I’ve known about Cannae for a long time. And, frankly, I’m not sure I trust the ancient historians.
On the one hand, in Greek hoplite warfare (I’ll get to Rome in a minute), things were like the opposite of a tug of war with a rope (two groups pulling away from each other, hoping to make the other team fall forward). Instead, two shield walls would crash together and push and push and push. Eventually, one shield wall would collapse and the men would fall apart and lose formation and then run and get speared in the back. It was all a question of who would break first.
Rome didn’t use hoplites, and didn’t depend on shield walls. But they weren’t dumb. At Cannae, the Carthaginians were greatly outnumbered by the Romans, yet the Carthaginians managed to surround the Romans, and squeeze them in the middle, pushing and pushing until the Romans had no where to go and just fell apart and were slaughtered.
That’s what they say. I think it would not have been difficult for the Romans to break out of the encirclement at one point or another and make the whole thing fall apart.
Maybe it happened just as they say — but history is full of lies. To read an ancient source and just accept it as the truth is, I think, a bad practice. The earliest source for this battle is Polybius (50 years after the battle) and most people think Polybius used a good bit of dramatic license. Livy wrote about it 200 years later (so how reliable can he be?).
The Romans eventually saw the weakness of the Phalanx and moved to the Maniple system. The Phalanx had one MAJOR flaw, slowness. If you could get around the flanks it was over. If you couldn’t flank them it was almost impossible to defeat. This flaw in the phalanx allowed the Romans to march through Macedonia and Greece and Asia Minor to the east directly after the Punic Wars. Totally agree with you about history and lies. This particular battle is pretty well documented though. The Romans were meticulous record keepers. But anything pre-dating the sack by the Gauls can only be taken as mythology. But you are fundamentally correct about historians. My next post will be about the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest and Arminius. One of the worst losses in Rome’s history. Supposedly left Octavian (Augustus Caesar) in shambles screaming “Varus! Give me back my legions”.
“Maybe it happened just as they say — but history is full of lies.”
History is written by the victors. Imagine what the history books would look like if the Germans had won.
Most people today don’t understand the majority of
slaughter came when one side broke and turned to run.