their subordinates, which was, as I understand it, far less true of the Diadochoi. If they sent off some general, and that general comes back having won a glorious victory, the Diadochos has created a competitor.
Comparably, it’s no accident that Augustus puts a hard stop to the habit of provincial commanders to fight wars and elevate their glory. A successful commander might have become a competitor to Augustus, so he only allows men he trusts blindly to win such glories.
this doesn’t answer the money question, why the poorer roman state can command so many more resources. sure mobilizing manpower isn’t easy, maybe the romans do better there, but navies take money, even in ancient era. the Seleucids and Ptolemies should have been tougher, given how much money they had.
I suspect this is a purchasing power thing. How much of the Seleucid empire is not on the coast, or not on the right coast? At a certain point you can only pay for so much economic activity of a certain type before there just aren’t resources left to dedicate, particularly in pre-industrial societies; remember that if a coastal region dedicates 100% of its population to cutting down trees and building ships it can’t just send food for those specialists over a train. They’d starve. And all state revenue really is, in that context, is the ability to dedicate surplus labor to certain tasks.
Combine with the fact that the Seleucids had about three other near peers and a half dozen unruly subjects or regional threats on their eastern borders which could not be fought navally, and you get the solution. Too much of their empire was focused on Persia to marshal a meaningful threat to the Mediterranean.
Note : Livy (35.43.3) presumably translated ‘covered’ and ‘open’ into Latin, rather than from Latin.
Hannibal Barca’s naval career: kind of like Michael Jordan’s baseball career?
Does “Polyxenidas” mean “there’s a lot of strange things about this guy”?
“-idas” was a patronymic suffix, the Dorian equivalent of “-ides” (cf. the famous commanders in the Persian War, Leonidas and Miltiades).
So “Polyxenidas” would mean “there’s a lot of strange things about this guy’s father”.
I think in this case it would mean “stranger”; no? So “Child of many strangers” or possibly “One of many children of strangers”?
Literally it would be “many-stranger-descendant”. But I wouldn’t read too much into it — ancient Greek names, like modern ones, often seem to have been chosen because the parents thought they sounded nice, rather than for their underlying meaning.
“Child of many strangers” sounds like an old-timey insult.
Polyxenidas means “son of Polyxenus”.
Polyxenus (Πολύξενος) means “he who has many guests” (so “very hospitable person”), with “poly-” (πολύ) means “many”, while “xenus” (ξένος) in this context means “guest” and not “stranger”. Since having many guests (and so retainers and/or political allies) is an important quality of a noble man, the name makes a lot of sense. You can compare this name with similar name Philoxenus (Φιλόξενος), “he who loves guests”, from “philo-” (φῐλο-, “loving”) and “xenus” (ξένος, “guest”).
So, son of a party animal?
It sounds like one of the reasons Rome won was that their navy was vastly superior. Sure, the final confrontation had to happen on land–but as Napoleon pointed out a few times, it doesn’t matter how big your army is, it matters how big your army is at the battle. And if you’re an expeditionary force cut off from your power base because the enemy navy has effectively turned the sea itself against you, that becomes more or less an impossibility. Any army that can be reinforced regularly is going to be larger, in terms of practical consideration, than an army that can’t.
This blog has touched on the importance of maritime trade to Rome before–specifically, in its discussion of how to feed a huge city at the time (short answer: Imports). Archaeologists also use shipwrecks as a proxy for economic activity, partially because that’s the data we have, but also partially because it was so critical to the functioning of the empire.
Part of me is wondering if we shouldn’t view Rome’s success as a product of its army, but rather its navy. It gets downplayed because the navy ran out of peer and near-peer competitors once Mare Nostrum was established, but that’s more an indication of the navy’s power. The army got all the press because the navy was so successful there was comparatively little for it to do! And owning a sea the size of the Mediterranean cannot help but have profound impacts on a society when oceanic trade is 20x more efficient than land trade.
Well Mahan argues (blaze it!) that sea power is not only essential to empires but hides it’s own effectiveness. Because the British controlled the seas, French privateers were constantly attacking British merchants because those were the merchants still at sea. However in both the British and Roman cases, we need to ask where those ships are coming from.
The British naval excellence by the 17th century is much talked about but what’s easily overlooked is that financial excellence underpinning it. Britain had effective systems of finance, such that they could make massive foreign subsidies during the seven years war even in the face of all that French privateering. Spending could rise even as trade fell because the loans weren’t backed by trade revenues, they were backed by the internal revenues of the British islands. Their greatest colonial war asset was the American colonies which were raising and supplying troops and ships in the western hemisphere not shipping money or goods to the home country. The navy is just an extension of the fact that they have a very effective government, interest rates are low, records are reliable, the political class is very literally invested in the government (in the form of bonds). And these resources could be directed at a navy/foriegn subsidies/domestic infastructure and later the industrial revolution.
So I would say it’s very much not a case that the Roman naval excellence is producing land victories. It’s just that the powerful navy and army have a common cause, an effective government. Once you have the effective government you can raise a navy or an army or subsidize foreigners or whatever else you need.
