Hey folks, fireside this week! Next week we’ll cap off our look at the Carthaginian army by covering some of the ‘odds and ends’ components (slingers, elephants), before looking at how that mixture of troop-types was employed in battle during the third century.
For this week’s musing, I figured I would answer a question that always come up in discussions of the Second Punic War: why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome? First it is worth noting this is hardly just a modern misconception – the idea that Hannibal ought to have just stormed Rome itself after Cannae shows up even in the ancient sources. But the answer to ‘why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome’ is that he couldn’t.
I want to address two different versions of that question, one which asks why he didn’t take Rome and one that asks if Hannibal should or could have taken Rome if he had siege equipment, reflecting an assumption that it was just Hannibal’s lack of siege equipment that prevented him from swiftly taking the city.
Let’s address the siege equipment side of the equation first: I think this assumes siege and defense technology more akin to warfare in the age of gunpowder where siege artillery both needed to be produced in advance (you can’t throw together cannon in a hurry) and then moved to the siege site and also where attempting to breach a fortress without cannon simply wasn’t going to work.
By contrast, the basic elements of siege warfare in antiquity are not catapults, but earthwork ramps, wooden towers and battering rams, all of which can be constructed on site out of local timber resources. Catapults – which in antiquity means torsion-powered catapults, not counter-weight or traction trebuchets – required more engineering expertise and preparation, but were often a ‘nice to have’ element of a siege, not a ‘must have.’ Catapults aren’t usually expected to breach walls, but rather to degrade them by smashing apart the crenelation (the zig-zag pattern that creates a protected fighting position on the top of the wall) or collapse towers.
That said, after Cannae, Hannibal has access to Capua and Tarentum – both of which revolted from the Romans in the aftermath of the battle. Between the two (and his soon alliance with Philip V), if Hannibal needed engineers who could build him torsion catapults, he can absolutely get them. His army is certainly also capable of building ladders, rams and towers, though again this would be done on site. In short, if Hannibal wanted to get siege equipment, he absolutely could.
Siege equipment isn’t the problem: logistics and geography are.
Rome is located along the Tiber at the meeting point of two regions: Latium (where the Latins live) to the south and Etruria (modern Tuscany, where the Etruscans live) to the north. Rome itself, in 216 is a walled city that hasn’t yet spilled well outside of its walls (as it will do in the two centuries following). It’s also not undefended: Roman recruitment focuses on relatively young men (from 17 to the late 20s), meaning that even after the disaster of Cannae, Rome does not lack 30- and 40-year old veterans able to take up arms to defend the city. Recall that the Roman dilectus normally only recruits iuniores (ages 17-46), but could recruit seniores (47+) in an emergency or to garrison the city itself against attack. So if Hannibal marches on Rome, he will find a walled city with a large garrison.
That means a long siege, even if he has siege equipment. Remember, catapults aren’t going to produce a breach quickly: their purpose is to degrade fortifications to enable escalade (attacking over the wall) using towers, ladders or – most reliably and frequently – an earthwork ramp (called a mole). If he attacks Rome (or any other large, fortified town) Hannibal is going to be stuck in place for quite a while.
And that’s a fatal problem, for reasons that have to do with that geography. Even after Cannae, none of the towns of Etruria or Latium have revolted from Rome. What that means is that the territory around Rome is studded over with Latin and Etruscan towns – functionally all of them walled. To march from the nearest major friendly settlement (Capua), Hannibal would have to bypass about a dozen fortified Latin towns, leaving them intact and hostile in his rear.
Which in turn has two obvious operational problems. The first is that the Romans can continue raising military force, so while Hannibal settles down to spend months besieging Rome, the Romans could be pulling together another massive army from their Italian socii, which would be forming up behind Hannibal. That in turn puts his smaller army in a really risky position and does so while he is effectively rooted to one spot and thus unable to maneuver. And that matters because Hannibal’s run of success up to this point has been in a large part predicated on his ability to maneuver and thus have the Romans engage him on ground of his choosing. By besieging Rome, he’d be allowing the Romans to dictate where and when their relief army challenged his siege and forced a pitched battle.
But there’s another even more immediate problem: logistics. Because the towns of Latium are fortified, Hannibal cannot access their grain stores without seizing them, which he cannot do without besieging them. The short of lightning campaigns of conquest that generals like Alexander III perform relied in no small part on cities like this ‘surrendering in advance,’ but the Latins and Etruscans had already refused to do this (and indeed, had also not done it when Pyrrhus actually did a lightning intimidation march on Rome back in 280; he couldn’t stop to besiege the city either).
Worse yet, with those cities garrisoned and untaken in his rear, Hannibal’s ability to forage supplies would be fatally hampered. If he tried to dispatch foraging parties – dispersing his already numerically inferior force – he would be vulnerable either to having his small foraging parties picked off by forces sortieing out of those Latin or Etruscan towns or, if he greatly enlarged his foraging party, to having his besieging force overwhelmed if the large Roman garrison sallied out.
In short, the presence of fortified Latin and Etruscan towns all around Rome, dominating the countryside and thus the agricultural supply base Hannibal needed for operations in the region, fatally complicated any effort to besiege Rome directly. In order to move against Rome directly, Hannibal would have needed to painstakingly besiege each Latin town in turn until he could open a clear supply route from Capua through to Rome.
In practice, what actually happens is that Hannibal first focuses on trying to secure his new ‘base’ in southern Italy and ends up basically playing whack-a-mole: Hannibal’s army could only be in one place, but the Romans could deploy multiple armies. Usually, one of these armies shadowed Hannibal to limit his foraging, contain his movements and frustrate his efforts to besiege settlements that remained loyal to Rome, while another army advanced the task of systematically reducing the communities that had revolted, besieging them one by one. Hannibal is able to win some victories in that struggle, but never to actually take the initiative and so he ends up slowly but steadily losing ground.
One of these days, I suppose, we ought to do a full run-through of the Second Punic War, because there is a lot more war happening then most casual students of ancient history generally realize. The Romans and Carthaginians (and their allies) are in any given year actively engaged in major operations in southern Italy (usually with more than one Roman army) and Spain, with supporting operations in Illyria (against Philip), Sicily (against Syracuse) and northern Italy (against the Cisalpine Gauls), all supported by naval operations (both sides have active fleets, although the Carthaginians make a clear choice not to directly challenge the Roman navy). So there’s a lot going on in most years that simply don’t get covered in treatments of the war unless they go really in-depth.
Fortunately, if you do want to untangle the first two Punic Wars, this week’s book recommendations will help you do so.
On to Recommendations.
I want to lead with L’Expérience Hoplitique, titled in English The Hoplite Experiment: about the routes in ancient Greece, a fascinating effort to simulate hoplite battle with reenactors at scale (200 to each side). Now I think it is worth noting up front that this sort of experimental approach is almost unavoidably wholly captive to its assumptions: these fellows aren’t in actual mortal peril (or even wearing armor) and so they are not responding organically to a threat environment: instead they are playing a role laid out by the organizers, so the results of the experiment will be to a very large degree controlled by the assumptions of those planners. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of value here, because of the ways such an experiment can reveal or demonstrate the emergent properties of those assumptions. In particular, the dynamics of the advance and the rout here – essentially experiments in crowd dynamics – are quite revealing. That said, I think the use of a more-or-less shoving othismos here (it appears only briefly because they were trying to study the rout) is a product of reenactors using blunts and I remain deeply unsure that real humans would really stay that close for that long under that much threat.
We also got a new Pasts Imperfect this week, which features an interesting essay by Matthew Vernon connecting the film Sinners (2025) with the medieval Old English epic Beowulf. I find I really like Vernon’s restrained but interesting argument here – not that Sinners adapts or even was inspired by Beowulf, but that the two stories are riffing off of the same themes of sin and the unknown, ‘how novel social arrangements emerge in times of terror’ and of course expressing that terror (in the real world the product of real humans) as monstrous outside forces. Humans being humans, we tend to return to similar stories to express similar anxieties, a reminder that we are connected by our humanity even when separated by gulfs of centuries.
