Gregory Aldrete: prediction

Transcript context

…Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal’s plan is, “I’m not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I’m going to invade Italy. I’m going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they’ll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back, so this is a reasonable plan. ” Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants. Dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story, sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes them out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, “Okay, Hannibal’s different. We’re going to take two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal.” They do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80, 000 Romans about, and he comes up with strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it’s this famous strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides. And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now, just to put that in perspective, that’s more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam. The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Gregory Aldrete. What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?…

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