The other day the Battle of Marathon (1959) was playing and it was amusing to see their (lack of) shield tactics after reading all your articles where medium infantry are so important. One guy’s shield technique was so distinctive that I went back and made a gif of it that y’all might enjoy: https://imgur.com/a/FG0Zxej
That out of the way, it seems paradoxical that the Romans could be pushed back to their camp by a force with so much heavy cavalry and horse archers while taking so few casualties. Did the sources completely drop the ball on socii losses this battle? Did the Romans have repeated rotation where the principes could fall back behind the reformed hastati once they were themselves getting exhausted and thus naturally fall back over time?
It really does seem to be the case that Roman commanders, Roman tactics, and Roman individuals all valued Roman soldiers’ lives to an unusual degree. Even the Romans’ tendency to stay at war after massive losses can be viewed through that lens. It’s entirely plausible that the standard rotation of ranks was improvised into a repeated rotation during the battle.
Well, when the soldiers are also the voting class who’ll determine if you get to be consul again (or for lower offices, at all…)
One thing I’ll say is I think Bret you are a bit optimistic about the state of Hellenistic armies compared to Alexander’s day. Like the Romans had a relatively small cavalry share to their army while that is supposed to be the Hellenistic hammer to the phalanx’s anvil. But that hammer more often than not not only fails to win the battle, but even to win the cavalry fight. Like the Hellenistic anvil arguably works in the sense it takes awhile to lose that part of the battle and often because taken in flank. But these ain’t Alexander’s Companion cavalry…
On another note I feel sorry for poor Hannibal. The actual thing he should have been doing was leading Antiochus’s army not being given a naval command with no naval experience as impossible as that was.
Not sure it matters in the end. Hannibal was a genius but he was also surrounded by officers who were, if not geniuses themselves, at least workmanlike officers. This army seems to completely lack such officers, meaning Hannibal might not have made a difference had he been in command.
Honestly, he’d probably have been better used as one of those officers himself here. It says something that the Selucid left was so ineffectual that it’s a reasonable claim that it never existed. No amount of planning would have saved a failure of that nature.
> On another note I feel sorry for poor Hannibal. The actual thing he should have been doing was leading Antiochus’s army not being given a naval command with no naval experience as impossible as that was.
I wonder how feasible that would have been? Commenters above are talking about the shallowness of the Seleucid leadership pool, partly because commanders seem to be equated with potential rulers. If Hannibal led the army successfully, would that position him to seize power, or at least put him close enough that Antiochus III would have to act to neutralize the danger? If they only have one army, and that army finds a better leader than Antiochus, that seems like a potential problem.
But my guess is that generals can’t generally be hot-swapped into leadership roles in the armies of different countries. I’d think a lot of their expertise involves knowing their troops, and subordinates, and their strengths and weaknesses. Not to mention how the troops feel about the general.
Still, what a depressing coda for one of the greatest generals ever. I’d never heard of this before.
As a Carthaginian barbarian, Hannibal should have a harder time getting enough support to overthrow the king, at least in theory.
“Whoa, is that the Hannibal? The ecumene-famous military genius? Yes, please.”
Hannibal actually gets a couple final showings even further east, although by then his story completely loses all coherence in terms of what he did where and when. Either he led a couple successful battles, built a palace, died cutting his finger accidentally, was poisoned after Rome demanded his head, or killed himself after Rome demanded his head after a siege. It’s chaos, and either tragic, sad, or darkly funny.
It’s not like Antiochus was a bad commander
But imagine this scenario-he gives Hannibal command of his army. Hannibal wins multiple big victories over the Romans, keeping them out of Asia Minor. The troops start to love Hannibal. Why’s Antiochus in charge again? Because he was descended from one of Alexander’s companions? Who cares?
Greeks of this period were pretty xenophobic, and tended to regard all non-Greeks as beneath them. Which isn’t to say that Hannibal couldn’t possibly have overthrown Antiochus, but he’d have to work very hard to get enough support.
The Greeks, sure, but what about the rest of the Empire’s subjects? You know, the ones that made up 75% of the army and 99% of the total population. The ones cut out of the Greek ethno-hierarchy. The ones that include big former Phoenician city states in Syria.
TBH it sounds like Hannibal might have been able to make a good go of things if he wanted to (and was politically savvy as well as militarily).
Is it fair to say that the Seleucids, and Persians before them, were not able effectively to mobilize the resources and manpower of their vast territories? That does not seem to have been true of their Sassanid and Parthian successors.
To be fair, the Achaemenids were better in this regard than the Seleucids: they managed to raise multiple armies to fight Alexander, and no doubt would have raised more had Alexander’s advance been less rapid.
The Achaemenids’ real problem, I would say, was that their subjects didn’t have as much buy-in to their empire as the Romans’ socii. Even after Hannibal trounced the largest Roman army ever assembled, the allied cities (with a few exceptions, like Capua) mostly closed their gates to him. With Alexander, OTOH, most cities surrendered without a fight, meaning that Alexander could enact sweeping conquests in the time it took the Persians to raise a new army and get it to the theatre.
I think part of it was probably that Darius himself was somewhat questionably legitimate (he came to power after a civil war we unfortunately don’t know too much about)
I’ve heard it argued that Alexander himself was sort of questionably legitimate. Or at least, there were a number of potentially legitimate heirs to Philip.