Also worth noting in the same issue of Pasts Imperfect is the important story that the ACLS, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association were able to win a court case over the mass cancellation of grants at the NEH (the ‘DOGE’ing’ of the NEH, as it were). We’ve talked before about how small a portion of the federal budget the NEH represents, how meager humanities funding is and yet these cuts left pretty deep wounds in fields that are already struggling. Equally, PI includes one of the many videos to come out of the depositions for this case which are, collectively, remarkably revealing in just how vapid the DOGE’ing was, an exercise of raw power by individuals – most of them quite young and inexperienced – who did not understand much of anything about the programs and projects they were killing.
Finally, on a modern military topic, I want to highlight over at Secretary of Defense Rock (SODRock)’s History Does You, an essay, “Square Peg in a Round Hole: AirPower against Mobile Targets and Missiles: A Case Study of Operation Crossbow, Scud Hunting and Iran.” SODRock here makes the point that the failure to disable Iran’s missile arsenal – upwards of three-quarters of which remains intact, reportedly – actually fits into a broader pattern where mobile launch systems are simply extremely hard to target effectively from the air. Readers will, of course, know that I think that the sharp limits of airpower is a lesson that both military and civilian leadership need to take on board and have also largely failed to do so. Airpower remains seductive because it feels easy and safe, but it is also often ineffective. It is not an easy solution to use in place of the hard solutions of diplomacy or boots-on-the-ground.
On to this week’s book recommendation and here I have something of a two-fer for you all. I’m going to recommend what I think are the best two campaign histories of the Punic Wars, J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996) and J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: A Military History (1998). Both have been in-print for basically forever, so the volumes are affordable and it isn’t hard to find used copies floating around.
Now I feel like I need to be clear what these books are and what they are not. These really are campaign histories: the focus is on the movement of armies, the position, nature and outcome of battles and the overall strategic position. There is some broader thematic analysis – Lazenby is willing to critique Carthaginian strategy (unfairly, I’ve argued) and praise Roman strategy (fairly) and recognize the greater effectiveness of the Roman military system (also fair) – but this is not a ‘war-and-society’ approach, nor is Lazenby aiming to give the reader a description of the whole of the Roman or Carthaginian military system. Instead, both volumes are a ‘and then what happened…’ narrative of their respective wars. Generally, I think one might fairly critique these books as being, as we’d say, somewhat ‘under-theorized’ in that regard.
That may sound rather more negative than I intend, but I don’t mean it as such – I am simply pointing out what Lazenby has not attempted in these two books.
What Lazenby has attempted in these two books is to provide that clear, direct campaign history. That turns out to matter quite a lot because these are big, long wars with many moving parts. The First Punic War (264-241) lasts 23 years and is fought at sea and on land (on both Sicily and North Africa, with brief raids into Italy and Corsica and Sardinia), while the Second Punic War (218-201) runs a ‘mere’ 17 years and has fronts – often simultaneous fronts – in northern Italy, southern Italy, Spain, Sicily, North Africa, Corsica and Sardinia, Illyria and Greece. The sources for these wars are also complex: Polybius is great when you can get him, but he ‘cuts out’ (lost text) for much of the Second Punic War and even for the First Punic War where his full treatment survives, his narrative can be usefully supplemented by other sources (often very obscure other sources).
Lazenby takes all of that – the various fragmented, sometimes conflicting, scattered sources and the complexities of tracking operations in a bunch of different theaters – and forms it into a single narrative that lets the reader track the development of each war on a year-to-year basis. The ample notes also let the reader themselves quickly find the passages he is looking at to see why Lazenby makes the assessments he does. In this sense, I think the two Lazenby volumes provide the best foundation to then begin pushing into some of the more ‘thematic’ treatments of elements of the war, which often presuppose a basic knowledge of what happened, where and when. I will note that Lazenby’s prose is more than a little dry, but that can be its own virtue: he is generally quite clear, valuable when trying to keep track of a complex conflict with many moving parts.
I would also just throw in that Hannibal’s attempts to take Nola provide a pretty clear example even in the post Cannae zenith that his abilities to take a fortified settlement were pretty limited. At least if Livy is correct, he seemed to rely pretty heavily on people inside the town opening the gates for him, and when that failed to materialize, he didn’t really have a good backup answer. Rome would have been a much tougher nut to crack.
I do note that is, at least partially, just a matter of the technology at the time. Taking a walled city that didn’t want to be taken could often take time and effort no matter how good you were at it. Sometimes you’d get lucky and find an unguarded gate or succeed in a hasty assault, but usually you just wouldn’t and would have to sit down and do the siege for months.
“he seemed to rely pretty heavily on people inside the town opening the gates for him”
This is pretty much the case for almost every would-be conqueror before large-scale deployment of gunpowder weapons.
Between the defenses of walled places, the difficulty of keeping besiegers supplied, and the likelihood of relief, storming a place against resistance to the last seems not to happen very often.
Furthermore, since storming a resisting fortified city sucked for the attacker, the attacker was often willing to offer some sort of terms, and since both the storming of a resisting fortified city and the aftermath (murder, looting, rape etc) sucked for the city, the city was often but not always willing to accept some sort of terms.
A side question I wonder about is how well this sort of thing worked for those opening the gates in general. Did they usually get rewarded with a bucket of money or a prestigious position in the revised city government? Or did they get eventually murdered by ungrateful invaders or city people resenting their treachery? What was the balance?
Yeah, and I have further questions in the same vein. Before GPS you surely needed local guides; even today certain types of map data is a military secret. Wasn’t there a story about the Romans easily overrunning Greece partially because local shepherds were annoyed with current management, allowing the invading armies to outmaneuver local forces?
I wonder how this sort of recruitment worked. I am sure nabbing the first local you saw as a guide was easy enough, but you probably didn’t want to stake the lives of 20000 men on one guy who doesn’t speak your language and who may be dumb, malicious, or both.
@cptbutton, usually very well – it does an invader’s reputation no good at all to not keep their word. Offering a lot of money to open the gates was apparently the preferred siege technique of Phillip of Macedon, Alexander’s father; and was still around in the Crusades and medieval period.
There’s almost certainly someone who disagrees with whoever is currently in power. If they take the money they and their family get to live, they’re sparing their fellow citizens the horrors of a sack, … not too hard to justify. Even if the rest of the citizenry (it does seem more common for cities than castles) are so pissed off that you can’t stay as the new ruler with the backing of the besieger, you’re now rich and can afford to move somewhere else in comfort.
As to how you make contact, the besiegers can be quite open about it with proclamations, letters, etc. Someone inside will need to be more secretive, but the nights are very dark when you don’t have electricity, and there’s a lot of wall you can lurk around for an opportunity to toss / shoot / float out your own offer.
It depended very heavily on the openers, the ones in the city not in that class, and the invader.
Anywhere from “you get to march out and go somewhere else” to “gathered into the churches which are then barred and set fire to.”
They probably got rewarded, to encourage more traitors. Surely wouldn’t be trusted though.
Rome did it all the time, actually. So did other big empires; the mongols grew well capable of breaching a city. Sapping or a siege ramp were typical along with advanced siege engines to suppress the walls during the construction.
The key was that the large well organized states of antiquity had enough trained manpower to simultaneously dig fortifications, suppress the walls, and dig a ramp, finishing in days. When later medieval armies tried this it took them months, because they had less people, and were poorer and less knowledgeable.
It wasn’t entirely a matter of gunpowder (indeed, star forts les to a resurgence of sieges bring hard) but also state capacity. The mongols pulled off big state tactics all the time, as did China whenever it managed to pull together a unified state during this period, just as an example.
