Rome started as a small city-state like several others on the Italian peninsula, and, through brute determination, grew into the world's greatest empire. For much of the first half of its existence it was a republic, but just before Jesus was born, it became an empire, a one man dictatorship. The mighty oak had began to rot from the inside, but very slowly. The journey from tiny acorn to rotten hulk took about 1,200 years.
When I think about Rome, I try to imagine where our American civilization sits along that twelve century trajectory. Rome had lots of ups and downs on it's way to dominion. Its great rival in the Mediterranean was Carthage in northern Africa. On this day in 216 B.C. Carthaginian general Hannibal defeated the Roman army at Cannae a couple of hundred miles miles east of Rome.
Rome was on its knees. This was its third defeat on Italian soil at Hannibal's hands. Rome always had a great army, but it simply attacked in a mass and steamrolled the enemy. Hannibal was the inventor of tactics. He studied his enemy and attacked its weak points until it broke apart. Then he annihilated it.
After Cannae, Rome's best generals and soldiers were dead. Hannibal called on the city to surrender. There was panic in the streets, but the Senate refused Hannibal's peace treaty. They raised a new army by lowering the draft age and recruiting criminals, debtors, and slaves. Public tears were forbidden and the word "peace" was banned. Appeals were made to the gods, several people were buried alive and a baby was set adrift in the Adriatic as human sacrifices.
Hannibal hung around Italy for the next 14 years trying to defeat Rome, but Rome's new general, Scipio, studied Hannibal's tactics and turned them against him. Scipio took the war to Africa and defeated Carthage at the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C.
So how does this war with Carthage correspond to our history? Maybe it was the equivalent of WWII. Without a crystal ball to read the future, I have to admit I don't really know.
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| All over Italy, never made it to Rome. |
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. Cato the Elder
ReplyDeleteGoes to show that bigger is not necessarily better, i.e. the elephants and H's ambitions. As always, thanks for the history lesson. JP Savage
ReplyDeleteThis story prompted me to reopen the book, “Born Fighting: How The Scots-Irish Shaped America,” by James Webb, because I remembered the Hadrian Wall, that the Romans built to keep the barbarians, i.e., Scots-Irish ancestors, out of town, stretching from what became Carlisle in the west, to the other side of Newcastle, another rather ancient model of civilization, in the east, a distance roughly equal from Wannaska to Drayton, ND. No small feat just to keep a few ‘barbarians’ at bay.
ReplyDeleteYou’d think, the Romans would’ve tried signs first: Barbari non licet. ex quo vadat as signage is cheaper, lessens the loss of life, and is psychologically effective. Granted not every Legionaire could read, but one can imagine how those who could, exaggerated or altered the translation--a historical fact.
Now likely Hannibal might’ve whupped these barbarians too, but not before they tasted more than a few of his elephants. I reckon elephant steak and roasts would be more than enough reason to die on the battle fields, for we’ve often heard over the millennia, “This steak is but to die for!” In fact, I’m pretty sure it supplanted the oft-favored battle cry, “I’m so hungry I could eat your horse!” if I’m not mistaken, sending waves of fear through cavalry companies poised to charge the field.
“Now, now, steady Betsy, no one’s goin’ to eat you--’cept me, but only if I have to.”