But constantly winning papers over those cracks.
Having a number of potentially legitimate heirs was normal for the Macedonians, and indeed for most societies whose royal families practised polygamy. Though IIRC, Alexander’s only known brother was mentally disabled in some way, so Alexander himself didn’t have much difficulty in terms of succeeding his father.
Completely unrelated, but I was listening to the partial historians and a thought struck me: What happened to the roman assemblies during the Principate?
We know Augustus mostly collected the powers of a bunch of magistrates, and I have a basic idea of how the Senate continued to function, but the assemblies kinda just disappear from most narratives? Did the Princeps actually usurp the power to make law, or are we to read “Augustus made a law…” as “Augustus had a rubber-stamp assembly pass a law with his name on it”?
I’ve read in Mary Beard’s book “Emperor of Rome” that Augustus basically transferred the legislative functions from assemblies to Senate, and that in the absence of much of function to do the assemblies just kind of peter out rather than ever being formally abolished. It strikes me as similar to what’s supposed to have happened to the Curia Assembly.
That’s what I’m curious about, since our Lord Host insists the Senate had no formal powers.
I think he’s always talking in the context of the Republic there. I imagine it’s a thing worth emphasizing when the popular image would be that the Republic was when a body called “the Senate” would have been strongest (which would probably actually be accurate) and how that would be accounted for through a modern lens.
The (early?) imperial Senate might have gotten the lawmaking functions of the assemblies, but even considering the point that it’s probably still only the magistrates who devise and present the laws, I get the impression that it didn’t come with the sovereignty that the assemblies had possessed, limiting not only the prestige but the range of measures that could be called for and passed. That in combination with the overall auctoritas of the Senate having diminished significantly, so it still can’t really be called a step up.
Small typo, Livy would have been translating Polybius to Latin, not “from” Latin.
Unexpected but nice to see a Swedish map!
I’m somewhat amused at the maps being english (understandable) german (okay, understandable given the history of german classical studies) and swedish (why?)
Re Swedish: I suspect it’s a Paradox.
Has anyone else stopped receiving all subscription emails form Bret’s blogs? I’ve gotten nothing since April 4th. And when I select “Email me new comments” on this reply, it resets itself to off… Though now it’s staying on after I toggled the other two options on and off.
I got the email announcing the post, but it seems like I’m not getting notifications for comments, even after posting a comment and clicking on the thing. I’ll try it again for this comment.
I’m still not getting any comments, despite the site claiming I’m subscribed again.
It said I was still subscribed.
Just a heads up – ‘via Wikipedia’ is not proper attribution for images because Wikipedia did not create the images used on its pages. If you click on the images in Wikipedia articles, it should give you the correct author to attribute at the bottom of the page.
Are there any depictions of what the plinthion looked like? The depth of the Macedonian phalanx makes it hard for me to picture. I’m also not sure how this formation wouldn’t break down at the corners.
From later periods, the corners were definitely the weak points.
I guess he’s now in his own domain and will very happily talks about Roman exploits but now I kinda miss the game articles
Whereas for me the game articles are the least interesting ones, and I’ve probably skipped some.
According to Patreon updates, Paradox’s imperator will be coming up after this series. (Which might be some time, because of other life stuff interfering, but based on similar updates in the past probably a month or two.)
I like the media ones personally. Either the more detailed analysis or a simple kit review articles.
Yeah TBH I do prefer the posts with a pop-culture tie in of one sort or another.
A striking thing about the battle of Magnesia was that the Roman legions and socii had so little effect on the Macedonian phalanx. In Appian, the Roman-Pergamene army encircles the phalanx with psiloi and horsemen and barrages it with arrows, but “The Romans did not come to close quarters nor approach them because they feared the discipline, the solidity, and the desperation of this veteran corps.” Many people who believe that arranging your line infantry in a phalanx was worse than arranging them in maniples do not want to read this. https://www.bookandsword.com/2016/09/10/suppressio-veri-and-the-battle-of-magnesia/
I have always wondered if someone paid Antiochus’ left wing to run.
So the Romans decided to take a slightly longer amount of time and win without additional casaulties and you view this as a *weakness* of their military system?
For starters, in Appian its probably mostly troops from Pergamon (and maybe velites) who beat Antiochus’ phalanx, not Roman hastati and principes! And our host argued that the Romans usually tried to break through the centre of the enemy line, but at Magnesia that failed. When the line infantry of a Roman army were isolated without light troops and cavalry you get Cannae.
“When the line infantry of a Roman army were isolated without light troops and cavalry you get Cannae.”
No, if heavy cavalry and light infantry fought legionaries alone, usually what you got was a legionary victory. You are falling into the trap of forgetting that the most exceptional cases get written about because they are exceptions.
I don’t think “just legions without plenty of slingers, archers, and cavalry” was ever successful against the Parthians. There was a famous battle after Carrhae where the Romans took shelter on a rocky hilltop so their slingers would never run out of stones.
The Roman sources on the early Parthian Wars have a lot of bitching about allies who supposedly let the legions down, whether Crassus’ Gallic cavalry who supposedly did not have enough armour, or Antony’s Armenians.