Rome did but it still took time: Numantia famously held out for months, Jerusalem took four months, Masada about a year, etc.
Even for the mongols Kaifeng took almost a year, they *do* have a bunch of quicker sieges but that often involves catching the enemy off-guard (or in some cases, managing to cut off a sallying garrison, like at Samarkand and Bukhara)
From this blog I learned that this capability also depended on the social structure. Greek generals had trouble conducting sieges because the citizens staffing them wanted to go back for harvest. Even if they could not vote a general out on the spot, pushing most of your voting population too hard might get you in trouble as soon as you go back to peace time.
This may be to blame for the forever war between Sparta and Athens – neither side could force its citizen soldiers to do years of hard labor completing a siege.
The first time the Romans won a war against a fortified city (don’t remember the name) was notable for the same reason. The Romans had to conduct a successful siege, which meant figuring out how to keep soldiers in the field yearlong instead of for just a couple months. Interestingly the Romans also used citizen armies, but they managed to do it anyway, unlike the Greeks.
This probably leads into the slow expansion of Rome into an empire, and the probably not coincidental change from citizen armies to professional soldiers. Militia are great when you’re defending a core territory, but it takes dedicated armies to extend in either range or time. Case in point: during the American War of Independence, although local militia could be important contributors, only the Continental Army had the mobility to engage or disengage with British forces at will.
Notably IIRC, at least in Livy, the siege of Veii is the catalyst for Rome to start to actually pay its soldiers, precisely for that reason. They’re expected to stay away for a long time and that means they have to be paid.
Not a military historian, but from what I know about econ history, it might just tie back to land inequality.
Every rural society has a lot of surplus population (for reasons our host has explained quite well), so the man of the house makes the harvest harder but not impossible. Women, teenagers and the elders can pull it off with some extra effort. In a system of small family landholding like the Roman one, the man being away means wearing ragged clothes a bit longer (because mom and grandma are busy harvesting and cannot weave), not famine.
In the much more unequal Greek system, where the average hoplite has enough land to do little work himself and just direct slaves or field hands, it also does not mean famine (for the landed class) but it could be a very significant economic loss. “The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands” after all. A huge part of pre-industrial econ history is basically just this: as field hands/slaves have no incentive to work harder than necessary (and sharecroppers only half the incentive), the efficient solution is either to redistribute property, make the sharecropper a renter (and thus a residual claimant of the harvest), or in many cases, just an elaborate and brutal system of overseers and delation to make effort observable and enforceable. Except that the average hoplite had enough land to have slaves/laborers, but not enough to have overseers. He was the overseer. So being sent home to supervise the harvest and properly motivate the laborers at a point of a whip could make the difference between maintaining his comfortable status or losing land one sluggish harvested harvest at the time
The attraction of “why didn’t Hannibal march on Rome” is because we know how it all played out.
If Hannibal knew he was going to lose in the end, I’m sure he would have marched on Rome. Why not take at least a chance at a knock-out blow if the alternative is how things actually went?
Even if Hannibal knew his course of action wouldn’t win after Cannae, he (or Carthage on the whole) had more choices than either marching on Rome or the current course of the war. Carthage could have fought Rome at sea. Hannibal could have focused on Cisalpine Gaul, beating Rome there enough to have a secure permanent base of operations from which to attack Italy, instead of whack-a-mole in southern Italy. Carthage could have tried something different in Spain and beaten Scipio there. There are probably many alternatives I don’t know enough to consider. Reducing a 17 year-war to just whether Hannibal tries to take Rome after Cannae reduces it too far.
AIUI it’s not even likely enough to work to make a reasonable gambit. There are so many veterans in Rome proper that the garrison alone would be able to outnumber his army if it made military sense to mobilize that many. The socii communities would be able to largely prevent foraging unless the foraging involved army detachments so large that the siege would be even further undermanned, and the detachments could plausibly be defeated in detail. The local human geography is friendly to Rome, so Rome and allies would have the advantage in knowing where the armies are.
Attempting to siege Rome under those conditions would be just a way to either kill some time, if Hannibal’s army withdrew before one of the above disasters manifested, or else a way to lose quickly. Maybe the appearance of besieging Rome would work as intimidation, but then withdrawing would do the opposite, and the only way intimidation turns into military victory is via a Latin or Etruscan revolt which enables extension of the siege.
My take is Hannibal would look elsewhere for gambits even if the grace of Baal suddenly granted him the conviction that he would definitely lose if he carried on his historical course of action.
How about some more patience? Carthaginian/Barcid military capacity was growing faster than Roman capacity, with the former’s warlordship over coastal Iberia. Just continue that for another decade or two, get warlordship over the inland Celtiberians and a good chunk of Transalpine Gaul. Only then start the war to drown Rome in gallic blood. Raise more armies than Rome can grind down. With some armies standing off the Roman armies, the others can siege down towns undisturbed; the several armies operating in proximity to each other would create a space where they could forage to their
hearts’bellies’ content. And they would need to forage severely indeed, to feed several armies in proximity to each other.Well, the Roman-Carthaginian treaty defined the Carthaginian sphere as being south of the Ebro in northern Spain, so there were limits to where Carthage could expand before the war would naturally “go hot”. Rome was already exceedingly cautious of the Gauls as a rule, Carthage expanding that way can be safely assumed to be deeply concerning for the Romans. They had the right to expand westward into the rest of Spain, but assuming they could do so-and that’s a big if, given the logistics-that’s basically it for Barcid style social takeover.
That leaves eastward expansion via alliances or takeover of Macedonian successor states, which wasn’t happening-even coordinating with a Macedonian successor to attack Rome was probably beyond the capabilities of either party, even ignoring all the other issues there.
The reason why Hannibal went “early” was that he needed to splinter off the Socii before they were fully integrated into Rome, and unfortunately for him that had already mostly happened *before* he attacked. It would take centuries for Rome’s political flaws to open their alliance up to fracture again, and Carthage simply didn’t have the time; it’s own alliance system was exceedingly fragile and likely wouldn’t survive the death of Hannibal. Almost certainly the Barcid fiefdoms would either secede or act as the nexus for a civil war to seize the state for a Barcid Monarchy, it’s really hard to imagine Carthaginian politics surviving a single noble family having a private army very nearly bigger than the states own forces, long term.
Hence if Hannibal goes north into Gaul or Spain Rome declares war because the Ebro treaty was violated. If Carthage expands west into Spain then waits its conquests likely splinter on Hannibals death, or Carthage falls into civil war.
Has aerial bombardment ever caused anyone to surrender? England, 1940? Nope. Germany, 1942-44? Nope. Possibly arguably Japan, 1945, but by then they had no conventional forces at all (and knew it) and were facing a vast surface invasion. It wasn’t even the nukes that inclined them to surrender. North Korea? North Vietnam? Both bombed to rubble and back, and did not surrender. Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? Yeah, no.
You might could make a case for the bombing of Rotterdam being what pushed the Dutch into surrendering after only four days in 1940 and the Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo.
Other than those, nada.
Rotterdam in 1940 was already being besieged by the German 9th Panzer division plus others, with some of the outer areas having already been captured. The Dutch didn’t surrender because it had been bombed, they surrendered because they couldn’t realistically hope to defend against further ground and air assault. (Wikipedia “German bombing of Rotterdam”) Like many air forces, the Luftwaffe took all the credit.
The Serbian withdrawal was a strategic loss for Serbia, but it was actually a better deal than that proposed by the Western alliance before the war. The pre-war proposal included Serbian withdrawal, but also free movement and basing of Western logistics of the interim Kosovo force inside Serbia proper. The war allowed Serbia to avoid that, which would have hampered its national sovereignity quite considerably – and Serbia was able to get a Russian contingent into the Kosovo force, which was a major advantage for them.
