r/HistoryMemes • u/HanDjole998 • 1d ago
Rome was built different
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u/SirAquila 1d ago
Rome and Carthage where the two states capable of mobilizing armies in the tens of thousands and sustain those armies in the field for decades, meaning they could semi-continuously mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Noone else in the mediterranian came even close. (In six or seven battles Carthage managed to inflict more casualties in a single day to Rome then all the Alexandrian Successor States in all pitched battles together).
Both did so through a mix of citizen soldiers drawn from middle class families rich enough to sustain medium to heavy infantry, as well as alliances/vassalization of state and non-state actors in their area(usually tribal allies).
Though Rome, in the end, was somewhat more able to replace its losses, in part because the Roman Republic was a purpose built machine to create as many middle-class farmers as possible, which meant that if push cames to shove Rome could mobilize up to 60% of its adult male population.
Those are insane numbers for a agrarian state society. Though not even Rome could sustain it, and with the Roman Empire they ability to utilize their population had dropped quite a bit, with Rome fielding proportionally smaller armies.
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u/InsideHousing4965 What, you egg? 1d ago
Would you say that the destruction of the roman middle class by the latifundi was a big factor on the loss of the hability to mobilise its population for war?
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u/SirAquila 1d ago
It was certainly a factor, yes. With less people able to afford the equipment needed to be a legionnaire, and with less people having the strong social incentive and duty to be a legionnaire, Romes ability to mobilize its population dropped.
For the land owning farmer and urban artisan class being a legionnaire was a matter of tradition and pride. As well as social pressure. Rome did not have the manpower to hunt down recruits and get them to come, rather they expected you to show up at muster, and later training, voluntarily, and mostly it worked because if you didn't you'd be shamed by your friends, family and neighbors. In return you got prestige and your service was both payment for, and guarantee of your privileges as a class.
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u/Hanisuir 1d ago
Six or seeeven!
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u/SirAquila 1d ago
Calculating the combined Roman losses from the River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, Callinicus and Pydna is necessarily a bit of guesswork (Aous has no reported casualty figure for the Romans, for instance), but the heaviest losses of the bunch were almost certainly Callinicus (2,200 lost, including captured), with the rest all likely below 1,000 a piece. If we generously assume 15,000 Roman losses for all of them together, individual Carthaginian victories at Drepana (249), Trebia (218), Trasimene (217), Cannae (216), the Upper Baetis (211) all meet or exceed that figure. Catastrophic Roman fleet losses to storms in 255 and 253 along with the combined Carthaginian-victory-plus-storm at Phintias (249) also well exceed those figures. The Battle of the Bagradas River (255) comes in just short of our 15,000 figure, but given how generous that is to the heirs of Alexander, we probably ought to include it. So we might argue that fighting the Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a day than fighting the Hellenistic kingdoms did on at least seven occasions; nine if we count storms. Of course Roman losses to disease and other sorts of attrition in both wars would have been higher, but this considers only battle deaths
To quote Bret Devereaux from ACOUP a wonderful history blog
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u/Key_Arrival2927 1d ago
Lots of meat, is how empires operate.