No, if heavy cavalry and light infantry fought legionaries alone, usually what you got was a legionary victory. You are falling into the trap of forgetting that the most exceptional cases get written about because they are exceptions.
Has there ever even actually been a battle where legionaries alone fought against heavy cavalry and light infantry alone, much less one in which the Romans won?
“was ever successful against the Parthians”
So first it was they couldn’t charge into pikes, then it was they’d get rolled by cavalry, now it’s they can’t one on one horse archers? Make up your mind!
You are talking about three radically different tactical needs. They serve a useful tactical role against all three of them but it’s a different tactical role. Against all three they win a lot more then they lose, hence, y’know the massive empire. Massive empire’s aren’t built by defeats!
That should be “you get Carrhae” sorry
Our sources are vague about what happened on the Roman left and its possible that Antiochus broke most of a legion of socii, could not break into the nearby Roman camp with his force of mostly horsemen, and then was spooked by an attack on his rear and messages from his camp.
That should be “you get Carrhae” sorry
To be fair, “you get Cannae” is also accurate.
In context this is the great failing of the Phalanx system. It could not break to engage because it was harried by lighter troops and couldn’t open ranks to catch them. It did precisely what it was supposed to do, held a fortress for the rest of the army to rally around, but the Macedonian system had degraded so much by now that there seems to be no one to rally a retreating force that isn’t the king or his son. Given how long the Phalanx does hold i suspect Seleucus is there or nearby, which is probably why his various cavalry and light infantry didn’t reform after mysteriously vanishing. Alternatively they got crushed just that badly that the son of the king couldn’t rally them, which makes me want a minute by minute depiction of just where the Seleucus generals were and what they were doing.
In general the problem the selucids seem to have had, other than fighting Romans, was having about two to few generals at the very least.
” the socii [fought] for their own status and loot within the Roman system, but what could Antiochus offer a subjected Carian or Cilician except a paycheck and a future of continued subjugation?”
On the face of it, he could offer status and loot within his own system. just what Rome offered the socii. But Rome could offer rewards (and punishments) that would last as long as you lived, whereas Antiochus could only offer rewards that lasted as long as HE lived.
A bit like the East India Company: it’s enemies were kings and prices who always, eventually, died. The Company didn’t. There are advantages to being immortal. And an organisation can be immortal in a way that a single person cannot be.
On the face of it, he could offer status and loot within his own system. just what Rome offered the socii. But Rome could offer rewards (and punishments) that would last as long as you lived, whereas Antiochus could only offer rewards that lasted as long as HE lived.
Personal friendship with Antiochus could only last as long as he lived, but if he gave a man an estate, the expectation would be that the recipient would keep it as long as he lived, and pass it down to his son, who’d be able to keep it as long as *he* lived, who’d…
Which begs the question; to what extent was a Hellenic monarchy ruled by a dynasty of military usurpers which controlled primarily non-Hellenic regions a rules based society? Could Antiochus actually write a law that would be followed *because it was law*, like the Roman Senate could? I suspect you’re asserting a level of legitimacy and hence legality that can’t be attested to by the context of the Diadochi kingdoms.
Hellenistic kings weren’t in the habit of cancelling their predecessors’ benefactions.
Is there even a non rules based society? I think this reminds me a bit of this article https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4587125 on the exceptionalism arguments regarding rule of law and its origins and how it would be news for the several societies skipped during its development that they didn’t have rules. (Also delves a bit into formal vs customary government institutions our host spent a good deal of ink on in his series on ancient governance.)
I think a great deal of the affairs of such a short lived society prone to military coups would owe to previous laws of the land, ‘common law’ if you will.
Apparently…
> How would you even defeat this?
Mad elephants.
Torture some elephants until they just don’t care any more, and then point them at the phalanx.
Quote from the Pyrrhus post:
> In theory an articulated phalanx ought to be more flexible, able to bend to deal with both rough terrain but also situations in which one part of the line is able to advance but others are not. In practice, it is oddly striking that this setup never comes standard or common.
I find it surprising that we see another articulated (within the actual phalanx) setup here. It is very convenient for the Romans that their phalanx-using opponents are repeatedly opting to leave non-phalanx gaps in the center that the maniples can exploit.
Charitably we can assume that the Macedonian kings aren’t stupid. Something in the Roman way of fighting is “forcing” them to ditch the tried-and-true solid phalanx in favor of a jointed one. But what is it?
I think you are misinterpreting the meaning of “jointed” phalanx. The Macedonian style pike phalanx was always multiple units with gaps between them, all the way back to the days of Philip and Alexander. If all the phalangites in the army at Magnesia had formed into one solid phalanx it would have been 900 metres wide. Impossible to give orders that can be heard by everyone, or heard with at most one repetition. Impossible to move through a valley less than almost a kilometre wide. If there’s an obstacle on the battlefield like a clump of trees or a walled building, the entire phalanx would grind to a halt in front of it. So “phalanx” is really shorthand for 4-6 large blocks of pikes, moving close together but still able to “articulate” around obstacles or to change direction to face new threats.