So, it is a case where the air war lead to a strategic victory, but the terms of peace were very much a result of negotiation.
Probably the greatest winner was China, who got the wreck of a stealth bomber as a result of the war for study.
Afghanistan is probably the best example and even that is questionable – it probably led to an armistice, but not to a surrender. See here for discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Anglo-Afghan_War#Importance_of_British_airpower
Also, this is a nitpick, but the name of the country is “the UK” or colloquially “Britain”. It’s made up of four nations – England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Please stop talking about “England in 1940”, “the King of England”, “the Prime Minister of England” and so on, when you mean “Britain” or “the UK”. Use “England” when you mean “the bit of Britain south of the Tweed and east of Offa’s Dyke, and not the other bits”. Charles III is King of England in the same way that Donald Trump is president of California.
@ajay,
Afghanistan is probably the best example and even that is questionable – it probably led to an armistice, but not to a surrender. See here for discussion
It also seems (if the Wikipedia article is reliable) that it’s kind of unclear who *won* the Third Anglo-Afghan War? Afghanistan did get back control of their foreign policy, in exchange for recognizing the modern Pakistan-Afghanistan border. So it certainly wouldn’t be a clear cut case of “airpower leading to victory”.
Yes, quite – airpower persuaded the Afghans to stop fighting and agree to an armistice, but that isn’t the same as it leading to victory.
Is there a difference in meaning between a sortie and a sally in pre modern warfare?
I don’t think so. I guess some people might assign slightly different shades of meaning (a sally being slightly smaller scale and more about surprise), but that’s the sort of nuance that different people add in different ways to what is functionally a pair of synonyms.
If you want to be really strict about it, it’s only sallying if you exit via a special side gate built specifically for launching sorties. In practice however, ‘to sally’ has idiomatic usage; it’s relatively normal for people to say ‘sally’ metaphorically even when the thing that’s only metaphorically sallying is literally a sortie.
This is exactly the sort of wonderful-yet-useless insight I come to a blog promising Unmitigated Pedantry to read and I would like you to know you are appreciated (in a “huh, neato, I guess” kind of way).
From looking at the related French verbs “saillir” (loosely, “to bulge”) and “sortir” (to exit), I would think that a sally is a push out from the base, while a sortie involves leaving and doing the thing somewhere away from the base. I’m not sure how much that actually holds up in usage as jargon, though, never mind usage by the general public.
I’m not sure if I would say it’s interesting, but in French the term sally is not really used anymore, it’s just sortie that’s used. Also I think sally is more likely to come the ‘leap out’ meaning of saillir (saillir has a few different meaning)
If Hannibal had besieged Rome, couldn’t he have built circumvallations to protect against socii relief forces and contravallations to protect against Roman sorties? Julius Caesar used this strategy many years later at Alesia, and it worked.
As i understand it, circumvallation is meant to prevent you from being raided or surprised from the rear, to slow any relief force down so your troops can turn and prepare to face the enemy. Against a drawn-out battle with an army highly-effective at fortress assaults, particularly given that the Romans can keep pulling more troops in, it just doesn’t seem possible for the Carthaginians to hold the entire length of the works, and keep the Romans in the city, long enough to capture Rome. And, of course, the Romans don’t need to assault him in that scenario—they have him surrounded, and his army cannot carry all that much food, nor can they forage while surrounded by the enemy. meanwhile, the romans are in their own territory and can arrange for regular food supply via their existing relationships with local authorities, so they could just starve him out.
In Alesia Caesar maintained a siege against attacks from within and without by two armies from his circumvallation, however he had more local resupply than Hannibal would have and the Gallic armies assailing him were significantly less sophisticated in terms of tactics and couldn’t as easily stress his logistics. Even then his supply situation was critical-it’s just that the Gauls were under even more stress and their morale broke first. It was, in fact, a bit of a Hail Mary pass of Caesar, and he was seriously risking his entire command being isolated and overwhelmed. Of course he won, but he could have gone the way of Crassius.
Hannibal was almost precisely in the opposite situation-he would have been building a local circumvallation against several determined enemies within and without, who outnumbered him, which had all the local grain supplies.
Victory for Hannibal after sieging Rome with a circumvallation would have required:
A. Successfully storming the city with either a hasty assault, some extremely unlikely siege tactic, or treachery before his own army starved or was overwhelmed-
B. Seizing Rome’s grain stores intact-
C. Leading his army away from the sacked Rome and defeating the local relief forces, potentially *while surrounded by them*-
D. Reducing *all* the local towns in turn, at least stretching back to Capua, in a series of similar sieges before his army starved.
If Caesar was making a Hail Mary pass, Hannibal would be relying on a Hail Mary pass, then an interception, another Hail Mary, and finally a series of flawless plays in overtime. We also know that Hannibal’s brilliance did not let him consistently pull off such upsets in sieges, because he’d lose the siege of Capua later in the war in almost identical situations, except with *him* in the best position for such actions (in charge of the force sieging the circumvallation, the position with the most initiative). His attempt to capture other Italian cities by treachery or hasty assaults would also fail, or succeed only partially at Tarentum where treachery worked but he failed to take the citadel and thus was operationally hampered for the rest of the war.
Oh, which brings us to E., Even if he manages to take Rome he needs to do such damage to it and the rest of Italia that he breaks the entire Roman alliances morale, so if he merely manages to loot the city or seize a district that’s insufficient. He cannot seize Rome like he did Tarentum, he needed to burn the entire city to ash, then do it again and again until Rome’s allies were broken or surrendered.
In essence, we have evidence that *every single part* of a theoretically successful siege on Rome would fail, from the initial assault, to relying on treachery, to siege tactics, to circumvallation, from other assaults of less well defended cities by Hannibal. And the one time it worked, Tarentum, he failed to take the citadel and thus was harried for the rest of the war. The idea that it’d work on Rome when it failed every other time can be dismissed as impractical.
And it’d still be the best move for Hannibal. Because it was the only option with a chance of victory, even if it was practically impossible.
Or Scipio loses in Spain and the Barcids use Spain as a base to form alliances in Gaul. Hasdrubal doesn’t lose and uses Cisalpine Gaul as a base to expand southwards. Meanwhile the Romans take a couple more campaign seasons to start their “avoid major battles with Hannibal but mop up everywhere else” strategy and suffer more massive defeats which pries a few more cities into siding with Carthage so Hannibal now has a sufficient base in Southern Italy to work his way northwards, eventually squeezing Rome from two directions (while the Roman setbacks embolden Carthage to confront Rome at sea, and this time they do it successfully). Not the likeliest course of events but also not insanely unlikely.
Well, we’re talking about what Hannibal could have done, not how Carthage could have won. You’re right though, put simply Hannibals theory of victory, while wrong, was much more rational. Hannibal wasn’t there to deliver a death blow alone, he was part of a larger campaign that relied on his force disrupting Roman action elsewhere.
What Hannibal could not have known was that his strategic position elsewhere was much more precarious than it seemed, because Rome hadn’t struck Carthage in all the other theaters yet. It hadn’t been revealed that his alliances were fragile.
To use an analogy Hannibal imagined his army in taly as the tip of a spear with the full weight of Carthage behind him. He didn’t need to deliver a killing blow, just get the tip in place for it to be driven home.
In truth it was a dagger, and all he had. He needed to get in close and try to deliver a killing blow, or else. But he had no way of knowing that the base of Carthage power was fragile.
Thanks. I see now why the Alesia operation would have had little chance of success.
Thank you for your explanation.
Does it make a difference that Rome lies on the Tiber and can be continually resupplied even during a siege?
It certainly complicates the matter of sieging a city.
