Download ROME Quotes - RedfieldAncient

Aristotle of Carthaginian government: “a democracy inclining towards oligarchy”
Dodge
 Numidian cavalry “ranked among the best of light horse”
 Pilums were made so that “the could catch an enemy’s shield and pull it off
his arm.

Timeline: Hannibal: The military biography of Rome’s greatest enemy (Richard
Gabriel)
 On ancient Roman interpretations of Hannibal. “An analysis of thirty-seven
Roman authors who offered a total of sixty sneering derogatory treatments
of Hannibal without a single positive treatment.”
 Roman treatments of Hannibal are antagonistic, inaccurate in important
details, and propagandistic, and almost every account of Hannibal’s sins
contains evidence of its refutation.”
 “That Hannibal’s family members were powerful aristocrats can be further
assumed from the fact that the Carthaginian Senate entrusted the military
command in Siciliy to Hamilcar in 247 BC.”
 “Observing his father’s military command of men in battle, of course, was
central to Hannibal’s military training.”
 “The strident Roman slur that Hannibal was cruel in his dealings with
prisoners and civilians is mostly false.”
Livy
 “For three years Hannibal served under Hasdrubal’s command, doing and
seeing everything which could help equip him as a great military leader”

Even when Roman writers acknowledged Hannibal’s military talents, they quickly
turn to the vices that supposedly marked his character. Charges levied against
Hannibal include greed, cruelty, sexual indulgence and even cannibalism
Polybius: whose assessment was most fair, “the prevailing opinion about him,
however, in Carthage was that he was greedy of money, at Rome that he was cruel.
Appian charges Hannibal with “casual sexual indulgences”
Many of the charges levied at Hannibal of greed come from sources hardly credible
sources such as King Massinissa, who betrayed Hannibal and joined Scipio, and
Hannibal’s political enemies within Carthage.
Roman historians also levy the charge of cruelty against Hannibal with a long list of
events such as prisoners being drowned in streams and their bodies used as a bridge
for Hannibal’s army to cross. Theodor Mommsen observes these as “wretched
inventions which furnish their own refutation.” Many of his actions were
commonplace in times of war or typical of the times, such as selling hostile
populations into slavery.
Polybius notes that “the force of circumstances” that Hannibal fought under makes it
“exceedingly difficult to estimate his (Hannibal’s) character”.
Theodor Mommsen’s judgement that “Nothing occurs in the accounts regarding
Hannibal which may not be justified in the circumstances, and according to the
international law of the times.”
 Richard Gabriel states “Hannibal accorded full military honours and burials to
those Roman generals he killed in battle, including Flaminius, Lucius Aemilius
Paullus” and goes on to mention others.
Romans endured a great amount of humiliation at the hands of Hannibal, and their
accounts deliberately disfigure his character and achievements in an attempt to
minimise that humiliation.
Army
 Second Punic War and Hannibal’s victories highlighted various deficiencies
within the Roman army
o Lacked archers (sagittarii) and slingers (funditores)
o From 218 BC, Roman armies regularly hired mercenary units of
archers from Crete and slingers from the Balearic Islands
 Proletarianisation of the army
o Due to extraordinary demands of the Punic Wars, in addition to a
shortage of man power, the tactical weaknesses of the manipular
legions were exposed
o Rome forced to effectively ignore its long standing principle that
soldiers must be both citizens and property owners
o 213BC 11,000 asses to 4,000 asses
o Due to the increased proletarianisation of the army, drawing
increasingly from the lower classes, saw the blurring of the different
types of infantry.
o Many soldiers were too poor to afford their own equipment and were
thus given standard-issue army equipment. As a result the distinctions
between the hasttiti, principes and triarii began to blur
o In addition to lack of manpower, there was a greater emphasis placed
on Romes allies for numbers. When these could not sufficiently
provide, Romans often hired mercenaries to fight alongside the
legions
Maniple:
 The army of Rome in this period was known as the manipular army. Maniples
were units of 120 men and small enough to permit tactical movement of
individual infantry units on the battlefield within the framework of the
greater army.
 Weaknesses exploited by Hannibal included
o Roman senior offices were civilians, magistrates and politicians who
were appointed to command the legion during time of war
o Gabriel: Another problem arose from the Roman consular system of
selecting Roman generals, “which often produced incompetent or
only marginally competent field commanders”
 Divided command stifled tactical innovation and cooperation
 One year tenure pressured the consuls into rash decisions
o Weakness of Roman cavalry: drawn from nobility, not necessarily well
trained
 Scipio tried and was unable, simply hired cavalry from allied
Spanish and Numidian tribes
Scipio and Army:
 Scipio introduced and trained the manipular legions in significantly more
efficient tactical manoeuvring
o Gabriel: ”Until Scipio introduced tactical innovations, it (army) could
not turn to face an attack on its flanks, move to the oblique, or form a
line to prevent its front from being overlapped.”
 Trebia River Roman flanks and rear were destroyed by the
legion’s front line continued forward, cutting through the
Carthaginian line and reaching safety
o Scipio hired Spanish and Numidian cavalry to nullify weak Roman
cavalry
o Incredibly poor Roman intelligence: Trasimene, Trebia, Hannibal
crossing Alps,
o Gabriel: “Scipio appears to have been the first Roman commander to
establish a permanent unit within the legion whose task it was to
collect tactical intelligence in the field.”
Gabriel
 “When the Romans discovered that the legion was too fragile to withstand
the massed attacks of the Carthaginian’s Spanish heavy infantry, they
strengthened it”; this became the cohort
 Cohorts gradually replaced the maniples until the cohortal legion became the
basic fighting unit.
Cato
 Mark Morford: “Others, however, were more sceptical of Greek influences,
and their most prominent representative was Marcius Porcius Cato”
 “For Cato, the greatest danger was the corruption of young Romans by Greek
ideas”
 Philip Stader: “Cato the Elder was the very epitome of the old Roman.”