The Romans aren’t forcing the Macedonians to change to an articulated phalanx, because they’re already using such. The Romans do seem to be much better than previous opponents at taking advantage of temporary disruptions or weaker troops covering the gaps if the phalanx units become too widely separated.
Brett says that Pyrrhus’ articulated formation with light infantry between the blocks of phalanx is unorthodox. That would mean that it was different from what Alexander and his successors used.
> Impossible to give orders that can be heard by everyone, or heard with at most one repetition.
This also affects the maniples with their 10-20 meter gaps. It’s solved by still keeping your kilometers-wide phalanx in notional regiments with their own junior officers. Plus the “fire and forget” nature of phalanx formations was explicitly called out in this series – it’s part of why Alexander was spending his time commanding the cavalry, which was more responsive to orders after the start of the battle.
As for gaps for trees – there was still space between individual soldiers. I recall Brett describing a less-common packed formation where the rear half of each column would move up, doubling the density of pikes; that space is also available if you need to dodge a tree. I can believe that they nonetheless left a meter or so between regiments to delineate them or something, or that they didn’t, but in any case putting elephants in such gaps would defeat the purpose.
It’s worth noting that Alexander also has lighter troops, and even personally commanded then as Issus in a charge before remounting.
Although I actually slightly doubt that one. I have a pet theory that Hephaestion actually did this, as Alexander *leaving the cavalry* makes no sense and this comes literally days if not hours before the famous “{Hephaestion} is also Alexander” incident with Darius’s mother. It would be just like Hephaestion to pretend to be Alexander while leading the charge for morale, then for Alexander to quietly affirm him later. Ancient sources being what they are, the battlefield deception becomes true history.
Pet conspiracy aside, the difference is that these forces typically followed the cavalry or screened the flanks, rather than acting as articulation for the Phalanx. I think this is actually *more* tactically sophisticated in practice; articulated Phalanx aren’t really supposed to show huge tactical genius on a unit by unit level, but in a real sense every component of the Alexander battle has tactical officers executing their own command, which is part of why the system worked.
It is literally routine to hear of Alexanders officers responding to a flanking regiment by moving his troops to engage them or suddenly charging a gap, or a couple units forming up to refuse a flank, or a detachment leaving to respond to some crisis. Alexander wasn’t the only decision maker in his army, just the final one, and even relatively junior officers maneuver independently when called on. That goes a long, long way to reducing the impact of army size on tactical cohesion.
Because these units weren’t locked into holding the space between Phalanx they had more room to maneuver, basically. This is another thing that goes away when being a notable officer becomes a political liability after Alexander dies and traditional legitimacy becomes ephemeral.
Right, the lighter troops connecting the cavalry to the phalanx seem standard. The unorthodox thing is the articulation in the body of the phalanx, and it is suspicious that we see it tried twice against the Romans.
Either these kings are overrated, or *something* about the Roman way of fighting was making these guys ditch the traditionally impregnable center for one with gaps.
I wonder if it’s as simple as not wanting to have a Phalanx block staring at the space between Maniples while another is fighting? Maybe the saw the skirmish filled gaps and decided “no, let’s not ask our men to maintain close formation while being skirmished, or charge into a gap and flank themselves, thank you”.
The *something* about the Roman way of fighting is their entire system, three lines of pila and gladius legionaries plus velites in front.
Before Pyrrhus the Successor states had fought the pike phalanxes of other Successors or spear-armed phalanxes. The Seleucids had quickly given up trying to hold on to Alexander’s Indian conquests, presumably figuring they had more productive things to do than fight wealthy, heavily populated, distant Indian states. The Persian nobility had been recruited into the Seleucid cavalry and the poorer Persians were now taxpayers and light infantry. The Parthians at this time are steppe nomads, ambitious but Antiochus had just cleaned them out of their most recent incursion.
The Greek cities had switched to either more pike phalanxes, or to thureophoroi kit, large shield with cloth body armour and omni spear and/or javelins. They’re still fighting in phalanx AKA shield wall type formation.
The big upset for the Seleucids was a massive Celtic migration, the Galatians, into Asia Minor. They fight with large shield and omni spear/javelins but supposedly otherwise naked! (Even if the chroniclers are exaggerating, Celtic mail was worn by the aristocrats on horseback, not the majority of infantry.) And their formation is once again a dense “phalanx” AKA shield wall.
So win or lose, Successor states have built up a lot experience and tactics for fighting against other phalanxes, whether pike or spear. What the Romans are doing different is all of their being Roman, with three lines of maniples and velites in front, heavy infantry with pila and gladius.
(Now that I’ve written this, I’d really like to know how the Galatians managed to beat pike phalanxes.)
Dr. Devereaux writes on the subject of casualties at Magnesia:
> Roman losses, by contrast, were shockingly light. Livy reports 300 infantry lost, 24 Roman cavalry and 25 out of Eumenes’ force; Appian adds that the 300 infantry were ‘from the city’ – meaning Roman citizens – so some socii casualties have evidently been left out (but he trims Eumenes’ losses down to just fifteen cavalry) (Livy 37.44.2-3; App. Syr. 36). Livy in addition notes that many Romans were wounded in addition to the 300 killed. This is an odd quirk of Livy’s casualty reports for Roman armies against Hellenistic armies and I suspect it reflects the relatively high effectiveness of Roman body armor, by this point increasingly dominated by the mail lorica hamata: good armor converts lethal blows into survivable wounds. It also fits into a broader pattern we’ve seen: Hellenistic armies that face Roman armies always take heavy casualties, winning or losing, but when Roman armies win they tend to win lopsidedly. It is a trend that will continue.