Mostly it means that the siege works needs to include anti-river transit measures if you mean to starve the defenders. The classical technique was to put something in the water to limit traffic. Static harbor defenses typically use a chain, which can be raised or lowered to deny passage and thus doesn’t fully deny passage, but other solutions like a series of wooden pilings under the water line also existed. You could also simply shoot at any ships trying to cross with siege engines, which was typically enough to dissuade most boats. Or use fire, typically ignited via an oil or pitch based substance, to set any ships on fire as they approached. This was often delivered through the use of fire ships, river fortifications, or siege engines; to my knowledge this was favored more in Chinese warfare, where it shows up every few hundred years or so to frustrate attempts by some northern Chinese dynasty to cross the Yangtze and reunite China.
The Chinese loved their fire.
Carthage was well versed with many of these techniques to defend harbors and rivers, including the chain method-they had one at Carthage itself to protect their harbor. We can’t say what method would be best to siege Rome specifically, to my knowledge, but it’s almost certainly a moot point because Hannibals only real chance of taking Rome would have been if he either had an insanely lucky escalade over the walls or if traitors opened the gate. His supply situation was already so untenable that talking about how Rome could be resupplied by river is pointless.
You’ve done analysis of fantasy and science fiction, if you’re also into superheroes I’d be very interested in your analysis of options for national metahuman policy. 🙂
Hot take: the Star Wars prequels have the most sensible metahuman policy in pop culture.
A supervillain having all the superheroes murdered is a sensible policy?
He’s almost certainly referring to the Jedi council, a politically neutral government organization and peacekeeping force whose primary peacetime roles are investigation, training and policing force sensitives, diplomacy, and philosophy.
The main flaw of the Jedi council and Republic as a whole was insufficient oversight of the Jedi and republics political elite, a flaw arising from the idealogical and structural flaws of the Jedi code and Republic government. In particular the Jedi order *could not* serve a military role, but it also couldn’t survive without the Republic, and the order membership clearly had personal connections in the capital which eventually acted as a fracture point. It was forced into a military role and from there corrupted as the idealogical flaws of its pacifism were made clear. Meanwhile the backroom connections between NGOs, political parties and dynasties, the administrative elements of the order and Republic, and Jedi council members themselves led to a civil war.
In truth Palpatine won when he became councilor and convinced the Jedi to lead his armies, so long as it’s not clear he started the war. All he has to do is reveal himself to be a Sith and let the Jedi arrive to murder him. There’s no indication being a Sith is actually illegal, and regardless it’s only a *philosophy*, and the Jedi were there to kill him for following it. Hence it doesn’t matter if Anakin intervenes or the purge happens, the highest ranking member of the order on coruscant had just *attempted to murder the Republics head of state*, over a religious disagreement. The Republic and order were going to fracture into chaos. If anything the purge was a mercy, because it retroactively justified Mace Windus attempted assassination. The reality where Sideous dies is actually *more lethal* to the Jedi as an idealogy.
There was no way out once the head of the Republic was a sith and the Jedi were generals. They were inherently trapped in a political and militaristic position, idealogically prohibited from intervention yet required to intervene to maintain their institution. Their philosophy was doomed.
But it’s still an unimaginably better baseline system for handling metahumans who can very easily dominate others than basically anything else in fiction. Remove them from politics, use them to maintain stability, discourage ambitions and connections that might lead to them taking political power, and back this up with an idealogical philosophy which you educate the metahumans in from a young age.
I congratulate you on a nuanced and well-argued take on the Jedi Order and their relationship with the Republic.
Fun read and broadly agree.
Explained it better than I could myself!
Regarding the collapse of the Jedi, I’d analogise it to civilian control of the military. The great virtue of the Jedi Order is that it’s incorporated into the wider political system and subordinated to legitimate authority.
Unfortunately there’s no good answer to “what do you do when the legitimate authorities ‘go bad’?” The textbook civil-military theory answer is “refuse to obey unlawful orders and resign if necessary”, but that doesn’t resolve the situation. Especially not if the ‘bad’ civilian leadership has firm control of other institutions and/or supporters within the military
No good answers there unfortunately. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
“Unfortunately there’s no good answer to “what do you do when the legitimate authorities ‘go bad’?”
Well, if the Senate appoints and dismisses the Chancellor, the ultimate authority is the Senate, not Palpatine. The question is: can you persuade them to replace him?
That is harder in a Presidential system where the President has a fixed term of office, but the Republic appears to have a Parliamentary system where the Chancellor has his office only for as long as the Senate wishes it.
And as the backstory canon holds, it was the Senate itself that had gone very bad. Either incompetent, impotent or outright corrupt. Having Jar-Jar Binks become a senator who helped grant Palpatine expanded war powers, was meant to show us everything we needed to know about the Senate. Amidala and the Organas were a minority helpless to stem the tide.
The solution Lucas/Star wars seems to have settled on was to remove the Jedi from the Republic. Instead of an integrated institution they became an independent NGO, organized on the periphery. The downside would be lesser control, with more idealogical diversity including the potential of new sith wannabes to arise, but the upside is that compromising one institution doesn’t compromise all of them. If your concern is primarily preventing a lunatic from using state resources to destroy entire civilian populations this is a the best solution; weaken state capacity! Why do you need such a strong state anyway?
Decentralization, in other words. Multiple watchers watching each other.
Of course the legendarium shows that in the absence of a centralized Jedi authority there absolutely were all sorts of weird dark side freaks showing up and doing bizarre crimes against the natural order, so it’s an imperfect solution.
Policy depends heavily on the details of what metahumans can and cannot do.
OGH has done analysis of specific F&SF settings and things within those settings. Note they’re usually pretty well defined ones, Battlestar Galactica being probably the least well-defined one.
OGH?
Our generous host 🙂
And yeah, not an ideal acronym if you’re used to it meaning something completely different (I can relate), but what the heyhey xD
Oh right, of course. And here I was thinking there’s some other blog that regularly runs analysis and setting breakdowns on Science fiction and fantasy works that I’ve yet to hear about.
Our Gentle Host, a term which I guess has gone out of fashion.
These firesides are getting as long the “real” blog entries!
For those interested in taking a look at these books before consulting their local bookstore, they are found on the Internet Archive at:
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22J.+F.+Lazenby%22
I found out yesterday that I’m going to have to put down my cat. Hug Percy and Ollie from me and treasure every moment with them.
Condolences. I dread losing our aging cat to the Rainbow Road. Treasure them always.
I wonder to what extend Hannibal’s barrier to besieging Rome (or any other city) was also a lack of siege/assault mentality among his troops. With which I mean, his new ex-socii allies might be able to teach his troops how to build a catapult or how to make a ramp up a wall, but will the troops be willing to do that, standing in bowshot of the city walls with nothing but a shovel? A lot of his troops are after all from pre-state societies who don’t really do sieges or assaults, but mostly raids, and who might react to orders to go and dig trenches the same way the Finnish army did during WWII: Doing it listlessly and haphazardly because they can’t see it as important for warfare.
Although of course that has to be tempered with the reminder that this is Hannibal, who is a genius general and gets his troops to do many things they’re not used to.
“…but will the troops be willing to do that, standing in bowshot of the city walls with nothing but a shovel?”
Did besieging armies not defend the troops building the ramps? It would be easy to build shielding–even mobile shielding–to protect them. They may balk at doing work (see Sparta), but the danger would be fairly minimal. It’s the labor that would be the issue.
I’d love to have a post on how that process actually works. I’ve visited Masada and seen the Roman siege ramp there and it’s quite impressive even two millennia later. Maybe it’s very pedestrian – a siege ramp is basically just a pile of dirt and rocks, after all, it seems hard to do much of anything to it from afar without explosives – but it’d be interesting to hear how armies protected the people building it during the process. Especially those last few meters getting it to the top of the wall in closest reach of the defenders.
The 1981 ABC miniseries depicted the Romans using Judean forced labor to build it, and the controversy among the defenders whether to fire upon their own countrymen or not. Historicity, I dunno.