And he is right, losses in the Roman wars with the Hellenistic polities are very much lopsided, with quite light Roman losses reported and very heavy Hellenistic casualties reported.
Part of that I think must be narrative bias in the sources: We use Roman sources like Livy, or we refer to sources sympathetic to Rome like Polybius. There may be an element of exaggeration, but I think it is a pretty consistent picture that Roman losses are quite light and Hellenistic losses quite heavy in these battles, by and large.
I wonder though whether the explanation for this really is armour and body protection. Yes, certainly, a scutum and a shirt of maille is quite good protection in the second century BC. It wouldn’t have been so popular otherwise. However, I think that a good part of the reason for why these battles go as they do lies in the actual physical nature of the confrontation between maniple and speira.
Polybius is quite clear that in a front to front confrontation on level ground, as at Magnesia, the phalanx is impregnable and irresistible. The sarissa of course outranges the gladius by a wide margin. A Roman soldier charging frontally into such an array is just asking to be skewered, scutum and maille or no. People by and large don’t fight in such a suicidal fashion, so I don’t think the Romans did so either. Therefore, I don’t think the Romans actually spent much time in close quarters combat against the phalanx at all.
I think rather that the light casualties accounted for the Romans in their battles with the phalanx indicates a more skirmishing-like mode of engagement. I think they were generally hanging back out of reach of the pikes of the speira, peppering it with javelins and other missiles, but not charging home with the gladius. If some hotheads or particularly brave men tried, they would surely be cut down by the sarissas, but I don’t think most Romans would have risked that. They would have kept their distance, and given ground if the phalanx advanced. This seems to be what happened as Philip’s phalanx advanced and drove the Romans back at Cynoscephalae. Hence it can be that they are forced to retreat, because they can’t make headway in a front to front confrontation with the phalanx, but yet their casualties remain quite light because they stay out of reach of the phalanx.
I don’t think actually that the maniple, evaluated on the rather limited basis of infantry combat alone, is decidedly superior to the phalanx. The actual frontal confrontation between them at their battles seemed to be a stalemate more than anything: The maniple can pelt the phalanx and resist its advance by skirmishing, but it cannot break through and rout the phalanx by a frontal charge as they could other types of enemies. The phalanx can advance and gain ground against the Romans, but they cannot inflict shock fast enough to actually rout them. More or less stalemated in the infantry contest, the results of the great battles between the Romans and the Hellenistic kingdoms seemed to me to hinge more on the actions at the flanks of cavalry, elephants, etc. I think the Roman victories here are more due to their whole military system, not any notable superiority in infantry combat.
As a counterpoint, the Roman legion does end up piercing into the Phalanx and routing it to some degree in the center, while meanwhile being overrun *by heavy cavalry* is insufficient to rout the Roman right; they retreat in enough order to eventually repel their attackers. However you explain that it’s an astounding difference in result.
Even in the context of the infantry contest we have seen, thrice now, that the Phalanx cannot decisively rout the Roman maniple. Meanwhile the maniple can, in a variety of circumstances, rout the Phalanx. Yet both accomplish the tactical goal of occupying the center and providing a position for allies to rally to and maneuver around; practically, the difference is that the maniple can deliver a decisive blow, while the Phalanx cannot.
Dcmorinmorinmorin,
In the major battles between the Romans and the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman manipular legion signally failed to break through the Hellenistic pike phalanxes in frontal confrontation.
What actually occurred is that the maniples and the speiras stalemated each other in the centre, and the battle was decided at the flanks.
At Cynoscephalae, Philip’s right wing phalanx drives the Romans before it and the Roman left wing fails to make any headway against it. The Macedonian left, which was still in marching order and not even deployed for battle, was then attacked and routed by the Roman elephants, allowing the Roman right wing to circle around and outflank the Macedonian right. The maniples did not rout the phalanx in front to front combat, they stalled for time while another element of the Roman army decided matters.
At Magnesia, the Roman maniples again failed to break through the Seleucid phalanx in the infantry contest in the centre. Roman victory at Magnesia was secured by the victory of the Roman and allied cavalry under Eumenes on the Roman left flank, and by the Seleucid elephants panicking and trampling their own men, which broke up the phalanx. Maniples did not break into and rout phalanxes by their own power, they again stalled for time while decision was reached by other means.
At Pydna, the Romans were once again driven back by their front to front encounter with the phalanx. Two things then robbed the Macedonians of a victory: Firstly, Roman elephants on the right wing broke up the Macedonian left flank. Secondly, Macedonian troops seem to have assumed that the retreat of the Roman first line was a general rout, and broke their own formation to pursue. When they had broken their ranks, they were easy prey for the legionaries of the reserve lines, and the Macedonian left wing had already been broken, allowing the Roman right wing to wheel around the phalanx’s flanks.