That sounds like the kind of thing Hollywood does to make things dramatic. Lots of siege ramps were built in lots of sieges throughout history, and it wouldn’t be possible to always build them using forced labor the defenders would be reluctant to shoot arrows at.
That is almost certainly complete nonsense, because the Sicarri had just massacred 700 Jewish women and children earlier in the war during a foraging raid. The Sicarri were absolutely willing to kill their own countrymen.
This is also one of those accounts which one needs to be *incredibly* wary of in popular discourse, because Israel has basically made an entire mythos around the Masada defenders.
For an example, some Zionists will gleefully point to the mass suicide of the defenders as an act of valor, despite contradictory archeological evidence that casts doubt on it ever occurring, then say there’s no archeological evidence that the Sicarri attacked any Jews. This means ignoring that the same sources that describe their massacre of women and children are our only sources for their mass suicide.
Basically, there’s a lot of blatantly two-faced accounting going on here.
Also, the archeological expedition to the site was performed by the IDF (well, one degree of separation, the main archeologist was *no longer* the IDF chief of staff), and they were responsible for much of the initial mythmaking. That archeologist would late become a major political leader for a few years. A later chief of staff normalized an elaborate swearing in ritual on the ruins. It would be unseemly to go on a tangent about *why* the political and military leadership in the state of Israel felt the need to glorify a mass suicide by violent extremists while laundering their massacre of women and children, but keep in mind that they did and do.
If they didn’t sally it’s because they either couldn’t or choose not to. Our sources are bad enough (and contradict the archeology enough) that we can’t really say one way or another.
Bret goes into it in his Fortification series: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/
There’s both passive defense (the venerable mantlet as arrow-catcher deployed in front of the workers) and active defense: Troops in gear patrolling to catch sorties, catapults degrading crenelations, archers on siege towers firing onto archers trying to shoot at the workers. We can assume that as the ramp goes higher and reaches those last few meters, the amount of suppression applied by the attacker increases. The whole army will be nearby at that point anyway because they’ll be using the ramp to get into the city in a minute, so there’s lots of people around who can shoot a bow or sling some stones.
Of course they did, they weren’t stupid. A well-organized army could bring or build a lot of tools to defend their siege projects. Just like you say, my question is more about whether Hannibal might have problems motivating and organizing his troops to accept the inglorious task of shovelling dirt to build a ramp, not about whether he could protect them while doing so.
This seems unnecessarily hostile.
It doesn’t require stupidity to not defend the folks digging the ramp. It can happen for a number of reasons–lack of material, cultural pressures, even who builds the ramp. There are plenty of situations where having groups of people killed off isn’t necessarily bad for your side–for example, if you captured a bunch of enemy soldiers and have THEM building the ramp, maybe you’re okay with taking a bunch of casualties. Or if they’re slaves, you may not care (I acknowledge that slavery is complex in the past). If the enemy practiced a burned earth policy to deny the besieging army supplies it may not be possible to build protections–and would say something about the defending city’s cohesion and availability of armies to encircle the besieging army.
There are also other ways to deal with these sorts of situations. Starting the ramp far enough out that you don’t need to worry about arrows, for example–it would be intimidating, and if the enemy surrenders before your ramp gets within bowshot you don’t need to expose your people. Or working at times when the enemy can’t effectively shoot at you (at night). Or maintaining enough pressure in another quarter that the enemy simply can’t amass enough people to shoot at your ramp-builders to make a difference. Or knocking down the crenulations first so the archers don’t have a good spot to shoot from. Do a combination of these and suddenly shooting your ramp builders doesn’t seem a smart idea anymore! Remember, the goal isn’t to build a ramp and storm the city. It’s to capture the city somehow, with the ramp being part of that “somehow”. There’s a lot more going on in a siege than just ramp building.
For that matter, building a ramp may not be necessary. It may be enough to simply arrive at the walls–if the besieged know they’re going to lose, maybe just starting to build the ramp and set up shop would be enough to cause the defenders to sue for terms. That’s hardly far-fetched–it’s the whole point of Rome’s policy for how to treat cities defeated in siege, after all. If you know you don’t need to do something for long you can take a few casualties while doing it.
If Hannibal is doing one or more of these things, that’s an interesting story worth telling and says something about his abilities as a general.
I apologize if it seems I wasn’t thinking of these things. It was an off the cuff question, not a detailed analysis.
Sorry if I came across as hostile, I was a bit misleadingly snippy in my initial post. I do think we’re roughly on the same page, in terms of position and the question of Hannibal’s abilities.
However I don’t think your scenario of using forced labour and not protecting it is very plausible, for several reasons. The first and foremost: It sound like a good recipe for a slave revolt. If you put captives into a position where their choices are “Do as your tormentor says and get killed by a defender’s arrow” and “Refuse to obey the order and get killed for disobedience”, they might just take decide to roll the dice on “Try to escape even if it means they’ll kill you if you get captured”.
In general, forced labourers have (for obvious reasons) low morale and cohesion, which makes them a bad choice for wanting to get a mission-critical, highly dangerous project done quickly. It’s hard to imagine they’d be more motivated to do the work than the army around them, even if the army disdains shovelwork for societal reasons.
And I doubt many armies had large enough contingents of prisoners or slaves to delegate this work to (and you do need a lot of them so you can work in shifts). Non-combatants in general were a logistical burden that a canny general reduced as much as possible. Potential saboteurs draining valuable army manpower to guard them? Very much first on the list of things to get rid of, and doubly so in a siege situation where you’re at the edge of the logistical limit even in the best of cases.
Given the numerous problems that arise with the idea of Hannibal besieging Rome (he’d be surrounded by socii still allied to the Romans, Rome would be garrisoned against him by highly motivated veterans, his supply lines would be chopped into mincemeat, et cetera), I don’t think “lack of mentality among the troops” was really the problem. He had quite significant numbers of soldiers from societies that absolutely did understand siege warfare and state hierarchies, and access to cities within Italy that had rebelled against Rome. Even with a very “siege-minded” army, he’d still be up against a very bad supply situation and facing a larger force while bogged down besieging the city.
I’m fully aware of that, and my question is less about Rome and more about the other fortified towns in Italy. As other commenters have pointed out, Hannibal’s not very good success rate with sieges left him with operational troubles even the notionally now under his control parts of Italy.
I mean, given the fact that the war started with a fairly lengthy siege and then assault of Saguntum, this seems…. unlikely.
Has a bit of the same energy as “Don’t siege Stalingrad, take it immediately.” (Lacking some of the immediately obvious political valences perhaps…)
Now I’m curious, could Carthage go full Fabian and stall Scipio instead of going to Zama.
The Fabian strategy is
– they have one general who’s better than any of ours, let’s not engage him
– but we have more manpower, we can simply keep that one general busy without engaging while engaging anywhere he isn’t
In Carthage’s position, this would turn into
– they have lots of generals who are better than ours except one, let’s not engage them
– they have more manpower, so we can not actually keep them all busy and there’ll always be some of them who are free to move where they want and besiege cities we cannot afford to lose
I’m sure you can spot the problem with Carthage trying to apply the concept.
The Fabian strategy wasn’t a stroke of genius. It was an admission of incompetence and a desperation move (giving up a chunk of Italy for over a decade) that Rome could afford only because it could mobilise more manpower than Carthage. It’s not actually possible to pull off with inferior numbers.
Lazenby may be dry, but sometimes that works; “The Romans Wash Their Hands in the Sea” is one of the great chapter titles, up there with “50 Ways to Feel Your Pudor”.
Are you going to do a piece on Thucydides’ Trap and its relevance today?