In none of these major battles are Macedonian speiras routed by the Roman maniple attacking frontally with pilum and gladius. The maniple can’t actually break into a phalanx with the power of its own weapons. But it can, however, skirmish with the phalanx and stall it while the battle is decided by other means on the flanks. And it can fall upon the phalangites if they have broken formation and make short work of them.
You’re talking past my point. While the Phalanx drove back the Romans at Cynoscephalae they were also held back by the Romans. While the Phalanx stalemated the Romans under both Antiochus and Pyrrhus the Romans also occupied the Phalanx. And where’s we have examples of Roman maniples eventually skirmishing the Phalanx to the point it has an exploitable gap, we never see the Phalanx overwhelm the Maniple after a similar mistake.
Tactically, the Phalanx is over specialized in this matchup. Maybe it cannot lose, but it also cannot win. The maniple both does not lose, it can win. Plus the maniple routinely and casually deals with threats like elephants that the Phalanx struggles against, while also doing such things as fleeing back to camp under mounted pursuit in good enough order to seize the day, something the Phalanx cannot do.
The phalanx did defeat the maniple during Pyrrhus’ first couple of battles. As for elephants, the standard way of dealing with them, for both Greeks and Romans, was using light infantry to pepper them with javelins and make them stampede back. If the general does his job well, neither maniple nor phalanx should be doing much fighting against elephants.
I would think the high casualties on both sides including among the phalanx in Pyrrhus’s battles would indicate that the manipular legion did manage to get to proper grips with the phalanx, and it was a hard-fought struggle.
It is quite possible that the big lesson learned and retained from that fight was “and we’re never trying that again” though.
Yeah, the Phalanx won in the sense the two forces ground each other down, but the entire point of Pyrrhus victories was that it wasn’t decisive. The Phalanx managed to not lose, the Maniple managed to not lose, and even the supporting arms were indecisive. Hence an inconclusive series of battles until he couldn’t fight anymore.
Meanwhile every time the Maniple defeats the Phalanx we hear some absurd casualty number and the receiving state enter terminal decline.
And yeah, I’m pretty sure everyone came away from that one with “this sucked”, possibly with “this sucked less for Rome”. Still even Rome seriously entertained giving him Manga Grecia to go away, suggesting even the Senate was unamused by the casualties.
dcmorinmorinmorin, I think the major difference is that the legion can effectively retreat in good order. If the hastati are feeling they are losing the fight their centurions can yell retreat and the troops can run pass the lines of principes and triarii. At that point they can stop since they can be confident the enemy won’t get past the line of principes any time soon, they have plenty of time to calm down and set up a new defense line. If the enemy is still victorious the principes retreat in their turn. If the enemy is a phalanx the legionaries can easily run away from them, there are not many enemies that can defeat a legion and also run faster than them.
I don’t see how a phalanx could do the same. Sure, the rear lines can turn 180 degrees and lower their spears and you get a two-directional phalanx that is equally dangerous in both directions. But it still won’t make the retreat easy when half the troops will have to walk backwards.
And that still leaves the sides vulnerable. Some of the troops could lower their spears, but then you are left with an interlocking square with long spears crossing all over the place. If you need to move that thing all of the troops will have to walk in sync with equally long steps, half of them backwards, some of them sideways. It will just take few guys walking to trip on something and all hell will break loose.
Are we sure that the hordes of light infantry on Antiochus’ flanks actually existed? Ancient sources are notoriously unreliable when it comes to numbers, after all, and if there are supposedly huge numbers of soldiers who don’t actually play any part in the battle, this raises the suspicion that they were invented at some stage to pad out the numbers.
It would be a very strange army composition without them.
Yeah, we know that the successors use a lot of light infantry, and if the left flank doesn’t exist we’d have an unusually phalanx-weighted infantry force and an oversized cavalry force. And it’d be weird to have all the light infantry on the right flank, so if the left flank doesn’t exist the deployment would also be pretty strange.
Our gracious host has pointed out before that it’s not unknown for armies to break before contact, so that seems the most likely thing to have happened here. Quite possibly they noped out of being on the receiving end of a charge by shock cavalry because they know how this story ends and didn’t feel like being a part of it.
The issue there is- did the Roman right really rout a force of chariots, then cavalry, then infantry, one after the other, while outnumbered? That’s rhetorical-that is precisely what happened, but nothing about the troops involved implies it as a natural result. We’re still back to saying that the forces involved were either bad, or truly mismanaged. Probably both lower in quality and with ineffectual leadership.
“but nothing about the troops involved implies it as a natural result”
Everything about the troops involved implies it as a natural result. Chariots are extremely obsolete and light infantry against legionaries is a massively unbalanced matchup.
One thing I’m curious about: how did harbor defenses work in the pre-gunpowder era. Like, the Seleucid fleet is defeated in battle by the Romans and retreats into their harbor. What stops the Romans from just sailing in, setting all their ships on fire, and sailing right back out?