For what it’s worth, Dr. Devereaux’s fellow “BlueSky milhistory/IR” writer just wrote a piece suggesting that premise is conceptually flawed.
https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/the-thucydides-trap-myth
Actually, my bad; that piece is 1.5 years old, and simply got linked recently. This here is the piece which was actually written directly in response to the recent meeting. (One should really read both of them.)
https://hegemon.substack.com/p/chinas-favorite-american-idea
There’s this https://acoup.blog/2019/12/05/collections-a-trip-through-thucydides-fear-honor-and-interest/
And this, recommended in another Fireside a couple of years ago
https://pasts-imperfect.ghost.io/pasts-imperfect-71025/
Remember how, after World War 1 exhausted Britain, the US started overtaking it — especially in naval power — and therefore in the late 1920s, World War 2 broke out between the US and Britain? No? That’s because people had realized (after just a single instance, WW1 itself) that a war like that would be really bad even for the winner, and so they got the relevant parties (these two plus Japan, France, and Italy) together and created the Washington Naval Treaty.
Two thoughts: First–
This is a point that needs highlighting in discussions of citizen militia: that while it is the under-30 youth which predominate offensive and projected military operations, static defense is much kinder to the older but still fit, who if not required to be able to march 25 kilometers every day for weeks can remain militarily significant.
Second–
This reminded me of how in the Napoleonic Wars the allied forces adopted a strategy put forward by Gebhard von Blucher, of not trying to engage and smash Napoleon’s main force in a decisive battle but to have multiple forces positioned so that whichever one Napoleon engaged could fall back while the others could attack the French army’s flanks. In effect, don’t try to fight a military genius on his own terms. Would you say that this is a fair comparison?
But Revolutionary/Imperial France had a huge manpower reserve. In the Second Punic War Rome had greater manpower reserves than Carthage, so Rome could send out multiple armies and put more soldiers in the field than Carthage. I don’t believe this is true for Napoleon v. Pick your Coalition. Because the French Revolution tapped more of the population for service than other European powers Napoleon could match the numbers of all his foes. And Napoleonic France was not like later Rome or Tang China where a general could lead his army to take over France. So spreading out the Coalition forces and forcing Napoleon to respond in kind, assuming Austria, Prussia or Russia could do that, doesn’t seem to be the magical way to defeat Napoleon. Napoleon would beat whichever army he faces, and France’s other armies could at least stalemate until Napoleon brought his attention to the remaining theatres.
>But Revolutionary/Imperial France had a huge manpower reserve.
Not in 1812/13. It was thoroughly outnumbered by the coalition forces, hence the 6th coalition winning despite Napoleon’s best efforts.
And it was the 6th coalition that put this strategy in place.
But the Trachenberg Plan (which was not Blucher’s) was developed specifically to deal with multiple armies, not just one. And its success in defeating Napoleon was preconditioned on his catastrophic losses in Russia, which allowed the Sixth Coalition to overmatch his forces.
The Roman plan is also about fighting multiple armies, which is why the analogy was made. Hannibal is avoided, but Romans armies seek fights with other Carthaginian armies (Spain, Southern Italy where Hanibal isn’t, Sicily, Gauls, etc.) So on the surface, there is a clear analogy.
Would the Socii remain loyal to Rome if Rome was under siege? Rome in this scenario can’t do anything to credibly threaten them in the near term for defecting.
Some? Probably?
Also have to remember that Roman citizens weren’t limited to Rome. Italy was dotted with Roman colonies, which can maintain ties with Socii and raise armies themselves.
Read the previous two weeks’ posts. Or better, read either Fronda’s dissertation or the book that expanded upon it. The problem here is that the politics of Italy wasn’t just Rome vs. everyone else, it was also smaller cities or communities vs. local hegemons where Rome played protector for the former against the latter. If a Latin or Etrurian city felt strong enough to break away from Rome with Hannibal’s aid, its weaker neighbours could have felt more threatened by that than by Rome’s more distant hegemony and would then drift closer to Rome instead in order to protect themselves against the local hegemon.
Yep. And Rome was not a bad distant hegemon. In the days of Punic wars, it did not require you to pay taxes, and it didn’t mess with your internal laws, customs and hierarchies. The only thing it wanted was manpower for wars (which you were accustomed to wage anyhow) and for your city to avoid any private wars. And your soldiers shared equally in the loot. So, it was not something you would really want to get rid of that much. On the other hand, the Romans had a really nasty reputation about dealing very harshly with disloyal allies.
“both sides have active fleets, although the Carthaginians make a clear choice not to directly challenge the Roman navy”
This is the bit I find odd. Italy, Iberia and North Africa are separated by the Western Mediterranean. On the face of it a war between the three is sure to dominated by control of that sea. It would take a near-miracle for Carthage to win with the Romans controlling it. So why were the Carthaginians not fighting for it?
Especially strange when so many people describe Carthage as a primarily naval power.
Perhaps because Carthage had tried that in the 1st Punic War, and it hadn’t worked? The Romans had managed to outbuild and outfight Carthage at sea, and now had full control over Sicily and Sardinia. Carthage would have to reconquer at least one of those, probably both, before they could launch and sustain a seaborne invasion of Italy.
If a primarily naval power cannot win at sea against a primarily land power, I do not see why we should expect it to win on land. Surely they could at least try to prevent a seaborne invasion of Iberia?
Has anyone done a seaborne invasion of Iberia starting from Italy? Just walking through coastal Transalpine Gaul is so much easier, more or less everyone chose that option, no?
Well, according to wikipedia, the sea is how the Romans sent an army from Italy to Iberia at the beginning of the war. Hannibal might have been the only person in the war to lead an invasion entirely by land.
It’s harder than it seems to just find and intercept an enemy fleet. Especially before modern stuff like radar (or even spyglasses!) it’s somewhat easier because navies like to hug the coast, but it’s still not as easy as it seems to keep someone from slipping through.
“It’s harder than it seems to just find and intercept an enemy fleet.”
Yes indeed. That’s one reason why virtually every famous naval battle happens within sight of land (which is handy, because it gives you something to name the battle after) – it means you’re operating in confined waters so it’s easier to find the enemy. Exceptions: Midway, the Glorious First of June, and I suppose the Atlantic convoy battles if you count those.
The other reason is, of course, that most naval battles are fought to affect events on land, and it’s easier to affect land that you’re close to.
And yet the Roman and Carthaginian fleets seem to have found each other often enough in the previous Punic War.
Because they were all fighting around Sicily or North Africa; the operational theatre was basically a ring around Sicily. In fact more than half the battles occurred in a line between Lilybaeum and Messana.
Of course this occurred because navies were generally logistically constrained enough that they needed to operate near fresh water. Iirc the navy would become more logistically sophisticated during the empire, but a lot of the innovations that allowed for long ocean voyages were distinctly early modern. This didn’t preclude moving an army through the center of the Mediterranean, but it meant it wasn’t doctrine, but an exceptional operation, significantly increasing the chance that hostile fleets find each other.
Notably, Scipio reached Spain by jumping between friendly city states in gaul.
The bigger reason Carthage didn’t dispatch their fleet was that they would have needed to leave carthage vulnerable to send a fleet to Spain. Otherwise Sicily would have acted as a launching point for Carthage. Which it did.
In fact the entire geography of the region grossly complicated Carthage sending it’s fleet out, once they lost their island bases. If they maintained sardina and corsica you can use these bases to resupply and reach a fleet following the coast of Gaul to reach Spain, or launch from them to intercept a fleet moving towards Carthage from Sicily. Without them you have no strategic reach. Hence why Rome was convinced the war would occur *on those islands* before Hannibal invaded.
“Hence why Rome was convinced the war would occur *on those islands* before Hannibal invaded.”
It is certainly what I would expect. Abandoning them means leaving Rome in control of the Western Mediterranean, which would seem to guarantee eventual Roman victory.
How did Rome´s fortification system work, and what were its failure conditions?