Constantinople, at least, had a big chain that could be drawn across the Golden Horn to physically block enemy ships from entering. Even if such a contraption was unavailable, military harbours were generally protected by walls on the seaward side with only a narrow gap for ingress or egress, so any ships sailing in would be vulnerable to being picked off one by one, both by the surviving enemy warships and by archers and catapults mounted on the walls. Basically, assuming the defences were well-manned, entering a hostile harbour would be entering a big killing killing zone where you’d be attacked from all sides.
Ephesus was one of the best fortified Harbors in the world. The entire thing is an extreme ellipse flanked by a hill on one side, nearly completely closed from the outside world; it’s such an aberrantly extreme feature that nature reclaimed it multiple times by virtue. While it probably had a chain you could also defend it by virtue of sitting on the nearby hill or shore and shooting anything that tried to enter, or maybe just rolling large stones into the water. You could also use the protected forts that were often built on the egress. You aren’t getting in there without the permission of those on shore.
Summarizing the other comments:
1. Build a wall on the breakwater, so that invaders can’t land troops on it, and so that your archers can shoot down from them onto the decks of the ships.
2. Make the harbour entrance so small that warships can only go through it single file.
3. Put catapults or other siege weapons on towers next to the entrance.
You don’t actually have to provide enough firepower to sink a ship to prevent entry by opposing forces. As long as you have methods of seriously affecting a ship’s maneuverability (which the catapults can do, taking out the rudder, oars or sails), the captain will think twice about trying to enter through the narrow gap – if the ship can’t turn back around because of the catapult damage, the crew is helpless pickings for the archers, or the eventual boarders.
Going into and out of a harbor is inherently tricky in anything but the best conditions. Ships are quite good at continuing on present course. Changing course in a single anticipated maneuver is pretty straightforward and well practiced. Once you start needing to make a bunch of sudden reactions everything goes to hell in a handbasket because different people will be making interdependent estimations with a lot of uncertainty. Rowing instead of sailing helps but it’s not infrequent to see an novice rowing crew that botched a docking maneuver flail around for a bit trying to salvage things until the coxswain decides to just pull away and retry from scratch. (And a modern crew shell has wide open sight lines and is tiny compared to even the smallest warships.) Naturally ships entering or exiting harbor try to go very slowly and in deliberate predictable maneuvers, exactly what you don’t want to be doing during battle.
So there’s a lot of things that could go very wrong. You could make yourself an easy target for counter attack or even just crash or entangle your ship. That said, I wouldn’t call it so difficult to always be impractical. But it’s also worth considering that if you have the enemy bottled up in port you have other options at your disposal like fireships or sinking obstacles in the harbor.
As an aside, collegiate crew was probably more familiar to the classics scholars of 100 years ago compared to today (or the writers of antiquity). So earlier modern writers might have just considered these risks as self evident in a way that contemporary writers or even ancient historians wouldn’t have known.
Come to think of it, it would be fairly analogous to the steamship era. Steamships are easier to maneuver but early seamines and cannons make approaching hostile harbors more dangerous. So in both cases you end up with risk and reward to weight. Sometimes it’s worth saying “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!” but you’d need good reason.
There’s also a bit of a firepower issue. Ships are restricted in gun size and defensibility by virtue of having to float. Emplacements aren’t. In the ancient context this was even more true; the ballista we see on naval ships were comparitively anemic.
Plus if a ship catches fire it’s only got what water it can carry or pump to put it out, while a shore fort can be both made of primarily stone and supplied with extra manpower and water relatively easily, hence flaming projectiles being a real risk for fleets forcing defenses.
Consecutive failures of elephants remind me of that Hannibal 4chan greentext where he’s obsessed with elephants, keeps winning without them and losing with them xD
It sure seems that while Romans struggled against eles early on, they learned over a few decades to make them a weakness for the enemy instead of a strength. If eles panicking was a standard event, nobody would use them. It must have been exploited deliberately.
I’m kind of surprised by the understated role of Eumenes and Pergamon at the battle of Magnesia. By winning on their flank and then sending back reinforcement to save the roman’ camp that was under mortal threat even though the Legionaries’ good order had avoided a route. Even the Romans aknowledge his role! The Pergamese cavalry coming at the rescue of the legion is a scene that we can find depicted on roman pottery and other engraving. Pergame’ more than generous rewarding following the war is also proof that the Romans had greatly valued their ally overall contribution to the war.
I stress this point because if we remember, the Aetolians who had played a similar role in the previous war against Macedonia had been less handsomely rewarded than the Pergameses will be. As far as they were concerned, they had won Cynoscephalae: its the Elephants and the Aetolians who routed, scattered, and took the Macedonian camp. Apparently the Romans did not think so, resulting in a memorial conflict between the League and the Republic.
(I also stress here the role of the Elephants in a Roman victory since Elephantry is so often derided on this blog)
Ultimately this series does correctly pinpoint Rome real edge over all its competitors: it was an economic and demographic monster capable of sustaining losses none of the other Mediterranean powers could tolerate.
“what could Antiochus offer a subjected Carian or Cilician except a paycheck and a future of continued subjugation? That’s not much to die for.”
Eh. Not even getting into modern day controversy with American Samoans, Druze etc, we can look back at Sikhs, Gurkhas and other subjugated “martial races”.