The idea of Rome´s defensibility described above was:
1) Rome had fortifications (Servian Wall) that hampered quickly storming the city
2) Inside the walls were substantial numbers of men able and willing to defend the city – the middle aged veterans who were not in field army nor in garrisons of outer fortresses, but capable of defending the walls and also sallying out against an army trying to set out siege camp or to forage outside.
3) Around Rome were fortified cities of Latium and Tuscany, that could also not be stormed quickly because of 1) and 2)
4) Bulk storage of harvests was inside fortified cities
5) A besieging army trying to forage in countryside would be inefficient because of 2) sallies hampering the foraging and 4) because granaries were not in villages
6) None of the fortified cities was going to defect
So this is supposed to have stopped Pyrrhos in 280-279 and Hannibal 216-211?
Because in the following centuries, Rome looks to have been indefensible:
1) 88 – Sulla took the city by coup
2) 87 – the only actual siege of Rome, ever. Octavius starved quickly, and Cinna won. How did Cinna and Pompeius Strabo supply their armies?
3) Spring 82 – Sulla was able to capture Rome while busy besieging Marius in Praeneste
4) November 82 – Samnites attacked the Colline Gate for a few hours or less before Sulla´s relief army arrived and ended up winning
5) January 49 – Pompeius may have stamped his foot, but defenders did not appear and Caesar took undefended Rome
6) August 43 – Octavius captured Rome without serious defence
7) December 69 AD – Vitellius did not make a stiff defence of the city
8) Summer 193 AD – neither did Didius Julianus
So… why did defences of Rome prove worthless a century after Hannibal? Did Sulla and Cinna prove Rome to have been a paper tiger in the first place?
There is a big difference between a civil war context and a foreign conquerer and even the Socii war in a lot of ways leans the former. Cohesion within the city and with surrounding communities will be much less (Rome gradually expanding outside the walls doesn’t help either). Even the 87 siege you mention wasn’t really a classic siege in its dynamics Its not universal, but a norm against urban fighting and sieges and for field combat in civil war is hardly uncommon either. Constantinople/Istanbul is famous for resisting sieges and rightfully so, but there are many times its ruler fell victim to a general marching on the city. Rome was not some remarkable stronghold, but it had walls and the population to man them and little reason to doubt the Romans would have had the will to defend it. As we see in the Third Punic War, subduing a city with a population in the hundreds of thousands can be a pain.
I wonder what kind of non-lethal equipment could be used to make a hoplite battle more realistic in its dynamic. Tasers on sticks?
Pay the reenactors, but withhold payment to the casualties?
They have done that to test air crash evacuation, I’ve heard (Which Frank may know about, or some equivalent),giving a large prize for surviving (however it is measured), would likely do the job.
Though you probably would need a prize for “the team that wins the battle” as well, and possibly for kills or “actually tried to fight well”to stop the reenactors from just staying back and not fighting. Which also simulates battle pressures, there’s the desire to avoid dying but also whatever social + money + other pressures to take the risk of dying.
Maybe you use a big prize to the winning team, and volunteers who are already part of a closely bonded social group, so there’s strong pressure not to let your side down. You could recruit amateur sports teams – though they might not be big enough. Or infantry battalions!
Those kind of thing could work.
Except it would run into another of our host perpetual problems : funding for the humanities.
Payment for a few hundreds peoples, reiterated over a dozen iteration would quickly add up.
And french researcher are most of the times poorer than the American one to begin with.
I remember reading about tests of “The Ultimatum Game”* were done with taxi drivers in some poor country where a few hundred dollars was really big money for them.
* Person A proposes how to split X$ with person B, Person B says yes (split used) or says no (neither gets anything.)
Sure, but buying a few hundred people dinner is probably cheaper than either a few hundred tasers or the insane liability insurance for tasing a few hundred people, on top of not requiring a detailed presentation to the ethics committee.
I also suspect the 400 re-enactors are already being paid, so you would actually save money by not paying the casualties.
Sure, using tasers or any of those kind of idea would have been far more expensive.
But you are still underestimating how poor those kind of project are in europe.
It is explained at the end, during the thanks.
None of the re-enactor where paid, in fact it was the other way around. They where paying to be there.
Or at least advancing the money for food, drinks and tools,until the scientific team could muster some financing to pay them back.
It is maddening that something that was such a common human experience across the world – mass close combat with edged weapons – died out so suddenly just as we were developing the technology that would make it possible to record what it was like, and we’re left with the equivalent of the Polish dictionary that had the entry “Horse: everyone knows what a horse is”.
At least the Polish encyclopedia did us the courtesy of actually telling us what is a horse anyway despite everyone knowing what a horse is.
That said, as celluloid film was literally made of low explosives, I find it difficult to imagine a world with video recording but no firearms…
I have a heart condition; that would kill me.
Reenactors are a good option. Understand that cohesion is going to be RIDICULOUSLY high in reenactment battles–we know we are unlikely to actually die, so we’ll do stupid things like stand and take 50% casualties. Maybe have a counter where at 10% your side loses? I know when I was in the Midrealm the crown had us run through a variety of scenarios to test effectiveness of various tactics and train us to actually do them.
I’ve heard that the SCA used to fight against (may still do) police in riot practices in some places. Ealdormere is where I heard they were doing it. The police need something realistic, and the SCA is happy to bash on and be bashed on by people with shields and big sticks. It can lead to some problems–give a polearmsman a big stick and he uses it like a polearm, which, against unarmored opponents, can be VERY dangerous even if the stick is blunt. But the police appreciate the chance to train in a situation where there’s enough actual risk to make it a good test, but not enough that they have to have a mortician onsite.
The real problem to my mind isn’t lethal damage, it’s non-lethal damage. We can simulate killing someone easy enough. Simulating injuring someone is tricky. There’s a world of difference between pretending to be injured and “Isn’t that bone supposed to be inside me?” situations. The visceral impact of seeing a colleague–someone you’ve trained with, eaten with, worked with, someone you call brother–incapacitated is not something you can simulate. And there’d be a LOT of that in an ancient battle. Roman senators were said to frequently display their wounds as evidence of their devotion to Rome, and there are also plenty of stories of men weeping over the wounds of their comrades in arms. You can’t simulate that, and that’s going to have a PROFOUND impact on the ability for fighters to stand together.
My big area of curiosity about the Second Punic War is: how did the Romans manage to go from having no navy to defeating probably the top Mediterranean naval power at sea? This might be an obvious one to classicists but I have minimal knowledge on the topic.
This is more of a First Punic War question and we might visit it in the future.
I cannot speak for others, but I would certainly like to second Eowyn.
Please do. I understand that Rome was really, really good at making a huge proportion of its population available for war and outfitting its people (or getting its people to outfit themselves). But building a huge navy seems like an economic mobilization. How was the Roman Republic so good at tapping into the wealth of its people. Purely on wealth available to build a navy the Ptolemies or Seleucids should have been able to build more ships than the Romans.
Yay! I would love that!
I believe this is mentioned in an episode of the Ancient History 101 podcast:
https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/ancient-history-101
At least initially the Romans relied heavily upon the corvus: the deployable boarding bridge that allowed them to turn battle at sea into an infantry action rather than primarily a battle of naval maneuver.
I am looking for a book I have seen recommended before but cannot recall the name of or find online. It was a ground-level view of what life was like in a medieval mercenary company. It might be The War People, though that’s early modern. Are there any other books that would fit that description?
The Peel Affinity?
While it’s fun to speculate on how Carthage might have in some sense not lost the Punic wars, given the strong possibility that they practiced child sacrifice, perhaps we should be happy the Romans won.
Recently discovered your blog and am blown away by the quality and content. Thank you for your work! I have been working my way through the posts linked in the resources for teachers and worldbuilders sections of the website, but saw that they were last updated in 2022. Are you considering doing an updated list adding some of the newer posts which you have published since then?